What Is Listening?

What Is Listening?

What is Listening ?

■ Listening is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages (International Listening Association)

Studies show that 53% of our waking hours are spent listening

Why then is Listening so difficult ?

■ Of the four communicative behaviours –

speaking, writing, listening, and reading –

listening was second only to reading as the least arousing

LESS AROUSING

What are the processes involved ?

Attending

Selecting and focusing on specific stimuli from the countless stimuli reaching the senses

1. Get physically and mentally ready to listen

2. Make shift from speaker to listener a complete one

3. Hear a person out before you react

Understanding

Decoding a message accurately to reflect the meaning intended by the speaker

1) Empathy

Intellectually identifying with or vicariously experiencing the feelings or attitudes of another

Letting people “know that they have been understood from within their own frame of reference and that they can see the world as they see it while remaining separate from it.

- (Hayes,2002 )

(a) Empathic Responsiveness

■ Experience an emotional response parallel to, and as a result of observing, another person’s actual or anticipated display of emotion

(b) Perspective Taking

■ Imagining yourself in the place of another (most common form of empathizing)

(c) Sympathetic Responsiveness

■ Feeling concern, compassion, or sorrow for another because of the other’s situation or plight

2) Questioning

Statement designed to get further information or to clarify information already received

(a) Recognize the kind of information needed to increase your understanding

(b) Phrase questions as complete sentences...

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