See also: Top Tips for Effective Listening Listening is the ability to accurately receive and interpret messages in the communication process. Listening is key to all effective communication. Without the ability to listen effectively, messages are easily misunderstood. As a result, communication breaks down and the sender of the message can easily become frustrated or irritated. If there is one communication skill you should aim to master, then listening is it. Listening is so important that many top employers provide listening skills training for their employees. This is not surprising when you consider that good listening skills can lead to better customer satisfaction, greater productivity with fewer mistakes, and increased sharing of information that in turn can lead to more creative and innovative work. Many successful leaders and entrepreneurs credit their success to effective listening skills. Richard Branson frequently quotes listening as one of the main factors behind the success of Virgin.
Effective listening is a skill that underpins all positive human relationships. Spend some time thinking about and developing your listening skills – they are the building blocks of success.
Good listening skills also have benefits in our personal lives, including: A greater number of friends and social networks, improved self-esteem and confidence, higher grades at school and in academic work, and even better health and general well-being. Studies have shown that, whereas speaking raises blood pressure, attentive listening can bring it down. Listening is Not the Same as HearingHearing refers to the sounds that enter your ears. It is a physical process that, provided you do not have any hearing problems, happens automatically. Listening, however, requires more than that: it requires focus and concentrated effort, both mental and sometimes physical as well. Listening means paying attention not only to the story, but how it is told, the use of language and voice, and how the other person uses his or her body. In other words, it means being aware of both verbal and non-verbal messages. Your ability to listen effectively depends on the degree to which you perceive and understand these messages. Listening is not a passive process. In fact, the listener can, and should, be at least as engaged in the process as the speaker. The phrase ‘active listening’ is used to describe this process of being fully involved. See our pages: Active Listening and Types of Listening for more information.
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen Adults spend an average of 70% of their time engaged in some sort of communication. Of this, research shows that an average of 45% is spent listening compared to 30% speaking, 16% reading and 9% writing. (Adler, R. et al. 2001). That is, by any standards, a lot of time listening. It is worthwhile, therefore, taking a bit of extra time to ensure that you listen effectively. Based on the research of: Adler, R., Rosenfeld, L. and Proctor, R. (2001) The Purpose of ListeningThere is no doubt that effective listening is an extremely important life skill. Why is listening so important? Listening serves a number of possible purposes, and the purpose of listening will depend on the situation and the nature of the communication.
Often our main concern while listening is to formulate ways to respond. This is not a function of listening. We should try to focus fully on what is being said and how it's being said in order to more fully understand the speaker.
Effective listening requires concentration and the use of your other senses - not just hearing the words spoken. Listening is not the same as hearing and in order to listen effectively you need to use more than just your ears. See our page: The Ten Principles of Listening.
Further Reading from Skills You Need Our Communication Skills eBooks Learn more about the key communication skills you need to be a more effective communicator. Our eBooks are ideal for anyone who wants to learn about or develop their interpersonal skills and are full of easy-to-follow, practical information. Barriers to Effective ListeningTo improve the process of effective listening, it can be helpful to turn the problem on its head and look at barriers to effective listening, or ineffective listening. For example, one common problem is that instead of listening closely to what someone is saying, we often get distracted after a sentence or two and instead start to think about what we are going to say in reply or think about unrelated things. This means that we do not fully listen to the rest of the speaker’s message. This problem is attributed, in part, to the difference between average speech rate and average processing rate. Average speech rates are between 125 and 175 words a minute whereas we can process on average between 400 and 800 words a minute. It is a common habit for the listener to use the spare time while listening to daydream or think about other things, rather than focusing on what the speaker is saying. Of course the clarity of what the speaker is saying can also affect how well we listen. Generally we find it easier to focus if the speaker is fluent in their speech, has a familiar accent, and speaks at an appropriate loudness for the situation. It is more difficult, for example, to focus on somebody who is speaking very fast and very quietly, especially if they are conveying complex information. We may also get distracted by the speaker’s personal appearance or by what someone else is saying, which sounds more interesting. These issues not only affect you, but you are likely to show your lack of attention in your body language. Generally, we find it much harder to control our body language, and you are likely to show your distraction and/or lack of interest by lack of eye contact, or posture. The speaker will detect the problem, and probably stop talking at best. At worse, they may be very offended or upset. Our page on Barriers to Effective Listening explains more about common listening problems, and our page Listening Misconceptions details some of the common myths and misconceptions about listening.
Finally, it is important not to jump to conclusions about what you see and hear. You should always seek clarification to ensure that your understanding is correct. See our pages: Clarification and Reflection for more information.
I so often write about how to create and give better speeches that I rarely write about listening to speeches. But of course the audience is one of the three essential elements of a public speech – without an audience, it’s not a speech any more than it’s a speech without a speaker or content. And yet that third element, the audience, can get lost in all the rest of our efforts to create a successful occasion, strange as that may sound. Aren’t all our efforts focused on giving the audience a better experience? Well, yes. But the audience has a role to play, too. And it’s one we rarely talk about. We have a right to expect something from them, in fact. So for this post I’m focusing on what the audience needs to do to help create a great speech: listen. If you find yourself in an audience, then, what should you be focusing on? How do you listen most effectively to a speech? I’m going to suggest five ways an audience can listen that will enhance its experience of a presentation – and therefore make the occasion better, too. First, listen for the frame. The most important moments of a speech are the opening ones. That’s the time when the speaker should tell us what the speech is about – preferably something interesting, and preferably in an interesting way. So listen for the frame at the beginning of a speech, because that will guide the entire rest of the occasion. Second, listen for the emotion. Ask yourself, what emotion (besides a little natural stage fright at the beginning) is the speaker trying to convey? Most speakers find their emotions attenuated by the difficulty of emoting on command in front of hundreds of people, so you may have to interpret for the speaker, or even make an educated guess. But knowing the emotions at play in the speech will give you a road map for the important landmarks in the journey the speaker is trying to take you on. Third, listen for the false notes. Of course, I’d much prefer for the speaker to succeed beautifully, but it’s also the job of the audience to decide whether or not the speaker is credible, and whether or not to trust the speaker. Sometimes that involves deciding that the speaker is not succeeding. You need to kick the rhetorical tires, and decide for yourself whether the speaker is what he or she claims to be. Fourth, listen for the stories. Good stories are at the heart of a great speech, and so the audience has a right to expect those stories at regular intervals, and for the stories to carry much of the emotional freight of the speech. Those stories should reveal personal involvement in the topic and should tell us things that we can’t learn any other way. Beware the speaker who tells stories that are clichés, that you’ve heard many times before. Because that usually means that he or she is letting someone else do the thinking. Finally, listen for the ask. At the heart of every great speech is a request, from the speaker to the audience. Even if it’s only a minimal “believe with me that this is important,” there’s always a reason why the speaker is doing all that work. Listen for that because to understand the ask is to understand the speech and the speaker. And here’s one more: listen like a child. Children have the opposite listening ability to grownups – kids listen to the whole experience. They have a hard time focusing. As a result, they notice a good deal more than most adults, some of it irrelevant, but some of it not. Spending some time listening like a child is a great way to open up your listening, refresh it, and avoid missing out on something essential. Listening is hard work, and most people find themselves half-listening at best, because what’s going on around them competes with their inner voices, and all the other distractions of the daily to do list. A little thought about what to listen for can help you get the most possible out of a speech – which will make the speech successful, too. |