Listening Skills
Listening is one of the important communication skill. We spend most of our time in listening than other communcation skills.It requires an attention and continuous practice..
Effective listening is a process of analyzing sounds, interpreting them and finally understanding the messages.
Factors influencing Listening:
- To learn
- To increase one understanding
- To advise
- To relieve one’s boredom (i.e. listening to music)
Process of Listening:
1.Hearing: Hearing is the first step in listening, where the sender starts communication, the receiver starts hearing the message.
2.Understanding: Once the communication starts, after hearing the message it starts understanding the conversation from sender.
3.Judging: The final step of listening is judging.Once you understand the message that have been conveyed by the sender, then you start thinking whether it make sense or not.
Barriers of Listening:
They are two types of barriers of listening. a) Physical Barriers b) Physiological Barriers
a) Physical Barriers:
- Noise
- Frequent Interpretations
- Uncomfortable Environment
- Message overload
b) Physiological Barriers:
- State of health: As the Listener might be suffering with fever or pain or any other form of body discomfort, at that point of time the listener can not listen properly.
- Wandering attention: The listener might not be in attentive while listening. Even sometimes he has no interest to listen in the conversation.
- Impatience: If the conversation is too lengthy, will not in a position to take in, sometimes overloaded information may also leads to impatience.
- Emotional block: Not in a position to listen, completely blocked with some other emotions/thoughts. They may completely blocked off by not listening.
Tips for Effective Listening:
- Give full attention while listening.
- Concentrate/be focused on the message delivered.
- Let the speaker finish before you speak.
- Remember all the important points.
- Let yourself finish listening before you begin to speak.
- Ask questions.
- Give feedback.
Research Findings:
People spent 32.7% of time in listening 25.8% of time in speaking 22.6%of time in writing.
Communication is not complete without effective listening. Many of the problems, we experience with the people in our daily lives is ineffective/lack of listening.
Effective Listening solves half of the problems.