essay on listening process

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3.4 The Listening Process

Listening is the learned process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. We begin to engage with the listening process long before we engage in any recognizable verbal or nonverbal communication. It is only after listening for months as infants that we begin to consciously practise our own forms of expression. In this section, we will learn more about each stage of the listening process, the main types of listening, and the main listening styles.

The Listening Process

Listening is a process, and as such, doesn’t have a defined start and finish. Like the communication process, listening has cognitive, behavioural, and relational elements and doesn’t unfold in a linear, step-by-step fashion. The stages of the listening process are receiving , interpreting , recalling , evaluating , and responding .

The video below is an introduction to the topic of listening and to much of the content that will be discussed in this section.

(Study Hall, 2022)

Before we can engage other steps in the listening process, we must take in stimuli through our senses. In any given communication encounter, it is likely that we will return to the receiving stage , sometimes referred to as attending , many times as we process incoming feedback and new messages. This part of the listening process is more physiological than other parts, which include cognitive and relational elements. We primarily take in information needed for listening through auditory and visual channels. Although we don’t often think about visual cues as a part of listening, they influence how we interpret messages. For example, seeing a person’s face when we hear their voice allows us to take in nonverbal cues from facial expressions and eye contact. The fact that these visual cues are missing in email, text, and phone interactions presents some difficulties for reading contextual clues into meaning received only through auditory channels.

The chapter on perception discusses some of the ways in which incoming stimuli are filtered. These perceptual filters also play a role in listening. Some stimuli never make it in, some are filtered into our subconscious, and others are filtered into various levels of consciousness based on their salience. Recall that salience is the degree to which something attracts our attention in a particular context and that we tend to find salience in things that are visually or audibly stimulating and that meet our needs or interests. Think about how it’s much easier to listen to a lecture on a subject that you find interesting.

It is important to consider noise as a factor that influences how we receive messages. Some noise interferes primarily with hearing, which is the physical process of receiving stimuli through internal and external components of the ears and eyes, and some interferes with listening, which is the cognitive process of processing the stimuli taken in during hearing. While hearing leads to listening, hearing and listening are not the same thing. Environmental noise , such as other people talking, the sounds of traffic, and music, interferes with the physiological aspects of hearing. Psychological noise , like stress and anger, interferes primarily with the cognitive processes of listening. We can enhance our ability to receive, and in turn listen, by trying to minimize noise.

Interpreting

During the interpreting stage , sometime referred to as understanding , we combine the visual and auditory information we receive and try to make meaning out of that information using schemata . The interpreting stage engages cognitive and relational processing as we take in informational, contextual, and relational cues and try to connect them to previous experiences in meaningful ways. It is through the interpreting stage that we begin to understand the stimuli we have received. When we understand something, we are able to attach meaning by connecting information to previous experiences. Through the process of comparing new information with old information, we may also update or revise particular schemata if we find the new information relevant and credible.

If we have difficulty interpreting information, meaning we don’t have previous experience or information in our existing schemata to make sense of it, then it is difficult to transfer the information into our long-term memory for later recall. In situations where understanding the information we receive isn’t important or isn’t a goal, this stage may be fairly short or even skipped. After all, we can move something to our long-term memory by repetition, and then later recall it without ever having understood it. It is possible to earn perfect scores on an exam in an anatomy class in college because you can memorize and recall, for example, all the organs in the digestive system. In fact, you might still be able to do that a decade after the exam. But you might not be able to tell the significance or function of most of those organs, meaning you didn’t really get to a level of understanding but simply stored the information for later recall.

Our ability to recall information , or remember , is dependent on some of the physiological limits of how memory works. Overall, our memories are known to be fallible. We forget about half of what we hear immediately after hearing it, recall 35% after eight hours, and recall 20% after a day (Hargie, 2016). Our memory consists of multiple “storage units,” including sensory storage, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory (Hargie, 2016).

Our sensory storage is very large in terms of capacity but limited in terms of length of storage. We can hold large amounts of unsorted visual information but only for about a tenth of a second. By comparison, we can hold large amounts of unsorted auditory information for longer—up to four seconds. This initial memory storage unit doesn’t provide much use for our study of communication because these large but quickly expiring chunks of sensory data are primarily used in reactionary and instinctual ways.

As stimuli are organized and interpreted, they make their way to short-term memory, where they either expire and are forgotten or are transferred to long-term memory. Short-term memory is a mental storage capability that can retain stimuli for 20 seconds to one minute. Long-term memory is a mental storage capability to which stimuli in short-term memory can be transferred if they are connected to existing schema and in which information can be stored indefinitely (Hargie, 2016). Working memory is a temporarily accessed memory storage space that is activated during times of high cognitive demand. When using working memory, we can temporarily store information and process and use it at the same time. This is different from our typical memory function in that information usually has to make it to long-term memory before we can call it back to apply to a current situation. People with good working memories are able to keep recent information in mind, process it, and apply it to other incoming information. This can be very useful during high-stress situations.

When we evaluate something, we make judgements about its credibility, completeness, and worth. In terms of credibility , we try to determine the degree to which we believe a speaker’s statements are correct and/or true. In terms of completeness , we try to “read between the lines” and evaluate the message in relation to what we know about the topic or situation being discussed. We evaluate the worth of a message by making a value judgement about whether we think the message or idea is good or bad, right or wrong, or desirable or undesirable. All these aspects of evaluating require critical-thinking skills, which we aren’t born with but must develop over time through our own personal and intellectual development.

Studying communication is a great way to build your critical-thinking skills because you learn much more about the taken-for-granted aspects of how communication works, which gives you tools to analyze and critique messages, senders, and contexts. Critical-thinking and listening skills also help you take a more proactive role in the communication process rather than being a passive receiver of messages that may not be credible, complete, or worthwhile. One danger in the evaluation stage of listening is to focus your evaluative lenses more on the speaker than the message. This can quickly become a barrier to effective listening if we begin to prejudge a speaker based on their identity or characteristics rather than on the content of their message.

Responding entails sending verbal and nonverbal messages that indicate attentiveness and understanding or a lack thereof. From our earlier discussion of the communication model, you may be able to connect this part of the listening process to feedback .

We send verbal and nonverbal feedback while another person is talking and after they are finished. Back-channel cues are the verbal and nonverbal signals we send while someone is talking and can consist of verbal cues like “uh-huh,” “oh,” and “right,” or nonverbal cues like direct eye contact, head nods, and leaning forward. Back-channel cues are generally a form of positive feedback that indicates others are actively listening. People also send cues intentionally and unintentionally that indicate they aren’t listening. If another person is looking away, fidgeting, texting, or turned away, we will likely interpret those responses negatively.

The Importance of Listening

Understanding how listening works provides the foundation we need to explore why we listen, including the various types and styles of listening. In general, listening helps us achieve all the communication goals (physical, instrumental, relational, and identity) that we learned about in Chapter 1 and is also important in academic, professional, and personal contexts.

In terms of academics, poor listening skills were shown to contribute significantly to failure in a person’s first year of college (Zabava & Wolvin, 1993). In general, students with high scores for listening ability have greater academic achievement. Poor listening skills, lack of conciseness, and inability to give constructive feedback have been identified as potential communication challenges in professional contexts. Even though listening education is lacking in our society, research has shown that introductory communication courses provide important skills necessary for functioning in entry-level jobs, including listening, writing, motivating and persuading, interpersonal skills, informational interviewing, and small-group problem solving (Di Salvo, 1980). Listening also has implications for our personal lives and relationships. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of listening to make someone else feel better and to open our perceptual field to new sources of information.

The main purposes of listening are the following (Hargie, 2016):

To focus on messages sent by other people or noises coming from our surroundings
To better understand other people’s communication
To critically evaluate other people’s messages
To monitor nonverbal signals
To indicate that we are interested or paying attention
To empathize with others and show we care for them (relational maintenance)
To engage in negotiation, dialogue, or other exchanges that result in shared understanding of or agreement on an issue

Listening Types

Discriminative listening is a focused type of listening that is primarily physiological and occurs mostly at the receiving stage of the listening process. Here we engage in listening to scan and monitor our surroundings in order to isolate particular auditory or visual stimuli. For example, we may focus our listening on a dark part of the yard while walking the dog at night to determine whether the noise we just heard presents any danger. Or we may look for a particular nonverbal cue to let us know our conversational partner received our message (Hargie, 2016).

Empathetic listening is the most challenging form of listening and occurs when we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling. Empathetic listening is distinct from sympathetic listening. Sympathy is generally more self-oriented and distant than empathy (Bruneau, 1993). Empathetic listening is oriented on others and should be genuine. Because of our own centrality in our perceptual world, empathetic listening can be difficult. It’s often much easier to tell our own story or to give advice than it is to really listen to and empathize with someone else. We should keep in mind that sometimes others just need to be heard and our feedback isn’t actually desired.

Listening Styles

Just as there are different types of listening, there are also different styles of listening. People may be categorized as one or more of the following types listeners: people-oriented, action-oriented, content-oriented, and time-oriented listeners. Research finds that 40% of people have more than one preferred listening style, and that they choose a style based on the listening situation (Bodie & Villaume, 2003). Other research finds that people often still revert back to a single preferred style in times of emotional or cognitive stress, even if they know a different style of listening would be better (Worthington, 2003).

People-oriented listeners are concerned about the needs and feelings of others and may get distracted from a specific task or the content of a message in order to address feelings.
Action-oriented listeners prefer well-organized, precise, and accurate information. They can become frustrated if they perceive communication to be unorganized or inconsistent, or a speaker to be “long-winded.”
Content-oriented listeners are analytic and enjoy processing complex messages. They like in-depth information and like to learn about multiple sides of a topic or hear multiple perspectives on an issue. Their thoroughness can be difficult to manage if there are time constraints.
Time-oriented listeners are concerned with completing tasks and achieving goals. They do not like information they perceive as irrelevant and like to stick to a timeline. They may cut people off and make quick decisions (taking shortcuts or cutting corners) when they think they have enough information.

Types of Listening Responses

Silent listening occurs when a person says nothing. It is ideal in certain situations and awful in others. However, when used correctly, silent listening can be very powerful. If misused, the listener could give the wrong impression to someone. It is appropriate to use this type of listening to discourage more talking. It also shows that the listener is open to the speaker’s ideas (Wrench et al., 2020).

Sometimes people get angry when someone doesn’t respond. They might think that this person is not listening or is trying to avoid the situation (Wrench et al., 2020). But the lack of response might be because the listener is just trying to gather their thoughts or perhaps feels that it would be inappropriate to respond. There are certain situations, such as in counselling, where silent listening can be beneficial because it can help the speaker figure out their feelings and emotions. Minor prompting might also be done in combination with silence (Wrench et al., 2020).

In situations where you want to get answers, it might be beneficial to use questioning . You can do this in a variety of ways (Wrench et al., 2020). You can pose open-ended or close-ended questions as a means of eliciting answers. Close-ended questions are very specific and do not allow elaboration. They are direct and often result in a “yes” or “no” response or a list of possible responses that are provided. Open-ended questions allow for more elaboration by the person responding, and specific response options are not provided. These forms of questions generally result in more discussion.

There are also different types of questions. Sincere questions are posed to find a genuine answer (Wrench et al., 2020). Counterfeit questions are disguised attempts to send a message, not to receive one. Sometimes, counterfeit questions can cause the listener to be defensive. For instance, if someone asks you, “Tell me how often you have cheated on an exam,” the speaker is implying that you have cheated on an exam, even though that has not been established (Wrench et al., 2020). A speaker can use questions that make statements by emphasizing specific words or phrases, stating an opinion or feeling on the subject. They can ask questions that carry hidden agendas, such as “Do you have five dollars?” because the person would like to borrow that money (Wrench et al., 2020). Some questions seek “correct” answers. For instance, when a friend asks, “Do I look fat?” you probably have a correct or ideal answer. There are also questions that are based on unchecked assumptions. An example would be “Why aren’t you listening?” This question implies that the person wasn’t listening, when in fact they are listening (Wrench et al., 2020).

Paraphrasing is defined as restating in your own words the message you think the speaker just sent (Wrench et al., 2020). It represents mindful listening in that you are trying to analyze and understand the speaker’s information. Paraphrasing can be used to summarize facts and to gain consensus in essential discussions. It could be used in a business meeting to make sure all details were discussed and agreed upon. Paraphrasing can also be used to understand personal information more accurately. Think about being in a counsellor’s office. Counsellors often paraphrase information to better understand exactly how you are feeling and to be able to analyze the information better (Wrench et al., 2020).

Empathizing is used to show that the listener identifies with the speaker’s information (Wrench et al., 2020). However, you are not empathizing when you deny others the rights to their feelings. Examples of this are statements such as “It’s really not a big deal” or “Who cares?” These response indicates that the listener is trying to make the speaker feel a different way. In minimizing the significance of the situation, the listener is interpreting the situation according to their perspective and passing judgement (Wrench et al., 2020).

Take the time to watch William Ury’s Ted Talk on the power of listening. He talks about how important listening is and what a difference it can make to others and to society as a whole.

(TEDx Talks, 2012)

Barriers to Effective Listening

Barriers to effective listening are present at every stage of the listening process (Hargie, 2016). At the receiving stage, noise can block or distort incoming stimuli. At the interpreting stage, complex or abstract information may be difficult to relate to previous experiences, making it difficult to reach understanding. At the recalling stage, natural limits to our memory and challenges to concentration can interfere with remembering. At the evaluating stage, personal biases and prejudices can lead us to block people out or assume we know what they are going to say. At the responding stage, a lack of paraphrasing and questioning skills can lead to misunderstanding.

Environmental and Physical Barriers to Listening

Environmental factors such as lighting, temperature, and furniture affect our ability to listen. A room that is too dark can make us sleepy, just as a room that is too warm or too cool can raise awareness of our physical discomfort to a point that it is distracting. Some seating arrangements facilitate listening, whereas others separate people. In general, listening is easier when listeners can make direct eye contact with and are in close physical proximity to the speaker. When group members are allowed to choose a leader, they often choose the person who is sitting at the centre or head of the table (Andersen, 1999). Even though the person may not have demonstrated any leadership abilities, people subconsciously gravitate towards speakers who are nonverbally accessible. The ability to effectively see and hear a person increases people’s confidence in their abilities to receive and process information. Eye contact and physical proximity can still be affected by noise. Environmental noises such as a whirring air conditioner, a barking dog, or a ringing fire alarm can obviously interfere with listening despite direct lines of sight and well-placed furniture.

Physiological noise , like environmental noise, can interfere with our ability to process incoming information. It is noise stemming from a physical illness, injury, or bodily stress. Physiological noise is considered a physical barrier to effective listening because it emanates from our physical body. Ailments such as a cold, a broken leg, a headache, or an itchy rash can range from annoying to unbearably painful and impact our listening relative to their intensity. Another type of noise, psychological noise, bridges physical and cognitive barriers to effective listening.

Psychological noise , or noise stemming from our psychological state, including moods and level of arousal, can facilitate or impede listening. Any mood or state of arousal, positive or negative, that is too far above or below our regular baseline creates a barrier to message reception and processing. The generally positive emotional state of being in love can be just as much of a barrier as feeling hatred. Excited arousal can also distract as much as anxious arousal. Stress about an upcoming event ranging from losing a job, to having surgery, to wondering about what to eat for lunch can overshadow incoming messages. Although we will explore cognitive barriers to effective listening more in the next section, psychological noise is relevant here given that the body and mind are not completely separate. In fact, they can interact in ways that further interfere with listening. Fatigue, for example, is usually a combination of psychological and physiological stresses that manifests as stress (psychological noise) and weakness, sleepiness, and tiredness (physiological noise). Additionally, mental anxiety (psychological noise) can also manifest itself in our bodies through trembling, sweating, blushing, or even breaking out in a rash (physiological noise).

Cognitive and Personal Barriers to Listening

Aside from the barriers to effective listening that may be present in the environment or from our bodies, cognitive limits, a lack of listening preparation, difficult or disorganized messages, and prejudices can interfere with listening. Whether you call it multitasking, daydreaming, glazing over, or drifting off, we all cognitively process other things while receiving messages. If you think of your listening mind as a wall of televisions, you may notice that in some situations some of the televisions are tuned to one channel. If that one channel is a lecture being given by your professor, then you are exerting about half of your cognitive-processing abilities on one message. In another situation, all the televisions may be on different channels. The fact that we have the capability to process more than one thing at a time offers both advantages and disadvantages, but unless we can better understand how our cognitive capacities and personal preferences affect our listening, we are likely to experience more barriers than benefits.

Lack of Listening Preparation

Bad Messages and/or Speakers

Bad messages and/or speakers also present a barrier to effective listening. Sometimes our trouble listening originates in the sender. In terms of message construction, poorly structured messages or messages that are too vague, too jargon filled, or too simple can present listening difficulties. In terms of a speaker’s delivery, verbal fillers, a monotone voice, distracting movements, or a dishevelled appearance can inhibit our ability to cognitively process a message (Hargie, 2016). Speakers can employ particular strategies to create listenable messages that take some of the burden off the listener by tailoring a message to be easily heard and processed. Strategies for creating messages tailored for oral delivery include elements such as preview and review statements, transitions, and parallel wording. Listening also becomes difficult when a speaker tries to present too much information. Information overload is a common barrier to effective listening that good speakers can mitigate by building redundancy into their speeches and providing concrete examples of new information to help audience members interpret and understand the key ideas.

Prejudiced Listening

Unfortunately, some of our default ways of processing information and perceiving others lead us to rigid ways of thinking. When we engage in prejudiced listening , we are usually trying to preserve our way of thinking and avoid being convinced of something different. This type of prejudice is a barrier to effective listening because when we prejudge a person based on their identity or ideas, we usually stop listening in an active and/or ethical way.

We exhibit prejudice in our listening in several ways, some of which are more obvious than others. For example, we may claim to be in a hurry and only selectively address the parts of a message that we agree with or that aren’t controversial. We can also operate from a state of denial where we avoid a subject or person altogether so that our views are not challenged. Prejudices that are based on a person’s identity, such as race or ethnicity, age, occupation, or appearance, may lead us to assume that we know what the person will say, essentially closing down the listening process. Keeping an open mind and engaging in perception checking can help us identify prejudiced listening and hopefully shift into more competent listening practices.

Ineffective Listening Behaviours

At times, the barriers to effective listening cause us to engage in ineffective listening behaviours. When our goal is to create shared meaning with others, these behaviours interrupt this process.

Pseudo-listening is pretending to listen and appear attentive but not listening to understand or interpret the information. Listeners may respond with a smile, head nod, or even a minimal verbal acknowledgment, but they are ignoring or not attending (Indiana State University, n.d.).
Selective listening involves the listener selecting only the information they identify as relevant to their own needs or interests. Listeners may have their own agenda and disregard topics if they do not align with their current attitudes or beliefs (Indiana State University, n.d.).
Insulated listening involves ignoring or avoiding information and certain topics of conversation. It can be seen as the opposite of selective listening.
Defensive listening can be seen as interpreting innocent comments as personal attacks. Listeners misinterpret or project feelings of insecurity, jealousy, guilt, or lack of confidence in the other person (Indiana State University, n.d.).
Insensitive listening involves focusing on information for its literal meaning and disregarding the other person’s feeling and emotions. Listeners rarely pick up on hidden meanings or subtle nonverbal cues and have difficulty expressing sympathy and empathy (Indiana State University, n.d.).
Stage hogging involves listening to express one’s own ideas or interests and being the centre of attention. Listeners often plan what they are going to say or interrupt while the other person is talking (Indiana State University, n.d.).
Ambushing is careful and attentive listening to collect information that can be used against the other person as an attack. Listeners question, contradict, or oppose the other person to trap them or use their own words against them (Indiana State University, n.d.).
Multitasking involves listening without full attention while attempting to complete more than one task at a time. Listeners are actually “switch tasking”—their brain is rapidly switching from one task to another—and the information is lost (Indiana State University, n.d.).

In this section, we had a chance to discuss the many aspects of the listening process, and since this such a valuable skill, the next section will focus on the skills needed to becoming more competent listeners.

Relating Theory to Real Life

Identify how critical listening might be useful for you in each of the following contexts: academic, professional, personal, and civic.
Listening scholars have noted that empathetic listening is the most difficult type of listening. Do you agree? Why or why not?
Which style of listening best describes you and why? Which style do you have the most difficulty with or like the least and why?
Bad speakers and messages are a common barrier to effective listening. Describe a time recently when your ability to listen was impaired by the poor delivery and/or content of another person.
Of the bad listening practices listed, which do you use the most? Why do you think you use this one more than the others? What can you do to help prevent or lessen this barrier?

Attribution

Unless otherwise indicated, material on this page has been copied and adapted from the following resource:

University of Minnesota. (2016). Communication in the real world: An introduction to communication studies . University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. https://open.lib.umn.edu/communication , licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 , except where otherwise noted.

Andersen, P. A. (1999). Nonverbal communication: Forms and functions . Mayfield.

Bodie, G. D., & Villaume, W. A. (2003). Aspects of receiving information: The relationships between listening preferences, communication apprehension, receiver apprehension, and communicator style. International Journal of Listening, 17 (1), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2003.10499055

Brownell, J. (1993). Listening environment: A perspective. In A. D. Wolvin & C. G. Coakley (Eds.), Perspectives on listening. Alex Publishing.

Bruneau, T. (1993). Empathy and listening. In A. D. Wolvin & C. G. Coakley (Eds.), Perspectives on listening. Alex Publishing.

Di Salvo, V. S. (1980). A summary of current research identifying communication skills in various organizational contexts. Communication Education, 29 (3), 283–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528009378426

Hargie, O. (2016). Skilled interpersonal communication: Research, theory and practice (6th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315741901

Indiana State University, Department of Communication. (n.d.). Comm 101 (Dutton). Whatcom Community College (WCC) Open Textbook Collection. https://textbooks.whatcom.edu/duttoncmst101/ , licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

McCornack, S. (2007). Reflect & relate: An introduction to interpersonal communication. Bedford/St Martin’s.

Milardo, R. M., & Helms-Erikson, H. (2000). Network overlap and third-party influence in close relationships. In C. Hendrick & S. S. Hendrick (Eds.), Close relationships: A sourcebook. Sage.

Study Hall. (2022, October 26). Listening | Intro to human communication | Study Hall [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ue41DmLZx4&list=PLID58IQe16nFcsed5sqo0VfQUZ7EF8rqY&index=12

TEDx Talks. (2015, January 7). The power of listening | William Ury | TEDxSanDiego [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saXfavo1OQo

Watson, K. W., Barker, L. L., & Weaver III, J. B. (1995). The listening styles profile (LS-16): Development and validation of an instrument to assess four listening styles. International Journal of Listening, 9 (1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.1995.10499138

Wolvin, A. D., & Coakley, C. G. (1993). A listening taxonomy. In A. D. Wolvin & C. G. Coakley (Eds.), Perspectives on listening . Alex Publishing.

Worthington, D. L. (2003). Exploring the relationship between listening style preference and personality. International Journal of Listening, 17 (1), 68–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2003.10499056

Wrench, J. S., Punyanunt-Carter, N. M., & Thweatt, K. S. (2020). Interpersonal communication—A mindful approach to relationships. LibreText. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Communication/Interpersonal_Communication/Book%3A_Interpersonal_Communication_-_A_Mindful_Approach_to_Relationships_(Wrench_et_al.)/00%3A_Front_Matter/01%3A_TitlePage , licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Zabava, W. S., & Wolvin, A. D. (1993). The differential impact of a basic communication course on perceived communication competencies in class, work, and social contexts. Communication Education, 42 (3), 215–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529309378929

Image Credits (images are listed in order of appearance)

Closeup of a human ear by משתמש:אנדר-ויק , Public domain

Wikimania 2016 – Listening to Community Voices 04 by Niccolò Caranti , CC BY-SA 4.0

Viquimarató d’Informació i Comunicació 2022 (4) by Kowalskyn, CC BY-SA 4.0

Mother with Daughter at Roadside – En Route from Qazvin to Rudbar – Northwestern Iran (7419752832) by Adam Jones , CC BY-SA 2.0

Wikimania 2016 – Listening to Community Voices 01 by Niccolò Caranti , CC BY-SA 4.0

בין השמשות. צילום קארין בר by Karin Bar, CC BY-SA 3.0

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Husband and Wife (detail, 1945) by Milton Avery. Gift of Mr and Mrs Roy R Neuberger. Photo by Allen Phillips/ Wadsworth Atheneum

The art of listening

To listen well is not only a kindness to others but also, as the psychologist carl rogers made clear, a gift to ourselves.

by M M Owen + BIO

Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen.

Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard. On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. I wasn’t sure what I was doing; but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. It felt rare, it felt real; I wanted them around.

As a culture, we treat listening as an automatic process about which there is not a lot to say: in the same category as digestion, or blinking. When the concept of listening is addressed at any length, it is in the context of professional communication; something to be honed by leaders and mentors, but a specialisation that everyone else can happily ignore. This neglect is a shame. Listening well, it took me too long to discover, is a sort of magic trick: both parties soften, blossom, they are less alone.

Along the way, I discovered that Carl Rogers, one of the 20th century’s most eminent psychologists, had put a name to this underrated skill: ‘active listening’. And though Rogers’s work was focused initially on the therapeutic setting, he drew no distinction between this and everyday life: ‘Whatever I have learned,’ he wrote, ‘is applicable to all of my human relationships.’ What Rogers learnt was that listening well – which necessarily involves conversing well and questioning well – is one of the most accessible and most powerful forms of connection we have.

T he paucity of my listening powers dawned on me as a byproduct of starting to meditate. This is not to make some claim to faux enlightenment – simply to say that meditation is the practice of noticing what you notice, and meditators tend to carry this mindset beyond the yoga mat, and begin to see their own mind more clearly. Among a smorgasbord of other patterns and quirks, what I saw was a self that, too often, didn’t listen.

The younger me enjoyed conversation. But a low, steady egoism meant that what I really enjoyed was talking. When it was someone else’s turn to talk, the listening could often feel like a chore. I might be passively absorbing whatever was being said – but a greater part of me would be daydreaming, reminiscing, making plans. I had a habit of interrupting, in the rather masculine belief that, whatever others had to say, I could say better for them. Sometimes, I would zone out and tune back in to realise that I’d been asked a question. I had a horrible habit, I saw, of sitting in silent linguistic craftsmanship, shaping my answer for when my turn came around – and only half-listening to what I’d actually be responding to.

The exceptions to this state of affairs, I began to see, were situations where there existed self-interest. If the subject was me, or material that might be of benefit to me, my attention would automatically sharpen. It was very easy to listen to someone explaining what steps I needed to take to ace a test or make some money. It was easy to listen to juicy gossip, particularly of the kind that made me feel fortunate or superior. It was easy to listen to debates on topics where I had a burning desire to be right. It was easy to listen to attractive women.

Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

On bad days, this attentional autopilot constricted me. On topics of politics or philosophy, this made me a bore and a bully. People avoided disagreeing with me on anything, even trivial points, because they knew it would balloon into annoyance and a failure to listen to their reasoning. In my personal life, too often, I could forget to support or lift up those around me. The flipside of not listening is not questioning – because, when you don’t want to listen, the last thing you want to do is trigger the exact scenario in which you are most expected to listen. And so I didn’t ask my friends serious questions often enough. I liked jokes, and I liked gossip; but I’d forget to ask them the real stuff. Or I’d ask them things they’d already told me a week ago. Or forget to ask about their recent job interview or break-up.

This is where bad listening does the most damage: it signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them, or you do but only in a skittish, flickering sort of a way. And so people become wary of opening up, or asking for advice, or leaning on you in the way that we lean on those people we truly believe to be big of heart.

All of the above makes for rather a glum picture, I know. I don’t want to overstate things. I wasn’t a monster. I cared for people and, when I concentrated, I could show it. I was liked, I made my way in the world, I apparently possessed what we call charisma. Plenty of the time, I listened fine. But this may be precisely the point: you can coast along in life as a bad listener. We tend to forgive it, because it’s common.

Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening (2020), frames modern life as particularly antagonistic to good listening:

[W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.

Why do we accept bad listening? Because, I think, listening well is hard, and we all know it. Like all forms of self-improvement, breaking this carapace requires intention, and ideally guidance.

W hen I discovered Rogers’s writings on listening, it was confirmation that, in many conversations, I had been getting it all wrong. When listening well, wrote Rogers and his co-author Richard Evans Farson in 1957, the listener ‘does not passively absorb the words which are spoken to him. He actively tries to grasp the facts and the feelings in what he hears, and he tries, by his listening, to help the speaker work out his own problems.’ This was exactly the stance I had only rarely adopted.

Born in 1902 – in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway, three years earlier – Rogers had a strict religious upbringing. As a young man, he seemed destined for the ministry. But in 1926, he crossed the road from Union Theological Seminary to Columbia University, and committed himself to psychology. (At this time, psychology was a field so new and so in vogue that, in 1919, during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, Sigmund Freud had secretly advised Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador in Paris.)

Rogers’s early work was focused on what were then called ‘delinquent’ children; but, by the 1940s, he was developing a new approach to psychotherapy, which came to be termed ‘humanistic’ and ‘person-centred’. Unlike Freud, Rogers believed that all of us possess ‘strongly positive directional tendencies’. Unhappy people, he believed, were not broken; they were blocked. And as opposed to the then-dominant modes of psychotherapy – psychoanalysis and behaviourism – Rogers believed that a therapist should be less a problem-solver, and more a sort of skilled midwife, drawing out solutions that already existed in the client. All people possess a deep urge to ‘self-actualise’, he believed, and it is the therapist’s job to nurture this urge. They were there to ‘release and strengthen the individual, rather than to intervene in his life’. Key to achieving this goal was careful, focused, ‘active’ listening.

That this perspective doesn’t seem particularly radical today is a testament to Rogers’s legacy. As one of his biographers, David Cohen, writes , Rogers’s therapeutic philosophy ‘has become part of the fabric of therapy’. Today, in the West, many of us believe that going to therapy can be an empowering and positive move, rather than an indicator of crisis or sickness. This shift owes a great deal to Rogers. So too does the expectation that a therapist will allow themselves to enter into our thinking, and express a careful but tangible empathy. Where Freud focused on the mind in isolation, Rogers valued more of a merging of minds – boundaried, but intimate.

On bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle

Active listening, for Rogers, was essential to creating the conditions for growth. It was one of the key ingredients in making another person feel less alone, less stuck, and more capable of self-insight.

Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view , just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard. As a teenager, I was a passionate atheist and a passionate Leftist. I saw things as very simple: all believers are gullible, and all conservatives are psychopaths, or at minimum heartless. I could hold to my Manichean view precisely because I had made no effort to grasp anyone else’s viewpoint.

Another of my old mental blocks, also flagged by Rogers, is the instinct that anyone I’m talking to is likely dumber than me. This arrogance is terrible for any attempt at listening, as Rogers recognises: ‘Until we can demonstrate a spirit which genuinely respects the potential worth of an individual,’ he writes, we won’t be good listeners. Previously, on bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle. I would look for clues that this person was wrong, and could be made to feel wrong. But as Rogers writes, to listen well, we ‘must create a climate which is neither critical, evaluative, nor moralising’.

‘Our emotions are often our own worst enemies when we try to become listeners,’ he wrote. In short, a great deal of bad listening comes down to lack of self-control. Other people animate us, associations fly, we are pricked by ideas. (This is why we have built careful social systems around not discussing such things as religion or politics at dinner parties.) When I was 21, if someone suggested that some pop music was pretty good, or capitalism had some redeeming features, I was incapable of not reacting. This made it very hard for me to listen to anyone’s opinion but my own. Which is why, Rogers says, one of the first skills to learn is non-intervention. Patience. ‘To listen to oneself,’ he wrote, ‘is a prerequisite to listening to others.’ Here, the analogy with meditation is clear: don’t chase every thought, don’t react to every internal event, stay centred. Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.

And when we do intervene, following Rogers, we must resist the ever-present urge to drag the focus of the conversation back to ourselves. Sociologists call this urge ‘the shift response’. When a friend tells me they’d love to visit Thailand, I must resist the selfish pull to leap in with Oh yeah, Thailand is great, I spent Christmas in Koh Lanta once, did I ever tell you about the Muay Thai class I did? Instead, I must stay with them: where exactly do they want to go, and why? Sociologists call this ‘the support response’. To listen well is to step back, keep the focus with someone else.

A nice example of Rogers’s approach, taken from his career, is his experience during the Second World War. Rogers was asked by the US Air Force to assess the psychological health of gunners, among whom morale appeared low. By being patient, and nonjudgmental, and gentle with his attention, Rogers discovered that the gunners had been bottling up one of their chief complaints: they resented civilians. Returning to his hometown and attending a football game, reported one pilot, ‘all that life and gaiety and luxury – it makes you so mad’. Rogers didn’t suggest any drastic intervention, or push any change in view. He recommended that the men be allowed to be honest about their anger, and process it openly, without shame. Their interlocutors, Rogers said, should begin by simply listening to them – for as long as it took, until they were unburdened. Only then should they respond.

Much like meditating, listening in this way takes work. It may take even more work outside the therapy room, in the absence of professional expectation. At all times, for almost all of us, our internal monologue is running, and it is desperate to spill from our brain onto our tongue. Stemming the flow requires intention. This is necessary because, even when we think an intervention is positive, it may be self-centred. We might not feel it, Rogers says, but, typically, when we offer our interpretation or input, ‘we are usually responding to our own needs to see the world in certain ways’. When I first began to observe myself as a listener, I saw how difficult I found it to simply let people finish their sentences. I noticed the infinite wave of impatience on which my attention rode. I noticed the slippery temptation of asking questions that were not really questions at all, but impositions of opinion disguised as questions. The better road, I began to see, was to stay silent. To wait.

The active listener’s job is to simply be there, to focus on ‘thinking with people instead of for or about them’. This thinking with requires listening for what Rogers calls ‘total meaning’. This means registering both the content of what they are saying, and (more subtly) the ‘ feeling or attitude underlying this content’. Often, the feeling is the real thing being expressed, and the content a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy. Capturing this feeling involves real concentration, especially as nonverbal cues – hesitation, mumbling, changes in posture – are crucial. Zone out, half-listen, and the ‘total meaning’ will entirely elude us.

Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists?

And though the bad listener loves to internally multitask while someone else is talking, faking it won’t work. As Rogers writes, people are alert to the mere ‘pretence of interest’, resenting it as ‘empty and sterile’. To sincerely listen means to marshal a mixture of agency, compassion, attention and commitment. This ‘demands practice’, Rogers said, and ‘may require changes in our own basic attitudes’.

Rogers’s theories were developed in a context where one person is attempting, explicitly, to help another person heal and grow. But Rogers was always explicit about the fact that his work was ‘about life’. Of his theories, he said that ‘the same lawfulness governs all human relationships’.

I think I started off from a lower point; by nature, I think my brain tends toward distraction and self-regard. But one would not need to be a bad listener to benefit from Rogers’s ideas. Even someone whose autopilot is an empathetic, interested listener can find much in his work. Rogers did more than anyone else to explore listening, systemise its dynamics, and record his professional explorations.

Certainly, being a good listener had an impact on Rogers’s own life. As another of his biographers, Howard Kirschenbaum, told me, Rogers discovered that ‘listening empathically to others was enormously healing and freeing, in both therapy and other relationships’. At his 80th birthday party, a cabaret was staged in which two Carl Rogers impersonators listened to one another in poses of exaggerated empathy. The well-meaning gag was a compliment; in a somewhat rare case of intellectuals actually embodying the ideas they espouse, Rogers was remembered as an excellent listener by everyone who knew him. Despite the kind of foibles that can weigh down any life – a reliance on alcohol, a frustration with monogamy – Rogers appears to have been a decent man: warm, open, and never cruel.

That he was able to carry his theories into his life should give encouragement, even to those of us who aren’t world-famous psychologists. Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists? Why else does all seduction start with riveted attention? Consider your own experience, and you will likely find a direct correlation between the people you feel love you, and the people who actually listen to the things you say. The people who never ask us a thing are the people we drift away from. The people who listen so hard that they pull new things out of us – who hear things we didn’t even say – are the ones we grab on to for life.

P erhaps above all, Rogers understood the stakes involved in listening well. All of us, when we are our best selves, want to bring growth to the people we choose to give our time to. We want to help them unlock themselves, stand taller, think better. The dynamic may not be as direct as with a therapist; there is more of an equal footing – but when our relationships are healthy, we want those around us to thrive. Listening well, Rogers showed, is the simplest route there. Be with people in the right way, and they become ‘enriched in courage and self-confidence’. They feel the releasing glow of attention, and develop an ‘underlying confidence in themselves’. If we don’t want this for our friends, then we are not their friends.

Indeed, such is the generosity of active listening that one can view the practice as one that borders on the spiritual. Though Rogers traded theology for psychology in his early 20s, he always maintained an interest in spirituality. He enjoyed the work of Søren Kierkegaard , an existentialist Christian; and, over the years, he had public discussions with the theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber . In successful therapy sessions, said Rogers, both therapist and client can find themselves in ‘a trance-like feeling’ where ‘there is, to borrow Buber’s phrase, a real “I-Thou” relationship’. Of his relationship to his clients, Rogers said: ‘I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself.’

Perhaps this is a bit rich for you; perhaps you would rather frame active listening as simply good manners, or a neat interpersonal hack. The point is: really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing. Only rarely will people notice, let alone thank you, for your efforts. Yet this generosity of attention is what people deserve.

And lest this all sound a bit pious – active listening is not pure altruism. Listening well, as Rogers said, is ‘a growth experience’. It allows us to get the best of others. The carousel of souls is endless. People have deeply felt and fascinating lives, and they can enfranchise us to worlds we would never otherwise know. If we truly listen, we expand our own intelligence, emotional range, and sense that the world remains open to discovery. Active listening is a kindness to others but, as Rogers was always quick to make clear, it is also a gift to ourselves.

Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel

Rogers became a hero of the 1960s counterculture . He admired their utopian dreams of psychic liberation and uninhibited communication; late in life, he was drawn to the New Age writings of Carlos Castañeda. All of this speaks to one of the key critiques of Rogers’s philosophy, both during his lifetime and today: that he was too optimistic. Rogers recognised himself that he was, in Cohen’s words, ‘incorrigibly positive’. His critics called him a sort of Pollyanna of the mind, and thought him naive for believing that such simple interventions as empathy and listening could trigger transformation in people. (Perhaps certain readers will harbour similar critiques about my own beliefs as expressed here.)

Those inclined to agree with this assessment of Rogers will probably think that I have overstated the case. Listening as love? Listening as spiritual practice? But in my own life, a renewed approach to listening has improved how I relate to others, and I now believe listening is absurdly under-discussed. Good listening is complex, subtle, slippery – but it is also right here, it lives in us, and we can work on it every day. Unlike the abstractions of so much of ethics and so much of philosophy, our listening is there to be honed, every day. Like a muscle, it can be trained. Like an intellect, it can be tested. In the very same moment, it can spur both our own growth and the growth of others. Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I couldn’t write nonfiction that anyone else actually wanted to read until I began trying to truly listen.

‘The greatest compliment that was ever paid me,’ said Henry David Thoreau, ‘was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.’ Left on autopilot, I can still be a bad listener. I’ll interrupt, finish sentences, chivvy people along. I suspect many of the people I know still find me to be, on balance, an average listener. But I try! With anyone I can impact – and especially those whose souls I can help to light up – I follow Rogers; I offer as much ‘of safety, of warmth, of empathic understanding, as I can genuinely find in myself to give.’ And I open myself to whatever I can learn. I fail in my attentions, again and again. But I tune back in, again and again. I believe it is working.

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Effective Listening Skills

Most of what we do in the Writing Center is listen, but there’s a difference between hearing and understanding the words someone is saying and listening to their message. Listening to your writers and your coworkers is vital to maintaining good conversation and avoiding misunderstandings that might lead to unnecessary conflict.

The listening process

The listening process involves four stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what’s been said, and respond (either verbally or nonverbally) to information they’ve received. Effectively engaging with all five stages of the listening process lets us best gather the information we need from others.

Paired with hearing, attending is the other half of the receiving stage in the listening process. Attending is the process of accurately identifying and interpreting particular sounds we hear as words. The sounds we hear have no meaning until we give them their meaning in context. Listening is an active process that constructs meaning from both verbal and nonverbal messages.

Understanding

The second stage in the listening process is the understanding stage. Understanding or comprehension is “shared meaning between parties in a communication transaction” and constitutes the first step in the listening process. This is the stage during which the listener determines the context and meanings of the words he or she hears. Determining the context and meaning of individual words, as well as assigning meaning in language, is essential to understanding sentences. This, in turn, is essential to understanding a speaker’s message.

Before getting the big picture of a message, it can be difficult to focus on what the speaker is saying. In the Writing Center, you and your writer may have trouble understanding each other if you have different accents, if the writer is struggling with language fluency, or if the space is very noisy.

One tactic for better understanding a speaker’s meaning is to ask questions. Asking questions allows you as the listener to fill in any holes you may have in the mental reconstruction of the speaker’s message.

During the evaluating stage, the listener determines whether or not the information they heard and understood from the speaker is well constructed or disorganized, biased or unbiased, true or false, significant or insignificant. They also ascertain how and why the speaker has come up with and conveyed the message that they delivered. This may involve considerations of a speaker’s personal or professional motivations and goals. For example, a listener may determine that a coworker’s forgetting to clean off their table is factually correct, but may also understand that the co-worker’s child is sick and that may be putting them on edge. A voter who listens to and understands the points made in a political candidate’s stump speech can decide whether or not those points were convincing enough to earn their vote.

The evaluating stage occurs most effectively once the listener fully understands what the speaker is trying to say. While we can, and sometimes do, form opinions of information and ideas that we don’t fully understand—or even that we misunderstand—doing so is not often ideal in the long run. Having a clear understanding of a speaker’s message allows a listener to evaluate that message without getting bogged down in ambiguities or spending unnecessary time and energy addressing points that may be tangential or otherwise nonessential.

The responding stage is the stage of the listening process in which the listener provides verbal and/or nonverbal reactions. A listener can respond to what they hear either verbally or non-verbally. Nonverbal signals can include gestures such as nodding, making eye contact, tapping a pen, fidgeting, scratching or cocking their head, smiling, rolling their eyes, grimacing, or any other body language. These kinds of responses can be displayed purposefully or involuntarily. Responding verbally might involve asking a question, requesting additional information, redirecting or changing the focus of a conversation, cutting off a speaker, or repeating what a speaker has said back to her in order to verify that the received message matches the intended message.

Nonverbal responses like nodding or eye contact allow the listener to communicate their level of interest without interrupting the speaker, thereby preserving the speaker/listener roles. When a listener responds verbally to what they hear and remember—for example, with a question or a comment—the speaker/listener roles are reversed, at least momentarily.

Responding adds action to the listening process. Oftentimes, the speaker looks for verbal and nonverbal responses from the listener to determine if and how their message is being understood and/or considered. Based on the listener’s responses, the speaker can choose to either adjust or continue with the delivery of her message. For example, if a listener’s brow is furrowed and their arms are crossed, the speaker may determine that she needs to lighten their tone to better communicate their point. If a listener is smiling and nodding or asking questions, the speaker may feel that the listener is engaged and her message is being communicated effectively.

Barriers to effective listening

Low concentration.

Low concentration, or not paying close attention to speakers, is detrimental to effective listening. It can result from various psychological or physical situations such as visual or auditory distractions, physical discomfort, inadequate volume, lack of interest in the subject material, stress, or personal bias. Regardless of the cause, when a listener is not paying attention to a speaker’s dialogue, effective communication is significantly diminished.

Lack of Prioritization

Just as lack of attention to detail in a conversation can lead to ineffective listening, so can focusing too much attention on the least important information. Listeners need to be able to pick up on social cues and prioritize the information they hear to identify the most important points within the context of the conversation.

Often, the information the audience needs to know is delivered along with less pertinent or irrelevant information. When listeners give equal weight to everything they hear, it makes it difficult to organize and retain the information they need. For instance, students who take notes in class must know which information is worth writing down within the context of an entire lecture. Writing down the lecture word for word is impossible as well as inefficient.

Poor Judgment

When listening to a speaker’s message, it is common to sometimes overlook aspects of the conversation or make judgments before all of the information is presented. Listeners often engage in confirmation bias, which is the tendency to isolate aspects of a conversation to support one’s own preexisting beliefs and values. This psychological process has a detrimental effect on listening for several reasons.

First, confirmation bias tends to cause listeners to enter the conversation before the speaker finishes her message and, thus, form opinions without first obtaining all pertinent information. Second, confirmation bias detracts from a listener’s ability to make accurate critical assessments. For example, a listener may hear something at the beginning of a speech that arouses a specific emotion. Whether anger, frustration, or anything else, this emotion could have a profound impact on the listener’s perception of the rest of the conversation.

Focusing on Style, Not Substance

In the case of listening, distracting or larger-than-life elements in a speech or presentation can deflect attention away from the most important information in the conversation or presentation. These distractions can also influence the listener’s opinion. For example, if a message is delivered in a way you perceive as abrupt or rude, you’re much less likely to understand (or want to understand) the message.

Cultural differences (including speakers’ accents, vocabulary, and misunderstandings due to cultural assumptions) can also obstruct the listening process. The same biases apply to the speaker’s physical appearance. To avoid this obstruction, listeners should be aware of these biases and focus on the substance, rather than the style of delivery, or the speaker’s voice and appearance.

The solution: active listening

The contents of this section are in part from “Active Listening” by Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License .

Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker, by way of restating or paraphrasing what they have heard in their own words. The goal of this repetition is to confirm what the listener has heard and to confirm the understanding of both parties. The ability to actively listen demonstrates sincerity, and that nothing is being assumed or taken for granted. Active listening is most often used to improve personal relationships, reduce misunderstanding and conflicts, strengthen cooperation, and foster understanding.

When engaging with a particular speaker, a listener can use several degrees of active listening, each resulting in a different quality of communication with the speaker. It’s important to keep in mind that these listening skills are based in the American style of communicating. If your consultee seems uncomfortable or confused, try something else.

he three the main techniques for active listening are paraphrasing, clarifying and summarizing.

Paraphrasing is restating the speaker’s thought, in your own words. For instance, “I think you’re saying that…” or “It sounds like you’re saying …”. This is so they know you understand, or don’t understand, in which case they can clarify for you.
Clarifying involves asking questions to make sure that you understand. For example, “Can you give me an example of that?” or “You just said that such and such is important, can you help me understand what that means to you?”
Summarizing is accurately and briefly summarizing the intent of their message. For instance, “I think the main ideas here are …”

Active Listening Guidelines

Put the focus of attention on the speaker
Paraphrase and clarify
Don’t discuss your own reactions or give well-intentioned comments like,”I know what you mean.”, “Oh yeah, that same thing happened to me.”, or “I don’t agree because… ” This is not a time to articulate your own view points or turn the attention back to yourself.
Don’t ignore the speaker’s feelings
Don’t pretend that you understand their meaning if you don’t. It’s perfectly fine to ask for clarification. For example, “What did you mean by…?” or “Can you tell me more about…?”
Don’t ignore the non-verbal content. People’s body language, facial expressions, gestures, pitch, tone, can give you clues about what they are thinking and feeling.
Don’t think about what you will say next. (Probably the hardest guideline to follow) It seems it is our default response when we are getting into a rather heated conversation with somebody, we’re just holding our breath until we can get a chance to insert our opinion, and that is the opposite of active listening.

External Links

“ Active Listening Strategies ” by Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences

“ Notes on Communication: Active Listening ” by G.T. Coates

“ Improving Listening Competence ” from UMN Libraries

Except where noted, the content of this page is adapted from Curation and Revision and “Listening and Critical Thinking,” provided by Boundless.com. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Listening Process and Its Key Advantages Report (Assessment)

There is a number of memory tips that an individual can use to advance their listening skills. For instance, to assist one in remembering what they hear, it is useful to try to visualize what the person is speaking. This might be a literal illustration or other ideas connected to the subject. When one listens for extended durations, this will make it easier to retain words and expressions. They will not need to plan what to reply if they can visualize what the speaker means (Hamilton et al., 2019). Then, being conscious of actions when someone is speaking will help one improve listening skills. One may accomplish this by taking notes after an in-person conversation or by listening to audiobooks or lectures without the text on the screen. In order to see how much material one can remember, they may try listening to recordings that are no longer than four minutes and playing them again. This can improve general communication skills and make a person more conscious of their function as a recipient of information.

The advantages of listening are numerous and significant to a great degree. In everyday life, a person can comprehend people, improve relations, convince or sell successfully, manage and motivate a team, or gain from others via efficient listening. Being connected to others via listening has been found to be essential for achieving happiness in people (Hamilton et al., 2019). Interpersonal relationships are more important to me and my wellness than wealth, fame, or material belongings.

Finally, the listening process is easier when one understands the basic stages of listening. During the process, there is a necessity to receive, understand, and analyze the information properly. In this vein, coherency can be achieved only via conscious actions and a train of thought (Hamilton et al., 2019). The theoretical foundation is necessary here as it helps to streamline these actions in an appropriate order.

Hamilton, C., Creel, B., Kroll, T. (2019). Communicating for success (2 nd ed.). Routledge.

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IvyPanda. (2023, June 14). Listening Process and Its Key Advantages. https://ivypanda.com/essays/listening-process-and-its-key-advantages/

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Listening Process and Its Key Advantages." June 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/listening-process-and-its-key-advantages/.

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5.2 Barriers to Effective Listening

Learning objectives.

Discuss some of the environmental and physical barriers to effective listening.
Explain how cognitive and personal factors can present barriers to effective listening.
Discuss common bad listening practices.

Barriers to effective listening are present at every stage of the listening process (Hargie, 2011). At the receiving stage, noise can block or distort incoming stimuli. At the interpreting stage, complex or abstract information may be difficult to relate to previous experiences, making it difficult to reach understanding. At the recalling stage, natural limits to our memory and challenges to concentration can interfere with remembering. At the evaluating stage, personal biases and prejudices can lead us to block people out or assume we know what they are going to say. At the responding stage, a lack of paraphrasing and questioning skills can lead to misunderstanding. In the following section, we will explore how environmental and physical factors, cognitive and personal factors, and bad listening practices present barriers to effective listening.

Environmental and Physical Barriers to Listening

Environmental factors such as lighting, temperature, and furniture affect our ability to listen. A room that is too dark can make us sleepy, just as a room that is too warm or cool can raise awareness of our physical discomfort to a point that it is distracting. Some seating arrangements facilitate listening, while others separate people. In general, listening is easier when listeners can make direct eye contact with and are in close physical proximity to a speaker. You may recall from Chapter 4 “Nonverbal Communication” that when group members are allowed to choose a leader, they often choose the person who is sitting at the center or head of the table (Andersen, 1999). Even though the person may not have demonstrated any leadership abilities, people subconsciously gravitate toward speakers that are nonverbally accessible. The ability to effectively see and hear a person increases people’s confidence in their abilities to receive and process information. Eye contact and physical proximity can still be affected by noise. As we learned in Chapter 1 “Introduction to Communication Studies” , environmental noises such as a whirring air conditioner, barking dogs, or a ringing fire alarm can obviously interfere with listening despite direct lines of sight and well-placed furniture.

Physiological noise, like environmental noise, can interfere with our ability to process incoming information. This is considered a physical barrier to effective listening because it emanates from our physical body. Physiological noise is noise stemming from a physical illness, injury, or bodily stress. Ailments such as a cold, a broken leg, a headache, or a poison ivy outbreak can range from annoying to unbearably painful and impact our listening relative to their intensity. Another type of noise, psychological noise, bridges physical and cognitive barriers to effective listening. Psychological noise , or noise stemming from our psychological states including moods and level of arousal, can facilitate or impede listening. Any mood or state of arousal, positive or negative, that is too far above or below our regular baseline creates a barrier to message reception and processing. The generally positive emotional state of being in love can be just as much of a barrier as feeling hatred. Excited arousal can also distract as much as anxious arousal. Stress about an upcoming events ranging from losing a job, to having surgery, to wondering about what to eat for lunch can overshadow incoming messages. While we will explore cognitive barriers to effective listening more in the next section, psychological noise is relevant here given that the body and mind are not completely separate. In fact, they can interact in ways that further interfere with listening. Fatigue, for example, is usually a combination of psychological and physiological stresses that manifests as stress (psychological noise) and weakness, sleepiness, and tiredness (physiological noise). Additionally, mental anxiety (psychological noise) can also manifest itself in our bodies through trembling, sweating, blushing, or even breaking out in rashes (physiological noise).

Cognitive and Personal Barriers to Listening

Aside from the barriers to effective listening that may be present in the environment or emanate from our bodies, cognitive limits, a lack of listening preparation, difficult or disorganized messages, and prejudices can interfere with listening. Whether you call it multitasking, daydreaming, glazing over, or drifting off, we all cognitively process other things while receiving messages. If you think of your listening mind as a wall of ten televisions, you may notice that in some situations five of the ten televisions are tuned into one channel. If that one channel is a lecture being given by your professor, then you are exerting about half of your cognitive processing abilities on one message. In another situation, all ten televisions may be on different channels. The fact that we have the capability to process more than one thing at a time offers some advantages and disadvantages. But unless we can better understand how our cognitive capacities and personal preferences affect our listening, we are likely to experience more barriers than benefits.

Difference between Speech and Thought Rate

Our ability to process more information than what comes from one speaker or source creates a barrier to effective listening. While people speak at a rate of 125 to 175 words per minute, we can process between 400 and 800 words per minute (Hargie, 2011). This gap between speech rate and thought rate gives us an opportunity to side-process any number of thoughts that can be distracting from a more important message. Because of this gap, it is impossible to give one message our “undivided attention,” but we can occupy other channels in our minds with thoughts related to the central message. For example, using some of your extra cognitive processing abilities to repeat, rephrase, or reorganize messages coming from one source allows you to use that extra capacity in a way that reinforces the primary message.

The difference between speech and thought rate connects to personal barriers to listening, as personal concerns are often the focus of competing thoughts that can take us away from listening and challenge our ability to concentrate on others’ messages. Two common barriers to concentration are self-centeredness and lack of motivation (Brownell, 1993). For example, when our self-consciousness is raised, we may be too busy thinking about how we look, how we’re sitting, or what others think of us to be attentive to an incoming message. Additionally, we are often challenged when presented with messages that we do not find personally relevant. In general, we employ selective attention , which refers to our tendency to pay attention to the messages that benefit us in some way and filter others out. So the student who is checking his or her Twitter feed during class may suddenly switch his or her attention back to the previously ignored professor when the following words are spoken: “This will be important for the exam.”

Drifting attention is a common barrier to listening. Try to find personal relevance in the message to help maintain concentration.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0.

Another common barrier to effective listening that stems from the speech and thought rate divide is response preparation. Response preparation refers to our tendency to rehearse what we are going to say next while a speaker is still talking. Rehearsal of what we will say once a speaker’s turn is over is an important part of the listening process that takes place between the recalling and evaluation and/or the evaluation and responding stage. Rehearsal becomes problematic when response preparation begins as someone is receiving a message and hasn’t had time to engage in interpretation or recall. In this sense, we are listening with the goal of responding instead of with the goal of understanding, which can lead us to miss important information that could influence our response.

“Getting Plugged In”

Technology, Multitasking, and Listening

Do you like to listen to music while you do homework? Do you clean your apartment while talking to your mom on the phone? Do you think students should be allowed to use laptops in all college classrooms? Your answers to these questions will point to your preferences for multitasking. If you answered “yes” to most of them, then you are in line with the general practices of the “net generation” of digital natives for whom multitasking, especially with various forms of media, is a way of life. Multitasking is a concept that has been around for a while and emerged along with the increasing expectation that we will fill multiple role demands throughout the day. Multitasking can be pretty straightforward and beneficial—for example, if we listen to motivating music while working out. But multitasking can be very inefficient, especially when one or more of our concurrent tasks are complex or unfamiliar to us (Bardhi, Rohm, & Sultan, 2010).

Media multitasking specifically refers to the use of multiple forms of media at the same time, and it can have positive and negative effects on listening (Bardhi, Rohm, & Sultan, 2010). The negative effects of media multitasking have received much attention in recent years, as people question the decreasing attention span within our society. Media multitasking may promote inefficiency, because it can lead to distractions and plays a prominent role for many in procrastination. The numerous options for media engagement that we have can also lead to a feeling of chaos as our attention is pulled in multiple directions, creating a general sense of disorder. And many of us feel a sense of enslavement when we engage in media multitasking, as we feel like we can’t live without certain personal media outlets.

Media multitasking can also give people a sense of control, as they use multiple technologies to access various points of information to solve a problem or complete a task. An employee may be able to use her iPad to look up information needed to address a concern raised during a business meeting. She could then e-mail that link to the presenter, who could share it with the room through his laptop and a LCD projector. Media multitasking can also increase efficiency, as people can carry out tasks faster. The links to videos and online articles that I’ve included in this textbook allow readers like you to quickly access additional information about a particular subject to prepare for a presentation or complete a paper assignment. Media multitasking can also increase engagement. Aside from just reading material in a textbook, students can now access information through an author’s blog or Twitter account.

Media multitasking can produce an experience that feels productive, but is it really? What are the consequences of our media- and technology-saturated world? Although many of us like to think that we’re good multitaskers, some research indicates otherwise. For example, student laptop use during class has been connected to lower academic performance (Fried, 2008). This is because media multitasking has the potential to interfere with listening at multiple stages of the process. The study showed that laptop use interfered with receiving, as students using them reported that they paid less attention to the class lectures. This is because students used the laptops for purposes other than taking notes or exploring class content. Of the students using laptops, 81 percent checked e-mail during lectures, 68 percent used instant messaging, and 43 percent surfed the web. Students using laptops also had difficulty with the interpretation stage of listening, as they found less clarity in the parts of the lecture they heard and did not understand the course material as much as students who didn’t use a laptop. The difficulties with receiving and interpreting obviously create issues with recall that can lead to lower academic performance in the class. Laptop use also negatively affected the listening abilities of students not using laptops. These students reported that they were distracted, as their attention was drawn to the laptop screens of other students.

What are some common ways that you engage in media multitasking? What are some positive and negative consequences of your media multitasking?
What strategies do you or could you use to help minimize the negative effects of media multitasking?
Should laptops, smartphones, and other media devices be used by students during college classes? Why or why not? What restrictions or guidelines for use could instructors provide that would capitalize on the presence of such media to enhance student learning and help minimize distractions?

Lack of Listening Preparation

Another barrier to effective listening is a general lack of listening preparation. Unfortunately, most people have never received any formal training or instruction related to listening. Although some people think listening skills just develop over time, competent listening is difficult, and enhancing listening skills takes concerted effort. Even when listening education is available, people do not embrace it as readily as they do opportunities to enhance their speaking skills. After teaching communication courses for several years, I have consistently found that students and teachers approach the listening part of the course less enthusiastically than some of the other parts. Listening is often viewed as an annoyance or a chore, or just ignored or minimized as part of the communication process. In addition, our individualistic society values speaking more than listening, as it’s the speakers who are sometimes literally in the spotlight. Although listening competence is a crucial part of social interaction and many of us value others we perceive to be “good listeners,” listening just doesn’t get the same kind of praise, attention, instruction, or credibility as speaking. Teachers, parents, and relational partners explicitly convey the importance of listening through statements like “You better listen to me,” “Listen closely,” and “Listen up,” but these demands are rarely paired with concrete instruction. So unless you plan on taking more communication courses in the future (and I hope you do), this chapter may be the only instruction you receive on the basics of the listening process, some barriers to effective listening, and how we can increase our listening competence.

Bad Messages and/or Speakers

Bad messages and/or speakers also present a barrier to effective listening. Sometimes our trouble listening originates in the sender. In terms of message construction, poorly structured messages or messages that are too vague, too jargon filled, or too simple can present listening difficulties. In terms of speakers’ delivery, verbal fillers, monotone voices, distracting movements, or a disheveled appearance can inhibit our ability to cognitively process a message (Hargie, 2011). As we will learn in Section 5.2.3 “Bad Listening Practices” , speakers can employ particular strategies to create listenable messages that take some of the burden off the listener by tailoring a message to be heard and processed easily. Chapter 9 “Preparing a Speech” also discusses many strategies for creating messages tailored for oral delivery, including things like preview and review statements, transitions, and parallel wording. Listening also becomes difficult when a speaker tries to present too much information. Information overload is a common barrier to effective listening that good speakers can help mitigate by building redundancy into their speeches and providing concrete examples of new information to help audience members interpret and understand the key ideas.

Oscar Wilde said, “Listening is a very dangerous thing. If one listens one may be convinced.” Unfortunately, some of our default ways of processing information and perceiving others lead us to rigid ways of thinking. When we engage in prejudiced listening, we are usually trying to preserve our ways of thinking and avoid being convinced of something different. This type of prejudice is a barrier to effective listening, because when we prejudge a person based on his or her identity or ideas, we usually stop listening in an active and/or ethical way.

We exhibit prejudice in our listening in several ways, some of which are more obvious than others. For example, we may claim to be in a hurry and only selectively address the parts of a message that we agree with or that aren’t controversial. We can also operate from a state of denial where we avoid a subject or person altogether so that our views are not challenged. Prejudices that are based on a person’s identity, such as race, age, occupation, or appearance, may lead us to assume that we know what he or she will say, essentially closing down the listening process. Keeping an open mind and engaging in perception checking can help us identify prejudiced listening and hopefully shift into more competent listening practices.

Bad Listening Practices

The previously discussed barriers to effective listening may be difficult to overcome because they are at least partially beyond our control. Physical barriers, cognitive limitations, and perceptual biases exist within all of us, and it is more realistic to believe that we can become more conscious of and lessen them than it is to believe that we can eliminate them altogether. Other “bad listening” practices may be habitual, but they are easier to address with some concerted effort. These bad listening practices include interrupting, distorted listening, eavesdropping, aggressive listening, narcissistic listening, and pseudo-listening.

Interrupting

Conversations unfold as a series of turns, and turn taking is negotiated through a complex set of verbal and nonverbal signals that are consciously and subconsciously received. In this sense, conversational turn taking has been likened to a dance where communicators try to avoid stepping on each other’s toes. One of the most frequent glitches in the turn-taking process is interruption, but not all interruptions are considered “bad listening.” An interruption could be unintentional if we misread cues and think a person is done speaking only to have him or her start up again at the same time we do. Sometimes interruptions are more like overlapping statements that show support (e.g., “I think so too.”) or excitement about the conversation (e.g., “That’s so cool!”). Back-channel cues like “uh-huh,” as we learned earlier, also overlap with a speaker’s message. We may also interrupt out of necessity if we’re engaged in a task with the other person and need to offer directions (e.g., “Turn left here.”), instructions (e.g., “Will you whisk the eggs?”), or warnings (e.g., “Look out behind you!”). All these interruptions are not typically thought of as evidence of bad listening unless they become distracting for the speaker or are unnecessary.

Unintentional interruptions can still be considered bad listening if they result from mindless communication. As we’ve already learned, intended meaning is not as important as the meaning that is generated in the interaction itself. So if you interrupt unintentionally, but because you were only half-listening, then the interruption is still evidence of bad listening. The speaker may form a negative impression of you that can’t just be erased by you noting that you didn’t “mean to interrupt.” Interruptions can also be used as an attempt to dominate a conversation. A person engaging in this type of interruption may lead the other communicator to try to assert dominance, too, resulting in a competition to see who can hold the floor the longest or the most often. More than likely, though, the speaker will form a negative impression of the interrupter and may withdraw from the conversation.

Distorted Listening

Distorted listening occurs in many ways. Sometimes we just get the order of information wrong, which can have relatively little negative effects if we are casually recounting a story, annoying effects if we forget the order of turns (left, right, left or right, left, right?) in our driving directions, or very negative effects if we recount the events of a crime out of order, which leads to faulty testimony at a criminal trial. Rationalization is another form of distorted listening through which we adapt, edit, or skew incoming information to fit our existing schemata. We may, for example, reattribute the cause of something to better suit our own beliefs. If a professor is explaining to a student why he earned a “D” on his final paper, the student could reattribute the cause from “I didn’t follow the paper guidelines” to “this professor is an unfair grader.” Sometimes we actually change the words we hear to make them better fit what we are thinking. This can easily happen if we join a conversation late, overhear part of a conversation, or are being a lazy listener and miss important setup and context. Passing along distorted information can lead to negative consequences ranging from starting a false rumor about someone to passing along incorrect medical instructions from one health-care provider to the next (Hargie, 2011). Last, the addition of material to a message is a type of distorted listening that actually goes against our normal pattern of listening, which involves reducing the amount of information and losing some meaning as we take it in. The metaphor of “weaving a tall tale” is related to the practice of distorting through addition, as inaccurate or fabricated information is added to what was actually heard. Addition of material is also a common feature of gossip. An excellent example of the result of distorted listening is provided by the character Anthony Crispino on Saturday Night Live, who passes along distorted news on the “Weekend Update” segment. In past episodes, he has noted that Lebron James turned down the Cleveland Show to be on Miami Vice (instead of left the Cleveland Cavaliers to play basketball for the Miami Heat) and that President Obama planned on repealing the “Bush haircuts” (instead of the Bush tax cuts).

Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping is a bad listening practice that involves a calculated and planned attempt to secretly listen to a conversation. There is a difference between eavesdropping on and overhearing a conversation. Many if not most of the interactions we have throughout the day occur in the presence of other people. However, given that our perceptual fields are usually focused on the interaction, we are often unaware of the other people around us or don’t think about the fact that they could be listening in on our conversation. We usually only become aware of the fact that other people could be listening in when we’re discussing something private.

Eavesdropping entails intentionally listening in on a conversation that you are not a part of.

Alan Strakey – Eavesdropping – CC BY-ND 2.0.

People eavesdrop for a variety of reasons. People might think another person is talking about them behind their back or that someone is engaged in illegal or unethical behavior. Sometimes people eavesdrop to feed the gossip mill or out of curiosity (McCornack, 2007). In any case, this type of listening is considered bad because it is a violation of people’s privacy. Consequences for eavesdropping may include an angry reaction if caught, damage to interpersonal relationships, or being perceived as dishonest and sneaky. Additionally, eavesdropping may lead people to find out information that is personally upsetting or hurtful, especially if the point of the eavesdropping is to find out what people are saying behind their back.

Aggressive Listening

Aggressive listening is a bad listening practice in which people pay attention in order to attack something that a speaker says (McCornack, 2007). Aggressive listeners like to ambush speakers in order to critique their ideas, personality, or other characteristics. Such behavior often results from built-up frustration within an interpersonal relationship. Unfortunately, the more two people know each other, the better they will be at aggressive listening. Take the following exchange between long-term partners:

Deb: I’ve been thinking about making a salsa garden next to the side porch. I think it would be really good to be able to go pick our own tomatoes and peppers and cilantro to make homemade salsa.

Summer: Really? When are you thinking about doing it?

Deb: Next weekend. Would you like to help?

Summer: I won’t hold my breath. Every time you come up with some “idea of the week” you get so excited about it. But do you ever follow through with it? No. We’ll be eating salsa from the store next year, just like we are now.

Although Summer’s initial response to Deb’s idea is seemingly appropriate and positive, she asks the question because she has already planned her upcoming aggressive response. Summer’s aggression toward Deb isn’t about a salsa garden; it’s about a building frustration with what Summer perceives as Deb’s lack of follow-through on her ideas. Aside from engaging in aggressive listening because of built-up frustration, such listeners may also attack others’ ideas or mock their feelings because of their own low self-esteem and insecurities.

Narcissistic Listening

Narcissistic listening is a form of self-centered and self-absorbed listening in which listeners try to make the interaction about them (McCornack, 2007). Narcissistic listeners redirect the focus of the conversation to them by interrupting or changing the topic. When the focus is taken off them, narcissistic listeners may give negative feedback by pouting, providing negative criticism of the speaker or topic, or ignoring the speaker. A common sign of narcissistic listening is the combination of a “pivot,” when listeners shift the focus of attention back to them, and “one-upping,” when listeners try to top what previous speakers have said during the interaction. You can see this narcissistic combination in the following interaction:

Bryce: My boss has been really unfair to me lately and hasn’t been letting me work around my class schedule. I think I may have to quit, but I don’t know where I’ll find another job.

Toby: Why are you complaining? I’ve been working with the same stupid boss for two years. He doesn’t even care that I’m trying to get my degree and work at the same time. And you should hear the way he talks to me in front of the other employees.

Narcissistic listeners, given their self-centeredness, may actually fool themselves into thinking that they are listening and actively contributing to a conversation. We all have the urge to share our own stories during interactions, because other people’s communication triggers our own memories about related experiences. It is generally more competent to withhold sharing our stories until the other person has been able to speak and we have given the appropriate support and response. But we all shift the focus of a conversation back to us occasionally, either because we don’t know another way to respond or because we are making an attempt at empathy. Narcissistic listeners consistently interrupt or follow another speaker with statements like “That reminds me of the time…,” “Well, if I were you…,” and “That’s nothing…” (Nichols, 1995) As we’ll learn later, matching stories isn’t considered empathetic listening, but occasionally doing it doesn’t make you a narcissistic listener.

Pseudo-listening

Do you have a friend or family member who repeats stories? If so, then you’ve probably engaged in pseudo-listening as a politeness strategy. Pseudo-listening is behaving as if you’re paying attention to a speaker when you’re actually not (McCornack, 2007). Outwardly visible signals of attentiveness are an important part of the listening process, but when they are just an “act,” the pseudo-listener is engaging in bad listening behaviors. She or he is not actually going through the stages of the listening process and will likely not be able to recall the speaker’s message or offer a competent and relevant response. Although it is a bad listening practice, we all understandably engage in pseudo-listening from time to time. If a friend needs someone to talk but you’re really tired or experiencing some other barrier to effective listening, it may be worth engaging in pseudo-listening as a relational maintenance strategy, especially if the friend just needs a sounding board and isn’t expecting advice or guidance. We may also pseudo-listen to a romantic partner or grandfather’s story for the fifteenth time to prevent hurting their feelings. We should avoid pseudo-listening when possible and should definitely avoid making it a listening habit. Although we may get away with it in some situations, each time we risk being “found out,” which could have negative relational consequences.

Key Takeaways

Environmental and physical barriers to effective listening include furniture placement, environmental noise such as sounds of traffic or people talking, physiological noise such as a sinus headache or hunger, and psychological noise such as stress or anger.
Cognitive barriers to effective listening include the difference between speech and thought rate that allows us “extra room” to think about other things while someone is talking and limitations in our ability or willingness to concentrate or pay attention. Personal barriers to effective listening include a lack of listening preparation, poorly structured and/or poorly delivered messages, and prejudice.

There are several bad listening practices that we should avoid, as they do not facilitate effective listening:

Interruptions that are unintentional or serve an important or useful purpose are not considered bad listening. When interrupting becomes a habit or is used in an attempt to dominate a conversation, then it is a barrier to effective listening.
Distorted listening occurs when we incorrectly recall information, skew information to fit our expectations or existing schemata, or add material to embellish or change information.
Eavesdropping is a planned attempt to secretly listen to a conversation, which is a violation of the speakers’ privacy.
Aggressive listening is a bad listening practice in which people pay attention to a speaker in order to attack something they say.
Narcissistic listening is self-centered and self-absorbed listening in which listeners try to make the interaction about them by interrupting, changing the subject, or drawing attention away from others.
Pseudo-listening is “fake listening,” in that people behave like they are paying attention and listening when they actually are not.
We are capable of thinking faster than the speed at which the average person speaks, which allows us some room to put mental faculties toward things other than listening. What typically makes your mind wander?
Bad speakers and messages are a common barrier to effective listening. Describe a time recently when your ability to listen was impaired by the poor delivery and/or content of another person.
Of the bad listening practices listed, which do you use the most? Why do you think you use this one more than the others? What can you do to help prevent or lessen this barrier?

Andersen, P. A., Nonverbal Communication: Forms and Functions (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999), 57–58.

Bardhi, F., Andres J. Rohm, and Fareena Sultan, “Tuning in and Tuning out: Media Multitasking among Young Consumers,” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 9 (2010): 318.

Brownell, J., “Listening Environment: A Perspective,” in Perspectives on Listening , eds. Andrew D. Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley (Norwood, NJ: Alex Publishing Corporation, 1993), 245.

Fried, C. B., “In-Class Laptop Use and Its Effects on Student Learning,” Computers and Education 50 (2008): 906–14.

Hargie, O., Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 200.

McCornack, S., Reflect and Relate: An Introduction to Interpersonal Communication (Boston, MA: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2007), 208.

Communication in the Real World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Understanding Listening

The importance of listening.

Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.

Learning Outcomes

Define active listening and list the five stages of the listening process

Key Takeaways

The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding.
Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker.
Three main degrees of active listening are repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.
Listening : The active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.
active listening : A particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker.

Antony Gormley's statue "Untitled [Listening]," Maygrove Peace Park.

Listening Is More than Just Hearing

Listening is a skill of critical significance in all aspects of our lives–from maintaining our personal relationships, to getting our jobs done, to taking notes in class, to figuring out which bus to take to the airport. Regardless of how we’re engaged with listening, it’s important to understand that listening involves more than just hearing the words that are directed at us. Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.

The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding. These stages will be discussed in more detail in later sections. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what’s been said, and respond (either verbally or nonverbally) to information they’ve received.

Effectively engaging with all five stages of the listening process lets us best gather the information we need from the world around us.

Active Listening

When engaging with a particular speaker, a listener can use several degrees of active listening, each resulting in a different quality of communication with the speaker. This active listening chart shows three main degrees of listening: repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.

Degrees of Active Listening : There are several degrees of active listening.

Active listening can also involve paying attention to the speaker’s behavior and body language. Having the ability to interpret a person’s body language lets the listener develop a more accurate understanding of the speaker’s message.

Listening and Critical Thinking

Critical thinking skills are essential and connected to the ability to listen effectively and process the information that one hears.

Illustrate the relationship between critical thinking and listening

Critical thinking is the process by which people qualitatively and quantitatively assess the information they accumulate.
Critical thinking skills include observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition.
The concepts and principles of critical thinking can be applied to any context or case, including the process of listening.
Effective listening lets people collect information in a way that promotes critical thinking and successful communication.
critical thinking : The process by which people qualitatively and quantitatively assess the information they have accumulated.
Metacognition : “Cognition about cognition”, or “knowing about knowing. ” It can take many forms, including knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving.

Critical Thinking

Roosevelt and Churchill in Conversation : Effective listening leads to better critical understanding.

One definition for critical thinking is “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. ”

In other words, critical thinking is the process by which people qualitatively and quantitatively assess the information they have accumulated, and how they in turn use that information to solve problems and forge new patterns of understanding. Critical thinking clarifies goals, examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, accomplishes actions, and assesses conclusions.

Critical thinking has many practical applications, such as formulating a workable solution to a complex personal problem, deliberating in a group setting about what course of action to take, or analyzing the assumptions and methods used in arriving at a scientific hypothesis. People use critical thinking to solve complex math problems or compare prices at the grocery store. It is a process that informs all aspects of one’s daily life, not just the time spent taking a class or writing an essay.

Critical thinking is imperative to effective communication, and thus, public speaking.

Connection of Critical Thinking to Listening

Critical thinking occurs whenever people figure out what to believe or what to do, and do so in a reasonable, reflective way. The concepts and principles of critical thinking can be applied to any context or case, but only by reflecting upon the nature of that application. Expressed in most general terms, critical thinking is “a way of taking up the problems of life. ” As such, reading, writing, speaking, and listening can all be done critically or uncritically insofar as core critical thinking skills can be applied to all of those activities. Critical thinking skills include observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition.

Critical thinkers are those who are able to do the following:

Recognize problems and find workable solutions to those problems
Understand the importance of prioritization in the hierarchy of problem solving tasks
Gather relevant information
Read between the lines by recognizing what is not said or stated
Use language clearly, efficiently, and with efficacy
Interpret data and form conclusions based on that data
Determine the presence of lack of logical relationships
Make sound conclusions and/or generalizations based on given data
Test conclusions and generalizations
Reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience
Render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life

Therefore, critical thinkers must engage in highly active listening to further their critical thinking skills. People can use critical thinking skills to understand, interpret, and assess what they hear in order to formulate appropriate reactions or responses. These skills allow people to organize the information that they hear, understand its context or relevance, recognize unstated assumptions, make logical connections between ideas, determine the truth values, and draw conclusions. Conversely, engaging in focused, effective listening also lets people collect information in a way that best promotes critical thinking and, ultimately, successful communication.

Causes of Poor Listening

Listening is negatively affected by low concentration, trying too hard, jumping ahead, and/or focusing on style instead of substance.

Give examples of the four main barriers to effective listening

Low concentration can be the result of various psychological or physical situations such as visual or auditory distractions, physical discomfort, inadequate volume, lack of interest in the subject material, stress, or personal bias.
When listeners give equal weight to everything they hear, it makes it difficult to organize and retain the information they need. When the audience is trying too hard to listen, they often cannot take in the most important information they need.
Jumping ahead can be detrimental to the listening experience; when listening to a speaker’s message, the audience overlooks aspects of the conversation or makes judgments before all of the information is presented.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to pick out aspects of a conversation that support one’s own preexisting beliefs and values.
A flashy speech can actually be more detrimental to the overall success and comprehension of the message because a speech that focuses on style offers little in the way of substance.
Recognizing obstacles ahead of time can go a long way toward overcoming them.
confirmation bias : The tendency to pick out aspects of a conversation that support our one’s own preexisting beliefs and values.
Vividness effect : The phenomenon of how vivid or highly graphic and dramatic events affect an individual’s perception of a situation.

Causes of Poor Listening : There are many barriers that can impede effective listening.

The act of “listening” may be affected by barriers that impede the flow of information. These barriers include distractions, an inability to prioritize information, a tendency to assume or judge based on little or no information (i.e., “jumping to conclusions), and general confusion about the topic being discussed. Listening barriers may be psychological (e.g., the listener’s emotions) or physical (e.g., noise and visual distraction). However, some of the most common barriers to effective listening include low concentration, lack of prioritization, poor judgement, and focusing on style rather than substance.

Low Concentration

When listening to speech, there is a time delay between the time a speaker utters a sentence to the moment the listener comprehends the speaker’s meaning. Normally, this happens within the span of a few seconds. If this process takes longer, the listener has to catch up to the speaker’s words if he or she continues to speak at a pace faster than the listener can comprehend. Often, it is easier for listeners to stop listening when they do not understand. Therefore, a speaker needs to know which parts of a speech may be more comprehension intensive than others, and adjust his or her speed, vocabulary, and sentence structure accordingly.

Lack of Prioritization

Often, the information the audience needs to know is delivered along with less pertinent or irrelevant information. When listeners give equal weight to everything they hear, it makes it difficult to organize and retain the information they need. For instance, students who take notes in class must know which information to writing down within the context of an entire lecture. Writing down the lecture word for word is impossible as well as inefficient.

Poor Judgement

Focusing on Style, Not Substance

The vividness effect explains how vivid or highly graphic an individual’s perception of a situation. When observing an event in person, an observer is automatically drawn toward the sensational, vivid or memorable aspects of a conversation or speech.

In the case of listening, distracting or larger-than-life elements in a speech or presentation can deflect attention away from the most important information in the conversation or presentation. These distractions can also influence the listener’s opinion. For example, if a Shakespearean professor delivered an entire lecture in an exaggerated Elizabethan accent, the class would likely not take the professor seriously, regardless of the actual academic merit of the lecture.

Home — Essay Samples — Education — Listening — The Art of Active Listening

The Art of Active Listening

Categories: Listening Perception Skills

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Published: Jan 29, 2019

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Comprehensive (Informational) Listening:- Students listen for the content of the message.
Critical (Evaluative) Listening:- Students judge the message.
Appreciative (Aesthetic) Listening:- Students listen for enjoyment.
Therapeutic (Empathetic) Listening:-Students listen to support others but not judge them.

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Listening Process’ Strategy and Effectiveness

Introduction.

The effective listening process is often challenged by many barriers that prevent persons from sharing ideas effectively. My listening habits are also imperfect, and I often suffer from such listening barriers as the focus on my mobile phone and concentration on what I want to say to the person instead of listening to his or her words. To improve my listening habits, I should focus on specific strategies to overcome the identified barriers.

The Aspects of Listening

My attention to the mobile phone creates a lot of problems for me during the communication process because I often want to check my messages while waiting for some portion of information instead of becoming focused on the communicator’s words. The other barrier is the concentration on what I want to say. It creates a significant problem for me because I become more interested in speaking than listening (Sole, 2011, p. 23). As a result, I often cannot catch the changes in the topic of conversations.

However, many listening strategies can be used to improve my listening habits and my ability to hear other people’s words. To overcome my problem with the mobile phone, I should focus on making eye contact with the speaker. This strategy is helpful to avoid looking at my phone too often. The next strategy is the reduction of distraction. I can not only avoid looking at the phone but also hide it in my bag.

To focus on the person’s speech instead of my thoughts, I should avoid jumping to conclusions because I can interpret the speaker’s words incorrectly. Moreover, I should ask for clarification to be involved in active listening (Steinberg, 2007, p. 81). As a result, I can hear, understand, and analyze more important information to respond to it adequately, without focusing on my ideas.

Sole, K. (2011). Making connections . USA: Bridgepoint Education.

Steinberg, S. (2007). An introduction to communication studies . USA: Juta and Company Ltd.

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6.2: The Importance of Listening

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Understanding how listening works provides the foundation we need to explore why we listen, including various types and styles of listening. In general, listening helps us achieve communication goals: physical, instrumental, relational, and identity. Listening is also important in academic, professional, and personal contexts.

In terms of academics, poor listening skills were shown to contribute significantly to failure in a person’s first year of college. Wendy S. Zabava and Andrew D. Wolvin, “The Differential Impact of a Basic Communication Course on Perceived Communication Competencies in Class, Work, and Social Contexts,” Communication Education 42 (1993): 215–17. In general, students with high scores for listening ability have greater academic achievement. Interpersonal communication skills including listening are also highly sought after by potential employers, consistently ranking in the top ten in national surveys. National Association of Colleges and Employers, Job Outlook 2011 (2010): 25.

Poor listening skills, lack of conciseness, and inability to give constructive feedback have been identified as potential communication challenges in professional contexts. Even though listening education is lacking in our society, research has shown that introductory communication courses provide important skills necessary for functioning in entry-level jobs, including listening, writing, motivating/ persuading, interpersonal skills, informational interviewing, and small-group problem solving. Vincent S. DiSalvo, “A Summary of Current Research Identifying Communication Skills in Various Organizational Contexts,” Communication Education 29 (1980), 283–90. Training and improvements in listening will continue to pay off, as employers desire employees with good communication skills, and employees who have good listening skills are more likely to get promoted.

Listening also has implications for our personal lives and relationships. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of listening to make someone else feel better and to open our perceptual field to new sources of information. Empathetic listening can help us expand our self and social awareness by learning from other people’s experiences and by helping us take on different perspectives. Emotional support in the form of empathetic listening and validation during times of conflict can help relational partners manage common stressors of relationships that may otherwise lead a partnership to deteriorate. Robert M. Milardo and Heather Helms- Erikson, “Network Overlap and Third-Party Influence in Close Relationships,” in Close Relationships: A Sourcebook, eds. Clyde Hendrick and Susan S. Hendrick (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 37. The following list reviews some of the main functions of listening that are relevant in multiple contexts.

The main purposes of listening are:

to focus on messages sent by other people or noises coming from our surroundings;
to better our understanding of other people’s communication;
to critically evaluate other people’s messages;
to monitor nonverbal signals;
to indicate that we are interested or paying attention;
to empathize with others and show we care for them (relational maintenance); and
to engage in negotiation, dialogue, or other exchanges that result in shared understanding of or agreement on an issue.

Listening Types

Listening serves many purposes, and different situations require different types of listening. The type of listening we engage in affects our communication and how others respond to us. For example, when we listen to empathize with others, our communication will likely be supportive and open, which will then lead the other person to feel “heard” and supported and hopefully view the interaction positively. Graham D. Bodie and William A. Villaume, “Aspects of Receiving Information: The Relationships between Listening Preferences, Communication Apprehension, Receiver Apprehension, and Communicator Style,” International Journal of Listening 17, no. 1 (2003): 48. The main types of listening we will discuss are discriminative, informational, critical, and empathetic. Kittie W. Watson, Larry L. Barker, and James B. Weaver III, “The Listening Styles Profile (LS-16): Development and Validation of an Instrument to Assess Four Listening Styles,” International Journal of Listening 9 (1995): 1–13.

Discriminative Listening

Discriminative listening is a focused and usually instrumental type of listening that is primarily physiological and occurs mostly at the receiving stage of the listening process. Here we engage in listening to scan and monitor our surroundings in order to isolate particular auditory or visual stimuli. For example, we may focus our listening on a dark part of the yard while walking the dog at night to determine if the noise we just heard presents us with any danger. Or we may look for a particular nonverbal cue to let us know our conversational partner received our message. Owen Hargie, Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 185. In the absence of a hearing impairment, we have an innate and physiological ability to engage in discriminative listening. Although this is the most basic form of listening, it provides the foundation on which more intentional listening skills are built. This type of listening can be refined and honed. Think of how musicians, singers, and mechanics exercise specialized discriminative listening to isolate specific aural stimuli and how actors, detectives, and sculptors discriminate visual cues that allow them to analyze, make meaning from, or recreate nuanced behavior. Andrew D. Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley, “A Listening Taxonomy,” in Perspectives on Listening, eds. Andrew D. Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley (Norwood, NJ: Alex Publishing Corporation, 1993), 18–19.

Informational Listening

Informational listening entails listening with the goal of comprehending and retaining information. This type of listening is not evaluative and is common in teaching and learning contexts ranging from a student listening to an informative speech to an out-of-towner listening to directions to the nearest gas station. We also use informational listening when we listen to news reports, voice mail, and briefings at work. Since retention and recall are important components of informational listening, good concentration and memory skills are key. These also happen to be skills that many college students struggle with, at least in the first years of college, but will be expected to have mastered once they get into professional contexts. In many professional contexts, informational listening is important, especially when receiving instructions. I caution my students that they will be expected to process verbal instructions more frequently in their profession than they are in college. Most college professors provide detailed instructions and handouts with assignments so students can review them as needed, but many supervisors and managers will expect you to take the initiative to remember or record vital information. Additionally, many bosses are not as open to questions or requests to repeat themselves as professors are.

Critical listening entails listening with the goal of analyzing or evaluating a message based on information presented verbally and information that can be inferred from context. A critical listener evaluates a message and accepts it, rejects it, or decides to withhold judgment and seek more information. As constant consumers of messages, we need to be able to assess the credibility of speakers and their messages and identify various persuasive appeals and faulty logic (known as fallacies). Critical listening is important during persuasive exchanges, but I recommend always employing some degree of critical listening, because you may find yourself in a persuasive interaction that you thought was informative. People often disguise inferences as facts. Critical-listening skills are useful when listening to a persuasive speech in this class and when processing any of the persuasive media messages we receive daily. You can see judges employ critical listening, with varying degrees of competence, on talent competition shows like Rupaul’s Drag Race, America’s Got Talent, and The Voice. While the exchanges between judge and contestant on these shows is expected to be subjective and critical, critical listening is also important when listening to speakers that have stated or implied objectivity, such as parents, teachers, political leaders, doctors, and religious leaders. We will learn more about how to improve your critical thinking skills later in this chapter.

Empathetic Listening

Empathetic listening is the most challenging form of listening and occurs when we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling. Empathetic listening is distinct from sympathetic listening. While the word empathy means to “feel into” or “feel with” another person, sympathy means to “feel for” someone. Sympathy is generally more self-oriented and distant than empathy. Tom Bruneau, “Empathy and Listening,” in Perspectives on Listening, eds. Andrew D. Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley (Norwood, NJ: Alex Publishing Corporation, 1993), 188. Empathetic listening is other oriented and should be genuine. Because of our own centrality in our perceptual world, empathetic listening can be difficult. It’s often much easier for us to tell our own story or to give advice than it is to really listen to and empathize with someone else. We should keep in mind that sometimes others just need to be heard and our feedback isn’t actually desired.

Empathetic listening is key for dialogue and helps maintain interpersonal relationships. In order to reach dialogue, people must have a degree of open-mindedness and a commitment to civility that allows them to be empathetic while still allowing them to believe in and advocate for their own position. An excellent example of critical and empathetic listening in action is the international Truth and Reconciliation movement. The most well-known example of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) occurred in South Africa as a way to address the various conflicts that occurred during apartheid. Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, Truth and Reconciliation Commission website, accessed July 13, 2012, www.justice.gov.za/trc. The first TRC in the United States occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, as a means of processing the events and aftermath of November 3, 1979, when members of the Ku Klux Klan shot and killed five members of the Communist Worker’s Party during a daytime confrontation witnessed by news crews and many bystanders. The goal of such commissions is to allow people to tell their stories, share their perspectives in an open environment, and be listened to. The Greensboro TRC states its purpose as such: “About,” Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission website, accessed July 13, 2012, www.greensborotrc.org/truth_reconciliation.php.

The truth and reconciliation process seeks to heal relations between opposing sides by uncovering all pertinent facts, distinguishing truth from lies, and allowing for acknowledgement, appropriate public mourning, forgiveness and healing…The focus often is on giving victims, witnesses and even perpetrators a chance to publicly tell their stories without fear of prosecution.

Listening Styles

Just as there are different types of listening, there are also different styles of listening. People may be categorized as one or more of the following listeners: people-oriented, action-oriented, content-oriented, and time-oriented listeners. Research finds that 40 percent of people have more than one preferred listening style, and that they choose a style based on the listening situation. Graham D. Bodie and William A. Villaume, “Aspects of Receiving Information: The Relationships between Listening Preferences, Communication Apprehension, Receiver Apprehension, and Communicator Style,” International Journal of Listening 17, no. 1 (2003): 50. Other research finds that people often still revert back to a single preferred style in times of emotional or cognitive stress, even if they know a different style of listening would be better. Debra L. Worthington, “Exploring the Relationship between Listening Style Preference and Personality,” International Journal of Listening 17, no. 1 (2003): 82. Following a brief overview of each listening style, we will explore some of their applications, strengths, and weaknesses.

People-oriented listeners are concerned about the needs and feelings of others and may get distracted from a specific task or the content of a message in order to address feelings.

Action-oriented listeners prefer well-organized, precise, and accurate information. They can become frustrated when they perceive communication to be unorganized or inconsistent, or a speaker to be “long-winded.”

Content-oriented listeners are analytic and enjoy processing complex messages. They like in-depth information and like to learn about multiple sides of a topic or hear multiple perspectives on an issue. Their thoroughness can be difficult to manage if there are time constraints.

Time-oriented listeners are concerned with completing tasks and achieving goals. They do not like information perceived as irrelevant and like to stick to a timeline. They may cut people off and make quick decisions (taking short cuts or cutting corners) when they think they have enough information.

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Want to provide feedback on Boone County's master plan? Listening sessions scheduled

Boone County is going to need more housing. The question is how much will be needed by 2050.

That is why a planning team contracted with Boone County and advisory and technical committees made up of community members and representative stakeholders, along with other public input, are endeavoring to find an answer through updating the county's nearly 30-year-old master plan. The last time the county developed a master plan was in 1996. The master plan is a strategic plan on housing density, land use, infrastructure and more as county population continues to grow.

Work started exactly a year ago, and just this past week a second, two-hour open house meeting was held. This time it was all online. Listening sessions are planned throughout the day April 23 and 24 so teams can get even more public input.

April 23 sessions will take place:

noon, Harrisburg VFW community room;
4 p.m., Centralia City Hall; and
7 p.m., Boone County Government Center in Columbia in the commission chambers.

April 24 sessions will take place:

8 a.m., Boone County Government Center, Room 214;
noon, Boone County Government Center, Room 214; and
5 p.m., Ashland City Hall.

Teams are in the growth analysis and scenario planning phase of work, which will soon transition to developing a draft of the master plan over the summer. The updated master plan will be refined and adopted this fall.

A concurrent but separate housing study also is underway, which is a partnership of Boone County and the City of Columbia, using the framework from the Boone County Upward Mobility Action Plan . The housing study is more so focused on affordable housing, while the master plan is looking at overall housing stock availability and density, along with planning and zoning considerations.

Public input meetings planned this week on the housing study are scheduled:

1:30 p.m., Monday at the Columbia Public Library Friends Room;
1 p.m., Tuesday at the Food Bank for Central and Northeast Missouri Community Room;
5 p.m. Tuesday at the Food Bank for Central and Northeast Missouri Community Room;
5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Hallsville Community Center; and
5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Ashland Optimist Club Building.

The master plan meeting from last week is looking at two different growth projections: more of the same, or in line with national trends, labeled as Americana, based on U.S. Census data and St. Louis University's Community Planning Lab. The more of the same projection is seeing a roughly 37% population increase by 2050, about 68,400 more people. Boone County in 2020 had a population of 183,600. If county population growth was more like the rest of the U.S., it would be a roughly 19% population increase of about 36,000 more people by 2050.

Even with the projected increases in population, household sizes are expected to decrease. So, instead of a household of two adults and a child, it will be a household of two adults. Boone County still will need from 21,700 to 48,200 new housing units by 2050 based on both population projections.

The study is not happening in a vacuum. Comparisons are being made to Johnson County, Iowa; Monroe County, Indiana; Greene County, Missouri; Douglas, Kansas and Kalamazoo, Michigan on their population changes and master plans on how land is used. In Boone County, 12% is considered land developed, 39% forest and 45% used for agriculture.

More: New Columbia Regional Airport master plan in preliminary stage as public provides input

There are three scenarios for housing growth. This includes cities growing out, more than up with housing density at the edges; more city infill development (an increase in housing density more central); or growth of rural residential areas, meaning that can eat into agricultural or forest land. The current trend is the first one, as while there is more housing density at city edges, it also is spread out on larger parcels.

An increase in housing also means looking at all the additional infrastructure that is needed too, any environmental impacts from growth and impacts to rural character.

The Boone County master plan ultimately will include "community vision and goals, existing conditions, growth analysis," along with a "future land use plan and transportation recommendations for areas of unincorporated Boone County," a master plan frequently asked questions page notes.

From 2022: 'Different approach to planning' used to create Mobility Action Plan to address Boone County poverty

Charles Dunlap covers local government, community stories and other general subjects for the Tribune. You can reach him at [email protected] or @CD_CDT on Twitter. Subscribe to support vital local journalism.

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My Story Was Told in ‘Hotel Rwanda.’ Here’s What I Want the World to Know Now.

By Paul Rusesabagina

Mr. Rusesabagina is the president and founder of the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation.

This week, the world will again turn its eyes toward Rwanda. April 6 marks 30 years since the start of one of the most horrific events in modern history, the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Nearer in time but not unrelated, it has been just over one year since I left Rwanda and returned to the United States, released from prison after 939 days in captivity .

I have not yet spoken at length about what those years in a Rwandan prison were like, or about the daily reality for Rwandan political prisoners who, like me, found themselves behind bars for exercising their freedom of expression. It has been a long year of physical and emotional recovery that has allowed me finally to put pen to paper again, and I expect the healing process will last the rest of my life.

The experience of being kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and silenced by those whom I had used my voice to criticize is difficult to describe. At many times during my captivity I believed I would be silenced for good, and that I would never again see my wife, my children and my grandchildren. But today I am a free man. And as we face this important and difficult milestone, I feel grateful to be able to join with my fellow Rwandans and reflect on what, if anything, we can take from this terrible chapter of our shared history.

For me and for so many Rwandans, the 1994 genocide remains the focal point of my life. The months of April to July 1994 were a time of incomprehensible horror, in which our beautiful country was dragged into hell by brutal violence and killings on a scale previously unimaginable. At some points in the crisis, as many as 10,000 people were butchered in a day, primarily by machetes and other crude weapons. Even now, three decades later, and even for those of us who saw the killings firsthand, it is impossible to process the depravity and the gravity of the loss.

At the time, I was the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where I tried to protect not only my own young family but also the 1,268 people who sought shelter within the walls of the hotel. Their bravery, and our daily macabre dance with death, became the backdrop of the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda.” This film brought to the screen our compromising, negotiating and begging with our would-be executioners to try to keep the waiting militia at bay.

This experience is still difficult for each one of us to relive. I am grateful to have survived it. I am also grateful for the two personal lessons I decided to take from living through this atrocity. The first: Never, ever, ever give up. This is what sustained me when I was kidnapped in August 2020 by an operative of the Rwandan intelligence services and wrongfully detained in Rwanda on charges of terrorism and other crimes, along with others who were critical of the current government. The second: Words are our most effective weapons when we are confronted by those who seek to oppress and victimize others.

Both of these lessons are on my mind today, as the world considers the state of Rwanda 30 years after the genocide brought us to our knees.

Now Rwanda is viewed by many nations as an important global partner — a partner that has bravely rebuilt itself into a thriving and inclusive modern society. But it is increasingly difficult to remain blind to the jailing — and even the disappearances and killings — of those who criticize or challenge the Rwandan government’s power. Independent journalists, human rights advocates and opposition political parties are nearly absent from the landscape of Rwandan civil society today. This is not a reconciled or inclusive society; it is an authoritarian state.

The rest of the world should stop looking the other way. As a global community, we are being confronted with the rise of authoritarianism and the co-opting of institutions meant to support basic liberties, such as the freedom of press, speech and association. Throughout the world, politics is being used as a tool to promote division, and in some cases violence, in order to gain or maintain power. We continue to see the fundamental human rights that we fought so hard for being upheld only for certain people in certain circumstances. And, as is so often the case, the vulnerable members of society are the ones who pay the greatest price. Rwanda, which today lacks strong democratic institutions and free and fair elections, is not immune to these problems.

I believe that it becomes the role of those of us who have been empowered by our circumstances to speak out, to act as a check on abuses of power and to resist the erosion of our fundamental rights. It is imperative to speak against those who seek to reduce civic space and basic freedoms for their own political gain, choose to fuel violence for profit and openly engage in brutal wars for material wealth. This becomes our work, even if speaking out puts us in the direct line of fire, as it has for me and my family.

Thirty years on from the Rwandan genocide, there is still cause for hope. We can see young Rwandans all over the world continuing to advocate genuine reconciliation and the building of a democratic Rwanda, despite the overt risks of doing so. We can see the bravery and unfailing resolve of the women of Iran and Afghanistan and those who support them. We can see the open resistance of people in Myanmar, Ukraine, Syria and Sudan standing up to tyranny and oppression. Their courage reminds us that it is our collective duty to counter autocratic regimes and policies and promote equality and, above all, peace.

This is my prayer, and hope, for the next 30 years, for Rwanda and beyond.

Paul Rusesabagina served as manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali during the Rwandan genocide, a story later told in the film “Hotel Rwanda.” In 2005, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush. He is the president and founder of the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation.

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Experimental Study on the Mechanical Behavior of Polyamide 6 with Glass Fiber Composites Fabricated through Fused Deposition Modeling Process 2024-01-5043

In this paper, experimental studies were conducted to examine the mechanical behavior of a polymer composite material called polyamide with glass fiber (PA6-GF), which was fabricated using the three-dimensional (3D) fusion deposition modeling (FDM) technique. FDM is one of the most well-liked low-cost 3D printing techniques for facilitating the adhesion and hot melting of thermoplastic materials. PA6 exhibits an exceptionally significant overall performance in the families of engineering thermoplastic polymer materials. By using twin-screw extrusion, a PA6-GF mixed particles made of PA6 and 20% glass fiber was produced as filament. Based on literature review, the samples have been fabricated for tensile, hardness, and flexural with different layer thickness of 0.08 mm, 0.16 mm, and 0.24 mm, respectively. The composite PA6-GF behavior is characterized through an experimental test employing a variety of test samples made in the x and z axes. The mechanical and physical characteristics of PA6-GF polymer were examined using tensile, flexural, and impact tests. The best outcomes were obtained for specimens printed with 0.08 mm lower value of layer height, which had a greater impact on all mechanical performance. The replacement of traditional materials was suggested with this high-strength printed samples in industrial application products.

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7.2: The Stages of the Listening Process
Listening is a complex and dynamic process that involves multiple stages and skills. In this chapter, you will learn about the stages of the listening process, the types of listening, and the barriers to effective listening. You will also discover how to improve your listening skills and apply them to various contexts and situations.
Listening Process Essay
Listening is one of the most powerful tools of communication and is a process that is used to receive, convey a meaning, and respond to both verbal and nonverbal messages. It is what we choose to do and it requires more work than speaking. Oftentimes, people simply misunderstand the difference between listening and hearing.
7.1: The Fundamentals of Listening
In this phase of the listening process, listening fidelity is crucial. Listening fidelity is "the degree of congruence between the cognitions of a listener and the cognition of a source following a communication event (Mulanax & Powers, 2001; Powers & Bodie, 2003, p. 24). It is possible to listen and still not understand what the message the ...
5.1 Understanding How and Why We Listen
Listening is the process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. In the receiving stage, we select and attend to various stimuli based on salience. We then interpret auditory and visual stimuli in order to make meaning out of them based on our existing schemata.
4.4 Stages of Listening
Figure 4.3 Stages of Feedback. As you read earlier, there are many factors that can interfere with listening, so you need to be able to manage a number of mental tasks at the same time in order to be a successful listener. Author Joseph DeVito has divided the listening process into five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating ...
3.4 The Listening Process
The Listening Process Image 3.9. Listening is a process, and as such, doesn't have a defined start and finish. Like the communication process, listening has cognitive, behavioural, and relational elements and doesn't unfold in a linear, step-by-step fashion. The stages of the listening process are receiving, interpreting, recalling ...
The psychologist Carl Rogers and the art of active listening
As Rogers writes, people are alert to the mere 'pretence of interest', resenting it as 'empty and sterile'. To sincerely listen means to marshal a mixture of agency, compassion, attention and commitment. This 'demands practice', Rogers said, and 'may require changes in our own basic attitudes'.
Effective Listening Skills » Writing Center
The listening process involves four stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what's been said, and respond (either verbally or ...
The Process of Listening and Its Styles
Despite the fact that there are some common elements involved in the process of listening, each person has an individual style, determining the way the incoming message is decoded. There are four major styles that can be summed up as follows (Adler, Rodman, & DuPré, 2016): We will write a custom essay on your topic. Relational listening style ...
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The listening process is a multistage process that involves "receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages" (pg. 109). In order to listen effectively it is necessary to attend to, interpret, evaluate, and respond to the message. The steps or stages to the listening process are as follows: attention ...
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Finally, the listening process is easier when one understands the basic stages of listening. During the process, there is a necessity to receive, understand, and analyze the information properly. In this vein, coherency can be achieved only via conscious actions and a train of thought (Hamilton et al., 2019).
The Process of Listening Essay
The act of listening involves four main parts: hearing, attention, understanding and remembering. Listening entails a vast amount of information that a majority of people does not know or understand. The common view on listening often does not even involve true listening. People often mistake hearing for listening.
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Listening as a positive communication process. The most common "birth story" of listening research in the Communication discipline begins with the work of Ralph Nichols [1] whose dissertation explored factors predicting student retention of lecture-based information.Perhaps the strongest of those narratives can be found on the website of the International Listening Association (ILA), which ...
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Physiological noise, like environmental noise, can interfere with our ability to process incoming information. This is considered a physical barrier to effective listening because it emanates from our physical body. Physiological noise is noise stemming from a physical illness, injury, or bodily stress. Ailments such as a cold, a broken leg, a ...
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The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding. Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker. Three main degrees of active listening are repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.
The Art of Active Listening: [Essay Example], 469 words
The Art of Active Listening. Listening is a creative process and is more than merely hearing words.Listening requires not just hearing but thinking, as well as a good deal of interest and information which both speaker and listener must have in common.Speaking and listening entail three components: the speaker, the listener, and the meaning to ...
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Explain the feedback stage of listening and the two types of feedback. Understand the difference between formative and summative feedback. Figure 5.2.1 5.2. 1: Author Joseph DeVito has divided the listening process into five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding through feedback. DeVito, J. A. (2000).
Essay On Listening Process
Essay On Listening Process. 830 Words4 Pages. The first step of listening process is hearing. According to Rost (1990), hearing can be defined as the sensory receptors of the ear stimulate by the sound waves and immediately causing response that identify as a physical response. In short, hearing is perception of sound waves.
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Lessons in Listening. " "Listen to many, speak to a few.". ". — William Shakespeare. When I was in college, I regularly had informal discussions with my friends on topics that ranged from silly to serious, hypothetical to real. We would go back and forth, expressing our opinions and challenging what we thought were the merits of the ...
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[PDF] The Application of Schema Theory in College English Listening
Listening was once believed to be a passive one-way comprehensive process. However, with the development of language teaching, listening comprehension is found to be an interactive process of two-way communication, during which listeners' background knowledge play an important role. Schema theory lays theoretical foundation for this explanation. Based on this, the author designs a Schema ...
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First-Year Application Process. Application Timeline. We are currently accepting applications for Fall 2024. St. Thomas offers two admissions types - Early Action (EA) and Regular Decision (RD). Both are free and completely non-binding, so you don't have to commit to St. Thomas until May 1. November 1 - Early Action Deadline.
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6.2: The Importance of Listening
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Experimental Study on the Mechanical Behavior of Polyamide 6 with Glass
Browse Publications Technical Papers 2024-01-5043. 2024-04-16. ... 6 with Glass Fiber Composites Fabricated through Fused Deposition Modeling Process 2024-01-5043. In this paper, experimental studies were conducted to examine the mechanical behavior of a polymer composite material called polyamide with glass fiber (PA6-GF), which was fabricated ...

3.4 The Listening Process

The Listening Process

Interpreting

The Importance of Listening

Listening Types

Listening Styles

Types of Listening Responses

Barriers to Effective Listening

Environmental and Physical Barriers to Listening

Cognitive and Personal Barriers to Listening

Lack of Listening Preparation

Bad Messages and/or Speakers

Prejudiced Listening

Ineffective Listening Behaviours

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The art of listening

Explore Highline College

Connect with Highline College

The listening process

Understanding

Barriers to effective listening

Lack of Prioritization

Poor Judgment

Focusing on Style, Not Substance

The solution: active listening

Active Listening Guidelines

External Links

Consultant Handbook

Listening Process and Its Key Advantages Report (Assessment)

5.2 Barriers to Effective Listening

Environmental and Physical Barriers to Listening

Cognitive and Personal Barriers to Listening

Difference between Speech and Thought Rate

“Getting Plugged In”

Lack of Listening Preparation

Bad Messages and/or Speakers

Bad Listening Practices

Interrupting

Distorted Listening

Eavesdropping

Aggressive Listening

Narcissistic Listening

Pseudo-listening

Key Takeaways

Understanding Listening

Learning Outcomes

Key Takeaways

Listening Is More than Just Hearing

Active Listening

Listening and Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking

Connection of Critical Thinking to Listening

Causes of Poor Listening

Low Concentration

Lack of Prioritization

Poor Judgement

Focusing on Style, Not Substance

The Art of Active Listening

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6.2: The Importance of Listening

Listening Types

Discriminative Listening

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Empathetic Listening

Listening Styles

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