Active Listening Skills
Listening
is not a skills we are necessarily “born with”, but it is certainly a critical
skill for building and maintaining relation-ships. Think how much you
appreciate the feeling you get when you believe that someone has actually heard
and under-stood your point of view. You feel that they might be a “kindred
spirit”. You want to spend time with people like that. Although good
communication always re-quires mutual respect and desire to send clear
messages, much miscommunication could be avoided through better listening
skills.
Listening
is not the same as hearing, al-though hearing is a necessary first step in
“getting the message”.
Real
listening is based on the intention to do one of four things:
- Understand someone
- Enjoy someone
- Learn something
- Give help or solace
...Unfortunately, a
lot of pseudo-listening masquerades as the real thing. The intention is not to
listen, but to meet some other need. Some of the typical needs met by
pseudo-listening are:
- Making people think you’re interested so they will like you
- Being alert to see if you are in danger of getting rejected
- Listening for one specific piece of information and ignoring everything else
- Buying time to prepare your next comment
- Half-listening so someone will listen to you
- Listening to find someone’s vulnerabilities or to take advantage
- Looking for the weak points in an argument so you can always be right, listening to get ammunition for attack
- Checking to see how people are reacting, making sure you pro-duce the desired effect
- Half-listening because a good, kind, or nice person would
- Half-listening because you don’t know how to get away without hurting or offending someone
Hey in my field of Security it is easy for me to LISTEN, your tips are spot on!
ReplyDeleteTnx Jackie
ReplyDelete