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