Is Anybody Listening, I Mean Really Listening Essays -

Is Anybody Listening, I Mean Really Listening? Is Anybody Listening, I Mean Really Listening? I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen. Ernest Hemingway. Often when a misunderstanding occurs, it is attributed to a lack of communication, which most of the time implies that whoever was delivering the message did not do an effective job. But what about the other side, the listener? Listening is important. It is the communication skill most often used in human interaction. Between 45 and 55 percent of people's communication time will be spent in listening to others (Curtis, Floyd and Winsor, p. 56). As our textbooks tell us, listening is not a skill that most people perform well. It is difficult to define listening. We could say that it is a receiver orientation to the communication process, since communication involves both a source and a receiver, listening consists of roles receivers play in the communication process. Listening is a process that includes attending, perceiving, interpreting, assessing, and responding (Barker and Gaut, p. 47). Our own listening habits have been developed since we were born. Such habits are so well established that we perform them without thinking. Unfortunately, such habits are usually undesirable and lead to poor listening. There are a number of reasons for ineffective listening. They do not apply equally to all listeners and the degree to which they do apply will vary from different situation, speaker, and topic. But, I think, they represent common and important reasons for ineffective listening. Rehearsing - your whole attention is designing and preparing what to say next. You look interested, but your mind is miles away because you are thinking about the next comment. Judging - negatively labeling people can be lead to trouble. Everyone has biases, but it leads to ineffective listening. Let's say you hear a speaker discuss an idea that you do not like, you might stop paying attention to that speaker, you might distort the message, in which case you would fail to understand the message because of prejudgment. This could cause your evaluation of the speaker or the message to be unfair or in error. A good rule of effective listening is that judgements should only be made after you have heard and evaluated the content of the message. Identifying - you take everything people tell you and refer it back to your own experience. They may want to tell you about a car's braking system, but that reminds you of your car accident. You launch into your story before they finish theirs. Talking rather than listening - we love to hear our own voice and feel that our comments and ideas are always right. We picture ourselves as the great problem solver. We are so good that we only have to hear a few sentences and we begin searching for the right advice. The problem is that while we are coming up with suggestions, we may have missed what is most important. Have you ever been in a situation where a person argues and debates with the other people in the group, making the other people feel as if they are not being heard, because that one person is so quick to disagree? It seems as though that person's main focus is on finding things to disagree with. Filtering - we usually filter out messages and listen only to those topics and materials that we want to hear. We will stop paying attention to those topics that we do not want to hear, such as messages that criticize us. Then we cannot be corrected, and we cannot take suggestions to change. Placation - we have been taught to be nice, pleasant and supportive to others, we seldom criticize others especially when others are telling us things that we want to hear. Sometimes too quick an acceptance of these messages that tell us what we like and want to hear can lead to serious problems. We may half-listen just enough to get the drift, but not really involved. We should be careful to pay attention, to comprehend, and then to analyze and evaluate what the speaker is saying. Distraction - a distraction is anything that pulls your