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3.5 Reception
Skills
3.5.1
Listening
How to Prepare for Listening:
In order to prepare yourself for listening
you should follow these guidelines:
a) Determine your purpose. We have
said that the chief difference between hearing and listening
is that listening involves both the mind and the ears.
Another way of expressing this difference is to say that
listening has a purpose. This point is important because
different purposes in listening imply different kinds of
listening.
Your purpose in listening may be to act
friendly and sociable as would be the case in a party
conversation; to obtain or to analyze critically, as in
listening to a political debate.
Listening in each situation calls for
different skills and for different degrees of
attentiveness. In each situation the demands are different
because the purpose is different so you must decide on your
purpose for listening in every listening situation. You
will be a better listener as a result of knowing why you are
listening.
b) Get ready to listen; good
listening implies a readiness to listen. This requires
that you prepare yourself for listening-physically, mentally
and emotionally. Literally, turn your back on distracting
sights and sounds, if necessary and always give your self
maximum opportunity for listening by sitting near enough to
the speaker to see and hear easily. 'If possible, read
about a topic in advance, because the more your know about a
topic the more interested you will be in what the speaker
has to say about it. Mental preparation, because it
invariably supplies you with a purpose for listening,
automatically leads to emotional involvement, and this in
turn, increases your readiness to listen.
Listening and Job Success:
Habits of efficient listening contribute
greatly to ones success in all areas of life, but
particularly in business.
a) Supervisors must know how to listen.
They listen to their employees to find out what they think
so that management can help to settle grievances and
establish good employee relationships. They also listen
to their employees because they know that their employees
often contribute time-and-money-saving ideas to those
employers which prove to be sympathetic and appreciative
audiences.
b) All employees must know how to listen.
Listening is also extremely important at all levels of
employment. Many employees in business rely on listening
skills to help them carry out their daily assignments. The
employees working, in travel and tourism must listen just as
carefully to determine the wishes of customers. One large
retailing- organization found that two out of every three
former customers had taken their business elsewhere because
its sales personnel were indifferent to customer's needs.
Moreover, the organization found that much of the
indifference was expressed through poor listening. Among
others who are greatly dependent upon effective listening
for success in their jobs are service department managers.
When a customer brings a car into an automobile service
department, the service manager must listen and record what
the customer thinks is wrong with the automobile.
All employees who provide service of any kind
and that include most are partially, if not mainly dependent
upon their listening ability to carry out their duties,
A person listening will express his attitude
to other people as surely as the way in which he speaks to
them. Indeed, writes Robert T. Oliver, "for the real master
of communication... listening and talking.
Nine Symptoms of Poor Listening:
1- Condemning the subject as uninteresting
without a hearing. There is no such things as an
uninteresting subject there are only uninteresting people. A
variation on this symptom is to prejudge a speaker as
uninteresting for some reason or another.
2- Criticizing the speaker's delivery or
aids. One way of expressing ones non-listening ability
is to fasten on the speaker's delivery or the quality of his
audio-visual aids. Some trick of pronunciation,
involuntary movements or mannerisms, all these can be sized
upon as excuses for not listening to the meaning.
3- Selective listening. Selective
listening should not be confused with listening in waves of
attention which is in fact characteristics of the good
listener. Selective listening means that you are
programmed to turn a deaf ear to certain topics or themes.
AdoIf Hitler achieved a unique mastery in this field: he
only wanted to hear good news. Those who brought him bad
news, or told him the truth, encountered a personal insult.
The danger in selective listening is that it can become
habitual and unconscious, we become totally unaware that we
only want to listen to certain people or that we are
filtering information. But our friends and colleagues know
better and they start predigesting the material for us,
omitting vital pieces, you can't tell him the truth he
doesn't want to know.
4- Interrupting. Persistent
interrupting is the most obvious signs of the bad
listener. Of course, interrupting is an inevitable part of
everyday conversation, springing from the fact that we can
think faster than the other person can talk.
The interrupter, however, either gets it
wrong or else-even worse-he allows in with a remark which
shouts out the fact that he has not been listening to the
half-completed part of meaning. He may often be working on
his own next piece of talk, and therefore be literally too
busy to listen. Once the remark is ready, he lets it fly
and starts winding up for the next one.
5- Day Dreaming. Day dreaming may be a
natural escape from an intolerable situation but it can
also be a symptom of poor listening. It is difficult to
think two things at the same time. The day dreamer has
switched off and his attention is given to an inner
television screen. Some in her agenda has gained precedence
over what is being said to him.
6- Submit to External Distractions.
Uncomfortable chairs, noise, heat or cold, sunlight or
gloom: the situation can master the listener and drown the
speaker and the content. The good listener will try to
deal with the distraction in some helpful way; the poor one
allows it to dominate his mind and rob him of attention.
7- Evading the difficult or technical.
Such is our addiction to the clear simple and vivid that
none of us cares for the difficult. The lazy listener
gives up at the first obstacle.
8- Submitting to emotional words.
Symptom of the poor listener is his vulnerability to trigger
words. Words enter the atmosphere carrying certain
associations, pleasant or unpleasant.
9- Going to sleep. Sleep can be a
symptom of a poor listener for the art of listening requires
a background. Sufficient sleep is a fact which the poor
practitioner habitually ignores. His late nights and
impressive tiredness may be signs that he has not understood
the importance of listening. Tiredness does affect our
listening.
3.5.2
Guides to Good Listening
Ten guides to food listening:
Based on a study of the 100 best and the 100
worst listeners Ralph G. Nicholas has produced ten useful
guides to listening. They can be described briefly, as most
of them are positive versions of the negative symptoms of
poor listening
1.
Find Area of Interest:
It is a rare subject which does not have any possible
interest or use for us; we naturally screen what is being
said for its interest or value.
2.
Judge content, not delivery:
Many listeners loose attention to a speaker by thinking to
themselves: "who would listen to such a character? What an
awful voice! Will he ever stop reading from his notes? The
good listener moves on to a different conclusionary thinking
"But wait a minute... I'm not interested in his personality
or delivery. I want to find out what he knows. Does this man
know some things that I need to know?"
3.
Hold Your Fire:
Over stimulation is almost as bad as underestimation and the
two together constitute the twin evils of inefficient
listening. The over stimulated listener gets too excited or
excited too soon by the speaker.
4.
Listen for Ideas:
The good listener focuses on the main ideas. He does not
focus on to the peripheral themes or seize of some fact or
other which may block his mind from considering the central
ideas.
5.
Be flexible:
The good listener should be flexible and moderate not biased
to certain ideas or color facts to his own interest.
6.
Work at Listening:
Good listening takes energy. Attention is a form of
directed energy. We ought to establish eye contact and
maintain to indicate by posture and facial expression that
the occasion and the speaker's effort are a matter of real
concern to us. When to express himself more clearly and we
in turn profit by better understanding the improved
communication we have helped him to achieve.
7.
Resist Distractions:
A good listener instinctively fights distraction. Sometimes
the fight is easily won by closing a door, shutting off a
radio moving closer to the person talking, or asking him to
speak louder. If the distractions cannot be met that
easily then it becomes a matter of concentration.
8.
Exercise Your Mind:
Good listeners regard apparently difficult or demanding
presentations or speakers as challenges to their mental
abilities.
9.
Keep your mind open:
Effective listeners try to identify their own
prejudices. Instead of turning a deaf ear, they seek to
improve upon their perception and understanding
precisely in those areas.
10.
Capitalize on thought speed:
Most persons talk at a speed of 125 words per minutes. There
is good evidence that if thought were measured in words per
minute, most of us could think easily at about four times
that rate. The good listener uses his thought speed to
advantage; he constantly applies his spare thinking time to
what is being said.
3.5.3 Active
Listening
Requires
listening to all verbal and the nonverbal interact with the
feeling behind the message.
Active listening means the search for the real meaning of
the message.
We can focus on four listening categories:
1) Selective Listening:
When you prepare your self to select certain
topics of your interest to concentrate in listening to it
avoiding other topics of less interest.
2) Comprehensive Listening:
This refers to listening with concentration
to information, opinion, emotions and feelings. The
comprehensive listening include listen to verbal and
watching non-verbal clues of the presentation.
3) Critical Listening:
This refers to listening with analyzing to
the presentation in order to conclude positive negative
aspects of the presentation.
4) Appreciative Listening:
This type of listening is linked to type of
information and the credibility of the communicator where
you appreciate the kind of information and the communicative
skills of the communicator.
3.5.4 Strategies
for Improving Listening Skills
There are several strategies we should bare
in mind for improving our listening skills:
-
Prepare to listen.
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Limit your own talking.
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Be patient, provide the time needed.
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Concentrate.
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List interjections.
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Clarify and confirm your understanding.
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Rephrase in your own words.
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Avoid jumping to conclusion.
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Practice listening.
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Listen to verbal, watch non-verbal.
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Listen for emotions and feelings. |
Communication Skills(3)
