7： Effective Listening
A PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR
A Psychology Professor had dedicated his life to teaching and worked hard to prepare interesting lectures, yet he found his student sitting through his talks with glass-eyed expressions. To learn what was wrong, and also find out what was on his students-minds if they were not focusing on psychology, he would, without warning, fire a blank from a gun and then ask his students to record their thoughts at the instant they heard the shot. Here is what he found:
20 percent were pursuing erotic thoughts or sexual fantasies. 20 percent were reminiscing about something or thinking about lunch.
STAGES IN EFFECTIVE LISTENING
Listening is the process of creating meaning from verbal and nonverbal messages. When we listen，we hear words and try to make sense of what we hear. Listening involves selecting, attending, understanding, and remembering. Let’s look at each of these four stages of the listening process in greater detail.
1. Selecting
Stop reading this book for a moment and take note of the sounds you hear. Do you hear the whir of an air conditioner or furnace, the wind, a ticking clock, voices, a car, a train, or a plane? You have the ability to select what you will listen to. Instead of listening to the noises around you, you can read this book and concentrate on the ideas in it, or you can focus on your own thoughts. When the time comes to deliver your speech to an audience, keep in mind that your potential listeners have the same choice. Your job as a speaker is to motivate them to select your message.
2. Attending
The sequel to selecting is attending. For most people, the average attention span while listening to someone talk is about eight seconds. When you select a sound, you attend to it; you focus on it. Even though you may pay attention to sound for only a fraction of a second, your mind must be focused on it for listening to occur. One of your key challenges as a public speaker will be to capture and hole the attention of your audience. What helps an audience listen to a message?
ACTIVITY AND MOVEMENT An audience is more likely to listen to an action-packed message than to one that listlessly lingers on an idea too long. Incorporating meaningful movement /into/ your delivery and using visual aids also help hole an audience’s attention.
CONCRETE WORDS AND IMAGES Effective speakers use words and images that the audience can visualize. Vividly describing a Shinto marriage ceremony will more likely hold an audience’s attention than will reciting research conclusions about marriage in Japan.
ISSUES AND EVENTS CLOSE TO AN AUDIENCE To make an audience more concerned about the state of medical care, focus on the problems in the audience’s own community rather than on those in a large city a thousand miles away. People pay attention to what affects them directly.
FAMILIAR IDEAS AND EVENTS Listeners can more easily summon up an image of something they have already seen than of something totally foreign. Referring to people, places, and events in the community that the audience has seen and heard can focus a listener’s attention.
NEW, DIFFERENT, OR NOVEL IDEAS, ISSUES, AND EVENTS While this may seem to contradict the previous points, audiences can become intrigued with something new or unseen if you relate it to something that concerns them, their communities, or their families.
STORIES THAT CREATE SUSPENSE Everyone likes a good story, especially one that keeps listeners on the edge of their seats. Whether the story is true or hypothetical, a well-told yarn can keep listeners tuned in.
CONFLICT Stories that pit one side against another, and descriptions of opposing ideas and forces in government, religion, or interpersonal relationships foster attention. The Greeks learned long ago that the essential ingredient for a good play, be it comedy or tragedy, is conflict.
HUMOR A fisherman went /into/ a sporting goods store. The salesperson offered the man a wonderful lure for trout: It had beautiful colors, eight hooks, and looked just like a rare Buckner bug. Finally, the fisherman asked the salesperson,“Do fish really like this thing?”
“I don’t really know,”admitted the salesperson.“I don’t sell it to fish.”
The speaker using this story could have simply said,“It’s important to know your audience.”Using a bit of humor makes the point while holding the listener’s attention.
All of these factors help an audience pay attention. Your job as a speaker is to make sure that you incorporate these factors /into/ your speech, so your audience will not have to work hard to attend to your message.
3. Understanding
Boiled down to its essence, communication is the process of making sense out of the world and sharing that sense with others. Understanding is the process of making sense out of our experiences. To understand something, we assign meaning to the stimuli that comes our way.
Although there is no single theory that explains how people make sense of the world, we do know that you understand what you hear by relating it to something you have already seen or heard. If you are talking about oxymoron’s (a combination of seemingly contradictory words in the same phrase) and your audience does not know what on oxymoron is, the best way to tell them is with an example that draws on their store of knowledge:“Efficient bureaucracy”would probably work. Your job as a speaker is to make sure your audience has the knowledge to understand what you are saying.
4. Remembering
How do you know whether someone listened to you or not? Most listening experts believe that you can find out whether someone has listened to you only by testing whether they can remember what they heard. Your geography professor determines how well you understand geography by testing you on the content of his of her lecture. But intentionally or not, the professor is testing your listening skill as well as your knowledge of geography.
PRINCIPLES OF EFFECTIVE LISTENINGE
ffective listening is extremely important because you spend so much time listening. In fact, if you measured importance by the time you spend on an activity, listening would be your most important communication activity. Most of your communication time is spent in listening. You will improve your listening if you listen actively, for total meaning, with empathy, and with an open mind.
1. Listen Actively
The first step in listening improvement is to recognize that it is not a passive activity. You cannot listen without effort. Listening is a difficult process. In many ways it is more demanding than speaking. In speaking you control the situation; you can talk about what you like in the way you like. In listening, however, you have to follow the pace, the content, and the language of the speaker.
The best preparation for active listening is to act like an active listener. Recall, for example, how your body almost automatically reacts to important news. Almost immediately you sit up straighter, cock your head toward the speaker, and remain relatively still and quiet. You do this almost reflexively because this is how you listen most effectively. This is not to say that you should be tense and uncomfortable, but only that your body should reflect your active mind. In listening actively:
- Use the thought-speech time differential effectively. Because your mind can process information faster than the average rate of speech, there is often a time lag. Use this time to summarize the speaker’s thoughts, formulate questions, draw connections between what the speaker says and what you already know.
- Work at listening. Listening is hard work so be prepared to participate actively. Avoid what James Floyd (1985) calls“the entertainment syndrome,”the expectation to be amused and entertained by a speaker. Combat sources of“noise”as much as possible. Remove distractions or other interferences (newspapers, magazines, stereos) so that your listening task will have less competition.
- Assume there is value in what the speaker is saying, resist assuming that what you have to say is more valuable than the speaker’s remarks.
2. Listen for Total Meaning
The meaning of a message is not only in the words used, it is also in the speaker’s nonverbal behavior. Sweating hands and shaking knees communicate as surely as do words.
The meanings communicated in a speech will also depend on what the speaker does not say. For example, the speaker who omits references to the homeless or to drugs in a speech on contemporary social problems communicates meaning by these very omission. Exactly what inferences listeners will draw from such omissions will depend on a variety of factors. Some possible inferences might be:
- the speaker is poorly prepared- the speaker’s research was inadequate- the speaker forgot part of the speech- the speaker is trying to fool the audience by not mentioning this- the speaker is trying to cover up certain issues and thinks we won’t notice- the speaker thinks we are uninformed, stupid, or both
As a listener, therefore, be particularly sensitive to the meanings that significant omission may communicate. As a speaker，recognize that most inferences that audiences draw from omissions are negative. Most such inferences will reflect negatively on your credibility and on the total impact of the speech. Be careful, therefore, to mention significant issues that the audience expects to be discussed. In listening for total meaning:
- Focus on both verbal and nonverbal messages. Recognize both consistent and inconsistent“packages”of messages and take these cues as guides for drawing inferences about the meaning the speaker is trying to communicate. Ask questions when in doubt. Listen also to what is omitted.- See the forest, then the trees. Connect the specifics to the speaker’s general theme rather than merely remembering isolated facts and figures.- Balance your attention between the surface and the underlying meanings. Do not disregard the literal (surface) meaning of the speech in your attempt to uncover the more hidden (deep) meanings.
3. Listen with an Open Mind
Listening with an open mind is difficult. It is not easy to listen to arguments attacking your cherished beliefs. It is not easy to listen to statements condemning what you fervently believe. Listening often stops when such remarks are made. Yet it is in these situations that it is particularly important to continue listening openly and fairly. In listening with an open mind:
- Avoid prejudging. Delay both positive and negative evaluation until you have fully understood the intention and the content of the message being communicated.- Avoid filtering out difficult, unpleasant, or undesirable messages.
- Avoid distorting messages through oversimplification or leveling, the tendency to eliminate details and to simplify complex messages to make them easier to remember.- Recognize your own biases; they may interfere with accurate listening and cause you to distort message reception through assimilation, the tendency to interpret what you hear (or think you hear) in terms of your own biases, prejudices, and expectations. Biases may also lead to sharpening - when an item of information takes on increased importance because it seems to confirm your stereotypes or prejudices.
