Listening is the processing of verbal communication. The concept of listening is often extended to include the processing of non-verbal communication and emotion when someone is speaking. People commonly adopt different styles and approaches to listening depending on the situation.
It’s one thing to hear a customer, but quite another to understand what he’s really trying to tell you. These listening styles can help you figure it out. In all relationships, communicating is not so much about what you say, but what your listeners hear. Since social media and digital marketing are a never-ending circle […]
Through the course of their day-to-day lives, people use comprehensive listening paired with verbal cues to understand what messages are being communicated to them. Informational listening: Informational listening (or informative listening) is the type of listening people use when they are trying to learn.
Understanding the different listening styles and when to use them can help build your communication skills and make you a better listener. Though you might think being a good listener is straightforward, there are actually a variety of types of listening.
Discriminative listening: Discriminative listening is the first form of listening humans develop as babies. This basic type of listening precedes the understanding of words and relies on tone of voice and other subtleties of sound to understand meaning and intention. Babies don’t understand words, but they rely on their discriminative listening to understand who is speaking and what mood is being communicated. As an adult, you may find yourself relying on discriminative listening when people around you are speaking a foreign language that you don’t understand. Though you may lack the language skills to understand the words being spoken, you can rely on the tone of voice and inflection to derive a vague meaning. When you can only rely on discriminative listening, you may turn to visual stimuli. The mannerisms, facial expressions, and body language of a speaker help clue you in to the speaker’s message.
Sympathetic listening: Sympathetic listening is an emotionally-driven type of relationship listening, wherein a listener processes the feelings and emotions of a speaker and tries to provide support and understanding in return. You might use sympathetic listening when a child tells you about trouble they had at school.
Informational listening has less to do with the emotional content of what is being communicated and more to do with critical thinking and following a logical sequence as it is communicated. When you try to learn important skills that are being taught to you, it’s vital that you pay attention and use informational listening skills.
The mannerisms, facial expressions, and body language of a speaker help clue you in to the speaker’s message. Comprehensive listening: Comprehensive listening is the next level of critical listening skills that humans usually develop in early childhood. Comprehensive listening requires basic language skills and vocabulary to understand ...
Learning critical listening skills is an important part of building interpersonal relationships and processing important information. There are a few general listening styles that people use, depending on the situation they are in and whether they are operating on a more emotional or logical level. Understanding the different styles ...
Empathetic listening is the most challenging form of listening and occurs when we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling. Empathetic listening is distinct from sympathetic listening. While the word empathy means to “feel into” or “feel with” another person, sympathy means to “feel for” someone. Sympathy is generally more self-oriented and distant than empathy (Bruneau, 1993). Empathetic listening is other oriented and should be genuine. Because of our own centrality in our perceptual world, empathetic listening can be difficult. It’s often much easier for us to tell our own story or to give advice than it is to really listen to and empathize with someone else. We should keep in mind that sometimes others just need to be heard and our feedback isn’t actually desired.
The first stage of the listening process is receiving stimuli through auditory and visual channels.
Responding entails sending verbal and nonverbal messages that indicate attentiveness and understanding or a lack thereof. From our earlier discussion of the communication model, you may be able to connect this part of the listening process to feedback. Later, we will learn more specifics about how to encode and decode the verbal and nonverbal cues sent during the responding stage, but we all know from experience some signs that indicate whether a person is paying attention and understanding a message or not.
Compare and contrast the four main listening styles. Listening is the learned process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. We begin to engage with the listening process long before we engage in any recognizable verbal or nonverbal communication. It is only after listening ...
The recalling stage of the listening process is a place where many people experience difficulties. What techniques do you use or could you use to improve your recall of certain information such as people’s names, key concepts from your classes, or instructions or directions given verbally?
It is important to consider noise as a factor that influences how we receive messages. Some noise interferes primarily with hearing, which is the physical process of receiving stimuli through internal and external components of the ears and eyes, and some interferes with listening, which is the cognitive process of processing ...
A person in control of a command center like the White House Situation Room should have a good working memory in order to take in, organize, evaluate, and then immediately use new information instead of having to wait for that information to make it to long-term memory and then be retrieved and used.
When trying to build rapport with others we can engage in a type of listening that encourages the other person to trust and like us. A salesman, for example, may make an effort to listen carefully to what you are saying as a way to promote trust and potentially make a sale.
Effective listening is very often the foundation of strong relationships with others, at home, socially, in education and in the workplace. This page draws on the work of Wolvin and Coakely (1996) and others to examine the various types of listening.
When discriminative listening skills are combined with visual stimuli, the resulting ability to ‘listen’ to body-language enables us to begin to understand the speaker more fully – for example recognising somebody is sad despite what they are saying or how they are saying it.
Discriminative and comprehensive listening are prerequisites for specific listening types.
Listening is perhaps the most important of all interpersonal skills and SkillsYouNeed has many pages devoted to the subject, see Listening Skills for an introduction. Further pages include The Ten Principles of Listening, Active Listening and Listening Misconceptions .
Listening is perhaps the most important of all interpersonal skills ...
In many listening situations it is vital to seek clarification and use skills such as reflection aid comprehension.
Through the course of their day-to-day lives, people use comprehensive listening paired with verbal cues to understand what messages are being communicated to them. Informational listening: Informational listening (or informative listening) is the type of listening people use when they are trying to learn.
Understanding the different listening styles and when to use them can help build your communication skills and make you a better listener. Though you might think being a good listener is straightforward, there are actually a variety of types of listening.
Discriminative listening: Discriminative listening is the first form of listening humans develop as babies. This basic type of listening precedes the understanding of words and relies on tone of voice and other subtleties of sound to understand meaning and intention. Babies don’t understand words, but they rely on their discriminative listening to understand who is speaking and what mood is being communicated. As an adult, you may find yourself relying on discriminative listening when people around you are speaking a foreign language that you don’t understand. Though you may lack the language skills to understand the words being spoken, you can rely on the tone of voice and inflection to derive a vague meaning. When you can only rely on discriminative listening, you may turn to visual stimuli. The mannerisms, facial expressions, and body language of a speaker help clue you in to the speaker’s message.
Sympathetic listening: Sympathetic listening is an emotionally-driven type of relationship listening, wherein a listener processes the feelings and emotions of a speaker and tries to provide support and understanding in return. You might use sympathetic listening when a child tells you about trouble they had at school.
Informational listening has less to do with the emotional content of what is being communicated and more to do with critical thinking and following a logical sequence as it is communicated. When you try to learn important skills that are being taught to you, it’s vital that you pay attention and use informational listening skills.
The mannerisms, facial expressions, and body language of a speaker help clue you in to the speaker’s message. Comprehensive listening: Comprehensive listening is the next level of critical listening skills that humans usually develop in early childhood. Comprehensive listening requires basic language skills and vocabulary to understand ...
Learning critical listening skills is an important part of building interpersonal relationships and processing important information. There are a few general listening styles that people use, depending on the situation they are in and whether they are operating on a more emotional or logical level. Understanding the different styles ...