Guide to Receptive Listening

Listening is the foundation for good communication. It is also the hardest skill to master. Do you listen to confirm what you already know, or do you listen to explore and learn new things? How can we create receptive communication as a listener? The real art of listening involves awareness and sensitivity to the feelings of the speaker because it is at the feeling level that genuine connection, relationship, and healing occurs.

Listening involves staying focused on the speaker even if you do not like or agree with what they are saying. Effective listening also involves hearing their message and feelings of the message without formulating a response.

Is Listening Passive Activity?

Listening is often mistakenly viewed as a passive activity—the speaker talks and the listener listens. The speaker is active and verbal, and the listener is passive and silent. When the speaker finishes talking, the assumption is that the message has been accurately received by the listener, with no observable effort or participation on the listener’s part. But it’s not so simple. The assumption that the listener truly understands what the speaker has said is one of the most dangerous assumptions in communication.

Is Listening Important?

In our culture, talking is valued much more than listening. But listening is important. We cannot be successful without developing this skill. Studies show we spend 45 percent of our communication time in daily life listening, and only 30 percent speaking, 16 percent reading, and 9 percent writing. To make matters worse, studies also suggest that we remember only 25 percent of what we hear after two days. Listening is important and yet we don’t do it very well. Listening is a process that requires your active participation.

What is listening?

Listening is the process of receiving, attending, understanding, responding, and remembering. The first step in the listening process is receiving or hearing sounds from your environment. The second step is attending, which is paying attention to some of the sounds you receive and disregarding or filtering out the others. Understanding, the third step, involves comprehending the message. Responding, the fourth step includes asking questions or giving feedback to the speaker. The final step in the listening process is remembering what was said.

Types of Listening

Given below are various types of listening:

Informative – listening for information
Relationship- listening because it is someone you care about
Appreciative – listening to certain people because of who they are, e.g. your manager
Critical – listening so you can make a decision
Discriminative – listening to the message and feelings within the message

Barriers to Listening Effectively

Highlighted below are some benefits of listening effectively:

Achieve business goals
Facilitate problem-solving
Improve communication
Improve relationships
Avoid mistakes from misunderstandings
Increase productivity

Common Issues with Listening

There are many different ways you can listen to another person and there is no one style of listening that creates or encourages effective, positive communication in every circumstance. The most obvious behavior that prevents effective listening is to refuse to listen to the other person. There are times when the listener attends and responds only to those subjects he is interested in and skips the rest. Listening is a difficult process. There are many barriers to listening that we experience and must contend with on a daily basis. The first barrier is the abundance of messages that bombard us every day. Preoccupation with self is the fourth barrier to listening. The final barrier to effective listening is that listening requires effort. Effective listening demands that we pay attention, process what is being said, and interact appropriately. Receptive listening ultimately requires that we put aside our ego, pay attention to what is being shared, ask questions to clarify the messages, and respond in ways that demonstrate understanding.

Effective Listening is Acceptance

The basis of all listening is an acceptance that is to be open to receive whatever the speaker is sharing with us. No receptive listening can occur without being open to the other person. Some of the barriers to effective listening discussed earlier prevent us from being receptive to what is being shared. To be truly accepted, you must be willing to put aside your thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and values for a few moments and receive what is being shared. To listen with acceptance requires that you abandon your preoccupation with yourself. Whenever a person speaks, someone else needs to listen for communication to occur. So your willingness to listen is a very important message. Don’t interrupt the speaker as he or she talks.

This article encourages participants to explore why people listen and to look at their own listening barriers that prevent them from fully listening. Participants also learn how to actively listen and to give appropriate responses. They are encouraged to use open and closed-ended questions in order to elicit more information or to confirm they understand what the speaker is saying.