Paraverbal communication cues include

What Is Listening?

Listening is the process of hearing someone speak, processing what you’re hearing, and demonstrating that you understand the speaker’s intent.

Effective listening has three dimensions: sensing, processing/evaluating, and responding.

Sensing involves hearing the words and receiving the nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expressions.

Processing/evaluating involves understanding the meaning, interpreting the implications, evaluating the nonverbal cues, and remembering the message.

Responding involves the listener sending the speaker verbal or nonverbal signals that he or she is being heard.

The act of simply “hearing” is a passive activity. The act of listening—truly listening— demands attention, concentration, and effort.

There are several different types of listening:

Passive listening occurs when you are trying to absorb as much of the information presented as possible. You act as a sponge, taking in the information with no or little attempt to process or enhance the messages being sent by the speaker.

Attentive listening occurs when you are genuinely interested in the speaker’s point of view. You are aware something can be learned from the interaction. In attentive listening, you make assumptions about the messages being relayed by the speaker and fill in gaps with assumptions based on what you want to hear rather than on what the speaker is actually saying. At this level of listening, you don’t check to see whether what you heard is what the speaker intended to say. Many barriers and biases can hinder this form of interaction.

Active or empathetic listening is the most powerful level of listening and requires the largest amount of work. In active listening, communication is a vibrant, two-way process that involves high levels of attentiveness, clarification, and message processing. In active listening, you not only hear and react to the words being spoken but also paraphrase, clarify, and give feedback to the speaker about the messages being received.

Barriers to Effective Listening

Despite its importance in promoting effective communication, active listening is often neglected. Many factors contribute to difficulties in listening:

■ Physiological limitations. Listening can be fatiguing. We are visual beings—about 80 percent of learning occurs though sight. Because the eye is victorious over the ear in the constant process of providing stimulation to the mind, many people don’t know how to be effective listeners.

■ Speaking/listening gap. The average person speaks at a rate of 120–150 words per minute (wpm), while our brains have the capacity to process information at 275–300 wpm. We can think at up to 500 wpm, which is why it is easy to tune in and out of conversations. Optimal speaking rate is about 275–300 wpm even though the other person’s thinking rate is higher. One strategy to address this is to develop additional presentation techniques to hold the other person’s full attention.

■ Inadequate background information. Most listeners hate to admit when they haven’t heard all of the information necessary to engage in conversation, so they stumble along hoping to catch up. They seldom do.

■ Selective memory. Some employees treasure every accolade and never hear a single criticism. Others hear only the complaints and never the praise. We have a tendency to hear—and remember—what we want. There’s a reason ad agencies run commercials over and over on TV and on the Web. Without reinforcement of key messages, it’s easy to forget entirely or to remember only selectively what a company has paid millions for you to remember. Interestingly, steps taken to increase viewers’ recall, such as adding an attractive spokesperson or using flashy video, result in viewers remembering the attractive person and not the product or what it can do for them!

■ Selective expectation. If you expect dishonesty, poor work attitudes, or inattention, you’ll probably get them. This is an example of the “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Many employees expect not to be listened to. So many managers are preoccupied with im- mediate tasks and seldom have the time to devote to individual employee concerns that employees become accustomed to not being heard and understood. Often, they’ll just give up and resign themselves to the short, nonattentive interactions with managers to which they’ve become accustomed, or withhold information, expecting it wouldn’t be attended to anyway.

■ Fear of being influenced or persuaded. Some managers hold certain beliefs so dear to their hearts that they are biased—unable to entertain another’s point of view about a matter. Typically, managers who feel this strongly about an issue have a tendency to turn off speakers who dispute their cherished beliefs even before the position is fully explained.

■ Bias and being judgmental. When you don’t like a person, it’s hard to hear what he or she says. Sometimes this bias is based on wrong or incomplete information, such as “She’s only 17, what could she know?” or “He’s a bigot, so why should I listen to him?” When we make a negative judgment about the speaker, we typically stop or severely curtail our desire to listen to the speaker.

■ Boredom. Thought processes are four to five times the usual speed of speech. When you can guess what an employee is going to say seconds or even minutes before he or she speaks, your thoughts wander. When you return, the speaker may have gone on an unexpected track whose beginnings you lost and whose point you never do understand.

■ Partial listening and distractions. You may hear the literal words, but miss the con- notation, facial expressions, or tone of voice. In essence, you get only part of the message. Perhaps you were trying to remember an important point when an employee interrupts to ask if he or she can leave to deal with an emergency at home. Chances are you didn’t give that employee your full attention—even though your empathetic response to the situation would have gone a long way.

■ Rehearsing. Many of us use the time during another’s talking to come up with a bulletproof rebuttal. If you do this, you aren’t really listening. Sometimes we are so intent on winning an argument that the conversation veers in a different direction during our “rehearsal,” resulting in our losing the segue for and impact of our carefully crafted rebuttal.

■ Selective perception. Perception is the process by which you take in and process stim- uli according to your own experiences or attitudes. As such, you create your own real- ity, apart from what may actually be occurring. Since communication has a great deal of room for individual interpretation, from the meaning of words to the interpretation of nonverbal signals, your perception can easily distort the true message or its intent. Perception can be influenced by a number of factors such as your needs, opinions, personality, education, or environment. Selective perception is a process in which you select or pay attention to only that information that adheres to or reinforces your own beliefs, views, or needs, causing severe distortion of messages.

■ Interference from emotions. Communication is susceptible to interference by emotions. Though we use communication to express our emotions, not everyone is able to understand, control, or explain his or her feelings adequately or fully. Emotions are neither right nor wrong, but rather an expression of human reactions. By observing nonverbal cues, you are better able to interpret the true level and type of others’ emotional states. You can then utilize empathy to neutralize emotional responses, paving the way to begin work on understanding the content of the communication. The emotional state of both the sender and the receiver must be considered in eliminating problems in the communication process.

Nonverbal communication is conveying meaning or expressing feelings consciously or subconsciously through means other than words. Since most of us are visually oriented and live in an environment dominated by visual images, it is not surprising that research indicates that over 55 percent of interpersonal communication is conveyed nonverbally.

Nonverbal communication cues fall into two broad classes. Nonverbal visual cues include facial expressions, eye blinks, eye contact, gaze aversion, nodding, smiles, postural shifts, physical positioning, and other bodily behaviors.

Paraverbal communication cues include aspects related to speech, such as pitch, pauses, tone of voice, inflection, and voice volume. How often have you experienced talking with someone who says he or she is listening even though the person is watching television or texting? Or having someone say they agree to something while shaking their head in disagreement? Conversely, have you experienced empathy from someone as evidenced by the person nodding in support rather than sharing their agreement with you verbally? We often communicate nonverbally in ways that contradict what we’re saying verbally. Nonverbal messages are often sent sub-consciously, leading others to believe they hold more of the true meaning than the verbal message.