Most people are shockingly poor listeners. We fake paying attention. We can look right at someone, appear interested in what that person says, even nod our head or smile at the appropriate moments—all without really listening.
Not listening doesn’t mean we don’t hear. Hearing is a physiological process, involving the vibration of sound waves on our eardrums and the firing of electrochemical impulses from the inner ear to the central auditory system of the brain.
But listening involves paying close attention to, and making sense of, what we hear. Even when we think we are listening carefully, we usually grasp only 50 percent of what we hear. After 24 hours we can remember only 10 percent of the original message.
Listening Is Important
Although most people listen poorly, there are exceptions. Top business executives, successful politicians, brilliant teachers—nearly all are excellent listeners. If you had an interview with the president of a multi-national company, you might be shocked to see how closely that person listened to your words.
In our communication-oriented age, listening is more important than ever. According to one study, more than 60 percent of errors made in business come from poor listening. In another study, conducted by the management consulting firm Accenture, 64 percent of respondents stated that listening has become more difficult because of the digital distractions of today’s workplace—phones, computers, messages, notifications, and so on.
Replacing poor listening with good listening improves efficiency, sales, customer satisfaction, and employee morale. This is why, in most companies, effective listeners hold higher positions and are promoted more often than ineffective listeners. When business managers are asked to rank-order the communication skills most crucial to their jobs, they usually rank listening number one.
Students with the highest grades are usually those with the strongest listening skills. The reverse is also true – students with the lowest grades are usually those with the weakest listening skills. There is plenty of reason, then, to take listening seriously. Employers and employees, parents and children, wives and husbands, doctors and patients, students and teachers—all depend on the apparently simple skill of listening. Regardless of your profession or walk of life, you never escape the need for a well-trained ear.
Listening is also important to you as a speaker. It is probably the way you get most of your ideas and information—from television, radio, conversation, and lectures. If you do not listen well, you will not understand what you hear and may pass along your misunderstanding to others.
Over and over, instructors find that the best speakers are usually the best listeners.
Listening and Critical Thinking
One of the ways listening can serve you is by enhancing your skills as a critical thinker. We can identify four kinds of listening.
Appreciative listening—listening for pleasure or enjoyment, as when we listen to music, to a comedy routine, or to an entertaining speech.
Empathic listening—listening to provide emotional support for the speaker, as when a psychiatrist listens to a patient or when we lend a sympathetic ear to a friend in distress.
Comprehensive listening—listening to understand the message of a speaker, as when we attend a classroom lecture or listen to directions for finding a friend’s house.
Critical listening—listening to evaluate a message for purposes of accepting or rejecting it, as when we listen to the sales pitch of a car salesperson or the campaign speech of a political candidate.
Four causes of poor listening
Not concentrating
The brain is incredibly efficient. Although we talk at a rate of 120 to 180 words a minute, the brain can process 400 to 500 words a minute. This would seem to make listening very easy, but it has the opposite effect. Because we can process a speaker’s words and still have plenty of spare “brain time,” we are tempted to interrupt our listening by thinking about other things.
Listening too hard
Until now we have been talking about not paying close attention to what we hear. But sometimes we listen too hard. We turn into human sponges, soaking up a speaker’s every word as if every word were equally important. We try to remember all the names, all the dates, all the places. In the process we often miss the speaker’s main point. What is worse, we may end up confusing the facts as well.
Rather than trying to remember everything a speaker says, efficient listeners usually concentrate on main points and evidence. We’ll discuss these things more thoroughly later in the chapter.
Jumping to conclusion
One form of jumping to conclusions—putting words into a speaker’s mouth. It is one of the reason why we sometimes communicate so poorly with people we are closest to. Because we’re so sure we know what they mean, we don’t listen to what they say.
Another way of jumping to conclusions is prematurely rejecting a speaker’s ideas as boring or misguided. That would be a mistake. Let’s say the announced topic is “Architecture and History.” It sounds dull. So you tune out—and miss a fascinating discussion filled with human-interest stories about buildings and other structures from the ancient pyramids to the latest skyscrapers. Nearly every speech has something to offer you—whether it be information, point of view, or technique. You are cheating yourself if you prejudge and choose not to listen.
Focusing on delivery and personal appearance
Sometimes we judge people by the way they look or speak and don’t listen to what they say. It’s easy to become distracted by a speaker’s accent, personal appearance, or vocal mannerisms and lose sight of the message. Focusing on a speaker’s delivery or personal appearance is one of the major sources of interference in the speech communication process, and it is something we always need to guard against.
How to Become a Better Listener
Take listening seriously
The first step toward becoming a better listener is to accord listening to the seriousness it deserves. Good listeners are not born that way. They have worked at learning how to listen effectively. Good listening does not go hand in hand with intelligence, education, or social standing. Like any other skill, it comes from practice and self-discipline.
Be an active listener
So many aspects of modern life encourage us to listen passively. We listen to Spotify while studying. Parents listen to their children while fixing dinner. Television reporters listen to a politician’s speech while walking around the auditorium looking for their next interview.
This type of passive listening is a habit—but so is active listening. Active listeners give their undivided attention to the speaker in a genuine effort to understand his or her point of view. In conversation, they do not interrupt the speaker or finish his or her sentences. When listening to a speech, they do not allow themselves to be distracted by internal or external interference, and they do not prejudge the speaker. They take listening seriously and do the best they can to stay focused on the speaker and his or her message.
There are several steps you can take to improve your skills of active listening. They include resisting distractions, not allowing yourself to be diverted by a speaker’s appearance or delivery, suspending judgment until you have heard the speaker out, focusing your listening, and developing note-taking skills. We’ll discuss each of these in turn.
- Resist distractions
In an ideal world, we could eliminate all physical and mental distractions. In the real world, however, we cannot. Because we think so much faster than a speaker can talk, it’s easy to let our attention wander. Sometimes it’s very easy—when the room is too hot, when construction machinery is operating right outside the window, when the speaker is tedious. But our attention can stray even in the best of circumstances.
One way to resist distraction is to think ahead of the speaker—try to anticipate what will come next. This is not the same as jumping to conclusions. When you jump to conclusions, you put words into the speaker’s mouth and don’t listen to what is said. In this case you will listen—and measure what the speaker says against what you had anticipated.
Another way to keep your mind on a speech is to review mentally what the speaker has already said and make sure you understand it.
Yet another is to listen between the lines and assess what a speaker implies verbally or says non-verbally with body language. Suppose a speaker is introducing someone to an audience. The
speaker says, “It gives me great pleasure to present to you my very dear friend, Ashley Hauser.” But the speaker doesn’t shake hands with Ashley. He doesn’t even look at her—just turns his back and leaves the podium. Is Ashley really his “very dear friend”? Probably not.
Attentive listeners can pick up all kinds of clues to a speaker’s real message. At first you may find it difficult to listen so intently. If you work at it, however, your concentration is bound to improve.
- Don’t be diverted by appearance or delivery
In Abraham Lincoln’s momentous Cooper Union speech of 1860, he seemed awkward and uncultivated, but he had a powerful message about the moral evils of slavery. Fortunately, the audience at Cooper Union did not let his appearance stand in the way of his words. Similarly, you must be willing to set aside preconceived judgments based on a person’s looks or manner of speech. Gandhi was an unimpressive-looking man who often spoke dressed in a simple white cotton cloth. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was severely disabled and could speak only with the aid of a voice synthesizer. Yet imagine how much poorer the world would be if no one had listened to them.
On the other hand, try not to be misled if the speaker has an unusually attractive appearance. It’s all too easy to assume that because someone is good-looking and has a polished delivery, he or she is speaking eloquently. Some of the most unscrupulous speakers in history have been handsome people with hypnotic delivery skills. Again, be sure you respond to the message, not to the package it comes in.
- Suspend Judgment
Unless we listen only to people who think exactly as we do, we are going to hear things with which we disagree. When this happens, our natural inclination is to argue mentally with the speaker or to dismiss everything she or he says. But neither response is fair and in both cases we blot out any chance of learning or being persuaded.
Does this mean you must agree with everything you hear? Not at all. It means you should hear people out before reaching a final judgment. Try to understand their point of view. Listen to their ideas, examine their evidence, assess their reasoning, then make up your mind. The aim of active listening is to set aside “one’s own prejudices, frames of reference, and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside.
Focus your listening
As we have seen, skilled listeners do not try to absorb a speaker’s every word. Rather, they focus on specific things in a speech. Here are three suggestions to help you focus your listening.
- Listen for Main Points
Most speeches contain two to four main points.
Unless a speaker is terribly scatter-brained, you should be able to detect his or her main points with little difficulty. Often a speaker will give some idea at the outset of the main points to be discussed in the speech.
- Listen for Evidence
Identifying a speaker’s main points, however, is not enough. You must also listen for supporting evidence. Careful listener will be concerned about evidence no matter who is speaking.
There are four basic questions to ask about a speaker’s evidence:
- Is it accurate?
- Is it taken from objective sources?
- Is it relevant to the speaker’s claims?
- Is it sufficient to support the speaker’s point?
- Listen for Technique
We said earlier that you should not let a speaker’s delivery distract you from the message, and this is true. However, if you want to become an effective speaker, you should study the methods other people use to speak effectively.
Analyse the introduction: What methods does the speaker use to gain attention, to relate to the audience, to establish credibility and goodwill?
Assess the organization of the speech: Is it clear and easy to follow? Can you pick out the speaker’s main points? Can you follow when the speaker moves from one point to another?
Study the speaker’s language: Is it accurate, clear, vivid, appropriate?
Does the speaker adapt well to the audience and occasion?
Finally, diagnose the speaker’s delivery: Is it fluent, dynamic, convincing? Does it strengthen or weaken the impact of the speaker’s ideas? How well does the speaker use eye contact, gestures, and visual aids?
As you listen, focus on the speaker’s strengths and weaknesses. If the speaker is not effective, try to determine why. If he or she is effective, try to pick out techniques you can use in your own speeches. If you listen in this way, you will be surprised by how much you can learn about successful speaking.
Develop NOTE taking skills
Speech students are often amazed at how easily their instructor can pick out a speaker’s main points, evidence, and techniques. Of course, the instructor knows what to listen for and has had plenty of practice. But the next time you get an opportunity, watch your instructor during a speech. Chances are she or he will be listening with a laptop or pen and paper. When note taking is done properly, it is a sure-fire way to improve your concentration and keep track of a speaker’s ideas.
The key words here are when done properly.
Unfortunately, many people don’t take notes effectively. Some try to take down everything a speaker says. They view the enterprise as a race that pits their note-taking speed against the speaker’s rate of speech. As the speaker starts to talk, the note taker starts to write or type. But soon the speaker is winning the race. In a desperate effort to keep up, the note taker tries to go faster and faster. But even this is not enough. The speaker pulls so far ahead that the note taker can never catch up.
Some people go to the opposite extreme. They arrive armed with pen, laptop, and the best of intentions. They know they can’t write down everything, so they wait for the speaker to say something that grabs their attention. Occasionally, the speaker rewards them with a joke, a dramatic story, or a startling fact. Then the note taker records a few words and leans back to await the next fascinating tidbit. By the end of the lecture, the note taker has a set of tidbits—and little or no record of the speaker’s important ideas.
As these examples illustrate, most inefficient note takers suffer from one or both of two problems: They don’t know what to listen for, and they don’t know how to record what they do listen for.
The solution to the first problem is to focus on a speaker’s main points and evidence. But once you know what to listen for, you still need a sound method of note taking. Although there are a number of systems, most students find the key-word outline best for listening to classroom lectures and formal speeches. As its name suggests, this method briefly notes a speaker’s main points and supporting evidence in rough outline form.
Research confirms that listening carefully and taking effective notes are vital skills for success in college. They will also benefit you in countless situations throughout life.
Summary
Most people are poor listeners. Even when we think we are listening carefully, we usually grasp only half of what we hear, and we retain even less. Improving your listening skills can be helpful in every part of your life, including speech making.
The most important cause of poor listening is giving in to distractions and letting our thoughts wander. Sometimes, however, we listen too hard. We try to remember every word a speaker says, and we lose the main message by concentrating on details. In other situations, we may jump to conclusions and prejudge a speaker without hearing out the message. Finally, we often judge people by their appearance or speaking manner instead of listening to what they say.
You can overcome these poor listening habits by taking several steps.
First, take listening seriously and commit yourself to becoming a better listener. Second, work at being an active listener. Give your undivided attention to the speaker in a genuine effort to understand his/her ideas. Third, resist distractions. Make a conscious effort to keep your mind on what the speaker is saying. Fourth, try not to be diverted by appearance or delivery. Set aside preconceived judgments based on a person’s looks or manner of speech. Fifth, suspend judgment until you have heard the speaker’s entire message. Sixth, focus your listening by paying attention to main points, to evidence, and to the speaker’s techniques. Finally, develop your note-taking skills. When done properly, note taking is an excellent way to improve your concentration and to keep track of a speaker’s ideas.
Extracts from book “ Art of Public Speaking”