Listening Is Important

What is a Listening Skills?
Listening is the ability to accurately receive and interpret messages in the communication process.

Listen to the conversation about the human body and do the exercises to practise and improve your listening skills. 
Listen to the speakers and do the exercises to practise and improve your listening skills. 
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 speechmaking.

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 her or his 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.

Listening Is Important

Although most people listen poorly there are exceptions. Top-flight business executives, successful politicians, brilliant teachers—nearly all are excellent listeners. So much of what they do depends on absorbing information that is given verbally—and absorbing it quickly and accurately. If you had an interview with the president of a major corporation, you might be shocked (and flattered) 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. 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.⁵

Even if you don't plan to be a corporate executive, the art of listening can be helpful in almost every part of your life. This is not surprising when you realize that people spend more time listening than in any other com­municative activity—more than reading, more than writing, more even than speaking.

Think for a moment about your own life as a college student. Most class time in U.S. colleges and universities is spent listening to discussions and lectures. A number of studies have shown a strong correlation between listen­ing and academic success. 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.

Besides, in class—as in life—you will listen to many more speeches than you give. It is only fair to pay close attention to your classmates' speeches; after all, you want them to listen carefully to your speeches. An excellent way to improve your own speeches is to listen attentively to the speeches of other people. Over and over, instructors find that the best speakers are usually the best listeners.

A side benefit of your speech class is that it offers an ideal opportunity to work on the art of listening. During the 95 percent of the time when you are not speaking, you have nothing else to do but listen and learn. You can sit there like a stone—or you can use the time profitably to master a skill that will serve you in a thousand ways.

Read more...
The power of Public Speaking
Ethics and Public Speaking
Giving Your First speech
Selecting a Topic and a Purpose
Analyzing the Audience
Gathering Materials
Supporting Your Ideas
Organizing the Body of the Speech
Beginning and Ending the Speech
Outlining the Speech
Using Language
Delivery
Using Visual Aids
Speaking to Persuade
Methods of Persuasion
Speaking on Special Occasions
Speaking in Small Groups

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.

Although all four kinds of listening are important, this chapter deals primarily with comprehensive listening and critical listening. They are the kinds of listening you will use most often when listening to speeches in class, when taking lecture notes in other courses, when communicating at work, and when responding to the barrage of commercials, political messages, and other persuasive appeals you face every day. They are also the kinds of listen­ing that are most closely tied to critical thinking.

As we saw in Chapter 1 (The power of Public Speaking), critical thinking involves a number of skills. Some of those skills—summarizing information, recalling facts, distinguishing main points from minor points—are central to comprehensive listening. Other skills of critical thinking—separating fact from opinion, spotting weak­nesses in reasoning, judging the soundness of evidence—are especially impor­tant in critical listening.

When you engage in comprehensive listening or critical listening, you must use your mind as well as your ears. When your mind is not actively involved, you may be hearing, but you are not listening. In fact, listening and critical thinking are so closely allied that training in listening is also training in how to think.
At the end of this chapter, we'll discuss steps you can take to improve your skills in comprehensive and critical listening. If you follow these steps, you may also become a better critical thinker…