Effective Listening

When a person communicates what they think, want, and feel do you know what they mean? Are you being an effective listener to the person that is expressing their thoughts to you? Being an effective listener requires more than just hearing the words that are coming out of the speaker's mouth. Hearing is mechanical and requires minimal effort or skill. Listening is a skill that requires practice and concentration to avoid the barriers that are working against it (Hynes, 2005). Effective communication exists when the receiver interprets and understands the sender's message in the same way the sender intended for it to be.

According to Larry Nadig, Ph.D. (1999), there are three basic modes of listening. There is competitive listening, attentive listening, and active listening. With competitive listening, the listener is more interested in his or her own point of view than that of the speaker's. With competitive listening, the listener is pretending to pay attention to the speaker when he or she is actually looking for an opening to take over the speaking and promote his or her own views. Attentive listening occurs

when the listener is genuinely interested in hearing and understanding the speaker's is saying. With attentive listening, the listener assumes that what he or she heard was correct and factual from the speaker but does not verify it. Active listening is the most important form of listening and can prove to be the most useful. In active listening, the listener is genuinely interested in what the speaker is saying but is also actively making sure they understand it so they can respond back to it. With active listening, the listener responds by restating their understanding of the message to the speaker for verification. The verification is what makes active listening useful and effective. With active listening, the listener is looking for the message not simply hearing the words are being spoken. By being an active listener, the communication process becomes an effective process.

While knowing the types of listening can help someone become a better listener, it is important to know that there are common barriers that interfere with the ability to effectively listen. One of the most common barriers comes from physiological factors. This arises from the fact that people think four times faster than they speak. This results in our thoughts drifting to other things while

someone is speaking or becoming irritated and impatient with the speaker. Other common barriers to effective listening are motivation and willingness. If someone does not have the energy or eagerness to want to be an effective listener then they will not be one. Another barrier to effective listening comes from an educational factor. Reading and writing is taught in formal education even though they consist of only 25% of our daily communication. Little emphasis is placed in formal education on teaching people how to listen effectively. It is important to understand that listening is a skill that needs to be taught and practiced to become effective and skilled at it.

Becoming an effective listener can be difficult because people have different levels of communication. The list below gives some ways to become

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