For meaningful human connections to occur, listening is a crucial ability. To enhance your general communication skills, it is imperative to build and enhance this talent. Everybody can benefit from increasing their listening skills because they are necessary for many employment tasks across industries. The importance of listening skills in the workplace and how to develop them are covered in this article.
What Is Listening?
Listening is the ability of the listener to make a conscious effort to understand the speaker’s message. It requires focus and attention and may come naturally to some more than others. Listening also requires the listener to resist the urge to comment or ask questions and understand the speaker’s perspective without judgement. It is an essential skill that improves and builds human relationships.
How To Improve Listening Skills?
Here are a few steps you may follow to understand how to improve listening skills:
1. Provide non-verbal cues
When listening to someone speak, it is essential to maintain eye contact. It provides a nonverbal cue showcasing your interest. Avoid looking elsewhere, scrolling through your phone or even wearing headphones. Limit such distractions and provide your undivided attention. Apart from making eye contact, make sure you face them and even nod occasionally to show your interest.
Nonverbal cues reassure the speaker and encourage them to express themselves. It helps remove their inhibitions. If the speaker is on a stage, it is essential to still look at them, even if they are not speaking with you directly.
2. Visualise what the speaker says
While listening to someone speak, try to master a mental image of the concept they discuss with you. It helps retain information and create a mental note of keywords and phrases important to the conversation. Additionally, visualisation helps you holistically understand and prepares you to ask questions. If you lose focus, make a conscious effort to concentrate. You may also write down key points and phrases while listening to the speaker.
3. Practice waiting to speak
Everyone speaks and processes information differently. It is essential to respect the pace at which a speaker talks and listen to it patiently. If the speaker talks slowly, do not try to complete their sentences. Interrupting someone showcases arrogance and shows that you do not care about what someone says.
If you disagree with the speaker, do not discourage them from speaking. It is essential to let them make their point before you discuss yours. Doing so also ensures that you interpret their perspective before concluding. If someone is sharing their problem, avoid immediately providing solutions. Sometimes the speaker is looking for someone to listen to them. If they require advice, they may ask for it. If you wish to share your ideas or solutions, seek their permission before sharing.
4. Limit judgements
Listen to a speaker without mentally criticising or judging their perspective. Indulging in mental conversations and comments while listening to someone compromises your effectiveness as a listener. It creates biases in your mind which limit your ability to understand the speaker’s point of view. If something they say agitates you, avoid thinking about it negatively. Listen to them thoroughly. In some cases, their perspective may gradually make sense to you. Avoid making any conclusions without listening to the full story.
In addition, do not judge the speaker’s accent or speech mannerisms. Everyone learns a language differently. It is essential to respect the speaker’s speech and focus on what they require to share.
5. Wait for a pause and seek permission to ask a question
If you did not understand something, do not interrupt the speaker. Instead, wait for a break and seek consent. Once the speaker allows you, ask your question. It helps show respect to the conversation and puts the speaker at ease. Additionally, it helps the speaker switch from speaking to listening and understanding your question before answering it.
6. Ask relevant questions
While raising questions, ensure they are relevant to the discussion. You may ask clarifying questions that help make the conversation engaging. It also showcases that you paid attention to the speaker and your interest in discussing further. While framing your question, avoid phrases that may reflect your bias or lead to an answer you wish to hear.
Asking irrelevant questions steers the conversation in a different direction and makes the speaker’s efforts seem inconsequential. If your question changes the topic of discussion, you may still complete that conversation and come back to the original topic. It shows you were listening to the speaker and still value what they said. You may use phrases like ‘coming back to the topic’ or ‘we seemed to have forgotten the original discussion’ to bring the conversation back to the main context.
7. Show empathy to the speaker
Empathy is vital to effective listening. It allows you to feel what the speaker says and showcase similar emotions. It establishes a connection in the conversation and helps open channels of communication. Empathising with the speaker requires practice, concentration and energy.
8. Understand the nonverbal cues
Communication is both verbal and nonverbal. Many conversations carry nonverbal cues that convey how the speaker feels. Actions and expressions showcase emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, enthusiasm, agitation or boredom. Identifying such cues can help you understand and empathise with the speaker. It allows you to comprehend the underlying messaging in the conversation and ask relevant questions.
If you are speaking with someone on the phone, notice their tone. Similarly, in an in-person conversation, watch the expressions around the eyes, hand actions and even the slope of their shoulders. The body language may also help you understand how the speaker is feeling.
9. Show that you are listening
While the speaker is talking, it is essential to provide constant feedback that assures your attention. It also helps reinstate that you understand what the speaker is saying. You may provide this feedback using verbal and nonverbal cues. Reflect the speaker’s feelings with phrases such as ‘That is amasing,’ ‘You did well,’ or ‘I understand these are tough times.’ You may pair these with nonverbal cues such as nodding your head, smiling or open body language.
10. Respond appropriately
While providing feedback, suggestions or even sharing your perspective is vital to showcase it respectfully. Be honest in your response and avoid words that are condemning or judgemental. Responding appropriately and patiently helps foster a healthy relationship and benefits the discussion.
11. Practice effective listening
Listening is a skill that requires practice. You may practice it by increasing your awareness. Do this by summarising conversations, podcasts, audiobooks, interviews or seminars. Listen to such material for at least four minutes before writing what you comprehend from the audio. Listen to the piece again to identify the amount of information you retained.
In a meeting, you may also choose to reiterate or summarise the conversation to ensure you understood the discussion and identified the key takeaway points. Listening exercises help enhance your listening skills and even improve your communication skill.
Importance Of Improving Your Listening Skills
Communication skills comprise speaking and listening. Being an attentive listener benefits professionally and personally. Some benefits of listening skills are:
- Building trust and eliminating conflicts
- Reducing misunderstandings
- Allowing critical assessment of the situation to identify issues
- Enhancing interactions
- Improving personal and professional relationships
- Avoiding missing critical details
- Helping expand knowledge
- Building empathetic leaders
Types Of Listening Styles
Listening is more than hearing someone speak. Depending on the scenario, a listener may embrace different forms of listening. Some common types of listening styles include:
- Informational listening: You may adopt it while learning something new. It requires you to critically think while listening to ensure you understand the context and the concept.
- Sympathetic listening: You may use it while consoling a friend, colleague or family member. It requires focusing on the speaker’s tone, emotions and nonverbal cues to support them.
- Therapeutic listening: It requires you to understand the speaker’s point of view while imagining yourself to be in their position. It is an empathetic form of listening.
- Critical listening: It is a style of listening you may adopt to analyse and solve problems. It requires understanding and processing complex information and drawing inferences to resolve issues.
- Biased listening: People adopt selective listening practices to hear specific information or to satisfy their existing biases. It is ineffective and can lead to distortion of facts.
- Discriminative listening: It is the first form of listening style that humans learn as babies. It relies on tone and subtleties of sound to understand emotions and meaning.
- Comprehensive listening: It is the type of listening that develops in early childhood. It requires minimal language skills and vocabulary to understand the message of the communication.