Communications: Listening

Hearing: A passive physiological activity that occurs when sound waves hit our eardrums

Listening is an active process that involves multiple steps.

  1. Being Mindful

  2. Physically receiving messages

  3. Select and interpret

  4. Respond

  5. Remember

Being fully engaged in the moment enhances communication

Physically receiving messages: Hearing words and sounds

Taking in a message or reading lips and sign language.

Selecting and Organizing Material: Where you select something that stands out to you.

Use cognitive schemata to organize our perceptions.

prototype, script, stereotype, and personal constructs.

Interpreting Communication: Putting together all that we have selected and organized to make sense of the overall situation.

Forms of Nonlistening:

Defensive Listening

Ambushing

Literal Listening—Takes the content level of meaning.

External Obstacles to Effective Listening

message overload

message complexity

Environmental Distractions.

Informational listening: Goal of gaining and understanding information

Critical Listening: Listen to form opinions

Evaluate people and ideas

Relational Listening: With the people we care about and relationships. We use communication to build relationships. and also end relationships too. Judgment comes from our perception.

Listening to a friend’s worries

Counseling a coworker

Discussing health concerns with a parent.

Informational and Critical Listening: YOU HAVE TO BE MINDFUL!

Express Support: The people you care about, and also in the workplace

Listening for pleasure and also to discriminate.

There are 4 Schemata, it is our mental structures

A prototype is the most common and best representation of a category: