Effective Listening Skills

TO BE SUCCESSFUL AT OUR job or study, we must be able to write, speak, and listen effectively. Of these three skills, effective listening may be the most crucial because we are required to do it so often. Unfortunately, listening also may be the most difficult skill to master.

Effective listening is challenging, in part, because people often are more focused on what they're saying than on what they're hearing in return. According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, people think the voice mail they send is more important than the voice mail they receive. Generally, senders think that their message is more helpful and urgent than do the people who receive it.

Additionally, listening is difficult because people don't work as hard at it as they should. Listening seems to occur so naturally that putting a lot of effort into it doesn't seem necessary. However, hard work and effort is exactly what effective listening requires.

In order to understand and implement this matter, below is the basic aspects, methods and some additional information about the skills for our concern:

1) Four (4) basic aspects of effective listening:

• attitude
• attention
• comprehension
• evaluation

2) Methods of effective listening:

• Identify the purpose of listening. Try to distinguish between useful information and that which is not.
• Not look at the surface meaning of what is being said. Rather, you should look for feelings or the real intention of the speaker. This can be done through familiarising yourself with real spoken language such as the use of  in complete sentences, slang, repetitions and others.
• Try to guess the meanings of words which are not familiar to you by focusing on the context in which they appear.
• Understand that in real life, most of what you listen to is not repeated. In such cases, you are advised to just get the gist of the information and grasp the main ideas presented.
• Listen for details or specific information when you listen for the second time to any repeated information such as announcements.
• Refrain from immediately responding or answering question. Listen to everything that is being said without unnecessary interruptions.

3) Basic skills of effective listening (additional information)

    i - Listening for specific information

• This requires us to listen for specific details related to certain incidents, situations or activities.

   ii - Listening for main idea

• Find out the general idea or the gist of a listening material