2 Steps To Becoming A Better Listener

Step 1: You can become a better listener by first deciding to take listening seriously! The first step to improvement is always self-awareness. Analyze your shortcomings as a listener and commit yourself to overcoming them.

Good listeners are not born that way. They have worked at learning how to listen effectively.

Good listening does not go hand in hand with intelligence, education, or social standing. Like any other skill, it comes from practice and self-discipline.

You should begin to think of listening as an active process. So many aspects of modern life encourage us to listen passively. We "listen" to the radio while studying or "listen" to the television while moving about from room to room.

This type of passive listening is a habit - but so is active listening. We can learn to identify those situations in which active listening is important. If you work seriously at becoming a more efficient listener, you will reap the rewards in your schoolwork, in your personal and family relations, and in your career.

Step 2: Learn to resist distractions. In an ideal world, we could eliminate all physical and mental distractions. In the real world, however, this is not possible. Because we think so much faster than a speaker can talk, it's easy to let our attention wander while we listen.

Sometimes it's very easy - when the room is too hot, when construction machinery is operating right outside the window, when the speaker is tedious. But our attention can stray even in the best of circumstances - if for no other reason than a failure to stay alert and make ourselves concentrate.

Whenever you find this happening, make a conscious effort to pull your mind back to what the speaker is saying. Then force it to stay there. One way to do this is to think a little ahead of the speaker - try to anticipate what will come next. This is not the same as jumping to conclusions.

When you jump to conclusions, you put words into the speaker's mouth and don't actually listen to what is said. In this case you will listen - and measure what the speaker says against what you had anticipated.

Another way to keep your mind on a speech is to review mentally what the speaker has already said and make sure you understand it. Yet another is to listen between the lines and assess what a speaker implies verbally or says nonverbally with body language.