Listening Skills: Become a Better Listener

What does it mean to listen?

The vast majority of us will spend our lives relying on our listening skills. No matter what our profession happens to be, listening plays a key role in any communicative environment. Like all other skills, listening requires a lot of practice – it is not necessarily something you are just born with.

Everyone has the capability of listening – but can you listen well? Indeed, listening well is more important than just merely allowing the information to flow in one ear and out the other. When we listen well, we retain the information that is being submitted to us – and are thus able to use that information in an effective manner at a later date.

How can I tell if I listen well?

The process of listening well can be summarized in three different steps. By going over these three steps and evaluating them in relation to your own listening practice, you should be able to get a pretty good idea as to the extent of your listening skills.

The first – and most basic step of listening, is hearing. When you hear someone, you are basically able to catch whatever the speaker has said. In a lecture on horses, for example, you might hear someone say that no two breeds of horses are exactly alike. If you are able to retain that information and repeat it at a later date, then you have heard what the person was saying to you.

The second part of listening is to understand. This is when you have not only heard something, but you have taken the knowledge you have acquired in order to comprehend it in your own special way. So, to use the horse lecture example above, you might deduct from the statement of there being no two horse breeds alike that horse breeds must be distinguished by their physical appearance.

The final step of listening is making a judgment. This is when you have heard something, understood it, and wish to come to a decision as to whether or not what the person has just said makes sense to you. Is what you have just heard believable or not?

Perhaps you might think to yourself – how can every single horse breed look different? There must be at least some characteristics that they have in common. But then again, every single human being has their own particular traits that set them apart from everyone else. So maybe for horses, it is the same.

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