Active Listening

Often, when people listen to others speaking, they don't really pay attention. Active Listening is a practice of specifically concentrating on everything that the other person says - focusing one's entire concentration on their speech - and using particular questions and comments to clarify and reinforce your understanding of the other person's opinion.

Active Listening can be described as listening empathically - caring deeply about the other person's opinion, and concentrating enough to prove it, even if you disagree.

Here's a few links for anyone who is interested in communication and Active Listening:

www.colorado.edu

crs.uvm.edu

(List is from Kay Pentecost on news:comp.software.extreme-programming, 4/8/2002. Thanks! ;-)

This sounds a bit like the "pacing" technique used in Neuro Linguistic Programming, a therapeutic tool developed by mental health counselors. Pacing involves listening or talking with someone else in the "language" they relate to most strongly. Each of us bases our experience of the world on one (or more) of the primary senses; sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The sense a person is most strongly centered on will manifest itself in various ways, one being the phrases they use ("I see what you mean!"; "I hear you."; "That's the rough idea, now let's smooth out the details."). This technique has been picked up and is widely used by salespeople, attorneys and others as a tool for persuasion. There are a host of other techniques used with pacing for persuasion, this is only part of that pie.

Pacing means that you give feedback to your communication cohorts by interjecting supporting comments aimed at the sense they employ most strongly. For example, if a cohort is visually based, you would make comments like "I see what you mean." or "I share your vision." without disrupting the flow of communication. This brings your state of mind closer to the state of mind of the cohort and improves the effectiveness of the communication because you're both working from a common sensory perception. Your interjected comments indicate to your cohort that you're "in tune" with them.

Pacing can also be used to facilitate the understanding others have of your communication. If you ask them to respond at various points in your dissertation, you can get a feel for the sense the audience is basing their understanding on. ("Does this sound right?"; "Does this depict the situation accurately?". "Do you get a feel for the subject?"). If the responses are based on a sense other than the one you're employing, you might be be able to rephrase your discussion and base it on the sense they're employing.

I don't know if this is what Kent means by Active Listening. This is being drawn from the memory of a class I took a dozen years ago, so I can't even be sure I've gotten it right. Active Listening brought this memory to the fore for me, and I thought it might be of interest.

Rick Tobias, tobiasr@ibm.net.

Active Listening is actively trying to hear (and see) what some one else means. A simple test is whether you can paraphrase what they've just said to their satisfaction.

Perhaps a three of Non-Active-Listening patterns may clarify thing?

Passive Aggressive Listening:
where you ignore everything that other person says, unless it can be used in evidence against them.

Aggressive Listening:
spend your listening time thinking of counterarguments and rhetorical techniques. (Categorizing each statement you hear under the appropriate Fallacious Argument category).

Passive Listening:
you think of something that is off topic.

-- Dick Botting

Some of the most active listeners I've seen in action also challenge the person they are listening too, rather than just make comments that indicate they are in tune with the 'speaker'. So they might say "Let me summarize what I'm hearing ... is this right?' when the speaker is delivering a lot of information or things like "Why do you feel that ..." and "How does this relate to ... you were talking about earlier" when the speaker is finding it difficult to move from one point to another or is getting bogged down on a particular point.

-- Paul Dyson