10 Types of Listening Skills: Tips and Importance of Listening |DT Evolve

Introduction

What if you have practical listening skills that are the key to success? Have you ever wondered what the importance of having strong listening skills is? Do you struggle with miscommunication? 

Are you struggling to connect with people because you are not fully engaged in conversations? Do you always find your mind wandering whenever someone is telling you important things?

Listening skills are fundamental skills a person needs to connect and build strong relationships with others. Developing good listening skills ensures better connections with others, deeper insights, and understanding, and avoids misunderstandings and conflicts. 

In this blog, you will learn how to develop strong listening skills and the importance of listening skills in your personal and professional lives. There are many types of listening skills, but you will learn ten main types of listening skills in this blog. Understanding the process of listening can help you better understand how you can develop your listening skills. You will also learn about the barriers to effective listening skills that create various hindrances in your life.

What is the Importance of Having Listening Skills?

Listening skills are the most important skill that a person should have besides communication skills. You should be able to analyze, what type of listening skill is needed in different situations. When you are able to listen carefully, you can have a better understanding of people, better relationships, and fewer conflicts. Some of the reasons, why you need to have listening skills are:

• Building Strong Relationships: Listening to others actively and attentively demonstrates our respect and interest in what they are saying. This leads to building trust, rapport, and stronger relationships with people. It establishes a feeling of connection and value in the relationship.

• Reduced Misunderstandings: When you don’t pay attention to the person’s words, many misunderstandings can arise. Not listening carefully when someone is saying something can lead to mistakes, conflicts, and missed opportunities.

• Enhanced Learning: Listening is a receptive skill that is the first skill to develop in a human being. Learning to listen also helps with a better understanding of the concepts. It improves your ability to catch things faster.

• Resolving Conflicts: Listening skills are crucial for conflict resolution. Listening to the concerns of people carefully and attentively, you can better understand their perspectives and identify the root cause of the conflict.

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Process of Listening

There are four stages involved in the process of listening: receiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding. Listening skills are not just about hearing but also decoding the meaning and intention behind the message. These stages are:

Receiving

The first step in the listening process is to receive the message so that you can decode the meaning behind it. Receiving stage includes hearing and attending. Hearing refers to registering sound waves whenever they hit the eardrum. Whereas, attending refers to identifying and interpreting sounds you hear as words accurately. There is no meaning to the sounds until you justify their meaning in context. Listening helps you construct meaning from both verbal and nonverbal messages.

Understanding

The next and second stage of the listening process is understanding. Communication is the transaction of words between people. Understanding refers to shared meaning between the speaker and the listener, which is the first step in the listening process. In this stage, the listener decodes the context and meaning of the message they hear. This leads to understanding the meaning of individual words as well as whole sentences. 

Evaluating

After receiving and understanding the message, you need to evaluate it. In this stage, the listener determines whether the information is well constructed or disorganized, biased or unbiased, important or not. At the stage of evaluation, you find out how and why the speaker has conveyed the message. Evaluation is only done after the listener fully understands the message of the speaker; however, when the speaker doesn’t fully understand the information, it leads them to form opinions and judgments and sometimes even creates misunderstandings. 

Responding

In the stage of responding, the listener provides a verbal or nonverbal reaction to the speaker after fully understanding and evaluating their message. Nonverbal reactions are gestures such as nodding, making eye contact, smiling, or any other body language. These nonverbal reactions preserve the listener’s role without interrupting the speaker’s words. A speaker often looks for nonverbal reactions to determine whether the listener or audience is engaged and interested in what the speaker is saying.

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Types of Listening Skills

Here are the main types of listening to create awareness about when to use which type of listening skill to effectively understand the words of the speaker.

Discriminative Listening

Discriminative listening begins at a very young age, possibly even before birth when a human is in the womb. Everyone is gifted with discriminative listening skills by birth, even when they don’t even know how to understand words and sentences. Discriminative listening involves the tone of voice, verbal cues, and other changes in sound.

For example, babies can understand the intention of sentences before they understand the meaning of the words. If you talk to them with a happy and amused tone of voice, they will smile back at you. And when you talk to them with an angry and aggressive tone, they are more likely to cry and get scared.

Comprehensive Listening

Comprehensive listening is used to learn information by understanding what is being said. The listener needs to have appropriate vocabulary and language skills in order to engage in comprehensive listening. If two different people are listening to the same conversation, there is a high chance that both of them will understand the message differently. 

For example, parents listen to their children when they tell them about their day at school. They understand their children by listening to them and provide feedback to strengthen their bond.

Informational Listening

Informational listening is used when you want to learn something and want to understand and retain the information being told. This type of listening involves a high level of concentration, so you need to get highly engaged to understand the information that is new to you. You can become a better learner by harnessing the power of informational listening. 

For example, when your teacher is teaching you a new concept in mathematics, you need to listen to her attentively and carefully in order to retain the information and formulas about the concept.

Critical Listening

Critical listening involves scrutinizing what is being said along with some sort of problem-solving or decision-making. It includes analyzing the information being received and aligning it with the existing information you have. 

For example, when a sales executive has to handle an unusual and complex request from a customer, they need to use critical listening to analyze solutions. 

Empathetic Listening

Empathetic listening involves understanding the feelings and emotions of the speaker. Empathetic listening is when you put yourself in the speaker’s shoes and try to understand their feelings and emotions behind the words. It helps to deeply connect with the other person. This type of listening is more than showing compassion and feeling sorry for the speaker, it is about realizing and understanding the speaker’s point of view.

For example, counselors or therapists use empathetic listening to understand the root cause of their patients’ negative emotions.

Selective Listening

Selective listening is a negative type of listening. When the listener is biased on the basis of preconceived ideas or emotionally difficult communication toward what they are hearing, it is known as selective listening. You are not able to understand the true context of the message that is being said as you have filtered out some of the information based on your existing perspectives.

Biased Listening 

Biased listening is the type of listening where you only listen to things you want to hear and form opinions and judgments. A listener might misinterpret the information of the speaker based on a stereotype they have against them. 

For example, there is a teacher who is biased towards a student named Rohan. The teacher asked a question from the whole class and asked Rohan and one other student to answer it. The other student answered the question in short, whereas Rohan started his answer with some basic explanation first and then the main answer, but the teacher didn’t listen to him and punished him for the wrong answer.

Sympathetic Listening

Sympathetic listening is the type of listening skills in which you do not focus on the message that is spoken through words but on the feelings and emotions of the speaker. Sympathetic listening is used to provide support to the speaker so that they can feel heard and validated by your listening efforts. It is beneficial when you want to build a deeper relationship with someone in your life, and it helps you understand how they are feeling. 

For example, your colleague is upset because of the work pressure and is not getting recognition for their work. They are upset and not even participating in conversations and team meetings at the office. You decide to talk to them and listen to what they have to say. In this case, you use sympathetic listening to understand and feel how frustrated and angry they are feeling. By doing this, they can feel heard, validated, and supported in hard situations like this. 

Deep Listening

Deep listening is listening skills in which you hear more than the words of the speakers but also tap into the deeper meaning behind the message, unspoken needs, and feelings conveyed. 

For example, when you listen to your loved ones, like family, friends, or spouse, you understand and feel the emotions of the words they say.

False Listening

When a person pretends to listen to the speaker but is not actually listening or comprehending the message, it is known as false listening. 

For example, you hate a friend of yours who always brags about things, but you cannot ignore them because they might feel hurt and ignored. So, to avoid these consequences, you just pretend to listen to them.

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Examples of Effective Listening Skills

1. The therapist listens to their clients with lots of emotional baggage. This profession requires active listening skills in order to free the client of their emotional baggage and provide them with validation and support to move on in their life.
2. For an introverted student struggling in school and afraid to speak up, only a teacher with excellent listening skills can determine the student’s hesitation and reach out to them to help them understand their discomfort.
3. Only through effective listening skills can you show support, care, and help to your friend who is going through difficult times. 

Barriers to Effective Listening 

Here are some tips for developing strong listening skills. 

Physical and Environmental Barriers 

Physical and environmental barriers are the barriers that create hindrances to effectively listening to what is being said. This involves noise, obstructions, and distance. If your manager is presenting a presentation and many employees are talking loudly outside the meeting room, making you unable to listen to your manager, this noise is considered a physical and environmental barrier.

Emotional and Psychological Barriers

The mental noise that is influenced by our mood and energy is known as emotional and psychological barriers. These barriers make it difficult to concentrate on the listening process. The upset mood causes difficulty listening to someone. For example, strong negative emotions, self-pity, or sadness turn your focus inward and distract you from the words of the speaker.

Cultural Barriers

People with different backgrounds, whether religiously, ethnically, culturally, or otherwise, can face cultural barriers to effective listening skills. For example, two companies doing business together from two different countries that speak different languages.

Low Concentration

Lack of attention to the speaker’s messages causes you to misunderstand the message of the speaker. You need to concentrate in order to decode the message in the right context. Low concentration arises due to various factors such as visual or auditory distractions, physical discomfort, noise, and a lack of interest.

Focusing on Style, Not Information

Distractions in a speech or presentation can sidetrack the attention of the listeners away from the message. These distractions can be accents, vocabulary, or the physical appearance of the speaker. If a speech is delivered in a way that you may perceive as rude, then you are more likely to not pay attention to the speaker’s words. 

Tips for Effective Listening Skills

Here are some tips to excel at listening skills and connect with people on a deeper level:

• Maintaining Eye Contact: Whenever listening to someone, try to maintain eye contact and face the speaker. It is a crucial part of any face-to-face conversation. Breaking eye contact in between conversations can be called good eye contact, whereas if you continuously keep eye contact, it can be considered as staring. You can look sideways at the right eye, then at the left eye of the speaker to maintain good eye contact.

• Listen to the “Body Language”: “Actions speak louder than words.” Learn to analyze the body language of the speaker to better understand the intentions and motive of the message. Body language involves facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures.

• Don’t Interrupt: Imagine you are presenting a presentation and one of your team members keeps interrupting you for something. Will you like or hate that behavior? So, the moral is that interrupting someone while they are saying something can be frustrating, instead, if you want to correct something or add something, wait for them to finish first.

• Don’t Start Planning What to Say Next: Don’t be a multitasker while listening. You cannot listen and plan what you will say next. Listen to the speaker without judging or jumping to conclusions, and don’t be hurried in replying to them.

• Ask Follow-Up Questions: Try to ask relevant questions about the topic to better understand the speaker’s words. Questions like, “Did you mean that…..”, “If I am right, did you say that….”, or “I think I didn’t get your point…did you mean…..”

Conclusion

In this blog, you have learned the importance of having strong listening skills. The process of listening involves receiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding. You learned ten main types of listening skills to help you develop strong listening skills. There are many barriers to effective listening skills that create hindrances to connecting with people deeply. There are tips to help you develop strong listening skills in order to be successful in your life.