Active listening
Introduction
Emotional intelligence represents skills of a human to understand own feelings and feelings of others, to be able to use and manage and create effective social relations. Active listening is one of the major skills of good communication practice. It is, therefore, worth being highlighted separately to become a firm base for prevention of any kind of miscommunication issues at class among peers as well as between teacher and students.
Levels of listening
Not listening
The other person speaks, we don’t listen, and we are simply waiting for pause and our turn to speak. Most often we are in this level being in conflict situation, frustrated, anxious.
Marginal listening
While listening we think about ourselves. For instance – our colleague is telling how was his first day at new job. We think about ourselves, how would we feel in the same situation or about our similar experience. So, while thinking, we miss many things told by the talking person.
Judgmental listening
We hear what other person is telling us, we start to judge the given information even if the person hasn’t finished his speech, we evaluate it from the scope of our experience and we are preparing our speech to give some good advises about the topic.
Active listening
We see the talking person from the inner side, what’s behind his said word. We are involved into conversation, we feel the person. It is a high level of listening, which helps to establish tight relationship.
Which level mostly represents your daily conversations’ routine with colleagues, family, students? Would you mind asking them about that? When do you feel that you are well heard by others? What could be higher level of listening than the ACTIVE one?
Four ears of listening
If person manages to listen with all 4 ears, he demonstrates the highest listening level – intuitive level.
“White paper” tool
A tool to help reach intuitive listening level.
White paper means refusal of all your prejudgments about the person you speak to, like his abilities, skills, opinion, way of thinking, previous experience in the topic, failures and even wins when you listen to him!!!
Surely, it’s the biggest challenge – but it’s the only way to win his/her respect and have an impact on! Please note, in many cases people think they may win respect of the audience by demonstrating how skillful they are, or how many successful experience, power and knowledge they have. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. The following video lesson will help to sum the topic up.