Active Listening Skills

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Active Listening Skills Carla Hall HHS307 – Communication Skills for Health & Human Services Personnel Instructor: Leighla Sharghi October 31, 2011 Active Listening Skills \ An important key factor in effective interpersonal communication is active listening. Active listening requires the therapist or counselor to participate in helping the client clarify and give detail to their story. Being an active listener includes hearing those small changes to feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Empathy is needed to be a successful active listener. Three basic skills to empathetic understanding are paraphrasing, summarizing, and encouraging. Showing empathy lets the client know that the counselor understands and truly cares about their well-being. This paper will discuss how active listening is used in a therapeutic setting, give personal examples of active listening and describe ways it can be improved. Avoiding interruption is equally important as empathetic understanding. If a client gets “cut off” midway through a statement, it can either cause them to forget what they are saying or make them feel insignificant. They must feel as it they have the counselor’s full attention and that means being able to finish what they are trying to communicate. “Give the other person the opportunity to complete the message and allow a brief pause before responding” (McShane, 2000, para.2). The pause ensures that the client is finished their statement. Encouragers are different verbal and nonverbal means used by the counselor to persuade the client to continue talking. Encouragers include head nods, openhanded gestures, phrases such as “uh-huh” and “I see”. Restating what the client has said by using two or more words exactly as they did are a helpful way to encourage them to elaborate their story. Paraphrasing what the client has just
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