Types Of Listening

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Four types of Listening Listening is one of the most important skills you can have. How well you listen has a major impact on the quality of your relationships with others. The four types of listening we use are, Emphatic listening, Critical listening, Active listening, and Listening for Enjoyment. . Emphatic listening – what can you do to be an emphatic listener? • Provide the speaker with your undivided attention. • Be non-judgmental. Don’t minimize or trivialize the speakers issue. • Read the speaker. Detect the emotions behind the words. Is the speaker angry, afraid, frustrated or resentful. • Be Quiet. Don’t feel you must have an immediate reply. Often if you allow for some quiet after the speaker has vented, they themselves will break the silence and offer a solution. • Assure your understanding. Ask clarifying questions and restate what you perceive the speaker to be saying An example of emphatic listening is; A man is talking about his father which had occurred a week earlier. As he talks about missing his father and his powerful love for him, you notice the man's voice gradually becomes filled with anguish and then he bursts into tears in front of you. When empathically listening, your thoughts may be, for example: He is remembering his father with pain and also the pleasure of his love for him. Your listening and perceiving another persons situation as if it were your own. Critical Listening – Is the way we listen in order to evaluate and judge, forming opinion about what is being said. Judgment includes assessing strengths and weaknesses, agreement and approval. This form of listening requires significant real-time cognitive effort as the listener analyzes what is being said, relating it to existing knowledge and rules, while concurrently listening to the ongoing words from the speaker we are listening to. Whilst in the community,
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