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What Is Listening And Why Is It Important

Good Essays

What is Listening and why is it important? This paper will address the viewpoint of listening skills and its outcome. Listening is an essential tool, which is one of the constructive aspects in the communication process, for communicating with other people. To listen well is a knack that is learned. However, for people to listen effectively, they would need to practice to obtain the skill. ”As with any new skill, learning to listen takes effort, attention, and practice” (Stewart, 2006, p. 202).Listening skills allow people to make sense of and understand what another person is saying. In other words, listening skills allow you to identify with the meaning of what people are talking about.
Listening skills is a beneficially sensible …show more content…

How to Listen

The first aspect of listening is to learn how to listen effectively. In today’s society, communicating appropriately has everything to do with listening. Learning to be a good listener will help improve all relationships both professionally and personally. If people do not know how to listen well, they can easily be distracted and their mind will start to wander. Since listening plays an essential role in the communication process, developing listening skills are important because they will help interpret what the speaker is saying during feedback. In other words, the listener should be able to respond to what the speaker talked about for clarification purposes. Accordingly, to become a better listener, and depending on the situation, there are three types of listening strategies that would be beneficial to ensure effective communication with other people. Hybels and Weaver (2007) states that “active listening, critical listening, and empathic listening are three different tactics that can be used in diverse situations” (p. 92).
For instance, critical listeners’ focal point is to listen with determination and an open mind. They need to recognize and expect to learn something new from the speaker and ask questions about their viewpoints. A second instance is that of empathic listeners. Their center of attention involves listening with emotion—they actually

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