Entry 4: Listening Skills

date : 20th April 2021 (week 2) Topics: Listening Skills Duration of time spent on this entry: 2 hours

Personal reflection

I believe people refuse to listen most of the time unless the things we are going to say are actually regarding them. People grow to be narcissist types of people and believe they are holier than thou, for example teacher and student, boss and employee and in the asian community hot issues are between parents and children. It's hard to gain people's attention if it's not something that is interesting like gossip for example. Listening is not easy to be honest, even sometimes I find myself fidgeting just to focus on a person talking, especially nowadays all the class requires extra attention due to it being online. But if it's something that is more intimate or close to the heart I can fully focus without being anxious most of the time maybe because the feeling of getting judged is not there. For example, does he or she care if I listen to them? Or do I need to respond to everything I listen to? Sometimes I wonder why I am tired by just listening to something. Why is it different when we listen to music but not when we listen to someone talking? This is the kind of question running in my mind most of the time. But what I'm wondering the most is are they able to comprehend after listening to me from the start till the end of a conversation. This is where I feel like listening skills are crucial and need to be taught from a young age.

Figure 6 shows the percentage of us communicating and listening

To understand the message, you must first determine the main idea you want to convey. Then consider the anecdotes, explanations and other details intended to explain its meaning. When trying to improve your listening skills, pay close attention to the primary stated goal (Educationcorner, 2021). There are two main types of listeners, namely active and passive listeners. According to research (Mulvania, 2020), passive listening is more than just listening. Listen to passive listening without responding: let others talk, without interfering. At the same time, do nothing else, but ignore what they are saying. Passive listening is a one-way communication where the recipient does not give comments or ask questions and may not understand the message from the sender.

Listen actively, include responses that show you know what you are trying to do with others about their experiences. This is a very different communication technique from passive or fuzzy listening that is often used in everyday conversation. When you accurately reflect back to a person what’s been said, you show that you’ve been listening, not just hearing and that you genuinely understand the feeling/s or message/s they are trying to convey. There is a conversation between Sheldon and Amy in the series of The Big Bang Theory. The reaction of Amy during the conversation is a great example of being an active listener. She reacts on certain points and the interaction builds a person’s self-esteem, she applies a lot of tips being an active listener like maintaining eye contact, using short verbal affirmations and she also displays empathy. (the link to the video https://youtu.be/3_dAkDsBQyk ) there is also an example of poor listening skill. A scene of a counsellor and a student, the counsellor shows a bad example of being a poor listener. There's a lot of this kind of counsellors and due to it it's not easy for students or anyone to open up their issues or problems. They tend to keep things to themselves because the one who gets paid to listen is not even listening to them. Even the professional did not show the care to listen to others (the link to the video https://youtu.be/7AzNPWnzgC4 ).