Mastering Active Listening Skills: Techniques and Pitfalls Unveiled

1. Listening Skills Advanced Speech

2. Listening vs. Hearing • What is the difference? • Passive vs. Active? • Rate of speaking vs. brain comprehension?

3. Four Ways to Listen • Appreciative • Discriminative • Empathic • Critical • Give examples of each.

4. Faulty Listening Behaviors and Reasons for Poor Listening Habits • Pseudo listening • Stage hogging • Selective listening • Filling in the gaps • Assimilation to prior messages • Focusing of delivery/physical appearance • Perception, stereotyping, status, experience

5. Faulty Listening Behaviors and Reasons for Poor Listening Habits • Insulated listening • Defensive listening • Ambushing • Insensitive listening • Criticizing • Distractions-three types of noise • Cultural differences

6. Faulty Listening Behaviors and Reasons for Poor Listening Habits • Effort • Message overload • Rapid thought • Talking has more apparent advantages (interrupters) • Lack of training • Jumping to conclusions • Ethnocentrism

7. Become a Better Listener • Take listening seriously • Resist distractions • Don’t be diverted by appearance/delivery • Make an effort • Suspend judgments • Focus your listening-into, body, conclusion

8. Become a Better Listener • Ask questions • Invite comments from others • Identify areas of commonalities • Vary and provide clear verbal responses • Use nonevaluative responses • Provide affirming statements

9. Become a better listener • Provide affirming statements • Demonstrate bodily responsiveness • Lean forward • Relaxed, but alert posture

10. Become a Better Listener • Establish an open body position • Responsive facial expressions and bodily movement • Direct eye contact • Sit or stand close to the speaker • Provide supportive utterances

11. Rhetorical Devices/Propaganda • Testimonials • False comparisons • Jumping on the bandwagon • Stacking the deck • Name calling

12. Guess the device.