Page 54 - SREENARAYANAGURU OPEN UNIVERSITY

Discussion An active listener can improve his/her lis-
2�1�1 Learning to Listen tening skills with practice, which will also
improve his/her interpersonal relationships. If
We hear many things, but most of them just you practice active listening, it will also allow
pass through us. As the saying goes, it enters you to recollect and retrieve important infor-
through one ear and exits through the other. mation readily.
When that happens, we are involved in pas-
sive listening. We assume that our brain will An active listener concentrates on the
capture the important part and that we will be speaker and shows curiosity in the conver-
able to reproduce it later, whenever needed. sation. He/she will convey response to the
This is not always the case and a lot gets lost speaker as well. In interpersonal communica-
in communication. To ensure effective commu- tion, being a good listener is important. It will
nication, active listening is crucial. also help to improve your leadership qualities.

Fig 2.1.1 Steps involved in listening

Let us break down the listening process to pay attention and concentrate on
into its five constituent steps. Understanding what the speaker is saying.
each of these steps allows you to fine tune and f Filter:
improve the process of listening. In this process, we pay attention

f Hear: to or concentrate on the words we
The first essential step is hearing. need and filter out those that we do
Hearing is the process of perceiving not need to process the information.
sound. To begin to listen, we have Filtering out the essential content
that is relevant for us is a nuanced

48 SGOU - FYUGP - SLM - English for Communication