Critical Skills - Listening

October 10, 2019 Gregory Ronczewski

By Gregory Ronczewski

"Are you listening? Yes, I hear you..." Right, that's exactly what often happens. I will ask again, are you listening? What is the difference between listening and hearing? Hearing is just a biological function. The ability to process and interpret sound waves that enter our hearing sensors. Those waves are measured in frequencies defined by a cycle per second and named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. A healthy ear can detect sounds ranging from sixteen to twenty thousand hertz. Hearing is passive. So when someone answers, "yes, I hear you," it means nothing. This person is not listening. Listening is active. As a side note, I wonder why in our system, we have Active Listening as a skill instead of having Listening. It is active by definition.

We spend so much time testing and judging the ability to read, write, and speak, but it turns out, on average, listening takes fifty-five percent of our daily communication. Speaking takes twenty-three percent, reading thirteen and writing only nine percent. We should pay more attention to the skill of listening. Or, is it more than a skill?

There is one more difference between hearing and listening. Since the sound travels in waves, our body can receive the auditory information not only through the ears but also through the whole body. The sound vibrations can be absorbed by touch, which is how people with hearing problems can feel what happens in their surroundings. In the same manner, people with sight deficiencies can fine-tune all their sensors to receive and process what the environment tells them via sounds.

"And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence."
~ Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

Listening gives us the ability to not only hear the sounds but also to focus on specific sounds, to remember what we heard, and to respond to it. It is not as easy as it sounds. For instance, how often are you caught in a noisy environment trying to have a conversation which all of a sudden begins to be an important one. You have to follow and process the information, and also keep in short-term memory the points you want to reply to. This is even more complicated. As the conversation progresses, some of your "replies" become obsolete, and you need to revise them accordingly to your mental notes. And all of it happens when your whole body is submerged in the ocean of sounds that is constantly feeding you with the entire array of different waves.

There is more. Sometimes we struggle to focus and concentrate on what is said, our mind picks on the information that, for some reason, seems more important. It may be the sound of a car approaching at an unusually high speed that gives us a chance to react, or it may be our name that is mentioned on the other side of the room. This selective filtering is also our way to cope with what some describe as sound pollution. Simply, there is a limit on how much we can absorb. It applies as much to the visual stimuli as to the audio. Our defence mechanism is responsible. It is called Perceptual Filtering. Our brain will "decide" which parts of the information need to be "saved" and which is not. It explains why we often recall just bits of conversation but not the whole thing.

Listening well is not easy, and it is a core skill that everyone should be working on. Proper communication and collaboration are not possible without listening. Dr. Albert Mehrabian created a rule named the seven percent rule. It states that when talking with someone, only seven percent of the message that you say is the content of your words. Thirty-eight percent is how you say these words. Fifty-five percent is your body language. Keeping this in mind, we really need to focus if we want to listen and listen well.

When we listen, we often hope to learn something. The learning process—in a very simplistic way—can be divided into Active, Passive and Implicit Learning. Active Learning gives us the best chances to "connect" with the person we are listening to. It is a challenging process and can be sustained only for a short time. Remember those super long meetings? After forty-five minutes, we are slowly fading away. The takeaway here - keep meetings short, fifteen to thirty minutes is much more productive.

There are ways to improve our abilities to listen thoroughly. For instance, there is the left-brain and right-brain thinking. The left side "controls" the right side of the body and according to brain physics, is responsible for tasks related to calculations, logic and science. The right side holds our creative brain, and interestingly, the right ear is the dominant one because it can transmit faster impulses through the nerves to the speech centres that are on the right side of the brain. Impulses from the left ear need to travel a tiny bit longer and, believe it or not, t makes a difference. During your next important meeting, try to position yourself in such a way that the person you are listening to is on your right side. In the classroom, students who have a hard time to focus could take a position where the presenter is slightly to their right. You will be surprised by the outcome.

In our system, Research, Business Planning and Presentations are listed as related skills to Active Listening, which is categorized as "Foundation" skill. I think Listening, apart from being one of the vital foundation skills, will take a significant position in the Competency Modelling environment. Many re-usable behaviours or tasks in our Open Competency Models will list Active Listening as a must-have skill.

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