Real Listening And Speaking 1 Pdf

[Rebbeca Schulke]

Even those of us who understand all this can easily fall in the trap of acting like blackbirds when someone we care about is struggling. It takes conscious intentionality to listen and hold the space.

Excellent post Jesse! We tend (especially men) to want to always fix things when what is really needed is compassion and companionship. I think of the lonely cancer patient and the struggle of not knowing what to say to them. Gosh, we struggle so much just being still and quiet! Thanks for this post and reminder!

It does seem to be a natural tendency, even with the best of intentions. Thanks for sharing your helpful tools, Alan. I find it especially helpful to write verbatim what I am hearing because it helps me stay focused in the moment and also help keep me from interrupting.

Thank you, Jesse. You made me think. True listening allows a masked person to trust enough to let their mask drop, in the knowledge that judgement is not in the equation. If my eyes reveal a listening heart, support exists. May it be so, daily as no-one knows what a day or a new year will bring.

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. Research by Dr Tali Sharot shows that, on average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; they expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more).

Remember the horrors of the London Plague? The plague killed a quarter of Londoners in eighteen months but individuals believed that whilst it would probably kill their neighbours, they themselves would survive.

Optimism Bias is aligned with Disaster Risk Assessment models, which usually overlook the difficulties people have in processing low probabilities. Social Scientists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky noted that people struggleto evaluate low-probability events (such as whistleblowing or speaking up), resulting in them tending to neglect the possibility of them altogether or giving them superficial attention. Neglection and superficial attention can both lead to blind spots, lack of preparation and lack of skill when people find themselves in the Red Zone.

Judgments of comparative risk are made all the time without reference to diagnostic information and real world experience, leading to a lack of contemplation and deliberation. Stated otherwise, people may have developed an almost knee-jerk tendency to perceive themselves as better than average, irrespective of a character trait or situation.

Optimism Bias and Financial Downfalls, New Technologies, Fake News and War
The harmful influences of overoptimism extend to the collective behaviour of groups. For instance, the optimism bias has been named by several economists as one of the core causes of the financial downfall of 2008. Unrealistic expectation of individuals, financial analysts and government officials that the market would continue growing, despite evidence to the contrary, likely contributed to the collapse. This example may be indicative of a trend in which the negative consequences of optimism are especially pronounced in the modern world.

Whether we are dealing with unfamiliar cultures (for example, in political relations) or novel technologies (for example, internet, whistleblowing hotlines and financial markets), fake news and war, modern life is rife with circumstances in which over optimism is likely to arise. The modern world has increased interactions between larger numbers of individuals, and whilst some individual biases may be inconsequential on their own, they can accumulate together to produce a large bubble, such as in the case of the 2008 financial market fall. The research highlights the possibility that the mind has evolved learning mechanisms to mis-predict future occurrences.

Our brain is wired to place high value on the events we encounter and put faith in its own decisions. This is true not only when forced to choose between two adverse options (such as selecting between two courses of medical treatment) but also when we are selecting between desirable alternatives. According to social psychologist Leon Festinger, we re-evaluate the options post-choice to reduce the tension that arises from making a difficult decision between equally desirable options.

How is it that people maintain a rosy bias even when front line, real world experience that challenges upbeat forecasts about speaking up and whistleblowing is so readily available?
While the past few years have seen important advances in the neuroscience of optimism, one enduring puzzle remained. Why do people readily incorporate favourable news into their existing beliefs, yet tend to underweight the strength of unfavorable information?

Whether a piece of news is good or bad is critical in determining whether it will alter our beliefs. This is known as a valence-dependent learning asymmetry. For example, when learning that our risk of experiencing future aversive events, such as being fired because of Speaking out, or the likelihood of our retaliation against an individual Speaking Up is higher than we had expected, we are less likely to integrate this data into our prior beliefs . The same pattern emerges when people receive desirable and undesirable information about their financial prospects or feedback about their intellectual abilities, personality or physical traits.

You are out with a group of friends or colleagues. One person is talking about her children. Another boasts about a recent trip. Two people are bantering about a political situation. You look around and realize people are speaking, but nobody is listening!

Effective communication is key to achieving our goals. Listening is an essential ingredient that strengthens relationships and connections. Truly listening with the intention to understand is one of the greatest gifts we can share. Benefits of powerful listening include exploring and generating new ideas, enhancing problem solving, resolving conflicts, inspiring meaningful interactions, and expressing caring and positive regard. In the workplace, listening can contribute to greater productivity and engagement.

Listening with empathy, interest, and intent to understand makes a positive difference in conversations and relationships. Genuine listening is indeed a precious gift that lets others know that they matter. Listening builds relationships, careers, respect, trust, and empowered relationships.

Active listening requires the listener to fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said. You make a conscious effort to hear and understand the complete message being spoken, rather than just passively hearing the message of the speaker.

Listening is the most fundamental component of communication skills. Listening is not something that just happens, listening is an active process in which a conscious decision is made to listen to and understand the messages of the speaker.

Active listening is also about patience, listeners should not interrupt with questions or comments. Active listening involves giving the other person time to explore their thoughts and feelings, they should be given adequate time for that.

Various studies stress the importance of listening as a communication skill. The studies on average say we spend 70-80% of our waking hours in some form of communication. Of that time, we spend about 9 percent writing, 16 percent reading, 30 percent speaking, and 45 percent listening.

Good listeners actively endeavour to understand what others are really trying to say, regardless of how unclear the messages might be. Listening involves not only the effort to decode verbal messages, but also to interpret non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and physical posture.

Hearing is an accidental and automatic brain response to sound that requires no effort. We are surrounded by sounds most of the time. For example, we are accustomed to the sounds of cars, construction workers and so on. We hear those sounds and, unless we have a reason to do otherwise, we learn to ignore them.

Listening, on the other hand, is purposeful and focused rather than accidental. As a result, it requires motivation and effort. Listening, at its best, is active, focused, concentrated attention for the purpose of understanding the meanings expressed by a speaker.

Listening means paying attention not only to the story, but how it is told, the use of language and voice, and how the other person uses his or her body. In other words, it means being aware of both verbal and non-verbal messages. Your ability to listen effectively depends on the degree to which you perceive and understand these messages.

The people-oriented listener is interested in the speaker. They listen to the message in order to learn how the speaker thinks and how they feel about their message. For instance, when people-oriented listeners listen to an interview with a famous musician, they are likely to be more curious about the musician as an individual than about music.

People using a time-oriented listening style prefer a message that gets to the point quickly. Time-oriented listeners can become impatient with slow delivery or lengthy explanations. This kind of listener may be receptive for only a brief amount of time and may become rude or even hostile if the speaker expects a longer focus of attention.

Noise is one of the biggest factors to interfere with listening; it can be defined as anything that interferes with your ability to attend to and understand a message. There are many kinds of noise, the four you are most likely to encounter in public speaking situations are: physical noise, psychological noise, physiological noise, and semantic noise.

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