Major Modes of Effective Listening and the Listening Process

Effective listening is an analytical process of hearing and processing things to come up with a logical conclusion. Listening is one of the most vital competencies in the workplace. With advanced competition in this competitive workplace, it is vital that the need good listening and communication skills.

Effective listening strengthens organizational relationships, alerts an organization to opportunities for innovation, and allows an organization to manage diversity both in the workplace and serves customers well. In this modern world, many of the leading educational schools and companies are emphasize soft skills such as listening, communication, etc.

The Major Modes of Effective Listening are:

• Content listening
• Critical Listening
• Empathic Listening

Content listening

This listening includes understanding and retaining the information in the speaker’s message. We only understand the content of the message as we are not evaluating the information of this point, whether we agree or disagree, approve or disapprove.

Critical Listening

In this listening mode, we understand and evaluate the meaning of the speaker’s message on several levels, the logic of the argument, the strength of evidence, the validity of conclusions, the implications of the message, the speaker’s intentions and motives, and the omission of any necessary points.

Empathic Listening

The goal of empathic listening is to understand the speaker’s feelings, needs, and wants to understand their point of view. It is done more through the heart than the head so it is based on the speaker’s emotional state.

The listening process is completed into five separate steps:

• Receiving
• Decoding
• Remembering
• Evaluating
• Responding

1. Receiving

Receive sounds, words, speech, body language, and more to understand the message conveyed by the speaker. This is done through physical processes and the sense organs play a vital role to perceive it. The sounds we hear have no which means till we supply them their which means in context. Listening is an energetic technique that constructs that means from each verbal and nonverbal message.

2. Decoding

Decoding is the reverse process of listening to words into mental images. Giving meaning to the sounds received is known to be decoding. This can be as per the listeners’ capacity, mind and feelings. Determining the context and which means of person words, as nicely as assigning which means in language, is indispensable to grasp sentences.

3. Remembering

Listening has this step where you store the important and relevant information for future endeavors. The unnecessary things are excluded to emphasize more on important information. Asking questions allows you like the listeners to fill in any holes you may have in the mental reconstruction of the speaker’s message.

4. Evaluating

The information can have importance according to its utility. The listener will analyze and evaluate the quality of the information. The evaluating stage takes place most correctly as soon as the listener thoroughly is familiar with what the speaker is attempting to say. Having a clear understanding of a speaker’s message allows a listener to evaluate that message without spending unnecessary time and energy addressing the main points.

5. Responding

The final step includes the reaction of the listener. How will they react at the end and what are their intentions for the concerned topic is replied in this step. Based on the listener’s responses, the speaker can choose to either adjust or continue with the delivery of the message. The listeners provide verbal or nonverbal reactions.

Nonverbal signals can include gestures like nodding, making eye contact, rolling the eyes, or any other body language. Verbal signals include asking a question, requesting additional information, or repeating what a speaker has said back to verify that the received message matches the intended message.

These are the modes and processes of listening where you can know more about the art of listening. Utilizing these modes of listening will make you an extra advantageous listener and, in turn, an extra high-quality communicator.