More Than Just Hearing

More than just Hearing

I believe in Dawn Rosenberg McKay's article "Now Pay Attention" she expands on what we learned in chapter seven. In her article, McKay talks about why and how you need to listen well and the barriers to listening. The best thing that I got out of this article is the portion talking about how to listen well. I believe that everyone can take at least a little out of it to help them listen better. McKay states that to listen well you need to maintain eye contact, not interrupt the speaker, sit still, not your head, lean toward the speaker, repeat their instructions and ask appropriate questions when it is necessary. I can think of times just today where I could have used everyone of those things to make a conversation between myself and someone else better. But I can also think of times where I have gotten annoyed because someone I was talking to did or did not do one of things and it felt like they were ignoring me or only half listening.

McKay also list off barriers to listening that we all run into frequently. Mckay lists the barriers as bias or prejudice to either the speaker or what they are saying, language differences or accents that make it hard to understand the speaker, noise around you and the speaker, worry, fear or anger, and the lack of attention span from the listener. None of these barriers come as a surprise to me but I think now that they have been listed down and I have paid attention to them that I might pay more attention to them as I am talking to people.

Becoming a better listener is something I really wanted to take out of this class. I would not have rated myself a very good listener because I used to like to be heard before I wanted to listen to anything that anyone had to say. I still would not rate myself as a great listener but the thing is that I am learning and it takes time. If I think that I messed up in a conversation listening to someone then it bugs me and later on I sit down and think about what I could have done differently to have made it turn out differently. From there I try to take that and apply it to my other conversations. I think that this chapter has been the most helpful to myself so far. Mckay's article can be found at the link provided here (http://careerplanning.about.com/cs/miscskills/a/listening_skill.htm).