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Meeting Listening Goals

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There are many reasons you want others to listen to you—and many reasons for listening to others. In some situations, you need to listen for information; in others, you must listen for ideas, emotions, or enjoyment. You listen to comprehend, to evaluate, to communicate empathy, and to appreciate (Steil, Barker, & Watson, 1983). And sometimes you listen with all these goals in mind.

Informational Listening. When you listen to a weather report on the radio, attend a lecture, or hear the details of your significant other’s day at work, your primary goal is to understand what’s being said. Through this process of informational listening (sometimes referred to as comprehensive listening), you seek to understand a message. As a student, you use informational listening extensively to understand concepts and information your instructors are presenting to you. When someone gives you directions, provides instructions, or tells a story, it requires informational listening from you.

Questions are important aids to informational as well as other types of listening. Through questioning techniques, you coordinate what the speaker is saying with what you are hearing. Asking such questions signals that you are listening; it also indicates to the speaker that you are tuned in and interested. Questions can also help a speaker become more effective by getting to the points that will do the listener the most good.

When Modern Family parents Claire and Phil Dunphy sit their children down for a family meeting or lecture, Haley, Alex, and Luke must listen more attentively than they would during casual, everyday interactions with Mom and Dad.

Critical Listening. Most listening is informational, but we sometimes need to go a step further—to make a judgment about a message we’re hearing. When you evaluate or analyze information, evidence, ideas, or opinions, you engage in critical listening (sometimes called evaluative listening). This type of listening is valuable when you cannot take a message at face value. Most of us probably need to employ this type of listening when considering a big financial purchase, like a car. Don bought his last car from a friend of a friend and failed to ask enough questions about the vehicle’s history. If he’d listened more critically, he would have learned the car had been in two accidents.

Critical thinking is a necessary component of critical listening. When you think critically, you assess the speaker’s motivation, credibility, accuracy (Has she presented all the facts? Is the research current?), and ethics (What does she stand to gain from this?). Four tips can help you improve your critical listening abilities:

Determine the thesis or main point of the speaker’s message. This isn’t always easy, particularly if the speaker is rambling on and on without making a point. But you can watch for key words and phrases like “What I’m trying to say . . .” or “The issue is . . .” or “OK, here’s the deal . . . .”
Focus your efforts. Listening is sometimes hard work. You might need to store up energy. For example, don’t head into your three-hour large group lecture after working out or frantically finishing a paper. You may also need to concentrate and avoid distractions.
Decode nonverbal cues. As you learned in Chapter 5, nonverbal behavior communicates volumes of information. Your friend might reveal sadness or anger in ways that don’t come across in his verbal message; your professor might hint at information that will be on a test by sharing it slowly and loudly or by repeating it.
Use your memory. If you’re in a lecture or on a job interview, note-taking can help jog your memory of what was said. If you’re listening to a classmate share concerns about a group project, note-taking might be awkward, so try to make mental associations with her words. For example, if she says, “Benjamin’s too controlling,” you might think “bossy Benjamin” to remember her complaint.

Empathic listening involves guessing at feelings and rephrasing what you think the speaker has said.

Empathic Listening. When we engage in empathic listening, we try to know how another person feels. This kind of listening requires openness, sensitivity, and caring. Through empathic listening, we can provide emotional support for someone in need or comfort someone when tragedy or disappointment has struck. This is particularly important in medical situations. Doctors, nurses, and other health care providers must listen compassionately to the seriously ill. They need to determine the mental and emotional state of patients and their families to decide how much information to disclose to them and when. Empathic listening helps manage the emotions of people confronting adverse events and can help uncover erroneous assumptions contributing to their anxieties (Iedema, Jorm, Wakefield, Ryan, & Sorensen, 2009; Rehling, 2008).

When you listen empathically, it’s helpful to paraphrase the thoughts and feelings being expressed. This involves guessing at feelings and rephrasing what you think the speaker has said. Empathic listening is person-centered (Burleson, 1994). It recognizes and elaborates on others’ feelings, giving them some degree of legitimacy. The empathic listener reflects the speaker’s feelings and thoughts without suggesting an answer or a solution (Fent & MacGeorge, 2006; Shotter, 2009). Effective listeners don’t overdo paraphrasing because overdoing makes for an awkward conversation and may cause the other person to feel ridiculed (Weger, Castle, & Emmett, 2010).

THINGS TO TRY

Describe a time when you listened well. How do you know you listened well? Where were you? Who were you with? What were your goals? Did you adapt your listening to the situational, cultural, or relational context? What can you learn from this successful listening experience to guide you in future listening challenges?

Appreciative Listening. We use appreciative listening to take pleasure in sounds. Listening to music, poetry, narrations, comedy routines, plays, movies, and television shows are all appreciative listening situations (Christenson, 1994). Some people find this type of listening so important that they schedule time to do it—that’s why they buy tickets to concerts and other performances or tell family members not to bother them when America’s Got Talent is on. Appreciative listening can also help relieve stress, unclutter the mind, and refresh the senses.

Table 6.1 offers ideas for accomplishing each of the four listening goals discussed in this section.

Table 6.1 Listening Goals
Type	Description	Strategies
Informational	Listening to understand, learn, realize, or recognize	Listen for main ideas or details; take speaker’s perspective; use memory effectively
Critical	Listening to judge, analyze, or evaluate	Determine speaker’s goal; evaluate source of message; question logic, reasoning, and evidence of message
Empathic	Listening to provide therapy, comfort, and sympathy	Focus on speaker’s perspective; give supportive feedback; show caring; demonstrate patience; avoid judgment; focus on speaker’s goal
Appreciative	Listening for enjoyment of what is being presented	Remove physical and time distractions; know more about originator (author, artist, composer); explore new appreciative listening opportunities