A Good Understanding of Active Listening
We listen for a variety of reasons. We listen to learn at school and college, we listen to gain information and insight from people and work, and we listen for pleasure with music and the arts. Simply, listening has a wide range of uses, so it’s quite surprising to hear that we only take in a quarter-to a half of what’s being said to us. Without active listening, all we’re doing is hoping that information that we need is remembered, and that useless, irrelevant talk doesn’t fill up the space that we have. The difference between listening and active listening, is that you can listen to someone whilst on your phone. You can listen to someone whilst watching TV. You can listen to someone just about anywhere you want, doing pretty much anything you want.
This isn’t the case with active listening. With active listening you need to be listening to what they’re saying with your full attention. No distractions, no tuning in and tuning out again. Just what they are saying. What this allows for is to understand the complete message of what they’re saying. This might be done through what’s called subtext. Subtext is the meaning of the message that’s not directly said, but heavily implied e.g., you ask your friend if they are “okay”, and they reply, “fine”, even though their body language and tone suggests differently, the chances are that they’re not fine. You can only interpret, understand and gain subtext and meanings behind conversations, as well as taking in more than 50% of the conversation through active listening.