Types of Listening

1. Discriminative Listening
1. Listening to Hear
  1. When the Greeks were unable to recognise individual words and phrases to foreigners. In this most basic type of listening, for that reason, there are a couple of reasons why it might be useful to go back to thinking about listening at this very basic level.
2. Are you listening?
  1. Silence is an important tool for a listener; it’s hard to listen when you yourself are talking. For that reason, a good practice to regularly leave a few seconds of receptive silence after the speaker has finished before you respond. This gives you more time to review what the other person has said.
3. What can you hear?
  1. To think about what we hear and don’t hear when we are listening to someone because it’s not only the words we are listening to. Some people are better than others at hearing the subtle emotional nuances in another person’s speech. If you are not hearing this emotional tone and colour, then you cannot take it into account when seeking to understand another person.
2. Empathic Listening
1. Listening to connect
  1. A good listener will go beyond the mere recognition of the emotional tone and feelings of the speaker, whether they are sad, confused, angry, frustrated, hesitant, or excited, you feel some of what they feel.
2. A responsive environment
  1. the idea that it might give you an insight into how your own words might be received by the other person
3. A common starting point
  1. If you are listening empathically to someone, you are trying to put yourself in their shoes, trying to see the situation as they see it. You put yourself in their position, you can get a better understanding of what they are able to see and what is hidden from them, because you are sharing their state of mind you may also be able to anticipate how they might perceive any intervention from you.
3. Comprehensive and reflective listening
1. Listening to understand
  1. In most cases, as you listen to someone you will be trying to understand what they are saying. Of course, this requires a shared vocabulary and syntax, but it is worth being cautious whenever you speak to someone new; the words, gestures and intonations they use may not have the meanings you assume.
2. Being selective
  1. Some words carry more information than others. When you are trying to understand what someone is saying, you will automatically attempt to identify the words, phrases, gestures and tones that carry the most significance. In doing this, there is always a danger that you are highlighting the wrong things
3. Being reflective
  1. Listening is usually a two-way process, where the listener becomes a mirror, reflecting back what the speaker has said and allowing them to reflect on the words they have used.
4. Interpretive and evaluative listening
1. Listening to diagnose
  1. To translate the speaker’s comments into your own frame of reference. Whenever you do this it is important to seek confirmation that you have translated accurately, using paraphrasing and questioning to check with the speaker that your interpretation is correct and acceptable to the speaker.
2. Putting things in boxes
  1. The first step to doing this is to become explicitly aware of the categories you are using. Replay a conversation either by remembering it or recording it. As you re-hear the speaker’s comments try to remember how you classified them at the time
3. Weighing things on scales
  1. It is also possible to assign what someone is saying to categories that are not equally valid, for example ‘true’ versus ‘false’, ‘something I agree with’ versus ‘something I dispute’, ‘useful’ versus ‘unhelpful’, ‘constructive’ versus ‘flippant’. In each of these cases one of the categories has more value to you than the other.
5. Reflexive Listening
1. Listening to yourself
  1. Listening is usually a two-way process. Therefore, as a good listener you should be listening to both sides of the conversation.
2. Listening to your speaking
  1. if you really are listening to your speaking, you will be aware that you are doing this and can counteract the effects by summarising at the end in order to make your eventual purpose clear.
3. Listening to your listening
  1. As should be obvious by now, one aspect of good listening involves being aware of what is going on inside you as you listen. But beware! You don’t want to get so involved in listening to your listening that you forget to listen to the speaker.
6. Open and Transformational Listening
1. Listening to everything
  1. Is it possible to do all of this listening at the same time? To listen to everything that’s going on in a conversation? Donald Schön calls this ‘reflection on action’ leading to ‘reflection in action’. The more you review afterwards, the better you get at responding during.
2. Hearing the whole
  1. Leonard Waks talks about what he calls apophatic listening in which you immerse yourself fully in the experience of just listening without trying to decide, decipher or define. Your whole attention is focused on taking in everything you can from the speaker, but it just becomes harder as an adult. In this way, it becomes a form of creative listening.

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Types of Listening

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	Created by Angie Velandia Galindo over 7 years ago