The Importance of Active Listening
The active process of listening helps in interpreting and assessing what we hear. This process entails reception, comprehension, evaluation, recall, and giving feedback. Active listening is a communication skill that requires a listener to respond to what a speaker talks about by repeating or paraphrasing the ideas in their own words. Consequently, both the speaker and the listener can confirm and communicate effectively due to repetition. Public speakers need to possess this skill to give correct information while responding to the audience because it promotes advanced interaction between the speaker and the audience. By actively listening when responding to queries from the audience, the speaker encourages open engagement and creates a conducive environment that allows genuine understanding of other people’s emotion and feeling towards the matter in question.
Developing Active Listening Skills
The first step in developing my active listening skills is by increasing my level of attention. The main difference between hearing and listening is attention. When one is attentive, it is easier to process the information provided by the speakers, identify, and summarize the forum’s key points. As a result, I will be able to easily relate to the audiences' questions and give detailed responses as well as gain more knowledge from fellow public speakers. Attention requires the right attitude for it to be effective. The wrong attitude towards a topic, speaker, and or member of an audience affects how attentive we are to what they are saying. As a result, an effective communicator has an intrinsic motivation for listening and zero tolerance towards judging others. Finally, my active listening skills will be further developed by adequately adjusting to the external voice of the speaker system. Due to the limited span of concentration, humans are usually resistant towards some topics and therefore introduces second-guessing the speaker. However, by fully adjusting to the current speaker, I need to develop the willingness to follow the speaker along by being more attentive to reacting to what is said accordingly.
