Listening Styles Research Paper

Listening is a complex process of selecting, attending to, constructing meaning from, remembering, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. Listening involves the process of selecting, sorting through various sounds that compete for your attention; Attending to, focusing on a particular sound or message; Understanding, assigning meaning to sounds; Remembering, recalling information; and Responding, confirming your understanding of a message. Whether an individual is aware of it or not, everyone has a specific listening style, (preferred way of making sense out of the spoken messages that are heard) that applies to them. In this paper I will discuss the different listening styles and barriers, the ones I personally have identified with,
Listeners tend to fall into one of four listening styles: people-oriented, action-oriented, content-oriented, and time-oriented. People-oriented listeners are comfortable with and skilled at listening to people 's feelings and emotions. Action-oriented listeners prefer information that is well organized, brief, and error free. Content-oriented listeners are more comfortable listening to detailed information than people with other listening styles. Time-oriented listeners like their messages delivered succinctly. Although, knowing your listening style can help you understand how to adapt to various listening situations, there are listening barriers that keep us from catching other 's meaning.

The listening barriers that affect our listening styles and skills are as follows: being self absorbed, unchecked emotions, criticizing the speaker, different speech and thought rate, shifting attention, information overload, external noise, and listener apprehension. I, personally, struggleListening Barriers 3with listening in company meetings at my place of employment. The listening barriers that apply to my attention span during these meetings are information overload and criticizing the
Our managers post notes up all over the back of the restaurant that contain negative criticism pertaining to the servers. Sadly, I have been employed there 3 years and have never seen a positive note posted anywhere. The meetings are basically scheduled so that the managers can go over the things we are doing wrong, rather than praising us for anything we do right. I dislike one manager, in particular, because he is always in a bad mood and nit-picks every last move I make. Also, it just so happens that this manager is the one who takes the lead speaker role at our meetings. As petty as it may sound, these factors contribute to my criticizing the speaker listening barrier at our company meetings.

There are ways to improve my listening skills that will help my mental state of mind at our meetings. To become a better listener I need to stop, look, and listen. To stop means to avoid tuning into our own distracting messages and to become mindful of what others are saying. To look is to observe and interpret unspoken messages. After stopping and looking, I can then listen more effectively to others by focusing on details and what the speaker is