 There's sort of this popular conception right now that in order to gain expertise in any behavior, any activity, any event, you need to put in at least 10,000 hours of effective practice to reach that level of expertise. Now, whether or not that's an accurate number or just a good estimate or a good framework, I don't know, but if we take that to heart and think about, okay, 10,000 hours to be a real expert in anything, listening is no different. Listening is a skill that requires that kind of effort and that kind of activity, that kind of intense focus to improve upon. So let's talk about some of the things that we can do to improve our listening competence, to improve our abilities as a listener and to make strides toward becoming better listeners. So first of all, we're going to really focus on the concept of active listening. We've discussed before that listening is not a passive process, excuse me, it's an active process that requires our engagement, our direct effort and engagement. So active listening is the process of pairing outwardly visible positive listening skills with positive cognitive listening practices. So in other words, what's on the outside needs to match what's happening on the inside as far as our listening behaviors. It requires both of those things. It pairs outwardly visible positive listening skills with positive cognitive listening practices. So let's break that down and kind of right down the middle. Let's start with our cognitive skills. What are we talking about with cognitive skills? What does that mean? What can we do to improve them? Well, the first cognitive skill that we can improve and first way that we can improve our cognitive skills is first of all to prepare, to listen, to understand that listening again requires our active involvement, our active focus. So we can prepare ourselves, we can prepare our minds, we can clear the clutter both from our environment around us, we can turn off the TV, we can shut down our email, we can put our phone down and we can also clear out the clutter in our mind cognitively. We can put things away, we can lock other things out for a bit while we're focusing on what that person is saying. If we're engaging in active listening, then our mind ought to be focused there as well. So we need to prepare ourselves for that and say, okay, let me push all this other stuff away, let me clear the mechanism and get rid of all that other clutter so that I can focus in here and be prepared to listen to this person. We can also work to maintain our focus. I mean, and that's not always easy. You know, if you've sat through a class before, especially a long class, if you have one that's three or four hours long or something, at the end of it, you're just exhausted and you may think, gosh, I'm just, I haven't done anything. I've just been sitting here listening to the instructor and trying to take in this information. But even that requires our effort because it's not a natural setting for us. So maintaining that kind of focus takes a lot of energy and takes our effort. It takes an active effort on our part to maintain that focus. So we can be really focused on maintaining our focus and not letting ourselves get distracted and not chasing down those rabbit trails in our mind. We can find our motivation. We can make an active effort to say, okay, this is why I need to listen to this. This is why it's important. Either this information is important to me and I need to listen because of that. That's why I'm motivated to do this or this relationship is important to me. And so I'm going to listen for the sake of the other person and for the sake of our relationship and developing that because I know it can further and enhance that relationship. We need to find whatever it is that motivates us to do anything and to find that motivation to listen as well. We need to take advantage of our rapid mental process and we've talked in the past about barriers to effective listening. And one of those is that our mind moves faster than the other person is speaking. On average, the average English speaker in the United States speaks at a rate of 150 words per minute, but our mind processes things at closer to 450 to 600 words per minute. So our mind is moving three to four times faster than the person is speaking. That can be a significant barrier because it allows us to get off trail, get off track and really lose focus very easily. But we can also flip that around in a variety of ways to take advantage of the fact that our mind is working faster. We can engage in a sort of internal dialogue, still focused on what that person is saying, but we can engage in internal dialogue through things like covert coaching where we're talking to ourselves, you're doing a great job, keep it up, whatever a self reinforcement of you're a good listener, stay there, you're a good friend, keep at this, whatever. Covert questioning, maybe asking ourselves questions in our mind and mulling things over what they're talking about. But still, again, important that we're still staying focused on that conversation, focused on what that person is saying, but we can engage our mind in internal dialogue, not spoken, not interrupting the other person, but this internal dialogue to keep ourselves focused and take advantage of the fact that our mind can still be listening effectively and doing these other things at the same time. Not totally different tasks, but still things that are related to that particular listening task can handle those things. We can engage in related thoughts, again, still staying on focus, still staying on track with what that person is saying, but related thoughts, parallel thoughts that we can add in our mind while still listening simultaneously. We can engage in mental bracketing where we're sort of closing off other things. We're literally compartmentalizing our mind and bracketing it around these things, only allowing these thoughts that are related to what that person is talking about and that maybe have helped us in that conversation. We can spend our time developing mnemonic devices to help us remember what that person is talking about for memory and then for feedback as well and responding. Mnemonic devices can be very important, so we can be thinking of things like acronyms or rhymes or visualization techniques that help us remember what that person is saying and then help us later on provide feedback and respond to what that person is saying. So all of these things, again, designed to take advantage of the fact that our mind is moving faster than the other person is speaking, so we're using it in pairing with active listening as part of listening to that conversation. We're doing these things simultaneously. Again, all still focused on that conversation, though not trying to divide our attention and do two things at once necessarily. So these are ways that we can develop cognitive skills that will help us and benefit us in the learning process. There are also then some behavioral skills, and we talked about that, pairing those outwardly behavioral positive skills for listening. These are some of those behavioral skills that we can use. First of all, we can establish and maintain eye contact, not to an uncomfortable level, but to a level that indicates that we are paying attention, that we are focused, that we are right there with that person. We can maintain eye contact. We can use other non-verbal behaviors, non-verbal behaviors like touch. If we're trying to convey a sense of compassion, we can touch the other person in the arm. Again, all of this as appropriate, you'll have to make that determination in your own communication scenario, but using touch, using smiling or frown, using our facial expressions for those types of things as appropriate to indicate outwardly that we are listening and that we are following along through our, and that's supported by our non-verbal behaviors. We can use what's called verbal back channeling. So we're not really saying much, but we might be indicating, you know, it's basically prompting the other person, yes, I see, go on, yeah, I understand, sure, why not, you know, those types of things. They are verbal, but at the same time, they're not trying to take over the conversation, you're just, you know, they're prompts to let the other person know that they should keep going or that you're hearing what they're saying and so forth. We can use those kinds of verbal back channeling. We can also refer to previous statements. We can reference for those previous statements and bring them back around again to connect and demonstrate, yes, I was listening, then let me show how that connects here and establish that that can support the idea that we are engaged in active listening. We can ask questions, again, appropriate questions, effective questions, pertinent questions, not just questions for the sake of questions, but questions that apply, questions that are relevant, questions that are pertinent. We can ask questions to kind of pull more information out of that person, but also to give a signal that we are listening, we are connected, we are on track. We can avoid interruptions. I mean, just the fact that we stay off of our phone while we're in a conversation with somebody else can be a significant indicator that we are listening. We can make a point of turning off the TV, we can close our email, we can put our phone down and leave it down while we're talking to this person. We can avoid those kind of interruptions to show that they have our full attention. That's a powerful behavioral support behavior in listening. We can even take notes. You wouldn't do this if it was like a personal conversation, somebody talking about their personal life or whatever, but if it's a business conversation, an organizational conversation that somebody's giving you instructions on how to do something, we can take notes while they're telling us that. That can be an indicator that we are paying attention, again, provided we're taking notes about what that person is talking about and doing so in an appropriate way. Those are some of the behavioral skills. Again, we can engage mentally and cognitively more effectively in listening. We can also demonstrate that listening behavior better through our own behaviors and demonstrate active listening through our behavioral skills, and we can improve in those ways too. So what about for some of the specific different styles of listening? We've referenced these in previous videos as well. Discriminative listening and informational listening, critical and then empathic listening. Now, we're not really going to get into discriminative listening because that just means you've made a point to select this is what I'm going to listen to as opposed to I'm not going to listen to the train going by or the TV I'm going to listen to or this conversation over here. I'm going to listen to this. That's discriminative listening. So there's not much there other than making better choices. So we're going to jump into these other three informational, critical and empathic listening just for some quick points on how we can improve in those areas. So just a reminder, informational listening has to do with listening with the goal of comprehending and retaining information. So think about when you're in like a classroom setting. So if you're just trying to learn some information, we're really just our goal there is comprehending and retaining. That doesn't mean we abandon all critical sense. We need to make sure that what this person is saying doesn't make sense and ring true to us. But at a basic level, we're just trying to learn some information. So we're listening for information. So in order to improve informational listening, first we can paraphrase what was said. We can either either in our notes if we don't want to speak it out loud or we can to that person say, So this is what I hear you saying. Now, remember paraphrasing puts it in your own words does not use the exact words that the other person was using. But it paraphrases the key concepts and ideas for verification and for clarification if needed. We can remember that not all information is equal. Not every word that comes out of the other person's mouth has the same amount of value. And I hate to say that as an instructor as a college professor, but not everything that I say is equally important. You need to listen for key concepts, key ideas and pull those out. Be able to identify and really retain those focus on those and remember that not all information is created equal. We need to allow for the fact that we may not know at all. It's hard to do sometimes, right? Because we tend to think of ourselves as an expert in different areas, and we may think we know it all at different stages of life. But the fact is we don't. So an important part of informational listening is admitting, Okay, I don't know it all necessarily. So there may be something here that I have to gain from listening to this person. And we can listen for substance over style. Not everybody's, you know, an expert communicator, not everybody can express an idea with the greatest penash and clarity and clarification and those types of things. But we need to listen for those key ideas and those core ideas and focus on substance over style. Whether that person is the most interesting speaker in the world, or whether they're dull and dry and it doesn't matter if that information is important. So we can focus on substance over style. And those are all things that can help us improve our informational listening. But when we move into what we call critical listening, which is evaluating the credibility, completeness, and worth of a speaker's message, there are some different things we want to do. Again, we should always, you know, have a little bit of a critical edge when we're listening, things ringing true, not true, so forth. But when we engage in critical listening, we want to step that up a little bit and say, Okay, is this person credible? Is their message complete? Is their value here? So when we're improving our critical listening, one thing we can do is distinguish between facts and inferences or facts and opinions. You know, we see some oranges and somebody says, These are oranges. That's a fact. Those are oranges. Okay. And that's what they are. Whether you like oranges, whether you don't, that's what they are. Somebody else may say oranges are great. We need to differentiate between the fact that that person is expressing an opinion or an inference that they would like an orange as opposed to not like an orange. But that's different from somebody saying, These are oranges. We need to distinguish between those two things, between what is a fact, what is that somebody's expressing, and what is an opinion that they're expressing. We need to evaluate their supporting evidence. We need to make sure that they have their ducks in a row. We need to not just take them at their word. When we're engaging in critical listening, we have to be ready and able to evaluate, you know, does that supporting evidence make sense? Is the data that they're sharing ring true? Is that, is it have value to me? And is it something that is verifiable and that I can go look up on my own even? We need to discover our own biases. So when we're listening to somebody, we tend to listen with a bit of a bias that leads us toward agreeing with things we already agree with and disagreeing with things we don't agree with already. We need to discover our own biases when we're listening in a critical sense so that we can more effectively evaluate what that person is saying and evaluate their credibility as a speaker. And so we need to listen beyond the message too. We need to listen beyond the message beyond just what that person is saying. What is the intent behind it? What is the purpose behind it? Where is this person coming from? We need to evaluate them as rhetorically in terms of what's their motivation? What's their background? What are their biases? We need to listen beyond just the words and focus on a variety of other things and listen more completely in that regard. Finally, we can look at improving our empathic listening, which is where we're listening to understand or experience what a speaker may be thinking or feeling. So we're getting beyond just is this true or not true and into where is this person coming from? Why is this their perspective? How might this be affecting your mindset? And how can I better understand that? So for improving empathic listening, first of all, we've got to clear out judgment. We've got to withhold judgment. Again, whether we agree or disagree with the person doesn't mean that we should be, in this case, assessing right or wrong. In my younger days, I worked with young people a lot and I had a youngster in middle school that I was talking to, and they were telling me about the heartbreak they were suffering because they broke up with their boyfriend recently. And the next step of laughing about this was somebody saying, you know, this person doesn't really know, this young person doesn't know what love is. So I mean, they've been seeing this person for like two weeks and so they don't really understand love anyway. So it's kind of funny to me. And the person I was talking to is very wise said, you know, puppy love is real to puppies. That really struck me. Puppy love is real to puppies. Whether or not I thought this person, you know, knew what love was or had experienced love, whether or not they had is really irrelevant. They felt that I needed to withhold judgment. If I was going to listen empathically and understand that whether or not factually, that was true is largely irrelevant compared to the fact that that's what they were feeling. Right. So I needed to withhold judgment. I wasn't able to do that at that time. And I've really made an effort to do that since then because that's an important part of empathic listening that we'd be able to withhold judgment set aside there, you know, almost set aside the facts and what we consider the realities and just focus on where's this person coming from. So withhold that judgment. We can again use paraphrasing and questioning when talking with this person. Just to get to, you know, where they're coming from to draw that out of them and to pull those things out of them. Paraphrasing and questioning can be really valuable in those instances. We can engage in nonverbal mirroring, which is basically just taking a posture, taking a stance, taking a tone that is very similar to the other person. You see this a lot in interviewing as well, that people will adopt a posture of the other person and kind of mirror them in a sense. It provides a sense of comfort, of connection, of those types of things. So we can, you know, nonverbally, we can, when we're listening empathically to improve that we can engage in nonverbal mirroring. Most importantly, when we're looking to improve communication skills in general and specifically listening and improve our listening competence here, we need to keep in mind what I call Whippy Wigo, which is essentially what you put in is what you get out. It's a really unwieldy acronym I know, but what you put in is what you get out. When we put in the work to becoming a better listener, that's what we're going to get out of it. And if we don't, then we're not. You know, we look at, you know, NBA superstar, for example, LeBron James. Now he's just a phenomenal basketball player, right? He's got so many different skills and, and has just developed all parts of his games, of his game to this point where he's really just such a well rounded player offensively, defensively. And he came in with a lot of physical gifts, but a lot of skills. But the truth is he started off as a scrawny little kid who didn't have an inside game, who didn't have much defense, right? So, and he didn't have much of an outside shot. So he was really limited. He was physically phenomenal, but he was fairly limited. But over time, boy, he has put in those 10,000 hours. It's not come just from, just from sitting around on the couch and letting it come to him. He has put in the work. I'm telling you, but I'm not a LeBron James guy. I'm not a Lakers fan or Cleveland plan or anything else. I'm not, but I have so much respect for the work that he has put in to become the player that he is today. That's exactly what we need to, to do in the mindset that we need to have if we are going to become better listeners. We've got to be willing to put in the time. We've got to understand that even if we think we're good listeners today, we've got that raw product. It still takes that energy, that effort, that focus and that work to become really a competent and effective listener. If you have questions about improving communication competence, improving listening competence, improving anything at all about the listening portion of your communication skills, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope that you will begin to put in those 10,000 hours or continue putting in those 10,000 hours and understand that this is a lifelong process. It's not something that's going to happen overnight. It's going to happen slowly over time and it's going to require our continuous investment to really get there. You can improve as a listener and you will improve as a listener if you're putting in the time working toward improving your listening competence.