 To wrap up this part of our discussion about effective listening and improving our listening skills related to understanding, we want to talk about how we can improve our understanding skills and improve this aspect of our listening skills. So again, we're talking about this in the context of the hurryer model of listening, HUR, IER, hearing understanding, remembering, interpreting, evaluating, responding, and we are looking specifically at the understanding aspect of this. We've sort of talked about language in a separate video. In this video, we're going to talk a little bit about context and intention and how all of those things really can factor into improving our listening skills through improving our understanding. So first, let's talk about how we can do this through what we would call two-way settings, meaning we are engaging with somebody on an interpersonal level or even in a group level or something where it's more of a it's a back-and-forth where both people are there synchronously at the same time. We're engaging with somebody. So these two-way settings, one of the first things we can do to improve our understanding and therefore improve our listening skills is by building our vocabulary. The more we can understand what people are saying through understanding their vocabulary, the language that they're using, not only that we're speaking the same language literally in terms of like we're speaking English or we're speaking Chinese or Spanish or whatever, but understanding remembers, we talked about languages exists in a particular context and culture. So understanding what the connotative meanings, as you recall from that other video, what the connotative meanings are and how they may affect our understanding in that situation. We can build our vocabulary and our understanding of specific language use in that context, in that culture, and how those different shades of meaning through the denotative and connotative meanings may affect the vocabulary. So we can build over our vocabulary just all over the place in that regard. We can do that by we build our vocabulary, particularly by reading is a great way to improve our vocabulary. There's also things like those, you know, word of the day calendars and things like that that you can use, but reading is in as a spectacular way. Reading the newspaper, reading magazines, reading books, and just expanding our knowledge and our understanding of vocabulary through those ways, doing crossword puzzles. There are all kinds of ways that we can build our vocabulary, but that's one really important way and an effective way of doing that to build our vocabulary for these two-way settings. Another thing we can do is ask questions. We can become more willing to say, can you explain that to me a little bit further? I didn't quite catch that or I don't think I'm quite following that or what specifically did you mean by that? We can ask questions in an effort to improve our understanding in these two-way settings. I know that, you know, one very specific way we can do that is through a perception check. We talked about a perception check in previous videos as well on perception. This idea of describing the behavior, these three steps describe the behavior, then provide two possible interpretations of that behavior or that the meaning of what that perception is saying, and then ask for clarification. So we can perform a perception check and you can go back and review how to do that. That can be a really simple way to engage in some assertive question-asking as well. Then we can just straight up ask questions. We can just ask guys, I don't understand, can you explain this to me a little bit more? What do you mean by this? We can just ask very direct questions in a polite way, of course, but we should certainly feel free to do that if we feel like we're lacking understanding there. The other thing we can do is in these situations is listen wholly. Listen wholly, meaning listen not just to the words that this person is using, but listen using our own eyes and our ears as well and every sense that we have. Take in those nonverbal factors when we're listening and just listen contextually. Become more high context listeners in factoring in all these different things and not just specifically the language and the words that the person is using, but every aspect of how they're communicating. We can listen wholly in that regard. There are also times we find ourselves in communication settings that are more one way. So we're sitting in a training session or somebody's giving a speech and there are things we can do to improve our listening skills in those contexts as well. One of the first things we can do is listen for organizational patterns. We can try and make sense and listen for patterns in their speech patterns in the content, all these types of things that we can use to help frame what they're saying and that will help us then help remember and understand more clearly what they're saying. So we can look for and use those organizational patterns. We can take notes. There are a variety of ways that people take notes, but taking notes can be really effective even if you never review them or look at them again. These have shown that just the process of writing things down can help us process and understand and remember information more effectively. So taking notes and it also just helps us stay focused on what's being said and what's happening in that situation. So taking notes in a one way setting can be a really good way to enhance your understanding then. We can be sure that we're listening for key concepts and not necessarily trying to gain or gather every single word that that person is saying, but what is the key concept concepts that this person is sharing with us and are we taking those away then instead of, you know, we don't necessarily have to remember every single word and every single, you know, gesture that the person makes, but we want to listen for key concepts. What is it that it's important for us to take away from this? Then finally, more and more we find ourselves in mediated settings as well and being in those situations can be difficult to listen, right? When we're in a Zoom meeting, we're on a phone call, those types of things. There are some things we need to keep in mind to be effective in those situations as well. First, it's important that we separate the personal from the professional in those situations. We listen differently on a personal level than we do on a professional level. So we need to to separate those things and also then that will provide us different avenues through contextual clues as to what, you know, that person is saying and understanding what they're saying, the language that they're using, we can do that by separating the personal and the professional in those situations. And I also think it's really important that we remove distraction. And by that, I mean, you know, if you're working from home or if you're in a meeting and you're not face to face with that person, you're meeting virtually via Zoom or via the phone or whatever. I think you could do yourselves a lot of favor by removing distractions by shutting down your email, by putting your phone somewhere, maybe that you can kind of see it if there's an emergency, but aren't going to be tempted to kind of check your text messages all the time. You can, you can go on camera. That can be a good way to remove distraction in terms of if you're on camera, a lot of times people will behave more like it's a regular meeting because they know other people can see them. If you're off camera, you can do all kinds of stuff and, and, you know, nobody's going to know necessarily. So remove distraction in whatever way you can and do whatever you need to do to remove that distraction, distraction more effectively than. So these are things that we can all do to understand, to improve our understanding in a situation to improve the, the way that we take this information in and are able to make sense of it in that regard. That's important just at a very basic level for listening skills. So be sure that we're focusing in them and working on improving these aspects of understanding. If you have questions about understanding, about listening, about any aspect of the listening process, please feel free to email me. It's lovely to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope that you will take these improvement tips to heart and begin to work on improving your understanding in route to improving your effectiveness as a listener.