 We've seen in other areas of communication that we've looked at that there's often times a process at work in these things and Listening is no different like many others a communication. There's a way that we break things down a way that we Know that things typically happen and we can examine and further understand the listening process by examining how it unfolds and what that process looks like what what it involves and so What we're going to do in this video is take a look at one model of that process called the hurryer Model of listening. It's not the only model of listening. That's available It's just the one that I prefer the one I want to talk about and use so that we can further understand What's happening as we listen so that we can improve the different aspects of listening? So a brief reminder on what we mean by listening our definition of listening is that it's the active process through which We make meaning out of assess and respond to what we hear We discussed that in another video. You can go back and check that out in greater detail If you wish but that's what we were getting at when we talk about listening and again We briefly discussed the hurryer model in another video, but I want to spend a little more time talking about it in this video So again the hurryer model just each of those letter stands for one aspect of the the process here that we look at They're not in that order of HUR IER. They're just there to help you remember the different The different parts of the listening process. So let's examine each of these a little bit further First of all, we have hearing hearing is an important part of the listening process hearing is not the same as listening, of course listening is is much more Full and and there's much more to it than just hearing but hearing is an important part of that process hearing is the Physiological aspect of listening. It's where those sound waves are striking your eardrums and Resonating in such a way that it creates these Senses that go to your brain and so forth and then there's whole physiological thing after that And I'm not really an anatomist or anything like that. So as you can probably tell but hearing is an important part If you can't hear well, it's difficult to listen if you have some sort of hearing loss Or if you were in a situation where there's lots of noise around you Then you know that it's difficult to focus and difficult to pay attention and difficult to listen effectively When you can't hear so hearing is not the same as listening, but it is an important part of the listening process The next area we can get into with the hurryer models It's what we know is understanding and this is basically are you speaking the same language? Are you able to understand the language that this person is using now in a in the broadest sense possible? That's you know, are you both speaking English or are you both speaking Spanish or Chinese or languages that you Understand in that regard, right? If you're speaking English and the other person is speaking Russian and you don't speak Russian That's going to be an issue even though you can hear them Well, if you can't understand what they're saying then that's going to be an issue But it doesn't just have to be a completely different language in that regard You know our oldest son and a nephew are engineers and when we're together sometimes as a whole family If they start talking about engineering stuff, I am completely lost they're both speaking English But I don't speak engineering that's not my area of expertise Or anything close to it So I have trouble understanding and so I have to quickly kind of drift off and lose interest because I don't know what They're talking about. I can't understand So we need to be able to speak the same language to make sure that we're on the same page and we're able to understand One another that's an important part of the listening process as well Next we could talk about interpreting This is where we're starting to make sense of what the person is saying in terms of how does this fit into what we know? And so we can hear them we can understand them How does this then fit into my experience with these things? How do I make sense of what they're saying? What's my definition of the things that they're saying any any Connotative meaning as we talked about with language and the denotative and connotative meanings How does how do I interpret this? How do I interpret what they're trying to say with this? There's a lot of interpretation going on when we're in the hearing and the listening process excuse me, so there's a lot of interpreting trying to make sense of and place what this person is saying within the context of Our situation and of everything else related to that that environment and that that that exchange The e then stands for evaluating here's where we get into the assessing remember as part of our definition We were we're assessing this information So, you know, this goes beyond just understanding just just having a basic understanding and denotatively what that person is saying It even goes beyond connotatively Interpreting what that person is saying trying to place it within the context of that exchange and of our relationship and so forth Into evaluating now we're assessing now. We're we're we're making judgments. We're Applying analysis to these things. We're determining whether this is something that rings true or as rings false to us Is this important information? Is it not we're triaging information in this stage? So we're evaluating and assessing the information both in terms of validity and also then again Where does this fit in in terms of my life? How do I need to use this information? What value does it have for me? We're prioritizing it in that way So we engage in evaluating and that's all kind of you know, it's related but separate understanding interpreting and evaluating We're all part of that initial process. We hear things and then we we do all these things We don't consciously usually separate them out. They just all kind of happen at once And so that's those are all the important parts of the listening process things that we go through both psychologically mentally Even physiologically as we're listening is it's part of that hearing understanding interpreting and evaluating We save the two hours for last the first arm is actually remembering So remembering will take place in different stages and in different ways too And sometimes we just need to remember things through the end of that conversation If it's not really that important, but still we should probably remember it until we're done talking to that person What's their name? What are they talking about? So we stored away just to you know, right in the front of our memory under the very short term information Other times we think there are things I may need to hold on to this You know if you're in a class and you're trying to remember things long enough for the quiz or the The exam or something like that Then you may need to remember it a little bit longer and hold on to that information and you know The more intermediate sense so that you have it for the time period that you need other things You're going to want to remember for a long time, right? If you meet someone you think boy, this person is significant to me This could be the one maybe this is the first I'm going to be with for a long time Then you may want to remember what's their birthday? What's their favorite color? What's their favorite food? These are things we may want to hold on to in a longer term sense and even more important information than right Or if it's for work, you know, we're prioritizing and triaging this information Short term intermediate term long term or even sometimes I don't need to remember this at all This is complete nonsense, right? So I don't need to hold on to it at all But at some level we need to determine do I need to remember this and then if so how long and where should I store this What effort should I make to remember it and so forth but remembering is an important part of the listening process The final r then is responding as we mentioned in the definition again listening is is a two-way process It's not a one-way street. It's a two-way process So it involves both taking that information in as well, you know, again the understanding interpreting evaluating remembering All of those are more that that direction of the incoming information But we're also we have outgoing communication as part of the listening process. Sometimes it's verbal. Sometimes it's nonverbal Sometimes it's really brief and just things like uh-huh. Yep. Go on. I understand Sometimes it's longer responses if we're offering advice or we're offering comfort It could be longer, but and it could just be expressions Maintaining eye contact facial expressions gesturing a touch things like that Those are all forms of responses that we would use That we need to choose and identify What's the most appropriate response for me in this situation? We'll have a whole other video on responding because this is such a critical part of the listening process But responding is that that other piece that's it's the two-way part of Of listening that we can't forget about it's not just a one-way thing It's a two-way thing in our expressiveness and both verbally and non-verbally is an important part of our overall listening Then again underneath all this we have this kind of current of You know beliefs and attitudes and values and culture and experiences and interests and biases All of this that we put together and we call the frame of reference Right the frame of reference is this sort of filter I think of it like a filter that exists between You know the stimuli that are coming in and your psyche and and so in the middle of that There's this filter that that is made up of all these things It's all of our experiences all of our our thoughts and our beliefs and our biases and everything So it gets kind of processed through that has to go through that before it gets to arm Kind of a kind of brain right really? And so that's how everything that we see and hear and experience takes on a different shade of meaning For each person because we all have a absolutely unique frame of reference And so when we're hearing when we're listening we also need to remember that that you would go through all the steps of the hurryer process But it's going to be deeply affected by our frame of reference at every part of this process So we need to keep that in mind as an important element of listening as well So now we see that listening is a process. There's there's a process that goes on Throughout the listening area and these are each things then we can identify Separately really kind of and say, okay, how can I improve my hearing? How can I improve my understanding? How can I improve my memory for these things and we can improve on each different aspect of the listening process If you have questions about the hurryer model about listening in general about about what happens and how it happens and how we can improve Please feel free to email me. I'd love to talk to you about that in the meantime I hope that you will next time you're listening you'll think about even after the fact think about Okay, what were the different stages that took place here? And what could I have done better in terms of each of these things because that's really the first step Of improvement is determining what each of these things are and how can I improve them as I seek to improve as a listener?