 We've come into the time where we want to begin to focus in more narrowly on the specifics of listening. Now we're going to get into great detail about the listening process and things we do as we listen and how we can improve those skills, but all of that has to start somewhere. So in this video, we're going to take a look at the listening basics, just the fundamental things about listening to give us our start. So starting with, well, how do we define listening? What is listening? Very simply, listening is the active process through which we make meaning out of, assess, and respond to what we hear. So again, simple as that, right? Although there's a lot happening here. First of all, listening is an active process. It's something we have to actively engage in. We have to flip that switch. It's not something that happens naturally for us. In fact, it's quite unnatural. So we have to put in that effort and make it an active process. We're also making meaning out of when we're listening. We're making meaning out of, we're assessing, and we're responding to what we hear. There's a lot going on as we're going to find as we look at the listening process. It's not just a matter of these sound waves hitting our eardrums. There's a lot that happens as part of this process and we've got to be fully participating and actively participating in all of it if we're going to be effective as listeners. But this is our definition of listening and what we're going to work with throughout the rest of this series. An active process through which we make meaning out of, assess, and respond to what we hear. So why is all this important? I think this is an important discussion for us to have. Why should we care about this? Why is listening important? What is any of this matter? Well, listening is important for a couple of different reasons. First of all, it's the most utilized component of communication. When we talk about communication, we usually talk about reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We talk about the forms and methods of communication, the components of communication. Out of those four, we listen more than we do any of the others combined. We spend more time listening than we do reading, writing, and speaking combined. Now that includes mass listening, like when we're watching TV or listening to music, things like that, but also face-to-face listening. But when you throw all that together, we spend more time listening than we do. All the others combined. That is amazing. We use it so much, so it's obviously important for us to be good at it if we're going to do it that much of the time and rely on it that much. It's also a critical skill in our professional and personal context. We can, you know, I'm sure many, many times you've heard from in your personal relationships, you don't listen to me or not listening to me and so forth. So it's an important skill there, but it's also important in the professional world. This Google search from not too long ago shows that the top communication skills in the workplace, if you Google that, I encourage you to Google it on your own, with these top two that came up. You can see that active listening and listening are at the top of each of those lists. Employers want effective listeners. And the truth is we're not very good at it most of the time. Most of us are not very good listeners, despite what we may think. We have a lot of improvement. The good news is though that because so many people are poor listeners, you don't have to improve a lot to stand out in the workplace. So just a few, you know, some modest improvement in your listening skills can really impress your employer and make a difference in the workplace. It's a really critical skill. Employees want people who can listen well to their supervisors, to their colleagues, to their clients and so forth. So it's an important skill and an important thing to develop for those reasons as well. But when we take a look at the origin story of listening, right? We're all about origin stories and where does this come from? How did this unfold? When we take a look at the origin story of listening, we know that listening is the first communication skill that we learn. We're able to listen before we're able to speak or read or write, right? So we're able to listen and understand those things when our parents say no. We learn that, you know, at an early age or we learn different words and what they mean. So we learn to listen first. It's also as we've discovered our most used communication skill. It's this communication skill that we use the most, the component of communication that we talked about. They use it twice as much as all the others combined. And yet in terms of origin story, how it's taught, how we learn these things, we get the least amount of instruction in listening. We get so much instruction in writing and reading, and that's important. And we probably get some in speaking. You've probably had some instruction related to giving presentations and things like that. But we get very little instruction in listening. I'd be surprised if most or any of us have had much specific detailed instruction just on listening. So even though we do it the most, we learn it first. We get the least amount of instruction on how to do it well. And the truth is that one is not simply become a good listener. As I noted, it's it's not a natural skill for us. It's not something that just comes to us. We need, we need that, that teaching. We need that instruction and we need that practice. So hopefully this video will be the start of that for you. In this series, we're going to use the hurrier model. Of the listening process. Let me point out there are a variety of different models that are used to describe and explain the listening process. All of them are good. But the hurrier model is the one that I choose to to use in my demonstration of my instruction on listening. So we're going to take a look at the hurrier model. And we're going to break this down in great detail, each component of it. But the components here and each one just is the letter. It's an acronym here. So each letter stands for a different part of the listening process. Here. So the H stands for hearing. So we're going to start with that. It's hard to listen. Well, if you can hear, well, we're going to spend some time talking about what is hearing, why is it important? How does it impact things? So, so anyway, we have hearing. Also, you have been, you know, as part of this process, understanding, interpreting and evaluating the information that you're receiving. Right. So the UI and the E are understanding, interpreting and evaluating it. And we'll break each of those down individually and look at them in the context of how they apply in this model. The two Rs then stand for remembering. So it's important that we be able to remember information that we're listening when we're listening. And then responding is also a part of the listening process. Listening is a two way process. So, so responding is going to be an important part of that as well. Then kind of underneath all this and moving through it, you know, kind of under undercurrent here are the different things that we bring individually to the table. Our beliefs, our attitudes, our values, our culture, our experiences, our interests, our biases, all of that and everything else that makes us an individual gets thrown into a blender. We call that sort of our frame of reference, which will also impact every aspect of the listening process. So we'll be talking about that as well. I want to talk just briefly to about the different types of listening that we have listening. It takes place in various stages and requires different skills at each of these stages. So first, we kind of think of it like a tree. Right. And we start with the root of the tree, where we find discriminative listening, right? That kind of the core of all listening is just discriminative listening. And all that means is that as we're going to find out, you know, beyond hearing, we have to choose which stimuli we're going to pay attention to. We don't always listen if you've got somebody talking to you and you're trying to watch TV or you're listening to a podcast or whatever, we make a choice about which one we're really going to pay attention to, if either one of them, you know, so against the active listening process, discriminative listening just says, this is what I'm going to pay attention to and separate to that from the other kind of noise and chaos that's going on around us here. Then we have informational listening, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's listening for the purpose of information. We get that kind of the trunk of this because it really does impact everything. Every other kind of listening, it starts kind of with informational listening. We have to be able to listen for ideas and information before we can engage in anything further, but especially in the classroom, for example, if you're in school, you engage in a lot of informational listening. You're trying to take in what the instructor is telling you, what your teacher is telling you. So informational listening would be the next step up. Then we have what we call critical listening. So now we're getting into the kind of the different branches of listening. Critical listening represents a specific kind of listening where we are evaluating, interpreting and evaluating. What does this mean? How is this important to me? What impact will this have on my life? Is this information that I find credible? Is it truthful or not truthful and so forth? All of that is involved in critical listening. Critical does not mean that we're tearing something down. It does not necessarily mean criticism, right? But critical just means we are being critical in evaluating as information comes in, as the stimuli come in. We are being critical in determining what's the value here, what's the validity, all of those types of things involved in critical listening. Then finally, we have kind of the top of these branches at the very top is empathic listening, where we're expressing empathy and where we're trying to understand what that person is saying. We're trying to relate to it. We're trying to gain their perspective, understand their perspective. And so that's really the highest level here in terms of many times the most often times the most challenging type of listening because it can be hard to really put yourself in that person's shoes. But it's an important listening skill to develop as we will find. But there are different kind of levels and they existed, you know, we start with discriminative listening and then we kind of progress on from there as the tree continues to grow and continues to extend into more branches and take on more foliage, then we get into other kinds of listening. So now we've just, again, a basic, very basic understanding of what listening is, what's the process involved and one of the different types of listening. So this is what we're going to use to develop our own skills as we continue to learn more and more about the specifics of listening and delve into each of these ideas individually and each of these areas individually so that we can become more effective listeners. If you have questions about the listening process or anything related to listening, please feel free to email me. I'd be happy to chat with you there. In the meantime, I hope that this has given you some perspective on what listening is, the different things that are involved, the different types of listening that there are and has established a foundation for us to continue on, again, in this more narrow discussion of the listening process.