What is listening?

Listening is taking in and absorbing the meaning of words, phrases or sentences with the brain, leading to understanding. It is often confused with hearing, which is the purely physical act of perceiving sounds.

• Difference Between Hearing and Listening

Hearing is an automatic physical action. Noise and sounds of some kind or another are constantly bombarding ears and many of them go by almost unnoticed. Listening, on the other hand, requires attention. In order to not be distracted by other sounds or thoughts, a listener has to concentrate on what is being said. This is known as active listening.

• Active Listening

Active listening can be defined as a structured communication technique requiring listeners to focus their attention on a speaker in order to understand and interpret, or evaluate, what is heard.

Many individuals do not listen actively during their interactions with others. They think about unrelated things, are distracted by other external influences or are busy thinking about what they will say next, which is often particularly the case during disagreements or other conflict situations.

• Primary Elements of Active Listening

Active listening has three primary elements, namely comprehension, retention and response. Comprehension, the first step of listening, involves the actual identification, separation and understanding of spoken words.

• Retention

Retention is concerned with memory. It is not only essential to remember the meaning of words in order to understand them, each word has to remain long enough within the short term memory to make sense out of a sentence. The brain relies on memory to attach meaning to what is being heard.

• Response

Listening is really an interaction between a speaker and a listener. The speaker looks out for responses, either verbal or non-verbal, from the listener, in order to determine whether what is being said is actually listened to.