4/5-week 5

Lucy discusses the five stages of listening: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding. She also provides tips for each stage. She then talks about common listening barriers, such as pseudo-listening and stage hogging. To overcome these barriers, she suggests active listening, which involves restating or rephrasing what is heard to ensure understanding. Lucy shares a personal example of miscommunication with her sisters and how active listening could have helped. In conclusion, she emphasizes the importance of active listening to avoid miscommunication. Hi, this is Lucy, and this is week five of looking at my relationship between myself and my four other sisters through the lens of interpersonal communication. And this week, I'm going to be talking about listening. Also, before I really get into anything, if you hear some weird noise in the background, I'm in my dorm, and someone's playing the electric guitar, so sorry about that. But to start off, I wanted to quote the According to Interpersonal Communication book by Joseph DeVito. He breaks down listening into five stages, and I feel like that was a good place to just start off giving us a little foundation to build off of for today. So the first is receiving, and that is when you know what's being said and also what's not being said. The second is understanding, where you learn what the speaker means. It's the stage where you grasp their thoughts and the emotions that they're expressing to you. Third is remembering, where you put the information into short-term memory and then rehearse it so that it's stored into your long-term memory. Fourth is evaluating. This is where you judge and evaluate the message that's being shared to you in some way. And the fifth and final stage is responding, and responding, you can do it immediately or at some later time, but you're just responding to the information that's been shared to you. So within these five stages of listening, DeVito provides the listener with five do's and don'ts to go along with these stages. For the first stage, which is receiving, he advises to focus on the listener to avoid interrupting and getting distracted. For the second, understanding, he advises to avoid jumping to thinking that you understand what the speaker is saying before they've said it themselves, and looking at things from their perspective, also asking questions and rephrasing what they've said to you. For the third stage, being remembering, he says to focus on their main ideas and to organize what you hear and repeat what they've said in your head or out loud if the situation allows it. The fourth, being evaluating, he says to distinguish facts from opinions and to identify any biases that the speaker or yourself might have and resist evaluating what is being said before understanding what their perspective is. And fifth and finally, the stage for responding, he says to support them and also be strong in your own responses and avoid completing their thoughts for them in your response. So now we've covered the five stages of listening and some tips for what to do and what not to do within those five stages. Now we can get into listening barriers that can also occur in those stages. According to Indiana State University, they provided a list of listening barriers that can commonly happen, and I'm just going to go through those and define them for you. The first is pseudo-listening, which is pretending to listen or appear to listen, but you're not actually understanding or interpreting the information that is being shared with you. The second is selective listening, which is where you're only picking and choosing information that you like that goes with the conversation that you want to have. Third is insulated listening. This is the opposite of selective listening, where rather than picking and choosing information to talk about, you're ignoring bits of information that you don't want to talk about. Fourth is defensive listening, which is where you take innocent comments and turn them into sort of personal attacks against you. The fifth is insensitive listening, which is where you're listening to the information for its literal meaning and disregarding a person's feelings and emotions. And sixth is stage hogging, where you're listening to what's being said, you're listening to the speaker, but only for the purpose of expressing your own interests and ideas, pretty much waiting for them to stop talking so that you can talk. Next and finally is ambushing, which is where you're carefully listening and you're attentive to what's being said, but you're only collecting this information in order to turn it against them and use it as a personal attack against them. So we've covered the five stages of listening, things to do and to not do, and also listening barriers that can occur, but how can we go through the five stages of listening as best we can without having these listening barriers come up inside of them? And according to Highline College, they say the solution to this is active listening. And they define active listening by saying, active listening is a particular communication technique that requires a listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker by way of restating or rephrasing what they've heard in their own words. The goal of this repetition is to confirm that the listener has heard and to confirm the understanding of both parties. So essentially, the point of active listening is to show that the listener has fully comprehended what is being said to them and that the speaker has an opportunity to correct any miscommunication and to make sure that they are on the same page by way of just rephrasing what has been said. So to give an example of this, in my own relationship with my sisters, it reminded me of the way my siblings and I share clothes and the conflict that has come up with that throughout our entire childhood. So having four sisters that are all so close to age, we all pretty much grew up sharing clothes for our entire lives. And it was something we really got used to. And for seasons, there was no problem with it. But as we got older, we became more particular about our own things and just wanted all our things to be in order because we started buying our own clothes or having our own sense of style or whatever it was that we wanted our stuff to be where we wanted it to be. And the people that had the most problem with this were probably the youngest siblings being myself, my older sister, Katie, and my younger sister, Caroline, just because we were around each other the longest after the older girls left. And I remember never knowing where my stuff was. It wasn't just that one thing of mine would go missing. It was that 10 of my shirts would go missing and I would have nothing to wear. And I would go to Katie or Caroline and find out that they had my stuff. And it just became this annoying problem that I felt like I was always dealing with. So to have some sort of a short-term solution to it, I just told them, hey, I don't care if you use my stuff, but just tell me that you're using it so that I can just know what's in my closet, what I had to wear. And they were both like, yeah, OK. It's totally fair. And then the same problems kept happening where I'd go into my closet and nothing was there. And I was so annoyed because I felt like I had been really fair with sharing my stuff. I just wanted to know where it was so that I didn't have to go looking for it. And I came back to them and I was like, hey, I told you guys you could use it, but you're supposed to tell me. Like, you didn't tell me. And both of them were confused because they thought that what I meant by saying, hey, you can use my stuff, just let me know you're using it, meant that they could just use it whenever they wanted and not tell me until after or during or whatever of them using my stuff. Not before. But in my mind, by me saying, hey, let me know you're using my stuff meant before you touch my stuff, tell me that you're using it just so I know. And this was just miscommunication that occurred between us. But we could have avoided that if they had just rephrased back to me what I had said, not in some weird way of, can you repeat back to me what I said to you? It didn't have to be that intense of a situation. It could have just been me saying, hey, you can use my stuff, just let me know when you're using it. And they could have said, OK, so do you want me to tell you before or after that I'm using your stuff? And then I could have said, oh, yeah, just tell me before. So it can be very natural. It doesn't have to be like someone saying, hey, could you repeat back to me what I just said to you? Because I think that can seem a bit demeaning. But it's such a common thing that you can hear and understand the words that are being said by someone and take them to mean something completely different. So I think active listening by way of rephrasing what's been said to a listener can really help avoid that miscommunication. So in conclusion, I would say that from learning about the five stages of listening and the listening barriers that can occur inside of it, the best way to avoid miscommunication would be if the situation allows to practice active listening by way of rephrasing or restating what has been said to you. So that's all I have for this episode. But I'll be back next week. And if you have any questions or comments or anything like that, you can just leave it in the chat box and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. But thank you so much for listening.