Poor Listening

"The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them."(R. Nichols). Listening is often misinterpreted as hearing. To hear, you are simply recognizing a sound being made. However, as defined by International Listening Association, listening is more than acknowledging sound; it is "the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages." (1996). Listening is the interpretation and processing of the information being conveyed.

Earlier this week at the office, I fielded a call from an irate insurance agent regarding the processing of her contracting and commission payout. The agent was hard to comprehend, partially due to a moderate language barrier but primarily due to her strong foreign accent. The phone call was not the first of means of communication, and definitely would not be the last. A disgruntled annoyance concerning her unfamiliarity of common knowledge within insurance practices altered my desire to empathize the message she was trying to get across. Before she could get out what she fully wanted to say, I already was creating my perception and response of where she is going with the conversation based on frequent routine situations and telephone calls with other agents that default to defined solutions or problems. The agent was being cut short in sentence, with I would like to say in efforts to use my time efficiently but more so it was a tone of superiority. The agent, rightfully so, was given the perception that I felt what she had to say was insignificant. In different terms, I was already trying to decode a message that had not even been encoded as of yet, based on horizons of experiences and selective attention. It was also hard to distinguish whether she was yelling with a raised voice, or a misinterpretation of the agent's emphasis on pronunciation and failed attempts of clarity in just speaking louder. Around in circles the communication transpired between me and the agent, with only accomplishing increased frustration from both parties. A solution and understanding did surface, but had the time been used efficiently and practice of empathic listening occurred, the dialogue would not have taken as long as it did.

Empathic listening is trying to understand the state of mind or point of view in the eyes of the other person, and the objective that is