Ineffective Listening

Ineffective Listening

Part One:

Personally, I have used the listed types of ineffective listening at one point or another with either my friends, family, at the workplace, and in school. One time, I arrived home late and very exhausted to find my family settling in for dinner. Though I wanted to go directly to sleep, I was forced to be part of them as it is custom for our family to eat dinner together. However, as they talked, I acted as if I was listening to them though that was not the case. It did not take long for my mom to find out that I was pretending to be part of the conversation. I had to apologize and requested that I be allowed to go to sleep as I was tired. Fortunately, they understood my case.

The other personal account of ineffective listening I can remember vividly is an argument I had with my sister over which eatery to go to when we were out shopping. I wanted to go to McDonald’s, and she preferred Chick-fil-A. The argument slowly degenerated, and I felt that each of us were rude to the other and began practising insensitive listening where we disregarded each other’s feelings when responding to each other. Another time we were debating with my friends about which candidates would be best suited for an upcoming election in our school. I would engage in stage hogging by frequently interrupting the discussions since I was more focused on expressing my ideas rather than listening to what my friends had to say.

Moreover, I also practised selective listening whereby I would filter criticisms my friends had against my perspective on who the best candidate was and instead, choosing to only respond to specific things that were of interest to me. In the same encounter, there were elements of insulated listening as I ignored certain concerns my friends raised regarding the integrity of my chosen candidate. I explicitly told them that I did not acknowledge those issues as, in my view, they were of little interest to me.

Part Two:

Based on the examples I have given, I would not rate myself as a mindful listener as they reveal that I have poor listening habits. According to Adler and “Mindless listening occurs when we react to others’ messages automatically or routinely, without much mental investment” (246). To be a better listener, I will begin by purposing to care about the other person even before I hear their message. When I place value or importance on the person, it will be easier to assign the same value to the message they speak. I have also learned that listening is a process involving various stages from hearing to attending to understanding the message to responding. Besides, remembering the conversations I have with others will help me to better assess my listening skills and look for ways to improve on areas I find myself to be an ineffective listener. However, it is important to note that we are normally exposed to countless messages every single day, and it is, therefore, difficult to pay careful attention and thought to every single message we receive.

Works Cited