Authentic Counselling Training

Poor Quality Listening

[Under construction: 23 August 2004]

This document in all parts is copyright © Peter Hughes from the date of construction given above.

These documents have taken me years of my own, unpaid time to perfect. Please feel free to make use of them for solely personal purposes. However, should you wish to use them for teaching, training, commercial or other purposes, you are required to ask me first.

Reasons for Poor Quality Listening

Listening is the key helping skill. If helping is to be done well, then the listening needs to be of high quality. This document begins by considering some of the ways in which people listen poorly.

• People tend to listen best to the beginning and end of what is said, and least well to the middle.
• People tend to hear poorly material with which they have little familiarity.
• People tend to listen selectively, hearing only what they expect to hear, or would like to hear, or fear hearing.
• People tend to listen selectively by eliminating detail.
• Before a speaker has finished speaking, people are often already formulating an answer, and may display an impatience for the speaker to stop talking, perhaps by finishing off the speaker's sentence. The end of what is being said is, in this case, not listened to.

Good quality listening allows people to explore their feelings. Only by coming to terms with their emotions will they be able to cope with and understand the personal consequences of new information and experience and thus formulate a plan of action. It is hard to hear the message a person is trying to convey to you under several types of circumstance. It may be something about the person. In particular, either when some feature of the person is different from you, and you find that difference difficult or unacceptable in some way; or else some feature of the person is similar to you, and you find it difficult to recognise that the person may differ from you in significant respects. Listed below are some of these features, along with a range of other reasons for poor quality listening.

• The person's opinions and attitudes.
• The person's cultural, educational or work experience.
• The person's vocabulary, dialect, grammatical style or accent.
• You dislike the person.
• What you are being told sounds familiar to you.
• The person's disclosure shocks you or makes you anxious.
• You feel out of your depth.
• The person tells you something you do not want to hear.
• The environment is noisy, or there are frequent interruptions.
• You are experiencing stress or discomfort (physical, emotional, social).
• The person's disclosure belies their actions or true feelings.
• Your emotions interfere.
• You have to admit an error.
• You have to apologise to the person.
• Your values are under attack.
• You are very self-centred and hear only your own voice.
• The news or outcome of a situation (e.g. a medical diagnosis) is bad.
• The person's needs will demand a commitment or involvement by you.
• Wanting to be somewhere else.
• Feeling anxious, angry, distressed, upset, stressed, ill, too hot.
• Considering what the person is saying is boring, repetitive.
• Do not have enough time to listen.
• Want information (intrusively or because of work role) and speaker goes off at a tangent.
• If the person is full of themselves.
• Outside noises/distractions/television/radio.
• Fancy the person.
• Dislike the person.
• Vindictive hijacking.

The pages in this document are:

• Introduction
• Common Listening Errors
• Reasons for Poor Quality Listening
• The Circumstances of Poor Quality Listening

Counselling_sitemap

Peter Hughes: introduction

p.g.h@btinternet.com

This document in all parts is copyright © Peter Hughes from the date of construction given above.

These documents have taken me years of my own, unpaid time to perfect. Please feel free to make use of them for solely personal purposes. However, should you wish to use them for teaching, training, commercial or other purposes, you are required to ask me first.