PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Personal Development



Personal Development

Introduction

Ineffective listening costs business billions of dollars annually. Because of poor listening, letters have to be retyped; appointments have to be rescheduled; shipments have to be reshipped; individuals and organizations are unable to understand and respond to customers' and clients' real needs; employees feel ignored, and ultimately alienated from management; ideas are distorted by as much as 80 percent as they travel through communication channels; unnecessary conflicts disrupt operations and decrease production; and entire organizations are manipulated by propaganda techniques. The list of problems caused by ineffective listening is endless, and the exact cost of poor listening is incalculable. If listening is to be improved, concerned people must make themselves heard in the silence that surrounds the subject (Condon, 2008).

Theory and Principles

Effective oral communication requires a partnership between speaker and listener. Listening is an indispensable part of oral communication. Yet, most conversation consists of one person talking too much and the other listening too little. Sometimes it seems that conversation is 90 percent talking and 10 percent listening (Fredriksson, 1999).

If one critically observe a meeting, instead of listening to what is being said to them, many people are busy listening to what they are going to say. Listen to how many times the same point is made by different people and how many irrelevant or repeat questions are asked. Meetings in which the participants are poor listeners usually result in too many mouths putting too few ideas into too many ears. Poor listeners are not half as fond of listening as they are of talking. In fact, they generally conduct conversations as if they were contests in which the first person to draw a breath is declared the listener. The problem, of course, is that poor listeners are conditioned to equate talking with power. They do not seem to realize that the person who is able to listen carefully, understand thoroughly, evaluate logically, and react intelligently is the one who possesses the real power.

Of the four communication skills-listening, speaking, reading and writing-listening is by far the most frequently used. Research reveals that the average person spends approximately 70 percent of his or her hours communicating and that approximately 45 percent of that time is spent listening-while only 30 percent is spent speaking, 16 percent reading, and 9 percent writing. In school, students spend as much as 60 or 70 percent of their time listening; and in business, listening is frequently cited as the most critical communication skill (Condon, 2008).

Although listening is the communication skill most used, it is the least taught. In fact, listening is almost never taught in school. It is small wonder that most people are poor listeners since our listening habits are not the result of training but the result of lack of training. Research indicates that immediately after listening to a 10-minute presentation, the average person has heard, understood, correctly evaluated, and retained only about 50 percent of what was said and that within 48 hours the ...