Course: CMM 128 Interviewing Practices

Lecture Notes

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Physical Preparations to Improve Listening
Physical preparations to improve listening

1. Get enough sleep
If you are asleep or drowsy, you will find it more difficult to listen.

2. Food
If you eat too much food, the blood rushes to you stomach and can make you tired.  On the other hand, if you are hungry, your body may lack energy you need and your hunger will be a distraction.

3. Alcohol and drugs
Alcohol makes it harder to listen.  Certain drugs can make you drowsy like cold and flu medicines.  Other drugs can make you more alert like caffeine.

4. Attire
Wearing comfortable clothes can eliminate one distraction to listening.

5. Adjust the environment
There are many distractions in the environment that you can control such as closing the door to decrease noise in the hallway, adjusting the room thermostat to make the room temperature comfortable, turning your pager to pulse vs. tone so it doesn't distract others, erasing the board before your speech, or closing the blinds to the window.

6. Give Feedback
Giving feedback includes watching the speaker, providing nonverbal cues such as nodding to indicate whether you understand, and asking questions.  Giving feedback to the speaker helps keep you more active (and awake) and gives information to the speaker that can be used to help him or her adjust to you.  It also helps you pick up information that you might have missed if you were only using your ears.  For example, a speaker might say they caught a fish and gesture how long the fish was.  If you were only using your ears, you would miss some important information.

7. Take notes
Taking notes helps in a number of ways.

  - First, it helps keep you active.  If all speaker wants from a listener is for the listener to hear them, then the other senses are unoccupied.  With nothing from the speaker to occupy the senses of touch, taste, sight, and smell, some people doodle, chew on a pen, or look around the room. Sometimes these distractions become more interesting than the speaker.  The more senses that are occupied, then, the less likely a listener will get distracted.  This is especially true for people who learn best in ways other than hearing.  Some people find it easier to remember something when they write it down.
  - Second, taking notes allows the listener to save until later the most difficult step in listening.  Listening involves a four step process that was partly depicted in the model of communication.
    - Hearing.  At this stage, external noise may interfere with the process.
    - Attending.  There are many sounds around such as the sound of the air conditioning system or noise from outside.  A listener has to decide which of these sounds he or she is going to pay attention to. Also a listener may be thinking about their own thoughts (e.g., daydreaming) rather than paying attention to the speaker.  If the listener does not pay attention to the speaker, internal noise occurs.
    - Understanding.  Once a listener decides to pay attention to a speaker, he or she still has to interpret what these sounds mean.  If a speaker is speaking in a foreign language or using words the listener does not know, then understanding will not occur and semantic noise takes place.
    - Memory.  Finally, the listener has to get the message into his or her long-term memory.  This can require effort on the part of the listener that the listener may not want to devote at the time.  Taking notes allows the listener to do this step later.