Writing User Documentation

Course outline

Copyright HCi, 1998

Week 1: Listening skills

This material is on the net at http://crs.uvm.edu/gopher/nerl/personal/comm/e.html

This document was produced by the New England Regional Leadership Program. It is posted by the center for rural studies for public use. The center for rural studies assumes no responsibility for the contents. for more information, refer to the users guide.

Think back to those few friends, mentors, counselors, or family members who have had the biggest impact on you. How would you characterize the communication between you? Was it helpful, meaningful, telepathic, or inspirational?

In one-to-one relationships with someone who knows us well, we are often in such complete synchronization that communication flows between us almost without words. Or so we feel. If this is the case, is it because we excel at expressing ourselves, or because we are masters of listening? Naturally, both are important, but, to turn a phrase, talk is cheap and listening is rare.

Chances are that those who influence us most are powerful listeners. Whether instinctively or through practice, they have developed the skill of empathy.

A University of Maine researcher, Dr. Marisue Pickering, identifies four characteristics of empathetic listeners:

• Desire to be other-directed, rather than to project one's own feelings and ideas onto the other.
• Desire to be non-defensive, rather than to protect the self. When the self is being protected, it is difficult to focus onanother person.
• Desire to imagine the roles, perspectives, or experiences of the other, rather than assuming they are the same as one's own.
• Desire to listen as a receiver, not as a critic, and desire to understand the other person rather than to achieve either agreement from or change in that person.

Further, she identifies ten discrete skills for empathetic listening:

• Attending, acknowledging: Providing verbal or non-verbal awareness of the other, ie, eye contact
• Restating, paraphrasing: Responding to person's basic verbal message
• Reflecting: Reflecting feelings, experiences, or content that has been heard or perceived through cues
• Interpreting: Offering a tentative interpretation about the other's feelings, desires, or meanings
• Summarizing, synthesizing: Bringing together in some way feelings and experiences; providing a focus
• Probing: Questioning in a supportive way that requests more information or that attempts to clear up confusions
• Giving feedback: Sharing perceptions of the other's ideas or feelings; disclosing relevant personal information
• Supporting: Showing warmth and caring in one's own individual way
• Checking perceptions: Finding out if interpretations and perceptions are valid and accurate
• Being quiet: Giving the other time to think as well as to talk

SOURCE: Pickering, Marisue, "Communication" in EXPLORATIONS, A Journal of Research of the University of Maine, Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 1986, pp 16-19.

These skills, like those of self-expression, can be learned, practiced, and mastered. Our society places much more attention on the spoken side of the communication equation, but if you think about who influences you, are they good talkers or good listeners?

As we come to understand ourselves and our relationships with others better, we rediscover that "communication is not just saying words; it is creating true understanding." Active listening is an important skill in that process.

Listening Skills Exercise

The group should be divided into subgroups of three. There will be three roles in each subgroup: speaker, listener, and observer. Everyone will take each role once in this practice, so divide into your subgroup and decide who is going to take which role first.

Objective

The point of the practice session is to give each person the opportunity to learn how to use verbal and non-verbal minimal encouragers and become a better listener.

To the speaker

Your task is to talk about something that is important to you: your job, your family, a decision, or a question. The practice will be more helpful if you talk about something you really care about, although role-playing is possible. You may find yourself in the midst of discussing something important when the allotted time runs out. If this happens, you could make an agreement with the person listening to carry on later, after work or during a break.

To the listener

Your task is to practice the skills of the session: eye contact, body language, silences, and verbal minimal encouragers. Don't panic! Just concentrate on following the speaker's train of thought. Try to limit your responses to the skills discussed in this session.

To the observer

Your task is to observe the listener's verbal and non-verbal skills. Observe and count only as many behaviors (eye contact, body posture, verbal minimal encouragers, topic jumps) as you can manage and still be relatively accurate.

Procedure

The first speaker will talk with the listener for three or four minutes. The listener will then discuss the listening experience with the two other members of the subgroup. (To the listener: What was comfortable? Difficult? Did you stay with the speaker?) Then the speaker will share his or her feelings about the listener's listening. (To the speaker: Did you feel listened to? Was it helpful? Did the listener have any habits you found distracting?) The observer will then share observations. This sharing process should take about three or four minutes.

Now everyone change places. Have the listener become the speaker, the speaker the observer, and the observer the listener. Go through the five minutes of talking and listening and five minutes of exchanging remarks twice more so that each person takes each role once. The entire practice session should take about 25 minutes.

When you are finished, form the large group. Your facilitator will help you share your practice experiences. How are these skills relevant to your work? Where else would they be useful? Go around the group so that participants have a chance to share at least one thing they have learned about themselves in this practice session.

Source: Interactive Skills Program: Helping Through Listening and Influencing, Hedlund and Freedman, Cornell University Cooperative Extension Service, l981.