What are your main take away lessons from the assigned reading this week? Describe and explain.

This week’s reading dwelled on listening, and there were several lessons that could have been derived. The reading has gone on to showcase the importance of listening. There is the assertion that good listening skills can make an individual to be highly effective. “Leaders who are good listeners typically have more influence and stronger relationships with team members. In fact, leaders’ listening skills are even more influential than their talking skills” (Adler et al., 2014). The reading also asserts that those individuals who possess good listening skills have a higher probability of being hired or gaining promotion at the workplace. This is because listening skills are vital for an individual to offer good service. There is the propensity to judge good listeners as being trustworthy and appealing.

There are various misconceptions that people have about listening. The reading ascertains that listening and hearing are not the same thing. “Hearing is the process in which sound waves strike the eardrum and cause vibrations that are transmitted to the brain. Listening occurs when the brain reconstructs these electrochemical impulses into a representation of the original sound and then gives them meaning” (Adler et al., 2014). There are many times when people are hearing, but they are not listening. People have the ability to block out what they do not want to get to their head yet they can hear it.

There are various reasons that usually result to poor listening. Among them are message overload, rapid thought, psychological noise, physical noise, hearing problems and faulty assumptions among other things. On message overload, people tend to encounter a lot of speeches on a daily basis hence it becomes impossible to listen carefully to everything that they hear. On faulty assumptions, people tend to give others a mental brush-off since they assume that their remarks do not have much value.

The reading has also touched on some elements of analytical listening. This form of listening is usually used when people desire to understand the message being passed across. Among the steps to incorporate while employing analytical listening is developing the concept of listening for information before evaluating. There is also the need of separating the message from the speaker. The listener also ought to search for value in the message being received.

How will they affect the way you communicate?

The lessons learned are likely to affect the way that I communicate. To begin with, I will have to improve my listening skills to ensure that they are at a desirable level. Being an educator, I will have to interact with numerous students from diverse backgrounds. Effective listening skills will help me in developing strong and influential relationships with the students. This will help in ensuring that the students pay back the favor by way of listening to what I have to say.

The analysis on the difference between hearing and listening has also brought some enlightenment. When executing my professional duties, I will need to take this into consideration. I will have to ascertain whether my students are merely hearing me or they are listening to whatever information I am passing across. This will help in ensuring that the students get to benefit from class lessons at all times.

I will also try to learn how to block aspects that are likely to result to poor listening. Some of them just come naturally, but I will have to take the initiative to ensure that they do not prevail. This way it will be easier for me to become a good listener.

In what ways do the concepts in the videos and readings relate to your professional life in education?

The video on 5 ways to listen better talks of how bad listeners people can be since they only tend to retain a small percentage of the content that they are listening to. The video illustrates the ways that people can become better listeners. Among them is silence, the mixer, listening position and acronym. The concept being taught in this video is very applicable to my professional life. I ought to learn effective ways of being a good listener and ensure that I uphold the concept while dealing with my students. This will come a long way into ensuring that I develop a favorable relationship with the students hence creating a positive classroom environment.

The video on “Danny & Annie” on the other hand incorporates a story that revolves around two characters that were in love with each other and ended up marrying each other. It would be typical for some people to see how the video begins, and end up concluding on whether to continue listening or not. This is because there are people that will say, well, “marriage? I have already seen a lot of this.” There are others who would ignore it just because they are not married. What results from this is that they end up missing on a good story due to assumptions that they have. This is something that is applicable to many professional lives. There are people who tend to ignore messages that they get from other people just because they do not think it would be important or they do not hold the person with high regard. This results in people missing on important inputs that would end up being beneficial in their lives.

 Reference

Adler, R., Rodman, G., & DuPré, A. (2014). Understanding human communication (12th ed.). Oxford University Press.c

 
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