Effective Listening Skills: the Most Difficult Communication Skill

It takes more than big ears to be an effective listener.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

- Pablo Picasso

Which communication skills do you use most frequently? Which one are you most effective using? One of the most critical skills of successful people whether in the business world or private life is their ability to communicate effectively. The most important component of effective communication … effective listening skills.

Listening is the communication skill most of us use the most frequently.

Various studies stress the importance of listening as a communication skill. A typical study points out that many of us spend 70 to 80 percent of our waking hours in some form of communication. Of that time, we spend about 9 percent writing, 16 percent reading, 30 percent speaking, and 45 percent listening.

Studies also confirm that most of us are poor and inefficient listeners. Why?

Several reasons are likely:

Listening training is few and far between

Even though listening is the communication skill we use most frequently, it is also the skill in which we’ve had the least training. From personal experience, we know we’ve had much more formal training in other major communication skills — writing, reading, and speaking. In fact, very few persons have had any formal training in listening.

The same is true of informal training. It’s not difficult to find workshops and conferences that provide opportunities to improve our writing and speaking skills. But it is difficult to find similar training programs to sharpen listening skills.

Thought speed greater than speaking speed

Another reason for poor listening skills is that you and I can think faster than someone else can speak. Most of us speak at a rate of about 125 words per minute. However, we have the mental capacity to understand someone speaking at 400 words per minute (if that were possible).

This difference between speaking speed and thought speed means that when we listen to the average speaker, we’re using only 25 percent of our mental capacity. We still have 75 percent to do something else with. So, our minds will wander.

This means we need to make a real effort to listen carefully and concentrate more of our mental capacity on the listening act. If we don’t concentrate, we soon find that our minds have turned to other ideas.

Inefficient listeners

Numerous tests confirm that we are inefficient listeners. Studies have shown that immediately after listening to a 10-minute oral presentation, the average listener has heard, understood and retained 50 percent of what was said.

Within 48 hours, that drops off another 50 percent to a final level of 25 percent efficiency.

In other words, we often comprehend and retain only one-fourth of what we hear. We all want to be more than 25 percent efficient. It’s not difficult to see the many problems inefficient listeners can create for themselves and others.

Listening skill suffers from age in the learning cycle

Other studies indicate that our listening skill suffers as we get older. Ralph G. Nichols, a long-time professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota (now retired), says in his book Are You Listening? that if we define the good listener as one giving full attention to the speaker, first-grade children are the best listeners of all.

Nichols describes an experiment conducted with the cooperation of Minneapolis teachers from first grade through high school. Each teacher involved was asked to interrupt classes and suddenly ask pupils “what were you thinking about?” or “what was I talking about?”

Results were discouraging but informative. The answers of first and second graders showed that more than 90 percent were listening. Percentages dropped in higher grades. In junior high school classes, only 44 percent of the students were listening. In high school classes, the average dropped to 28 percent.

Focused listening is difficult

Another likely reason for inefficient listening is that it’s difficult and hard work to listen intently. Have you been forced to listen intently for an extended period of time? Try to remember your feelings. You were probably physically and mentally tired after such a period of concentration.

Key Takeaways

Most of us are poor listeners for a variety of reasons. We have had little training and few training opportunities exist. We think faster than others speak. Listening is hard work.

It’s a challenge to be a good listener. But good listeners get big rewards. We will discuss several informal listening training techniques in a future post.