The Value of Active Listening

            So far out of all our experiences in this class, I think the one that was the most eye opening for me was observing everyone's, including my own, reactions to the activity we did to demonstrate active listening.  In that activity, we had one person designated as the talker, one as the listener, and one as the observer, so everyone got an opportunity to see the activity from every perspective.  As you can imagine, the results were very interesting. 

            My first position in the activity was being the active listener, which proved to be much more difficult that I could have ever thought.  I sat there and listened to my partner talk about an experience she had at work for about seven minutes, which felt like an eternity because of my inability to provide any verbal feedback during that time.  While I tried my best to listen and use non-verbal cues to still engage in the conversation, it was extremely hard to stay completely focused on her and avoid getting distracted by my own thoughts that I wanted to contribute to the conversation.  This was very uncomfortable for me because I usually consider myself to be a good listener, and not being able to speak in the conversation made me realize my flaws as a listener that I hadn't realized before.  I was then interested to observe my two partners interact in the same role. 

            After observing my two partners interact in the active listener role, I could tell how they were equally as uncomfortable with it as I was.  All three of us were visibly uncomfortable with not being able to speak for so long, and this made me realize that to a degree it is human nature to be bad listeners.  I don't know whether it's our egos or just our natural desire for people to think we are intelligent, but most people have a tendency to concentrate much more on what they are going to say next than on actually listening to what is being said. 

            For me, I think this activity helped me see how important it is to practice active listening skills, for both leadership and relational purposes.  A big thing that we've talked about in this class is being open to other people's different perspectives, understanding the people you are working with, and being able to learn from those you are working with through constant feedback.  It's now clear to me that being able to practice active listening is crucial to making these goals a reality, and our activity in class is what helped me to realize this.