I think the first phase of listening was the most difficult to me when talking with one of my friends a couple days ago. The first phase of listening is sensing or hearing the message. “Sensing or hearing the message is a voluntary act whereby we choose certain sounds and noises to pay attention to, while avoiding others.” (Harris/Sherblom, 2008, pg. 131)
I went to my hometown to visit my family and one of my old friends wanted to hang out with me as well. However as the years have gone by, we continued to have less and less in common. Most of the time she talks about things that I find either irrelevant or that I cannot relate to. She likes to gossip or talk about people and when she does that I find it hard to pay attention to what she is saying. It got to the point that all I literally heard was “blah blah blah” and I just continued to nod my head or smile.
I think this was so difficult for me because I did not want to hear what she had to say whatsoever, and I could not even use selective attention. That shows how much of a disinterest I had in the topic. I felt bad though because she is and old friend and was only trying to talk and catch up with me. I probably could have overcome this issue by telling her that I was not interested in the gossip so that she or I could have changed the subject to something we both were interested in hearing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Pocahontas, I agree that it is hard to sensing the message, especially when you are seeing an old friend for the first time in years. Many years have gone by, and people change over time. Their lifestyles and interests change as well. For instance, I might still like to watch basketball, but he or she starts liking soccer. If he talks about soccer, I would probably find it disinteresting. I could nod or say "oh, really" in agreement, but this is not really listening to his message. The same thing would happen if I bring up baseball in the conversation. He would probably not listen attentively to what I am saying. In actuality, the person might think it is a boring subject to listen to.
ReplyDeletePocahontas,
ReplyDeleteI have also experienced situations like this were you are completely uninterested in the topic being presented. This makes it almost impossible to listen to sometimes because you cannot relate to what the other person is saying. In my situation the person I was talking to was also gossiping and I actually found myself thinking about other things to myself, which was completely unrelated to what she was talking about. I did end up asking her to stop gossiping because I found it offensive. She then apologized and stopped, but I can say most of the conversations I had with this person were all gossip and I never found that we had anything in common to talk about, now we are no longer friends.