Briefly explain the five processes of active listening.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Active listening is a complex process made up of five steps: attending, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding to the messages one receives. Active listening begins with attending.
Active listening begins with attending. Attending is the process of willfully perceiving and focusing on a message. Poor listeners have difficulty exercising control over what they attend to, often letting their minds drift to thoughts unrelated to the topic. One reason for poor attending is that people typically speak at a rate of about 120-150 words per minute, but human brains can process between 400 and 800 words per minute. This means listeners usually assume they know what a speaker is going to say before he or she finishes saying it. The first step to becoming a good active listener is to train themselves to focus on or attend to what people are saying regardless of potential distractions.
Understanding is accurately interpreting a message. Four strategies to improve listening to understand are:
Identifying the main point
Asking questions
Paraphrasing
Empathizing with the speakers
Remembering is being able to retain and recall information later. Several things can make remembering difficult. For example, when listeners filter out information that does not fit their listening style, their listening anxiety prevents them from recalling what they have heard, they engage in passive listening, they practice selective listening and remember only what supports their position, they fall victim to primacy-recency effect of remembering only what is said at the beginning and end of a message.
Evaluating is the process of critically analyzing a message to determine its truthfulness, utility, and trustworthiness. This may involve ascertaining the accuracy of facts, the amount and type of evidence used, and how a position relates to one’s personal values. When statements and inferences are made, listeners must determine if they are valid.
Responding is providing feedback. When a person responds to a friend or family member who appears emotionally upset, to a colleague’s ideas, or to a public speech, the person has to do so in ways that demonstrate respect for the speaker even when they disagree with him or her.