Importance Of Active Listening In Our Society

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Active Listening in Our Society Today
Benjamin A. Ingraham
Drexel University

When thinking about a topic for this paper, I realized that we all go through our daily lives having lots of conversations with friends, co-workers, and our family members. Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t listen as well as we could or even should at times. We seem often distracted by our environment, with things such as TV, the Internet, or our phones. I believe that we are listening so-to-speak, but we aren’t giving them our full attention. Hence my topic for this paper, a skill called active listening. When thinking about what active listening actually is, we see that it’s all about building understanding and trust of the listener. As I present
We see our own habits have been developed since we were born when it comes to listening. Whether that’s listening with one ear and doing something with the other, or not looking someone in the eyes when they talk, or maybe interrupting someone mid-sentence. Habits such as these are documented amongst many people, and are established enough in our daily lives that we perform them without thinking. But in the end, we see that these habits are undesirable almost all of the time, and almost always lead to poor listening skills throughout life’s journey. In terms of the number of reasons for ineffective listening, most of them do not apply equally to all listeners for that matter, and we see extent to which they apply and vary from situation to situation dependent on the speaker, topic, and the listener as well. (Casperz,
One main way of listening that we see in our society is called Passive listening, which is little more than just hearing something. Passive listening by definition, is the skill of listening without reacting or really allowing someone to speak, without interrupting and giving your own two cents like many of us do when we are having an argument or maybe just a casual conversation where you may disagree on something not really notable. We also see that while passive listening is mainly a one-way communication technique, where the receiver of the info doesn’t provide feedback the opposite, Active listening, is drastically different as we have seen so far in this essay. (Sullivan, 2011) Active listening opposite of passive listening, includes responses from you the listener that demonstrate what you have heard, and if you can recall what the speaker has been saying to

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