Mindless Listening Importance

The Importance of Listening for Professional and Personal Relationships

Listening is essential for communication, yet is a skill in which most are lacking. Though we are listening constantly, knowing what to listen to requires an enormous amount of discipline and practice, which is vital for communicating effectively. Learning to listen will benefit all relationships from professional to personal and not being able to listen effectively can cause these relationships to deteriorate. “Indeed, although aware of the instrumentality of listening, even trained communicators often fail to listen correctly or at opportune times” (Cline, 2013). In order for all of areas of communication in an individual to flourish, listening must be emphasized.

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“Mindless listening occurs when we react to messages automatically and routinely without much mental investment” (Adler & Proctor, 2011, p. 237). Both of these ways of processing information require cognitive reaction. Out of the two, mindless listening is used in most situations. When someone asks what the weather is like outside, someone can quickly respond with “cloudy” or “sunny”. While this is referred to as mindless listening, it is still listening and requires mental feedback. If that person didn’t hear someone ask what the weather was like outside, they would only be hearing and it would not elicit a response from them. “Mindless listening allows for quick reactions and very little consideration of what the speaker is saying” (Cline,

(2014) used the Listening Styles Profile-Revised (LSP-R). This scale was revised by Bodie, Worthington, and Gearhart in 2013 and is “…based on four factors: relational, analytical, task-oriented, and critical listening”. Relational listeners (RL) are responsive and considerate of others’ feelings. “RL captures listening as a way to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships” (Gearhart et al., 2014). Analytical listening (AL) is used to gather all of the information from the message being received before coming to a judgment (Gearhart et al., 2014). The next style is task-oriented listening (TOL) and it is comparable to the time-oriented listening style from the LSP-16. While this style is also concerned with listening to wordy messages and just getting to the point, “the revised conceptualization of listeners of this type reflects concern with the amount of time spent in an interaction, as well as a listener's desire for a speaker to stay focused and on-topic” (Gearhart et al., 2014). The last style, critical listening (CL), is actually a combination of the action and content styles of the LSP-16. This style “…refers to a tendency to focus attention on the accuracy and consistency of a speaker's message” (Gearhart et al., 2014). CLs tend to pay attention for inaccuracies and conflicting statements while listening to