Active Listening Exercises
This exercise is designed to help you understand the dynamics of active listening in conversations and to develop active listening skills. For the exercise you will compose the following three statements that demonstrate active listening. Here are details about each of these three types of responses.
1. Empathy Statement – Showing empathy: acknowledge feelings. Sometimes it sounds like a speaker wants you to agree with him or her, but in reality, the speaker mainly wants you to understand how he or she feels. “Acknowledging feelings” involves taking in the speaker’s statements while looking at the “whole message” including body language, tone of voice, and level of arousal, and trying to determine what emotion the speaker is conveying. Then, you let the speaker know that you realize what he or she is feeling by acknowledging it in a sentence.
1. Seeking Clarification – Asking for clarification and detail while withholding judgment and opinions. This conveys that you are trying to understand, not just trying to push your opinions onto the speaker. To formulate a relevant question in asking for more clarification, you will have to listen carefully to what the speaker says. Frame your question as someone trying to understand in more detail; often asking for a specific example is useful. This also helps the speaker evaluate his or her own opinions and perspective.
1. Nonevaluative Feedback – Providing nonevaluative feedback: feeding back the message you heard. This will allow the speaker to determine if he or she conveyed the message to you and will help prevent troublesome miscommunication. It will also help the speaker become more aware of how he or she is coming across to another person (self-evaluation). Just think about what the speaker is conveying; paraphrase it in your own words and say it back to the speaker (without judging the correctness or merit of what was said), asking him or her if that is what was meant.
Vignette #1 – EXAMPLE – Dr. Karn Completed THIS ONE for an Example
A colleague stops by your desk and says, “I am tired of the lack of leadership around here. The boss is so wishy-washy, he can’t get tough with some of the slackers around here. They just keep milking the company, living off the rest of us. Why doesn’t management do something about these guys? And you are always so supportive of the boss; he’s not as good as you make him out to be.”
Develop three statements that respond to the speaker in this vignette by (a) showing empathy, (b) seeking clarification, and (c) providing nonevaluative feedback.
· Empathy Statement: I can hear you are frustrated with the lack of leadership around here.
· Seeking Clarification: What is it that you feel management should do?
· Nonevaluative Feedback: It sounds like the lack of management has you upset. And you want them to motivate the other workers. Is this correct?