The Things You Haven’t Noticed That Might be Affecting Your Ability to be a Good Listener

Everybody wants to think of themselves as being a good listener. Listening is just as important in communication as being able to put across your own thoughts and ideas well, and being thought of as a good listener will make others happy to talk to you and form good relationships with you. Equally, being a good listener is a necessary skill when you want to be able to take in information, whether it’s when you’re in a lecture or training session, or even when you’re watching the news. Being able to listen well and take in what you are hearing is a vital skill not only from a social perspective, but also for your own ability to get the most out of information presented to you, and so it is a soft skill that is well worth working on.

However, in order to be able to work on your own listening skills, it is important to be aware of some of the things that can cause you not to be able to focus well on what you are hearing, and the behaviors that can end up with you not taking in what you are listening to as well as you might think you are.

Here, we look at some of the things you need to be aware of that can affect your listening skills.

Environmental Factors

If you are trying to listen to somebody and there are distractions around you, this can have an immediate impact on how well you can listen. Naturally, the most obvious is if there are loud noises that make it hard for you to actually hear what the speaker is saying, but environmental factors that can affect your focus can also include quieter distracting noises, and non-sound things like having the sun in your eyes, being uncomfortable where you are sitting or standing, or something else in the room competing for your attention.

It may not always be possible to remove some of these external factors from the situation, but even just being aware of the impact they might be having on you can help you to overcome them and listen better. You should also aim to ensure that when you are giving presentations or talking to people in general, they are being affected by as few of these things as possible – for instance, by giving people an opportunity to make themselves comfortable and choosing locations with few distractions.

Physiological Factors

As well as environmental ‘noise’, you can also have distractions from your own body that can make it hard for you to pay attention and listen in a relaxed way. As this article explains, you are able to listen best when you aren’t feeling too hot or cold, you aren’t hungry or thirsty, you don’t need to go to the bathroom, and you aren’t physically tired or in pain. If you are someone who experiences nagging aches and pains (back pain from postural issues, for example), then you may not even notice anymore that you are always somewhat distracted by the discomfort. Doing things to address how you physically feel before a day of work or studying by doing things like stretching or getting advice from your doctor about any chronic low-key pain you feel can help set you up to be a better listener. You should also consider making sure you arrive for a session where you’ll need to be listening at your best like a seminar or lecture prepared, so you won’t be trying to concentrate while you’re hungry, thirsty or in need of the bathroom.

As a presenter, you should consider the need to offer regular breaks during your sessions so that people can take care of any needs like these that may be affecting their listening ability.

Attention Span

Even when you are comfortable, relaxed and there aren’t distractions around you, there is always a limit to how long you can listen at your best for before you need a break. This can be especially true during sessions where you are not interacting, so are focusing only on listening for the whole time – that is to say, you will find yourself able to listen well for longer during a conversation than while watching a lecture. Attention spans vary from person to person and even within the same person from day to day, but good presenters know that it is important to vary things and offer regular breaks to account for this.

When you are responsible for how long you need to listen for yourself, for instance if you are doing an online course and listening to lectures at home, it is important to be aware of when your own attention span is reaching its limits, so you take a break then to restore it, rather than trying to push through and not really taking in a lot of what you are listening to after you’ve lost your focus.

Listening too Carefully!

A final thing that could be impacting your ability to listen well is that you could be trying too hard! Being too worried about listening to everything someone is saying, such as in an important meeting or lecture, can lead to you focusing too hard on individual words and trying to remember them or write them down, and when this happens, you are more concerned with your note taking or worrying about your memory than you are on taking in the bigger points of what is being said, and understanding the meaning.

Work on developing good note taking habits, which can meet your needs in terms of jogging your memory about what was said but without distracting you by making you fight to try to transcribe the whole thing. Also, consider how much of what is being said can be referred back to from materials from the session or whether you’ll have an opportunity to re-watch a recording of the session later. It could well be that you don’t really need to be taking notes or worrying about remembering things at all, because you’ll be able to revisit what was said whenever you want anyway.

These are a few things to be aware of when you need to bring your best listening skills, which can also be helpful to consider when you are planning something where you need people to listen well to yo