Week 3: Listening, Verbal, and Nonverbal Skills

This week, I learned much about not only the concepts of effective listening and nonverbal skills, but even more importantly, my own relationship and abilities in regards to these concepts. The focus of this week's blog post will be on how I assessed my own strengths and weaknesses in these areas.

One fact of importance I learned from the text is that, "the first skill necessary for interactive listening is the ability to diagnose your own listening behavior" (O'Hair, Friedrich, & Dixon, p. 102). With this taken to heart, I was led to take the Personal Listening Profile, also made available by the authors of the text. This is a brief survey which when taken, provides the participant with a basic yet useful understanding of how well they effectively listen. Listening effectively, I also learned, is instrumental in so much that makes one successful in life, whether it's academically, professionally, personally, or developmentally. I went into the test expecting to score fairly averagely, but perhaps slightly above, as I consider myself a quiet, thoughtful, and open-minded person overall. The test provides a scale that goes from twenty-seven at the most competent all the way down to negative sixteen, the least competent. My score, much to my surprise and chagrin, was a negative three! This set off some alarms and caused me to do a more thorough reassessment of my self-perception of my listening skills.

After doing this reassessment, I found that I do have some areas in need of improvement. One area that I will put every effort into improving is my tendency to impatiently insert my own thoughts and opinions on a subject brought up by another speaker, without allowing them to finish their own thoughts and musings. In fact, I know that my wife has chastised me multiple times for this, yet I haven't yet made much proactive improvement in the area of active and patient listening. This will be a primary focus of my Improvement Plan, and I will start implementing my own mental checks while I am listening to others speak as to whether or not it would be beneficial or not to interject. Probably more often than not, it is not.



O'Hair, D., Friedrich, G., & Dixon, L. (2011). Strategic communication in business and the professions (7th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.