Listening Skills. The Social Work Skills Workbook 6th edition By Barry R. Cournoyer copyright 2011,2008 Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning

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1 Listening Skills Listening involves the use of your sensory capabilities to receive and register the messages expressed verbally and nonverbally by others. The listening skills include hearing or receiving others words, speech, and language; observing (Carkhuff & Anthony, 1979, pp ; Ivey et al., 2010) their nonverbal gestures and positions; encouraging (Ivey, 1988, pp 93-95; Ivey et al., 2010) them to express themselves fully, and remembering what they communicate. Most people are rather poor listeners tending to pay more attention to their own thoughts and feelings than the messages others are trying to convey. Competent listening rarely comes naturally. Yet listening, perhaps more than any other skill, is essential for effective social work practice. It requires two actions. First, you minimize attention to your own experiences (for example, thoughts, feelings and sensations). Then, you energetically concentrate on the client with a determination to understand- rather than evaluate- what the client is experiencing and expressing. For most of us, one of the genuinely humanizing events in life occurs when we feel truly understood by another person. Accurate understanding conveys respect. It demonstrates that you value others and are interested in what they have to say. In a sense, careful listening is a gesture of love. Because of this, is a dynamic factor in social work practice. It has several purposes. First, effective listening enables you to gather information that is essential for assessment and planning. Second, it helps clients feel better- often reducing tension or anxiety, heightening feelings of personal safety and well-being, and encouraging greater hope and optimism. Third, attentive listening encourages clients to express themselves fully and freely. Fourth, effective listening usually enhances your value to clients. Finally, attentive listening often contributes significantly to positive change in clients self-understanding and self-efficiency as well as their problem solving and goal seeking capacities. To listen effectively, you need to manage your own impulses, tendencies, and pre-dispositions. This is essentially a matter of self awareness and self discipline. You hold back from fully experiencing and freely expressing your own reactions, ideas, or opinions. Such self discipline involves temporarily suspending judgment and action so you can better hear and understand other people. As a social worker, you are probably highly motivated to help troubled people. In your desire to serve, you may sometimes be tempted to rush to conclusions and solutions. Although life threatening situations often require immediate intervention, engaging in premature assessment, advice or action typically interferes with effective listening. Frequently it also has unintended adverse consequences. In most circumstances, you would be wise to listen carefully and fully before assessing or intervening. As Shulman(2009)suggests, Workers who attempt to find simple solutions often discover that if the solutions were indeed that simple, then the client could have found them without the help of the worker (p.126). Self disciplined listening involves some use if silence. Social workers frequently perceive silence as a hindrance and a hazard to the progress of the interview the professional assumption is that talking is better (Kadushin, 1983, p.286). This is certainly not always the case. Periods of silence, pauses in the exchange, are vital elements in

2 effective communication. Of course, you should not let silence continue so long that it becomes an anxious contest to see who will speak first. Do recognize, however, that with some clients, at certain moments, silence can be a powerfully helpful experience. Instead of a threat, silence should be seen and utilized as an opportunity (Kudushin, 1983, p. 294). Hearing refers to the process of listening (that is, receiving messages), which involves attending to the speech and language of other people. Numerous factors can impeded or obstruct hearing. A room might be noisy, or a person might talk softly or mumble. Someone may speak in a foreign language or adopt an unfamiliar dialect. Another person might use words you do not understand or use them in ways that differ from your understanding. Effective hearing involves diminishing the obstacles and focusing entirely on the words and sounds of the other person. It also involves reducing the tendency to hear selectively because of our own temptation to judge, compare, or criticize the words and sounds of others. In attempting to hear clearly, we hope to take in and remember the messages sent by the speaker. In listening, process is as important as content. Therefore try to hear more than the words themselves. Listen as well to the person s manner of speaking. Try to hear the meaning and feeling just beyond or just beneath the words actually said. Another vital element in the listening process is the skill of observation. Observing (Carkbuff & Anthony, 1979, pp.42-47; Ivey et al., 2010) occurs when you pay attention to the client s physical characteristics; gestures and other non-verbal behavior. Non-verbal communication is at least as informative as verbal expression and sometimes more so, especially in multi-cultural context. As a social worker, try to observe non-verbal manifestations of energy level, mood, and emotion as well as indirect signs and signals. Quite often, clients do not directly express their feelings through verbal speech. Without staring, try to observe carefully so you notice non-verbal expressions of feeling. The purpose of observing is to gain a better and more complete understand of the ways in which the client experiences the world. During interviews, attend to subtle or indirect communications. These may relate to things of power or authority, ambivalence about seeking or receiving help, difficulties discussing topics that involve a stigma or taboo, and inhibitions concerning the direct and full expression of powerful feelings (Shulman, 2009). You may pick up more indirect communications from non-verbal rather than verbal expressions, so observe closely. Be careful, however, to avoid the tempting conceptual trap of reaching premature conclusions. The most you can do is formulate a tentative hypothesis about a theme based on the words and the non-verbal gestures a client has used. Such tentative hypotheses are not, in any sense, true or valid. They represent, rather, preliminary hunches! Among the specific aspects to observe are (1) facial expression, (2) eye contact, (3) body language, position, and movement. In observing predominant facial expressions, head and body positions, physical gestures, and patterns of eye contact during communication exchanges. Consider them in light of cultural affiliations as well as the context. Also, look for the nature and timing of changes in these non-verbal indicators. These may suggest feeling states such as contentment, calmness, acceptance, joy, sadness, fear or anxiety and anger. Based on these observations, consider what these expressions,

3 gestures, and behaviors might suggest about how this person experiences herself or himself and the issue of concern. Also, imagine what they indicate about how the person thinks and feels about you and about this meeting. Encouraging (Ivey et al., 2010) is a form of listening that involves some talking. You can encourage some other people to continue expressing themselves by making very brief responses in the form of single words, short phrases, or sounds and gestures that invite them to continue their expression. Some examples of brief verbal encouragers include: Please go on and? uh huh mmm yes please continue. Non verbally, you may further communicate by nodding, making attentive eye contact, gesturing slightly with you your hands, and leaning or inclining slightly toward the client. Repeating a portion of a phrase or a key word that a client uses may also continue encouragement. Such brief responses enable you to demonstrate that you want to hear more, but without interrupting with a lengthy statement of your own. However, avoid using the same encouragers over and over. After a while, their repeated use may suggest a lack of sincerity. Also, recognize that the use of minimal encouragers alone is insufficient. Active listening communications are necessary to demonstrate empathetic understanding. The final dimension of listening involves remembering what the client communicates. Hearing and observing are skills without much inherent value unless you can retain the information received. Remembering is the process of temporarily storing the information so that you may us it later-for example, to communicate understanding, make thematic connections between messages expressed at different times, prepare a written record, or develop an assessment.

4 Active listening Active listening combines the talking and listening skills in such a way that others feel understood and encouraged to express themselves further. It is a form of feedback. You listen carefully and communicate you are understanding of a speakers messages by reflecting or mirroring them back. In essence, you paraphrase the client s message. Ideally your words should be essentially equivalent to or synonymous with those of the client. If the client communicates factual content, your active listening response should convey that information. If the client expresses feelings, reflect those feelings in your active-listening response and do so at an equivalent level of intensity. If the client shares conceptual ideas, paraphrase them through active listening so that you accurately capture his/her meaning. Active listening represents a clear and tangible demonstration that you have understood or at least are trying to understand what a client has expressed. It indicates that you want to comprehend fully and accurately the messages communicated. Active listening shows that you are interested in the client s views, feelings, and experiences. Because it conveys empathy and furthers understanding, there is simply no substitute for active listening. It constitutes a major element of the vital feedback loop between you and your client. If you do not listen actively, you are more likely to miss parts of a client s message and thereby misunderstand, distort, or misrepresent it. Furthermore, if you fail to listen actively or if your paraphrase is a consistently inaccurate fashion, you discourage the client from free and full expression. You also significantly diminish your own value in the relationship. Clients look forward to being understood. If you do not accurately communicate understanding, clients may feel unheard, disappointed, and alienated. Experiences of oppression, discrimination, abuse or exploitation have left many clients feeling profoundly misunderstood throughout their lives. When you, as a professional social worker, communicate sincere and accurate understanding, the effect can be positive indeed. However, if the client s feel that you too, like many before, also misunderstand, a powerfully adverse effect may result. Experiencing yet another repetition in alienation, such clients may wish they had never sought your services in the first place. Active listening combines the talking and listening skills into three steps. Step one: Inviting. By your body position, facial expression, speech and language, you indicate that you are prepared to listen. Often, you can invite the other person to express himself or herself by asking a questions such as What happened? Or How did this all come about? It is not always necessary, however, to ask a specific question. Many clients begin to talk about themselves and their concerns as soon as you begin to attend to them with your eyes, face, and body. Step two: Listening. When a client responds to your invitation to speak and begins to talk, you listen carefully by attempting

5 to hear, observe, encourage and remember. In this step you essentially use your ears and brain to receive and retain the messages sent by the other person. Step three: Reflecting. Periodically, as the client pauses at the conclusion of a message segment, paraphrase his or her statement. For example, a client might say I m really frustrated with my boss; he says he wants production, production, production! But then he comes down to my shop and spends hours shooting the breeze. In active listening, you could say in response You re annoyed with him because he tells you he wants you to work harder and harder but then he interferes when you re trying to do so. Here is another example, suppose a client says Ever since I was seven years old, I ve felt fat and ugly. You might say in active listening From the time of your childhood up through the present, you ve thought of yourself as overweight and unattractive. By communicating and equivalent message you demonstrate emphatic understanding. Active listening is, of course, most useful when you have accurately understood and paraphrased the client s message, but it can be helpful even when you have not. Sometimes you may misunderstand a message or miss part of it as your attention wanders or the client may misspeak and send an incomplete or confusing message. In each case, your sincere attempt to understand by active listening almost always elicits further explanation from the client. A client may spontaneously express confirmation when your activelistening response accurately reflects his or her message. The client may say something such as Yeah, that s right. Then the client often simply continues to talk. On those occasions when your response is not entirely accurate but close enough to demonstrate that you have heard some of the message and are genuinely trying to understand, the client may say, Well, no. What I meant was He or she may then try to restate the message so that you can understand. However, when you are extremely inaccurate, perhaps due to your own lack of attention or interest, the client very well may respond with an emphatic No! and then become much less expressive. A similar phenomenon can occur when you do not listen actively often enough. If you only talk or only listen but do not actively listen, you may discourage clients from expressing themselves fully and freely. When they are first developing skill in active listening, social workers tend to make several common errors: Using so many of the clients own words that your paraphrased reflections sound like mimicry Repeatedly using the same lead-in phrases (for example, I hear you saying, It sounds like ) Trying to be clever, profound or interpretive- playing the role of brilliant analyst or clever detective tends to indicate that you are listening more to your own thoughts and speculations than to the client s message. Responding only to facts, thoughts and ideas or just to feelings and emotions rather than listening actively to all dimensions of the client s expression Interrupting frequently to reflect the client s message Using active listening following every short phrase of statement

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