Listening is a Ten Part Skill

Through reading Ralph G. Nichol's "Listening is a 10 Part Skill", I learned a lot about how to be a better listener. A few ideas especially caught my eye that I'd like to work on personally. I learned that it's better to listen for central ideas than for facts. I know I find myself listening for facts most of the time when I am in a lecture class, and as a result, I take down an overload of information. If I instead only focused on finding the central idea, I could save myself some time and energy. Going along with that, I also need to learn a few more styles of note taking in order to become more flexible. I would have believed that note-taking and outlining were near synonymous. However, after further thought, I agree that note-taking for me often becomes a distraction to where I focus more on mindlessly writing words than listening to the actual points. If I could come up with a few more "systems" of taking notes, perhaps I could better retain and understand the information I was receiving. Another new idea I found to work on is capitalizing on thought speed. I had no idea that we think for times faster than we speak! It's understandable then that many people subconsciously become impatient with the speaker's slowness and let our thoughts run at their normal speed. I am guilty of doing this when I feel like the person speaking to me is saying too little to be worth my time. I let my thoughts take over and only appear to be listening, which could later result in me missing important information. Therefore, I need to work on anticipating what the speaker is going to say, mentally summarize their message, weigh the speaker's evidence, and listen between the lines. If I practice these four things, I will be able to slow down my brain to fully listen to people when they speak to me and avoid becoming easily distracted. This little booklet taught me a lot about being a good listener, and I will definitely use some of its ideas to help make myself a better listener.