Why Listening Matters

“We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.” —Diogenes

The Importance of Listening

“You’re not listening!” is something that you may say when you are frustrated with your teenager. A frustrated parent might yell this phrase as a toddler runs through a parking lot. A teacher could say it while flicking the overhead lights on and off, trying to get her unruly students to listen to her. A woman may offer these three words as a parting shot before hanging up on her significant other. A man might make this complaint to his spouse during a couple’s counseling session. In all of these instances, the person speaking wonders if their message is truly being heard.

Public speaking requires an audience to hear. Otherwise, you are speaking to yourself and, maybe, your couch. An essential element that makes public speaking truly effective is when the audience hears and listens. You might think that “hearing” and “listening” are synonymous. But they aren’t, as you will soon understand. In a classic listening text, Adler notes, “How utterly amazing is the general assumption that the ability to listen well is a natural gift for which no training is required” (p. 5). Listening requires great effort.

Listening skills apply to every aspect of your life—educational, personal, and professional. As a student of public speaking, you need to understand active listening, the differences between hearing and listening, strategies for better listening, and what your role as a listener is, when you are in the audience and in the position of providing feedback.

In public speaking, if listening is done well, communication is effective between a speaker and a receiver. The speaker shares a message with the receiver, using a particular method to communicate their message. The receiver aims to interpret the message and share an understanding of the message with the speaker. The effectiveness of a communication is determined by how well the shared interpretation of the message is between the speaker and receiver. This effectiveness is achieved through listener response and feedback as well as through speaker response and feedback, thus creating a communication loop. When done successfully, the communication is complete, shared meaning is achieved, and both sender and receiver feel connected.

Therefore, listening is a critical skill in the communication loop. It holds value in all aspects of our human interactions.

Hearing Versus Listening

A mother takes her four-year-old to the pediatrician, reporting that she’s worried about the girl’s hearing. The doctor runs through a battery of tests, checks in the girl’s ears to be sure everything looks good, and makes notes in the child’s folder. Then, the doctor takes the mother by the arm. They move together to the far end of the room, behind the girl. The doctor whispers in a low voice to the concerned parent, “Everything looks fine. But, she’s been through a lot of tests today. You might want to take her for ice cream after this as a reward.” The daughter jerks her head around, a huge grin on her face, “Oh, please, Mommy! I love ice cream!” The doctor, speaking now at a regular volume, reports, “As I said, I don’t think there’s any problem with her hearing, but she may not always be choosing to listen.”

This mother-daughter interaction is not uncommon. People choose when they want to listen, but hearing is biological. It is something many do without even trying. It is a physiological response to sound waves moving through the air at up to 760 miles per hour. First, we receive the sound in our ears. The wave of sound causes our eardrums to vibrate, which engages our brain to begin processing. The sound is then transformed into nerve impulses so that we can perceive the sound in our brains. Our auditory cortex recognizes a sound has been heard and begins to process the sound by matching it to previously encountered sounds in a process known as auditory association.^[1] Hearing has kept our species alive for centuries. When you are asleep but wake in a panic having heard a noise downstairs, an age-old, self-preservation response engages. You were asleep. You weren’t listening for the noise—unless perhaps you are a parent of a teenager out past curfew—but you hear it. Hearing is unintentional, whereas listening (by contrast) requires you to pay conscious attention. Our bodies hear, but we need to employ intentional effort to truly listen.

Benefits of Listening

Academic Benefits

As you are reading this section as part of your college class, it seems appropriate to start with how listening is beneficial in academics. If you are learning online, and especially if you are learning about public speaking in an asynchronous (not real time) format, listening is important skill for understanding and analyzing  speeches. It’s easy to be distracted when you’re at your home computer, when you don’t have to be physically present in a location.  You may know how hard it can be to pay attention to a video conference when your child is crying.

In a traditional classroom, listening is required. Bommelje, Houston, and Smither studied effective listening among 125 college students and found a strong link between effective listening and school success, supporting previous research in the field linking listening skills to grade point average.^[1] This finding is unsurprising as the better you listen while in class, the better prepared you will be for your assignments and exams. It is quite simple really. When students listen, they catch the instructions, pointers, feedback, and hints for learning the concepts of the course.

Professional Benefits

Developing strong listening skills will invariably improve your work performance. There are many professional advantages of active listening. It helps you to understand what was said better. It improves your ability to make connections between ideas and information. It changes your perspective and challenges your assumptions. It engages you in empathizing and showing respect or appreciation to others, which may lead to enhancing your work relationships. Honing your listening skills also assists you in building and improving your self-esteem.^[2] If it is clear that people aren’t listening at work, it becomes more problematic to get things done effectively and trust can be broken, which could lead to employees fostering resentments, which can result in very serious communication issues. Bell and Mejer, identified poor listening as a “silent killer of productivity and profit.”^[3] Thus, changing a work environment can become extremely difficult to implement when people are not listening.

Effective listening can also help you to make a better impression on employers. This impression begins at the interview. Here is an example. You really want a particular job, but during the interview you are really nervous, which results in having trouble paying attention to what the CEO of the company is saying. As the interview comes to a close, the CEO asks you if you have any questions, and you ask something you were wondering about in the elevator on the way up to her office. If you ask something that she has already covered in the interview, you’re unlikely to get the job. Even if you, somehow, convince her to hire you, that first impression might stick. You will be required to work hard to change her first impression. If you are unable to listen actively even as you work at this job, you will make little progress at the firm. Your supervisors should not have to tell you things repeatedly. Not listening could also contribute to you making decisions that cost the company a loss in profits because you weren’t paying attention effectively in a team meeting. This lack of listening could lead to losing your job.

Ferrari states the importance of actively listening in your profession well. He identifies listening as the “most critical business skill of all.” He notes, “listening can well be the difference between profit and loss, between success and failure, between a long career and a short one.”^[4] Therefore, it cannot be stressed strongly enough how important it is to work on your listening skills not only at work but in all areas of your life. The benefits to listening do not stop with your education and profession. Here is how these benefits apply personally.

Personal Benefits

The active listener who employs the skills detailed in this section is more likely to be better received by others, which, in turn, can increase their self-esteem. People like to be heard when they speak. So, those who listen actively are also more likely to reduce tension in situations and resolve conflict.^[5] There are times when having someone just listen to another’s grievances and attempt to understand can dissolve a situation.

The process of actively listening assists people with strengthening intimate relationships. A spouse wants their partner to hear them when they speak. Remembering small details shows that you are really listening and care about the other person. Following through on requests demonstrates that you paid attention to the request and didn’t forget. It is the small actions within listening that show the loved one that you take the time to be focused on them. You are showing them that they are important and worthy of attention. This goes a long way toward sustaining a positive relationship.

The same holds true for familial relationships. A child wants their parents to stop what they are doing and listen to their issue. Children are more secure and have better self-esteem if parents listen actively to them. For you, the issues a child has may be small, but to them these issues are paramount and the center of their life. Taking the time to listen and show you are listening can help to reduce conflict within the household. Active listening gives you the skills to demonstrate that the child’s problem is important to you too, no matter how small. This, in turn, instills trust and security in the parent-child relationship.

Truly listening to the words of another is sure to make a positive difference in your interactions whether they are academic, professional, or personal.

In the following video, negotiator and mediator William Ury talks about the power of listening.

You can view the transcript for “The power of listening | William Ury | TEDxSanDiego” here (opens in new window).

1. Bommelje, R., Houston, J. M., & Smither, R. (2003). Personality characteristics of effective listeners: A five factor perspective. International Journal of Listening, 17(1), 32–46. ↵
2. Hoppe, M. H. (2006). Active Listening: Improve Your Ability to Listen and Lead. United States: Center for Creative Leadership. ↵
3. Majer, C., & Bell, C. T. (2011). The silent killers of productivity and profit: New wastes for a new world. T+ D, 65(2), 62–67. ↵
4. Ferrari, B. T. (2012). Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All. United States: Penguin Publishing Group. p. 2 ↵
5. Wobser, A., Routh, J. L., Wright, K., Mares, L., & Educational Video Network, Inc. (2004). Developing positive listening skills: How to really listen. Huntsville, TX: Educational Video Network. ↵