If you decide to listen intensively, not selectively, start by eliminating distractions. Don’t think of selective listening as a default, as a habit, as the inevitable way you have to listen. Think of selective listening as a conscious strategy – something that you choose to do or not to do. Most people will feel ignored or even insulted if they catch you selectively listening and drifting off when they’re talking about something you’re not interested in. People tend to know if you’re fully listening to them. In social contexts, selective listening can certainly be a bad way to get to know someone or to build rapport with someone. Like tuning out what you don’t want to hear. Selective listening is often considered a bad habit.
Selective Listening Explained – Simplicable You’ve got to preserve your energy after all! in a meeting, when your boss speaks, you pay more attention, even if it doesn’t seem relevant! ).ĭeveloping a general impression of what is said rather than memorizing an accurate account. For example, planning what you’re going to say while someone is talking.ĭeciding when to retain important information and when to ignore non-critical information.įocusing on high priority information (e.g.
#Selective listening full#
Giving listening less than full attention. To take this metaphor back into the realm of social listening, here are some common features of selective listening in a typical conversational or business meeting context: You’ll just skim over text that doesn’t seem critical but focus on text that seems most relevant to your comprehension goal. One metaphor for understanding selective listening is to imagine yourself as a high school student with a massive history chapter to review for a test and a yellow highlighter.īecause you’re studying for a test, you use a highlighter to focus on key ideas in the book that you think will be on the test – that’s your goal. Selective listening is a listening technique that filters input to achieve the listener’s goal. This is what I mean by “selective listening”: paying attention deliberately to what is relevant to your goals. So (finally!), the principle of teaching selective listening (or selective attention, if you prefer) is to heighten the listener’s “attention radar” for what is relevant.
#Selective listening how to#
In terms of teaching listening – which is triggered by the act of “paying attention”, the key is to focus on how to make more conscious choices about what to attend to.Īnd…the final twist on this: We always and only pay attention to that which is relevant to us… (This principle is well articulated in the work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.) We simply can’t take in or process everything that is going on in our “attention space”. It’s the same principle in everyday life: if we paid attention to everything, we’d go crazy. I remember an old episode from The Twilight Zone called 20/20 Vision in which a severely nearsighted man was granted his wish to see everything… Spoiler Alert: He wound up going crazy and committing suicide - he simply couldn’t process everything he was seeing and it drove him mad. OK, yes, that makes sense… but “pay to attention to everything“? Is the goal of “paying attention” to fully understand what someone is saying? to fully understand what everyone is saying? We were all taught at home and at school to “pay attention”.