Active Listening Possible
When You’re Upset or Angry?
It's well recognized that the capacity to innovate is a function of active listening and effective thinking, often compromised by
chronic job stress.
Your ability to listen and actually hear is influenced by your emotions, your thoughts as well as by your surroundings. Developing active listening skills can help you manage
Developing active listening skills
can help you manage
personal stress
or de-stress highly charged and challenging workplace situations. Good listening skills means hearing what someone else is saying, and also tuning into your own thoughts and feelings to assess how you’re receiving the perceived message. By listening you learn to assess what you think you heard against what your body’s feeling state perceived in an efficient and meaningful way. It's a mistake to think we listen only with our ears. It's much more important to listen with the mind, the eyes, the body, and the heart. Unless you truly want to understand the other person, you'll never be able to listen. Mark Herndon
How does Listening Work?
Sound is movement. Our ears transform sound and movement vibrations received into neural impulses to send to the brain.
As the sound waves move the eardrum, the bridge of the three small bones, "ossicles" vibrate back and forth which moves the oval window, transmitting the rhythm of the sound into the inner ear.
When sound waves move the fluid in the inner ear, the basilar membrane and the hair cells float in rhythm much like a boat on the water causing the tiny hair or cilia on top of the cells to bend. This bending of the cilia sends patterns of electrical signals from the hair cells to the nerve of hearing to the brain. The brain makes sense of the electrical patterns transmitted by the nerves and you understand that you hear.
Listening is a skill that gets better with practice. Learn how.
Functions of the Ear
Our ears, not only let us hear, they also:
- Control balance
- Help coordinate body movement
- Permit language
- Allow us to speak eloquently and
- Sing in tune.
When our head and body move, the labyrinth of the inner ear moves with them with the vestibular fluid following at a different pace.
The difference in speed of the movement of body and the fluid stimulates the sensory cells resulting in neural impulses sent to the vestibular nerve which carries the message to the brain. Vestibular sensations record body positions and movements permitting their control. The energy we receive from body movement is vestibular energy.
Sound as Nourishment
The sounds and movements we experience are food for our nervous systems, providing almost 90% of our sensory energy needs. Listening requires the ability and the desire to use our ears. We tune in and tune out at will - we choose to actively listen. Listening takes heed of the
Self.
It energizes us and brings about harmony within us and in our relationship with others and our world.
The practice of listening to your own inner voice or listening to another can have the same powerful healing effect. Listening actively helps us understand our emotions and learn to acknowledge and recognize the feelings of others.
Active listening helps us:
- stay centered and grounded,
- present in the here and now,
- energized and ready to act.
Listening affirms and validates that which has been heard, and as such it is the cornerstone to developing awareness,
emotional intelligence
and enhanced coping skills.
Protect Your Hearing
How effectively can you listen if you lose your hearing? Statistics show that hearing loss is a problem that affects at least 10% of Canada’s population and is the
third most common chronic disability in Canada.
Environmental and occupational exposures are the most common cause of
noise-induced hearing loss.
© By Julia von Flotow, December 2010
Speak with Us
Active listening is learned behaviour. A competency required for sustainable success and central to all our
coaching programs.
Based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, KAIZEN Lifestyle Management, we work with executives, managers, independent professionals, artists and other creative individuals who are compelled to contribute toward developing a more sustainable world without forsaking themselves in the process. We offer a free no obligation consultation. To learn more about how you or your organization can benefit by developing active listening skills and other coaching programs, you may reach us at 416 686 6463 or send us an email via
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