11 Listening Skills

Introduction

Counselling is a two-way processwith interaction between humans which requires an advanced set of skills. Perhaps one of the most important skillsin counselling is communication, particularly listening. This assertion may seem obvious, as counsellors and their clients need an avenue in which to express themselves in one way or another for anything productive to occur, but the subject of communication is more nuanced and varied than merely just taking turns in speaking and listening.

Listening is a receptive skill that aids in building and strengthening the therapeutic alliance between the counsellor and the client (child or adult). However, a distinction between hearing and listening is paramount to counselling. While hearing is the physical process of sound entering the ears, which happens automatically, listening requires something more such as attention and focus, both physically and mentally. Also, this requires complete involvement and hence it is not just a passive process.

Counsellors listening ability generally to capture and understand messages of a clients’s communication as they tell stories and those messages are transmitted both verbally and nonverbally. Careful listening helps counsellors to analyse details and support them both physically and psychologically, this assurance by councillors will help client to share their world with him or her confidently.

Learning Objective

At the end of this module we will be able to

• Understand the importance of listening skills
• Types of listening skills in counseling
• Process and functions of listening skills in counseling

Importance

Listening in a counselling session makes the client feel ethical, appreciated and admired. When we give all of our attention the client, he or she responds positively by communicating on a deeper level, perhaps by providingmore information or by becoming more relaxed.

When a counselor pays particular attention to what the client is saying they are encouraging the client to continue talking, as well as ensuring that communication remains open, positive and participative.

Carl Rogers and Richard Farson coined the term “active listening” in 1957 in a paper of the same title. They wrote: “Active listening is an important way to bring about changes in people. Despite the popular notion that listening is a passive approach, clinical and research evidence clearly shows that sensitive listening is a most effective agent for individual personality change and group development. Listening brings about changes in peoples’ attitudes toward themselves and others; it also brings about changes in their basic values and personal philosophy. People who have been listened to in this new and special way become more emotionally mature, more open to their experiences, less defensive, more democratic, and less authoritarian.”

When a counsellor becomes a good listener, getting a clear-cut image of different situations of the client becomes easier. This means asking questions to find out about needs and issues of the client is facilitated better. Listening enable the counsellor to providing affirmation, recognizing and exploring the problem.Effective listening also important in order to have a smooth transition between a variety of topics that the counsellor may encounter in a counselling session.

Typesof Listening skills in Counselling

There are two main types of listening skills that counsellor should be endowed with. They are active listening and empathic listening.

1.   Active Listening

The term active listening has been used to describe the strategies used by clinicians and counsellors to facilitate communication with clients. (Egan,1986). Active listening involves listening to both verbal and nonverbal messages:

•  Listening to and understanding the client’s verbal messages: Generally client tells you their story, which is usually a mixture of experiences, behaviours and affections.by actively listening to client’s problems, counsellors are reassuring their client that they understand their situation, this assurance of counsellors make the client to feel connected. Counsellor’s skills will be tested when they are having conversation with children as they tell stories which are may or may not be relevant.

• Listening to and interpreting the client’s nonverbal messages.

When dealing with children counsellors are supposed to give importance to read nonverbal messages such as bodily behaviour, facial expression, voice, observe physiological responses, general appearance and physical appearance. The onus will be on counsellors to extract messages without distorting or over interpreting them. This approach is very important while counselling children as capturing information verbally may be difficult initially.

2.  Empathic Listening

Listening is more than just hearing what the client is saying. Listening must be empathic; the empathic listener is affected by the sorrow or suffering of the person being interviewed. It is characterized by placing oneself in the client’s shoes and differs slightly from sympathy. The sympathetic listener says, “I know how you feel but I don’t feel the same way,” whereas the empathic listener says, “I know how you feel and I feel the same way.” Empathy enables the listener to understand emotionally the experiences of his or her clients. It is important, however, that empathic listening not be carried too far – the therapist must be able to step out of the client’s shoes.

Empathy is an essential characteristic of counsellors, but it is not a universal human capacity. Although empathy can probably not be created, it can be focussed and deepened through training, observation and self-reflection. An empathic counsellor may anticipate what is felt before it is spoken and can often help clients articulate what they are feeling. Nonverbal cues, such as body posture and facial expression, are noted. Client’s reactions to the counsellor can be understood and clarified. Clients sometimes say, “How can you understand me if you haven’t gone through what I am going through?” Counselling, however, is predicated on the belief that it is not necessary to have other people’s literal experiences to understand them. The shared experience of being human is often sufficient. Whether in the initial session or in an ongoing session, clients draw comfort from knowing that counsellors are not mystified by their problems.

Critical listening:

When the main aim of listening is to judge, inspect or evaluate, then it is termed critical listening which is a lot more vital than the active listening since most of the times this requires some plans to be put down gently or decisions to be made carefully. Critical listening is not certainly aimed at finding faults or defects, but also to keenly absorb, understand, predict and interpret the motto of the speaker and weigh the knowledge or information or news or opinion being imparted.

When listeners have to evaluate a message and respond with their opinion, this is called critical listening. You need to examine carefully what is being said, and play an active role because it usually requires you to make a decision, form an opinion or solve a problem. Making a judgment requires you to assess the situation, and requires you to both listen to what’s being said while inspecting it at the same time.

While practicing critical listening you need to ask yourself

• What is the speaker actually trying to say?

•  How do I feel about their opinion?

• What is the main argument that is being presented?

•Does what I am hearing align or differ to my own beliefs and opinion?

All of the decisions we make on a daily basis have a critical listening. It’s important that you have an open mind and not let bias or stereotypes influence your judgment, and by doing so you will become a much better listener. Focus on these three features are described as you perfect your critical listening skills

1.  Is the speaker a credible source, who is both an expert on the subject being discussed and that I can assurance to be giving honest and unbiased details?

2. Reflect on what’s being said and decide for yourself if it’s true. Consider the sources of details, the data used, and if it really is the right conclusion that has been move in a specified direction.

3. Think about the speaker’s intention, and make sure you’re not following an emotional response. Hearing critical listening skills are based on logic.

Processes and Functions of Listening in a counselling set-up

Being a good counsellor involves much more than simply knowing what questions to ask and it is imperative to be an effective listener as skill in questioning involves timing, wording and types of question.

Cormier and Cormier (1991) describe four basic listening processes or responses that are crucial for counsellors whether the client is an adult or a child.

1. Clarification: refers to questioning that helps the counsellor understand an ambiguous message. Typical clarifying responses start with phrases such as “Are you saying that…”, “Could you describe for me…”, “Say what you mean by…” and end with repetition of the client’s own words. In addition to clarifying the message, clarification responses confirm the accuracy of the counsellor’s perception and highlight for the client exactly what he or she has communicated.Hence, the functions of clarification are: (1) to encourage client elaboration, (2) to check out the accuracy of what you heard the client say, and (3) to clear up vague messages.

2. Paraphrasing: involves taking what the client has said, rephrasing it, and saying it back. The counsellor tells the client, in the counsellor’s own words, what he or she understood the client to say. Paraphrasing communicates to the client that he or she has been understood. In addition, it also provides the client with an opportunity to clarify the message if the counsellor has misunderstood. Another purpose of clarification is to encourage the client to say more about an important topic. Finally, paraphrasing can be used as a strategy to gently redirect the client back to the topic at hand. Consider the following interaction:

CLIENT: “School has always been really difficult for me. I really have to work hard to do well. My grades have always been good but it hasn’t been easy. Not like my sister who has always just found it easy right through school.”

COUNSELLOR: “So while you’ve done well in school, you’ve had to work very hard…What about that?”

The main functions of paraphrasing are (1) to respond to the content, (2) to help the client focus on the content of his or her message, and (3) to highlight content when attention to feelings is premature or self-defeating.

3. Reflection: is similar to paraphrasing but rather than the counsellor rephrasing the content of what the client has said, reflecting involves describing the emotional component of the client’s message. Cormier and Cormier provide the following example to illustrate the distinction between paraphrasing and reflection:

CLIENT: “Everything is humdrum. There’s nothing new going on, nothing exciting. All my friends are away. I wish I had money to do something different.”

COUNSELLOR PARAPHRASE: “With your friends gone and no money around, there is nothing for you to do right now.”

COUNSELLOR REFLECTION: “You feel bored with the way things are for you right now.”

The main functions of reflection are (1) to respond to the feelings of the client, (2)to encourage the client to express more of his or her feelings, (3)to have the client experience feelings more intensely, (4) to help the client become more ware of the feelings that dominate him or her, and (5) to facilitate the client to discriminate his or her feelings accurately.

4.Summarizing: is an extension of paraphrasing and reflecting. It involves tying together two or more distinct parts of what the client has said. Summarizing is sometimes used to identify and check out a common theme that reappears across different contexts. Summarizing, like paraphrasing and reflection, provide the client with an opportunity to clarify what he or she has communicated.

Listening as a skill in counselling is unfortunately not too easy to acquire. According to Egan (1998), counsellors should be aware of some of the following hindrances to effective listening.

• Inadequate listening: It is easy to be distracted from what other people are saying if one allows oneself to get lost in one’s own thoughts or if one begins to think what one intends to say in reply. Counsellors are also often distracted because they have problems of their own, feel ill, or because they become distracted by social and cultural differences between themselves and their clients. All these factors make it difficult to listen to and understand their clients
• Evaluative or Critical listening: Most people listen evaluatively to others. This means that they are judging and labelling what the other person is saying as either right/wrong, good/bad, acceptable/unacceptable, relevant/irrelevant etc. They then tend to respond evaluatively as well.
• Filtered listening: We tend to listen to ourselves, other people and the world around us through biased (often prejudiced) filters. Filtered listening distorts our understanding of our clients.
• Labels as filters: Diagnostic labels can prevent you from really listening to your client. If you see a client as “that women with Aids”, your ability to listen empathetically to her problems will be severely distorted and diminished.
• Fact-centred rather than person-centred listening: Asking only informational or factual questions won’t solve the client’s problems. Listen to the client’s whole context and focus on themes and core messages.
• Rehearsing: If you mentally rehearse your answers, you are also not listening attentively. Counsellors who listen carefully to the themes and core messages in a client’s story always know how to respond. The response may not be a fluent, eloquent or “practised” one, but it will at least be sincere and appropriate.
• Sympathetic listening: Although sympathy has its place in human transactions, the “use” of sympathy is limited in the helping relationship because it can distort the counsellor’s listening to the client’s story. To sympathise with someone is to become that person’s “accomplice”. Sympathy conveys pity and even complicity, and pity for the client can diminish the extent to which you can help the client.

Conclusion

Listening skills play a key role counselling and guidance whether involving a child or an adult. It primarily helps to establish rapport. It is important distinguish hearing from listening, as listening is an active process. Listening is not just being attentive to the narration but also to body language, voice modulation, style of narration and usage of language.It also requires the counsellor to maintain good eye contact, positive gesturing along with clarification, paraphrasing, reflection and summarizing in order to make the client feel heard and cared for.Effective listening fosters better feedback from the counsellor to the client and vice-versa. Whilst actively listening, it is important that a counsellor stops any other kind of distraction. This includes the natural dialogue that everyone has running through their mind constantly. Forming judgments, regarding what is being said, is also a block to actively listening, as is the urge to provide information at, what may be, an inappropriate pause in the conversation.In case the counsellor fails to comprehend what the client tells, it is better to clarify immediately or ask the client to repeat instead of faking to have listened. Counsellors must be aware of their listening habits at all times, and must continue to check they are supporting the client in the most appropriate way.

Web links / Reference

• https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/imaizzati/basic-counseling
• https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/listening
• Principles of guidance and counselling by K.K.Shrivastava
• Career Guidance and counselling by Edwin L Herr, Stanley H Carmer in 1979
• Guidance and counselling in Education by Dr. V. Govianda Reddy in 2016