Five Stages Of Active Listening As An Active Process

Listening is a skill of critical significance in all aspects of our lives - from maintaining our personal relationships, to taking notes during lectures, to leading and working in a team, to even figuring out what the heck the man on the metro intercom is trying to say. However, regardless of the content of what we are listening to, we must know that in order to listen, we must do more than just hear. You see, listening is an active process in which we must perceive, understand, analyze, and respond to the sounds we hear. It is more than an involuntary function.

Active listening, in particular, is a communication technique that involves five specific stages:

1. Receiving

2. Understanding

3. Evaluating

4. Responding

5. And Remembering.

Active listening begins with the receiving stage. This stage involves hearing and attending.

To begin, I must point out the obvious. The ability to physically hear what is being said is a crucial factor in gathering information through listening. The better the sound quality, the easier the listening process becomes. If you have the ability to perceive sound, then this should be quite simple. However, other contributions such as headphones, outside noise, and other factors, also, impair a listener’s ability to hear and actively listen.

Alongside hearing, attending is the remaining half of the receiving stage in the listening process. Attending is the process of detecting and deciphering the sounds and movements we notice as words. Before we attend to a sound or movement, they have no meaning or purpose. It is not until we give them context that they form a practical message. For this reason, listening is described as an active process that assembles meanings from not only from verbal messages, but also from nonverbal

Evaluating allows the listener to form individual opinions of what they’ve heard and, if necessary, develop a response. This stage of critical analysis is significant for a listener as what they hear will affect their singular ideas, decisions, and beliefs, either in favor or opposition of the speaker’s points.

Next, you have the responding stage, a crucial stage in active listening. This stage contributes action to the listening process, which would otherwise be a passive process. In this stage, the listener or listeners provide verbal and nonverbal replies to stay engaged in the exchange.

Nonverbal responses, like nodding, allow the listener to express their interest and opinion without disrupting the speaker, therefore preserving the roles of speaker and listener. However, when a listener responds verbally - asking a question or redirecting the focus of a conversation - the roles of speaker and listener are reversed, momentarily.

And finally, we reach the final stage of the listening process, remembrance. This stage occurs as the listener catalogues the knowledge they’ve gathered from the speaker for future