The Concepts Of Mindful Listening In Interpersonal Communication

The seventh chapter in Interplay centers itself around listening, and how vitally important it is in interpersonal communication. The first concept that I found to be interesting in this chapter is mindful listening. First, this book defines listening of the interpersonal type to be “the process of receiving and responding to others’ messages” (Adler, Rosenfeld, Proctor, 2015, pg. 206). More specifically, the book then goes on to describe mindful listening as “giving careful and thoughtful attention and responses to the messages we receive.” The authors use examples such as when listeners tend to pay closer attention when the message is more important to them or concerns an important topic. This is as compared to answering to information mindlessly,

They were talking to me about some drama happening in their life, and asked me a question about what I thought. I then said without thinking, “sorry, what was that?” Then, after they repeated the question and I was still focusing on my homework, I asked them to repeat it again. They became frustrated with me as I wasn’t listening, and I turned away from my homework and wholly devoted myself to the conversation. As I wasn’t very invested in the conversation, I wasn’t listening to my friend very intently thereby “mindlessly listening.” However, having been on the other end of this, I realize how hurtful it can be to be talking to someone and not have them be fully listening to what you have to say. Due to this, I would say mindful listening is a very good thing, and that there is no downside to mindful listening other than you can’t multitask when doing it. Mindful listening requires full attention and removes the hurt and ignorance of mindless listening. Additionally, in professions when mindful listening can save lives such as medicine or in the military, it is very important to be paying full attention to the matter at

Paraphrasing is defined as “feedback that restates, in your own words, the message you thought the speaker sent” (Adler et. al, 2015, pg. 221). This strategy becomes useful when you want to clarify what you thought they said without asking them to repeat themselves. This creates a natural flow of conversation that specifies what was said without pausing the conversation and make it seem as if you weren’t listening mindfully. This strategy can remove the heat or tension from a conversation. I’ve personally, unknowingly used this strategy several times, particularly in high intensity situations. For example, I’ve used paraphrasing when having a conversation with my best friend about the death of a loved one. When his grandfather passed away, he was very upset and didn’t give a lot of information, so I was left to paraphrase his statements and clarify how he truly felt about the situation. It ties in very closely with questioning, however paraphrasing works more efficiently for defusing the high-stress situation. He would generalize about how upset he was and how he felt, so by paraphrasing I was able to determine the root of his distraught and how best to help him. If I had straight up asked him why he was upset, he would most likely have become upset and offended by my insensitivity. I support the use of paraphrasing, and most definitely