Four Barriers to Listening- Lisa Rooney

Here's another great article by one of my talented students, Lisa Rooney. Here Lisa covers what she call the Four Barriers to Listening. Read it and leave your comments below letting her know that you enjoy her work, and whether you agree!

Ter Scott
www.terscott.com/speaker

Lisa Rooney

Informational Listening Barriers

 

Informational listening has four barriers that can prevent a person from hearing and listening what is meant to be heard and understood correctly. The barriers include cultural, gender, history, language, and history. The cultural barrier can affect many areas of listening including different types of verbal slang, accents, and language style. This can also be affected by non verbal communication aspects like age differences, appearances, and even a person’s cultural difference alone can distract a listener.

Gender barriers can affect men and women that see the other sex as inadequate or less superior. Gender barriers can also become apparent when there is a difference in the mental thought process between men and women, which have been shown in brain tests. These brain tests show that men and women use different parts of the brain to process what is being heard when listening. Gender barriers can also be shown in misunderstandings of verbal cues like “Oh, really?”, or “That’s interesting”. These verbal cues can show a difference in meaning between men and women. Men can see them as a cue to make the conversation longer where women see them as a movement piece for a conversation.

Language barriers can include non-native speakers where the speaker can use a different language from the norm in that workplace. Another aspect of language barrier can be affected by a speaker’s volume of voice, because of their cultural background. History barriers are apparent when there are past negative experiences or annoyances. This means that the listener feels they would not learn anything from the speaker, because they have adverse feeling for the speaker.

There can also be feelings of the speakers inadequate knowledge by the listeners feelings of superiority, that can come from the speakers previous negativity or complaining. Any one of these informational listening barriers will prevent a listener from gaining the message that a speaker is portraying.

Lisa Rooney