Listening

[owlmoose]

The school where I work is really big on personal and professional development. They offer lots of online seminars and, since I'm on the fast track to management, I'll get to take a lot of them. Today's "webinar" was on different modes of listening. These things are almost always connected to an online personality test, and so today I took one on my listening style. Turns out I'm an empathic listener. Who knew? (Answer: me. And likely everyone else. Not a shocker.)

Anyway, it was a relatively interesting refresher on communication styles. The factoid that sticks with me: only 7% of communication is verbal (i.e. through words). Almost 40% comes from tone of voice and the remaining 50%+ is body language. This has incredible implications for how we communicate online -- we're trying to get by with a tiny fraction of the information we usually use to understand what another person is telling us. Of course I already knew this in theory, but I found the reminder useful.

The other tidbit I wanted to share: the average person can listen at a rate of 500 words a minute. But the average person can only speak at about 150 words per minute. No wonder it's so easy to get distracted during a lecture.

Just some musings on a Monday afternoon.

Comments

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

All veeeery interesting.

I react to tone of voice so much that it's almost paralyzing. I find online communication restful because it takes away that layer of intimidation/manipulation.

It does certainly make online friendships more challenging! I wonder how Skype is affecting that issue. (I know with at least one friend that it has changed the tone of our friendship slightly.)

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

Interesting, that you find online communication easier in a way, with a layer of complexity taken away.

I'd think Skype and other voice-over-Internet technologies help in terms of getting tone of voice back. But for body language you'd need videoconferencing, and the technology for that lags way behind. And you still don't get as much out of it as you do face-to-face.

I

[kunstarniki.livejournal.com]

Hence the necessity of emoticons. I cannot tell you how often I inadvertently offended various persons before I began using those little indications of my intention. And thank you for that information about the speed with which a human can listen and speak. I have frequently wondered why I kept weaving my own thoughts in between the words of those to whom I was supposedly listening. ;)

Re: I

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

Emoticons help, definitely. But look at the burden we are asking them to carry! A full 93% of human communication, encoded in a smiley. That's an awful lot to expect out of a few bits of punctuation. ;)

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know ...

I used to moderate on a bulletin board where smileys were an artform for precisely that reason. However, I've mostly weaned myself off of them, since those who aren't used to them find them distracting.

mew!

[rustehroll.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I was training to be a court reporter once, and you have to be able to type up to 300 wpm because some people can speak quite quickly, but yeah, 150-180wpm for speaking is normal.