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

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. ;)