Page 149 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

116 Part 2 Between Audience and Speaker

Anxiety

As discussed in Chapter 3, anxiety signifi cantly detracts from our ability to
process the information to which we are exposed. Anxious speakers often are
unable to focus on audience feedback as they speak or actively listen to an in-
structor’s feedback when they fi nish speaking. Likewise, anxious audience mem-
bers have diffi culty listening actively and remembering what they have heard.

Poor Listening Habits

The fi nal obstacle may be the most common and easily overcome: poor listening
habits. Ralph Nichols, one of the seminal researchers on listening, found that poor
10
listeners commonly shared a set of 10 poor listening habits. According to Nichols,
poor listeners tend to do the following:
1. Quickly decide that a subject is dull or uninteresting
2. Criticize the speaker’s delivery rather than focus on content
3. Jump to conclusions and make a quick evaluation of speakers without
hearing them out
4. Listen only for facts, thus missing the speaker’s main ideas
5. Try to outline everything the speaker says rather than focusing on the
important points
6. Fake attention when they are not really interested
7. Become easily distracted
8. Avoid diffi cult listening situations
9. Let emotional language interfere with listening to the speaker’s message
10. Waste the differential between the rate of speaking (about 125 words a
minute) and the rate of thinking (400 to 500 words a minute)
The audience member in the opening example of this chapter exhibited many
of these bad habits. Deciding the speech topic was just more of the same old
environmentalist rhetoric and becoming distracted to the point of sending a text
message were just two of the manifestations of these bad habits. As teachers
we’ve experienced these and many more bad listening practices from our stu-
dents, who are then often puzzled by their low test scores or missed assignments.
Obviously, the cure for these habits is to do just the opposite. You can assess
your own listening habits by answering the questions in the box “How Well Do
You Listen?” Later in this chapter we discuss a number of ways to improve your
listening and overcome these poor listening habits.

The Model Listener

Up to this point we have concentrated on the nature of listening and common
obstacles that can interfere with effective listening. We now turn our attention
to becoming model listeners. Effective listening begins with the common types
of listening in which we engage and what we can expect to gain from each
type. Different types of listening are inextricably tied to the goals of listening