If you experience communication difficulties, the following active listening strategies will enhance your communication with other people to create a more positive communicative environment.
- Look at the person who is speaking. Position yourself to get a full view of the face, not just a profile view. A lot of information can be obtained by watching as well as by listening. Although no one can gain all of the information by sight alone, everyone has some ability to speech read; that is, to obtain information on what is being said by watching a speaker’s lips, facial expressions, gestures, body language, etc.
- Wear your glasses when indicated. They will help you to speech read.
- Reduce the distance between you and the person talking. The ideal distance is approximately three to five feet.
- Avoid carrying on conversations from another room.
- Concentrate on the thought or ideas that the speaker is expressing rather than straining to understand every word that is said. Do not get discouraged or give up if you miss a few words. Speech is commonly redundant and predictable.
- Try to be aware of the topic of conversation and environmental cues that may help you to make educated guesses. Friends can be coached to give occasional leads about the subject being discussed. They can unobtrusively say, “We are discussing the housing problem,” or you might quietly ask someone in the group to tell you what they are discussing.
- Become familiar with the way different people express themselves such as facial expressions, vocabulary, sentence structure, accent, or dialect, etc.
- Don’t hesitate to ask someone to clarify information you may have missed. In order to reduce frustration on both sides, it is helpful to be very specific about what you have missed so that the person does not have to repeat the whole message. You may also want to ask the person not just to repeat the information, but also to rephrase it so that words you have difficulty hearing can be replaced with words that are easier to hear.
- Tell the speaker specifically which part of what they’ve just said you did not understand. Merely saying, “I didn’t hear,” or “I didn’t understand,” doesn’t give the speaker the necessary information to correct your problem. Tell them if they are speaking too softly, too rapidly, if their hand is in front of their mouth or if background noise is preventing you from understanding.
- Work at listening and do not get into the habit of allowing someone else, such as your spouse or friend, to listen for you.
- Maximize the use of lighting. Have the light behind you, not behind the speaker where it may cast a shadow.
- Resist distractions. Try to reduce or eliminate interfering background noise. This includes turning down or off the television, radio, running water or fan while conversing. In a social setting or restaurant, you may want to find a quieter corner away from the noise for your conversations.
- If you are in a room with an open door or window facing a noisy or busy area, close it. It also is helpful to keep the car window closed or lower the volume of the hearing aid that is closest to the window. Most hearing aids adjust to noise automatically.
- If needed, consider improving the acoustics of a room frequently used for conversation. This may involve installing carpeting, draperies, padded furniture, or acoustic ceiling tiles.