Hello, dear friends, and welcome back to our course, Basic Skills in Constructive Communication. In Week 3, we cover the cornerstones of any effective, especially constructive communication. Active listening for proper understanding of your interlocutors, your partners, as well as precise formulation of your own thoughts. So you will learn how, when applying active listening, you will get the essence of the phrases and statements, meanings of your interlocutors. At the same time, you will learn some two rules to apply in order to make yourself clear, express yourself clearly, make yourself understandable to others. So first of all, let's have a look at listening as a process and different listening levels. When we discover what interaction consists of. So we can clearly see that in 42-53 percent of the cases, we listen to others, which is basically half of the time. Whereas from 16-32 percent, we ourselves speak, which is less than 20 percent or let's say a third of the time in best case. Well, 15-17 percent we would read something, as well as 9-14 percent we would write. So as we can see that when it comes to listening, it takes more time than speaking and reading combined. That's why listening matters. Now, what else is important to know about listening? So listening is not just a passive process of receiving some acoustical information with our hearing organs. No, it's also about structuring, understanding, and even memorizing incoming information. So we clearly can say that the lack of listening skills is often the case or the reason for misunderstandings, mistakes, and even problems in communication, which turn out to be problems in relationships between people, between groups of people, between societies, between nations, maybe between races. So in other terms, without listening skills, without properly developed listening skills, we won't be able to achieve the main goal of communication, which is to create a common understanding between the parties involved in the communication process. Now what's very interesting is that most of the people rate their listening abilities pretty high, like 70-75 percent out of 100. Whereas in fact, the listening skills of most of the people are developed in best case on a level of 25 out of 100 percent, which means there's a lot of space for improvement. When we have a look at the following, I'll say, information, the picture gets even more depressing. So imagine you want to say something which is on your mind, which is important to you and you want to share with your interlocutors. You want to get some feedback, you want to have a discussion. So in most of the cases, people even speak out just 80 percent of what they have originally in mind, 80 percent. Now the others, the interlocutors hear, perceive acoustically just 70 percent of those 80 percent. Now out of those 70 percent of those 80 percent, the interlocutors understand only 60 percent. From those 60 percent that they have understood, out of 70 percent of what they've heard, out of 80 percent of what has been said, only 25 percent can be recollected and repeated. So that means that from thinking a thought, speaking out to being heard, being understood and being, how it is rephrased, the long way with a lot of losses. That's why listening skills is such an important issue to pay attention to. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean that we are doomed to be unable to listen and get the points of our interlocutors. Of course, it's a process that can be learned. Its effectiveness, efficiency can be raised, and this is what this course is about. Now let's have a look at the three different levels of listening, which is cosmetic listening, conversational listening, and finally, active listening. So what does cosmetic listening mean? You just show that you somehow listen to a person, but when you hear the information that comes in from your interlocutor, you start thinking on your own. That is often because thoughts are much faster than words. So you might say that when you speak out one sentence with, for example, 10 words, you've got at least 40 thoughts at the same time. So the amount of thoughts while talking is much more than the words you speak out, actually, literally. So cosmetic listening is just when you hear some information, for example, it's node, and then you just switch off the process of perception of incoming information. You think of your own stuff like, obviously I've got to change my tires on my car. Now, what is conversational listening about? It's just when two people talk, one person talks about one thing, the other one listens, get some ideas, replies to it. It's just a prose of like ping-pong, the ball is just constantly changing sides. It's like in a usual conversation, not necessarily in a purposeful discussion. When it comes to purposeful discussions where it's really important, where it matters to create this common understanding as a common ground to go further on and coordinate activities in order to achieve a common goal, then we need to apply active listening. Now this is the essence of active listening. What you can do about active listening is what we are going to cover in our next video. So for the time being, thank you very much for your attention and your patience. See you later.
