5) Facilitative Listening This goes beyond even empathic listening because it implies and requires that you are able to extend an especially helpful approach to the other person or people. A crucial factor here is “the capability to interpret the cognisance or self-awareness  of the speaker and the extent to which you are hearing and observing genuine ‘adult’ sounds and signals as distinct from [the senders] emotionally skewed [‘child’ or ‘parent’] outputs”. Again according to Business Balls ‘facilitative listening requires that you as listener will pause to think and prepare your responses during the exchange’, which is not a common trait with many listeners. They go on to say, “facilitative listening contains a strong additional element of being interested in helping the other person see and understand their options and choices”. To be a facilitative listener ‘you need to be devoid of any selfish personal motive, other than to extend help and to place the other person’s interests are at the forefront’. In my experience sound practitioners of this form of listening are able to use effective questions rather than making long winded so called ‘statements of fact’ to help the sender get where they need to be in their conversation and thoughts.

As I said the type of listening we use can have considerable outcomes in terms of our relationships and we all have a natural tendency to use one type or another. Again different situations or message senders will tend to influence our listening behaviour. I guess the most important thing to understand is that there are different forms of listening or listening behaviours and whether you see them as a hierarchy of “seven stages” or “eight levels” implying ‘improving progressions’ or you just accept my “five types” model you must be aware of how you are perceived as a listener and the consequences.

references

(1) http://www.managementblog.org/archives/2010/04/09/seven-stages-of-listening/

(2) http://www.businessballs.com/empathy.htm