Effective Listening: Personal Barriers and Information Overload

This article discusses the personal barriers and information overload that affect effective listening. It explains how personal concerns and extreme sensory input can take listeners away from listening and reduce their ability to concentrate on others’ messages. It also notes that ethnocentrism can limit effective listening and interests of cultural group. The article provides tips on how to overcome these barriers and improve listening skills.

Running head: HUMAN RELATIONS
HUMAN RELATIONS
Name of the Student:
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Author note:

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The difference between speech and thought rate have been linked to the personal barriers
towards effective listening skill. As personal concerns have been typically regarded as focus of
competing thoughts, it can take the listeners away from listening and further challenge their
ability to concentrate on others’ messages. Furthermore, according to Duck and McMahan
(2018), extreme sensory input known as information overload tends to reduce the ability of
effective listeners. For example, trying to do two things simultaneously, such as email while
listening to a lecture, radically decreases the ability as well as effectiveness of each behavioural
pattern.
Meanwhile, Duck and McMahan (2018) have noted that ethnocentrism has been
highly similar to egocentrism rather than show constraints to own personal interests and
perspectives. Such behavioral patterns tend to limit effective listening and limit the interests of
cultural group. Thus, effective listening typically calls for listening first and efficiently realizes
the position before rejecting it and stops listening.
As a student I have experienced certain situations where I have developed a sense of
obtaining excessive information during any communication process with other students. At such
scenarios I have felt highly overwhelmed and sensed certain level of apprehension that
individuals will not be able to maintain any information at all. At this juncture, Chu and Kita
(2016) have stated if information tends to contain information which has been new to the
receiver that include processes or concepts that have not been recognizable, then the probabilities
of getting overloaded. These barriers have been emerging during the process of encoding or
decoding the message into words and ideas correspondingly (Alrahlah, 2016). However, due to
lack of control of such information flow major proportion of communication has been

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misinterpreted and elapsed or sometimes greatly disregarded. As a result communication has
been less effective.
Thus in order to overcome overload information individuals must obtain a reasonable
idea of the type of information individuals need to gather. Furthermore, it has been important to
recognize the suitable kind of information individuals require along with a handful of the most
appropriate sources. Individuals for effective listening must require to successfully establishing a
systematic way of receiving, synthesizing and implementing such information which will benefit
listeners (Alrahlah, 2016). Furthermore, individuals have been attempting eliminate acronyms,
contractions in addition to jargon which can further result to severe misinterpretations and
further restrict the length of communication with speakers by efficiently relating to essential
factors.

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References
Alrahlah, A. (2016). How effective the problem-based learning (PBL) in dental education. A
critical review. The Saudi dental journal, 28(4), 155-161.
Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2016). Co-thought and co-speech gestures are generated by the same action
generation process. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 42(2), 257.
Duck, S., & McMahan, D. (2018). Communication in Everyday Life A Survey of
Communication. Retrieved from https://www.sagepub.com/hi/nam/communication-in-
everyday-life/book245674