I asked a family member to tell a story about their experience with school. The story focused on the activities that their school friend group engaged in and important events for their friend group. Summarizing the story, I can suggest that their experience was positive as reminiscing about the memories seemed to evoke many pleasurable emotions. Based on my listening skills, I was able to capture the main plot of the speaker’s story, but due to a lack of context, some details were left unattended. However, minor details, such as the names of secondary characters, do not impact the story’s overall picture. Thus, I do not feel that having trouble remembering those details is an important issue for my listening skills.
During the listening process, I mostly used an empathetic and informational type of listening as the story involved a personal perspective and emotional context. Thus, by being attentive to the speaker, I ensured an understanding of important connections in the story and their impact on the speaker. However, as I was closely familiar with the speaker and some details of the story may have been distorted by the narrator’s memory, I also used critical listening to ensure the accuracy of the information.
Thus, the main barrier to listening was the speaker’s mind wandering, triggered by a sudden rush of many memories unrelated to the story. Lastly, I tried to provide more kinds of feedback to ensure that the narrator was confident in the concentration of my attention. I mainly used backchanneling when the narrator mentioned interesting or familiar details and supporting to show my knowledge and experience with the theme. In addition, I used empathizing feedback to eliminate the opportunity for the speaker to be distracted by other topics.