Barriers to Effective Listening

Effective listening is an energy-intensive process. Like communication as a process is learned, listening is also a learned skill that we need to practice. We can also become lazy listeners from practicing some bad habits, like information overload and failing to fully listen to a message. Recognizing listening barriers in our daily routines – such as pseudo-listening and selective listening – is crucial for becoming better listeners and presenters. Pseudo-listening is characterized by pretending to listen when really, we are not. Selective listening is simply attending to those messages that we want to hear and disregarding the rest. And sometimes we assume that we know what the speaker is going to say, and we ignore the message that is being presented.