What Is Your Listening Style

 A listening style is the perferred way of making sense out of messages you receive from others. There are four different listening styles:

• People-oriented listeners will typically empathize and search for common areas of interest between them and the person with whom they are engaged. And a people-oriented listener will be more comfortable when interacting in small groups and in face-to-face conversations.
• Action-oriented listeners like information well-organized, error-free and delivered in "sound bites," or short declarative statements. While they listen, however, action-oriented listeners may be skeptical of what they hear initially, which means that they will typically second-guess the underlying motive of the message to determine whether it is true or false.
• Content-oriented listeners are comfortable listening to complex, detailed information. They are most interested in facts, details, and evidence in a message, otherwise they can become sekeptical and reject the message. They are more comfortable engaging in listening  and learning about issues, participating in arguments (debate) and are concerned with a speaker's accuracy and credibility. 
• Time-oriented listeners like messages delivered  succintly and thwy are most interested in bottom line statements and perfer bulleted talking points.

Understanding your listening style will help you communicate more effectively with others. By understand the various listening styles, you can adjust your approach to listening and gathering information. This exercise will help you do that. Here are some questions to get you started:

1. During the next 24 to 48 hours, keep a listening journal that describes the following:
2. Particular listening situations incxluding the goal, the time of day, and the content/reason for listening, and they style used.
3. After your journal is complete, discuss the listening style in which you were most comfortable?
4. When did you find you used a particular listening style?

You might find "Charting your Listening Cycle" on pp. 154 particularlly helpful.

When you have completed your journaling, please provide you feedback to this question:

What is the effect of your listening energy cycle on the type of listening you can do successfully?

Post your answers here, then let's discuss in class.

How Does Personalty Affect Your Communication Style

We talked about how self-concept and self-esteem affect how you communicate. Understanding our personality type, in other words, specific characteristics, traits and attributes of our personality can also teach us in several ways, such as, how we how we perceive the world and make decisions.

Here's you assignment, if you so choose to take it:

Take the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and discuss how your personality affects the way you communicate, then discuss how knowing the attributes of your personality can help you more effectively communicate with others.

These are link to help you research your personality:

• High-Level Description of the Sixteen Personality Types 
• Type Logic   
• Similar Minds
  

How Do We Communicate in Chat Rooms

Interpersonal communication is governed by rules, and these rules can be extended to social media as well. I'd like to collect your thoughts and observations of a particular chat room. Here's what you need to do:

• Find an appropriate chat room you feel comfortable entering.
• Log into the chat room.
• Observe the chat room activity and look for the evidence of social rules governing the environment and take note of the.
• Enter the conversation once you feel comfortable that you're aware of the social rules.
• After some time of interaction with those in the chat room, create an opportunity to break the rules you observed.  What happened? 
• Write about your experience in the comment section.