in our last video we introduced listening and we talked a little bit about the difference between hearing and listening and in this video i want to talk to you about the four basic levels of listening the four levels at which human beings listen to other people or listen to a message they are appreciative listening empathic listening comprehensive listening and critical listening and appreciative listening empathic listening comprehensive listening and critical listening we'll talk about them in that order because each level of listening becomes more difficult than the levels prior to it which makes the easiest level of listening that of appreciative listening um and appreciative listening simply means what it says we're listening for appreciation such as when we listen to music or some other form of entertainment something to kind of get our mind off of uh you know the stresses of the world and things like that we all love to listen to our favorite music our favorite band or maybe watch a good movie to take ourselves away from our stress so think about having downloaded a new album uh you know off of itunes or something of your favorite group everybody knows this situation you get it and you know a few years back it wasn't an album off of itunes but my kids bought me a double set uh cd of the eagles long road out of eden uh album and uh in two weeks time without even trying i knew the words to 19 or 20 new songs you know what i'm talking about you're the same way let's drive around we listen we listen we listen for you know what you know the words to all these you probably know the words you can sing along at least to 100 songs because we listen to those things at the appreciative level my question then becomes why the heck can't you do that in physical science why can't you do that in biology if you can commit that stuff the memory why can't you commit that other stuff to memory i know what some of you are thinking you're thinking well it's uh uh it's not interesting you know the music's more interesting well i would counter that argument with the fact that there are a lot of science geeks out there the little nerdy folks who love biology and love physical science more than you and i love rock and roll and they can't commit those uh physical science formulas uh to memory as much as they could the lyrics to hotel california so that's not it it's not a matter of whether we're interested in it or not what's really going on is this at the appreciative level with appreciative listening we're barely listening we're almost not listening we're not listening to a message usually or anything like that we're just listening to melody and rhythm and even the lyrics we hear them in re as melody and rhythm uh tempo and things like that in other words it's almost like a child learning the alphabet for the first time they learn that abc song a b c d e f g they but they don't know that those little things that they're singing about are the molecules that make up language that they are vowels and consonants when put together form words and then in a sentence structure give us subject and predicate and all of that kind of stuff it's just sound they don't know what it is they're singing about so quite often when we listen at the appreciative level we're kind of doing the same thing you know it's bad uh when as you start getting older and uh you know 40 is a rough time for guys is what they say um and i kind of laugh at it now that's a long time ago for me but uh i remember having turned 40. it was a miserable time i've always had thick glasses but they said doctors eye doctors will do this to you two weeks after i turned 40 he put me in coke bottles bifocals so thick that you would probably trip if you had them on your head that didn't make me happy i was all depressed turning into an old man and all of this kind of stuff and uh one fall evening i was headed back home from heber springs arkansas i think some of you know where heber springs is it's beautiful it was a fall evening maybe it was 15 minutes 20 minutes before full sunset that's a beautiful time of night the only thing about hebrew springs is way up there on top of a mountain and you're spending half your drive home coming down a mountain basically coming into deshay and batesville and all of this kind of stuff and i was feeling kind of bad looking at the treetops from the top of that mountain with a nice sunset and all of this and i had a great big old f-150 quad cab or crew cab whatever they call that one i can't even remember now and the eagles came on my favorite group and it started playing life in the fast lane [Music] ah now that was from the day and i took in some oxygen all of a sudden this little four foot uh five foot four inch guy right here uh started to feel like i was six four i rolled that window down got in some fresh air and i was rocking i'm listening to my song i'm coming in and just saying i bet every citizen of deshay was hearing that i was feeling fun somebody in deshay was about to get a whooping that's how i felt about it like that's but that's the song so i'm feeling good listening to life in the fast lane and all of a sudden i literally remember seeing my eyebrows and my eyes get big uh in the mirror i wasn't looking but i remember kind of catching that because i just all of a sudden went oh my gosh is that what we were singing about i was 40 years old and for the first time in my life started paying attention to the lyrics to life in the fast lane up until that day it was just a cool guitar rift it was some rock and roll had some awesome harmony and all of this stuff but right then at that moment i listened to it i was no longer listening to it for appreciation i was listening to it and it was quite frightening have you ever listened to the lyrics of hotel california there was a party going on i thought this about a couple teenagers running from the law in ventura california or something like this just having a good old time oh no no no this was a cocaine trip lines on the mirror lines on her face you've seen the movies with the little credit card scrape lines what that stuff on us call the doctor i think i'm going to crash doctor says he's coming but you got to pay in cash what kind of doctor shows up the house cures your and what ails you only if you pay in cash i'm like man no wonder my mom and dad were huddled in the corner shivering while i was rocking out to that at age 15 or 16 in my bedroom they thought we were all gonna burn in hell or something we were cranking that thing up so what happens at the appreciative level is we're just listening to feel good it's barely listening we're not comprehending very much at all just like the alphabet song it's easy to memorize but when unlike the formulas in physical science or biology you have to understand what the pieces of the formula represent now we're getting very conceptual the second level of listening is empathic listening e-m-p-a-t-h-i-c um which simply means listening with empathy empathic listening means you're listening with empathy you're um you're listening to provide emotional support for the speaker uh you know you're listening to uh like you would maybe a friend spill their troubles out onto you or something like this or maybe a psychiatrist listening to a patient or a bartender they're both in the same line of work one just costs more than the other but it's when you're listening to provide emotional support all right empathic listening means you're listening to put yourself into somebody else's shoes so what is the difference between empathy and sympathy well with sympathy we're not just putting ourselves in the other person's shoes we are actually feeling their sentiment if they're hurting we hurt that's a sympathetic gesture uh you know mom loses a loved one from high school that we never met and mom's broken-hearted and sad we're broken-hearted and sad that's sympathy but if a loved one i mean if a friend at work lost a loved one and we don't know that person we're not really that close to the person at work uh we put ourselves in their shoes we said we've been there we hold the door open for them maybe by their lunch or something like this but we go home and we don't dwell on it that's the difference between sympathy and empathy so when you listen at the empathic level which is level number two you're listening to provide emotional support just so that you can understand their predicament put yourself in their shoes the third level gets a little more difficult at the third level we call it comprehensive listening listening comprehensively um such as when we listen for understanding like when you're listening to a teacher or a director or a supervisor you're listening to learn from the content all right so if you're asked you know who at what level does a psychiatrist listen at don't confuse it with comprehensive listening don't don't think or they listen for comprehension no they work at the comprehensive level but they don't listen and you know i don't want to be flip about something so serious so i'll just parallel it to the sitcom version of the psychiatrist and a patient you know patients on the couch and patients said well what's going on doc thank you so much for listening to me because nobody else is paying any attention to me whatsoever uh it says doc i can't sleep at night i haven't slept in two years because i toss and i turn and i know at two o'clock in the morning there's gonna be these lights bouncing off the wall in my bedroom and they're gonna be green they'll be coming through the bedroom window i run to it i push the window up and i look outside and there's a silver saucer floating four feet off the ground a little ladder protrudes and these little three foot tall people come out they're all shiny and purple and they grab the johnson's dogs that's my next-door neighbors the johnsons and they put them up on a table and they dissect them and reach in there and try to find something they can't find it they staple those dogs up and hop back on that ship and take off right before the sun rises yeah i know that sounds pretty crazy it's the whole time that that patient is telling that doctor about that about that stress that is that doctor sitting there trying to figure out exactly what those martians are up to no that would be comprehensive listening um but that doctor knows that's not really going on what that doctor is trying to do at a far more sophisticated level than you and i can is simply put himself or herself in that patient's shoes see what it is that's causing them to think that way not trying to make sense out of what they're thinking but make sense out of why they're thinking it so even that even though it seems a little odd at the highest level that's just empathic listening now the patient will leave doctor will go back to the desk and pull the books down open up the computer draw on their expertise that's comprehensive working but they're not listening they're just now they're trying to diagnose the patient but not there while the patient's on the couch the third level of listening was something i indicated in the last video and that is critical listening critical listening means that we are listening as an evaluator so when we listen critically we're evaluating we're doing so to determine whether or not we want to accept or reject another person's idea we're listening as an evaluator see that's what um that's what jurors do they sit in the box and they listen to the prosecution present a case in order to determine whether they want to accept or reject then they listen to the defense present a case in order to determine whether they want to accept or reject and that's critical listening they're evaluating they're listed they're listening for fault in somebody's reasoning and yes that's what we're teaching you to do are we teaching you not to trust no are we teaching you to be pessimistic about your fellow human being no not at all but it's a healthy practice to listen for fault if we listen for fault and someone's listening i mean i'm sorry if we listen for fault in someone's reasoning and we don't find it uh we could feel pretty comfortable that it's not there if we listen for fault and someone else's reasoning and it is there we will probably find it it's when we're passive that we are not serving ourselves well as critical listeners so critical listening unlike the others actually involves a number of skills you have to develop these talents these abilities along the way in order to be a good critical listener now takes a little effort to develop these but over time i've done it and it makes life a lot more fun when i listen to news programs now and we all know that news programs on any side of a political divide are all biased these days and all of that is kind of hard to decipher what the truth is so half the time i'm not just listening to a story i'm listening to try to determine in my head why it is this anchor is presenting this story what is it they're up to what's the reason for uh giving us this message and so forth and that almost becomes sport and the older you get the more you enjoy that but you have to develop the skills once you develop them they become a conditioning then you do them automatically and it's not work at all it's kind of like learning how to play a short hop in baseball when you're very young at first it's hard to get it you take some hard knocks you get your shins busted and get you know cracked in the chin and all of this kind of stuff but eventually you get that timing you you understand what's going on it's muscle memory and it's not that much work at all anymore same thing with these critical listening skills so what are some of the critical listening skills first one would be to summarize information you want to learn to summarize you want to learn to take a full presentation or full segment of a presentation and pretty much put it in a nutshell say to yourself in a nutshell i think this speaker or this attorney or whatever case might be is trying to establish this you know a defense attorney might put up five witnesses in one day or in a week or something like that and you're sitting in the jury box at the end of all those witnesses you need to be able to say you know what i think all in all in summarization what this attorney was trying to establish was this one point was this one fact then you take that summarized information and you put it on a shelf so that you can implement the next critical listening skill which is recalling facts recalling facts so now you've got the prosecution cross-examining those five witnesses maybe even put up putting up some uh refuting witnesses to counter what what those witnesses had said earlier now you're listening to a different version of things and you want to sum that up and say you know in a nutshell i think what the prosecution is trying trying to establish as this so you put those two sides together critically and help yourself to distinguish which one you want to accept and which one you want to uh reject a third critical listening skill would be that of distinguishing main points from minor points distinguished main points from minor points do you think a main point is more credible than a minor point no they're both credible you know or they could also both be uh worthless in that regard but i mean no a main point a minor point could be equally credible what separates a major point from a minor point is um the significance that that point has in making the case all right you know sometimes uh we get caught up on a sideline issue which would be a minor point and that sideline issue seems to capture our attention and the presenters know that and they're able to keep us diverted from the main issue it's an unethical practice but we want to avoid that we have to constantly be asking ourselves is this point of contention that they're bringing up right now something that's gonna determine uh how i rule or how i whether or not i accept this person's uh persuasion or is it a supplement to one of the others and they're just hooking me with the emotion or something like that we need to be able to make that separation as critical listeners you want to be able to separate fact from opinion separate fact from opinion there is absolutely nothing wrong with a speech being full of opinion sometimes opinion is all we have you know there's a big debate on climate change i think it's a valid debate i'm not going to get into what side of it i'm on or anything in this video but it's a valid debate i think people on both sides uh can be overly fanatical and i think people on both sides can also have folks that are very reasonable there's validity to it all right and for the most part it's opinion um the only facts are is that you know the temperature has risen a slight degree the core of the earth temperature has risen a slight degree over the past century or so and all of that but all the reasons why uh are our our opinion this side thinks it's this the size think this natural this side thinks it's you know humans this side thinks it's you know the sun is getting larger whatever the case might be all right and there's nothing wrong with a presentation being full of opinion however if facts exist you want to be able to decipher as a critical listener which one of these things are facts because those are going to be the things that help you form your opinion and sometimes good crafty unethical presenters know how to give you a list of facts slip an opinion in to make it appear to be factual and if we're not thinking critically as a listener then we're going to miss that point also we want to spot weaknesses in logic and reasoning as a critical listener we want to listen to the present presenter and we want to purposefully try and define fault in their reasoning process see if to some of the things that they're adding up are not possibly not logical we want to try to spot uh weakness in logic and reasoning and uh you know uh in another video you will hear about uh unemployment you know sometimes politicians brag on their ability to create jobs by showing you a documented drop in the unemployment rate well we know that unemployment drops for more reasons than just people going to work maybe it dropped because people bailed out out of the process they gave up on looking for a job their benefits ran out maybe the person passed away those are all reasons that the unemployment rate dropped that uh when that person did not get a job so to say hey i'm the best man for creating jobs because the unemployment rate has dropped is actually not logical it might be factual they might be they might work together but until they show you what the employment rate looks like they've left the gap in their logic so you want to be able to spot things like that when you're listening to someone else present you want to be able to judge the validity of the evidence is it valid sometimes people will throw numbers at us that have very little to do you know i'm giving this presentation during the covet 19 scare all right and um uh right now we we're watching the news and every time i see that the numbers jumped up big today in arkansas not the number of deaths but the number of cases of covet 19. or they really spiked worldwide or spiked nationally or something like that i say to myself oh dang you know it's getting worse it's getting worse when in actuality what is happening is more people are getting tested the same amount of people who had it yesterday but more of them have been tested and now we're on the record and i go okay now relax a little bit and so forth because if somebody were to present oh you know uh you know we're all misbehaving and that's why the uh the copa 19 rate has increased overnight in arkansas uh that statement may not be valid it might be in some places but it isn't here it's just more people are being tested so you want to judge if that evidence is valid that's a critical listening skill so critical listening requires the use of all four listening levels when you listen critically you're also listening uh for comprehension and you're listening for him with empathy empathic listening and you're also kind of sometimes listening for appreciation critical listeners are listening at all four levels at one time and it uses the evaluative process as well and you want to develop these skills condition yourself to employing these skills every time you are a listener and you won't only find it beneficial to your ability to comprehend you'll actually find it to be somewhat recreational somewhat like a sport because then you kind of have the ability to determine what the presenter is actually up to you