A lot of the time I'll hear from people that hearing and listening are the same, and they are very much not. Hearing is actually the physiological process. The way the texts describe it is the perception of sound by detecting vibrations through the ear.
I will also say this, because ASL is a language, we tend to listen to the non-verbals as well. So I would add on to this definition that hearing is also us taking in all of the symbols before we start making meaning out of it. So that's just us taking in the information, but if we don't pay attention to it, it could just be noise that's in the background.
So the difference between hearing and listening is that we're conscious of it and we're trying to make meaning out of it. So it says here listening is a complex psychological process. The process of physically hearing, interpreting that sound, and understanding the significance of it.
Hearing is passive. It happens. Maybe you don't pay attention.
You heard some noise and you heard certain words, but you really weren't paying that much attention to it. You weren't attending. With listening, we're attending to the message.
We're paying attention to it. I want to understand. I want to make meaning.
And I want my meaning to match that of the person who is sending you the messages. That's listening. This is the hearer model of listening.
And idealistically, this is how we would listen. Now, a lot of the time what you'll see is that with listening, we tend to start to listen, hear some certain words that poke out to us, and then we respond. But it's not always effective. If we can really focus on our listening, we would follow something similar to this model of listening.
We would start by hearing. We would take in the verbals and the nonverbals. We would take in the symbols, and we would try really hard to understand what does that mean. Then we try to start remembering the aspects of it that mean something to us in that relationship with the person specifically.
Then we are able to make our own meaning, which means our interpretation of what just got sent to us. Then we evaluate. What does this person want in terms of a response?
And then we form our response. So one of the things that says in this chapter in terms of the hear your model of listening. is that we can use COAL, C-O-A-L, Curiosity, Openness, Acceptance, and Love. Now, these are very simple directions, but hard to listen to.
Hard for us to every time we communicate with someone, listen, don't respond, try to understand, remember, interpret, evaluate, and then respond. Sometimes it takes us a little bit longer to get to that point. So what types of listening do we use? We have different types of listening.
Discriminative, comprehensive, therapeutic, critical, and appreciative. With discriminant, we're really trying to figure out what should I pay attention to? Because there's lots of noise and sound that really aren't directed at you that are only going to distract you from your mission at hand.
We have comprehensive listening. This is what you do when you are in a class, when you're communicating interpersonally. You are figuring out, what do I want to understand and remember? This is, again, a conscious act is listening, but with comprehensive listening, I feel like it takes it to another level. Therapeutic listening is something that makes us feel good, right?
So this is an individual serves as a sounding board to another person. Have you ever needed to vent? My husband and I will do this thing when we are on a storytelling mission. Where we'll ask, do you want advice?
Do you want someone to listen? Do you just need a hug? Because sometimes we just need to be heard as humans. And it's a big part of our needs.
We have critical listening. This is where we're analyzing messages and trying to figure out the validity of what's being said. We do this a lot at work. We do this at school. And then we have our favorite, which is appreciative listening, where we're listening to something for pleasure or enjoyment.
So the next time you are binge watching a show that you like or listening to that podcast that really understands you and someone says, why do you do that so much? You say, because appreciative listening is so important to us as human beings. And it really does. It's very important to us.