Active Listening Distractions And Divided Attention

Most people confuse listening with hearing. It is possible to hear something without listening to them. Listening, as Keys to Success states, “is a process that starts with hearing but also includes focused thinking about what you hear.” Active listening “requires you to understand, interpret, and evaluate what you are being told” as stated in The Art of Active Listening, a book by Flynn Walker and Josh Gibson. In order to be a better listener we need to learn how to overcome the obstacles preventing us from being good listeners. There are many obstacles, I am only going to discuss a few.

Distractions and Divided Attention
Distractions can be both internal and external. They can either be something in your mind, or an outside influence. For example, if you are sitting in class and get a text on your cell phone, you may be tempted to pick up your cell phone and read it. This is an external distraction. You attention would be divided between the class lecture and your cell phone. Let’s say you put the cell phone down, but you cannot get what the text message said out of your mind. You would then be distracted by an internal distraction, because your mind would be thinking of the text instead of the lecture. An internal distraction can be just as harmful to your ability to listen as an external distraction. …show more content…
Most of the time, when people zone out in class, it is because their mind is distracted by an internal distraction. It is difficult to actively listen to someone while your mind is distracted. A distracted listener can sit through a lecture, with good eye contact, and still be zoned out and retain nothing from the lecture. This is a listening lapse, you subconsciously hear the lecture, but you weren’t listening to the