Barriers To Active Listening
All elements of communication, including listening, may be affected by barriers that can impede the flow of conversation. Such barriers include distractions, trigger words, vocabulary, and limited attention span.
Listening barriers may be psychological (e.g. emotions) or physical (e.g. noise and visual distraction). Cultural differences including speakers' accents, vocabulary, and misunderstandings due to cultural assumptions often obstruct the listening process.
Frequently, the listener's personal interpretations, attitudes, biases, and prejudices lead to ineffective communication.
Read more about this topic: Active Listening
Famous quotes containing the words barriers to, barriers, active and/or listening:
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it is only when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“You need not be proud of me.... I’m only being active till you can be again—it isn’t such a great desire on my part to serve the world and I’ll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily!”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Proportion ... You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist.... It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way.... A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)