Four Types Of Listening

In my listening experiences, the style depends upon the situation - who, venue, format, topic, teacher, student, etc. Different listening activities will determine what style is used. Listening to someone discuss their experiences of, for example, going out for coffee or to a ballgame compared to describing what it was like when they learned they were told they had cancer and how jumbled up their future just became. We shift. A remarkable ability we have is being able to be the dad for a child who was describing an activity in school, listening to my wife explain her day or having my son tell me his wife's brother just died. In each instance, we must remove ourselves from the speaker's story. It isn't about us. Years ago i remember being told the reason God gave us two ears and one mouth is that it is more important to listen than talk.