W9 - Discussion Question # 1

I would have to say that the “hearing” phase of listening is probably the most difficult for me, especially at work. While I can biologically hear what is being said, a lot of times my mind is in a million directions and I am always preoccupied with one thing or another. For example, today was a really busy day at work and we had a constant flow of customer traffic all day. I am known for always multi-tasking and often can be found on the phone, e-mail, and talking to someone in person all at the same time! When one of my staff members came up to me and asked me a question, I kind of rushed them a long and asked them to get to the meat of the message, instead of giving them a chance to let them tell me the whole story because I was so engrossed with everything else that was going on around me. Come to find out, I gave the wrong information to my employee and I had to spend even more time to fix the issue because I was not really “listening” to what they were trying to tell me. Luckily, I can honestly say that this type of incident doesn’t happen often; however, it does happen once in a while and it is something that I need to work on. While multi-tasking is great for handling hands on types of duties, I’ve come to realize that you cannot multi-task when it comes to listening. It is important to give your full attention to someone when they are trying to tell you something because that way you can make sure that you heard the entire content of the message and also give the correct feedback.