Surface And Depth Listening

we communicate with everyone, everytime, and everywhere. but most of the time we only get the obvious meaning that said by the speaker. in short, theres and an obvious meaning that you can derive from a literal reading of the words and sentences. unfortunately, most of the messages that we use in our every day life have more than one level of meaning. so, listening is very important for us to understand whether we should accept the surface meaning or the depth meaning.

lets see a situation where two friends are communicating :

sarah : jim, how do you like my new tops that i bought in sunway pyramid?
jim    : its nice sarah...
sarah : oh...thank you jim....

at one of view, sarah's question has a clear meaning. but theres another important level, where sarah is asking jim to tell something positive about her new top. hence, this is what we learn as surface and depth listening. sadly, if we fail to engage in any of this listening method, it may lead us to miscommunication.

in regulating surface and depth listening, we have to follow some guidelines which sounds like this :

• focusing on both verbal and nonverbal messages
• listen for both content and relational messages
• make special notes to refer back to the speaker
• dont ever disregard the literal meaning of interpersonal messages

last but not least, we must always know ourselves to engage in surface and depth listening. we might not lnow the importance now, but when time comes we should be able to differentiate the meanings....

by: amutha supayah