Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

having dinner at a crowded restaurant. Your ear is going to be attending to a lot of different messages
all the time in that environment, but most of those messages get filtered out as “background noise,” or
information we don’t listen to at all. Maybe then your favorite song comes on the speaker system the
restaurant is playing, and you and your best friend both attend to the song because you both like it. A
minute earlier, another song could have been playing, but you tuned it out (hearing) instead of taking
a moment to enjoy and attend to the song itself (listen). Next, let’s say you and your friend get into
a discussion about the issues of campus parking. Your friend states, “There’s never any parking on
campus. What gives?” Now, if you’re critically listening to what your friend says, you’ll question the basis
of this argument. For example, the word “never” in this statement is problematic because it would mean
that the campus has zero available parking, which is probably not the case. Now, it may be difficult for
your friend to find a parking spot on campus, but that doesn’t mean that there’s “never any parking.” In
this case, you’ve gone from just listening to critically evaluating the argument your friend is making.
Model of Listening
Judi Brownell created one of the most commonly used models for listening. 39 Although not the
only model of listening that exists, we like this model because it breaks the process of hearing down
into clearly differentiated stages: hearing, understanding, remembering, interpreting, evaluating, and
responding (Figure 7.4).
Stage 1
Hearing
Stage 2
Understanding
Stage 3
Remembering
Figure 7. 4 HURIER Model of Listening
Stage 4
Interpreting
Stage 5
Evaluating
Stage 6
Responding
Hearing
From a fundamental perspective, for listening to occur, an individual must attend to some kind of
communicated message. Now, one can argue that hearing should not be equated with listening (as we did
above), but it is the first step in the model of listening. Simply, if we don’t attend to the message at all,
then communication never occurred from the receiver’s perspective.
Imagine you’re standing in a crowded bar with your friends on a Friday night. You see your friend
Darry and yell her name. In that instant, you, as a source of a message, have attempted to send a
message. If Darry is too far away, or if the bar is too loud and she doesn’t hear you call her name, then
Darry has not engaged in stage one of the listening model. You may have tried to initiate communication,
but the receiver, Darry, did not know that you initiated communication.
Now, to engage in mindful listening, it’s important to take hearing seriously because of the issue of
intention. If we go into an interaction with another person without really intending to listening to what
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