Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

prevents you from effectively listening to their message or even others’ messages involving this politician.
Overcoming our own biases against the source of a message or the content of a message in an effort to
truly listen to a message is not easy. One of the reasons listening is a difficult process is because of our
inherent desire to evaluate people and ideas.
When it comes to evaluating another person’s message, it’s important to remember to be mindful.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, to be a mindful communicator, you must listen with an open ear that
is nonjudging. Too often, we start to evaluate others’ messages with an analytical or cold quality that is
antithetical to being mindful.
Responding
In Figure 7.4, hearing is represented by an ear, the brain represents the next four stages, and a person’s
mouth represents the final stage. It’s important to realize that effective listening starts with the ear and
centers in the brain, and only then should someone provide feedback to the message itself. Often,
people jump from hearing and understanding to responding, which can cause problems as they jump to
conclusions that have arisen by truncated interpretation and evaluation.
Ultimately, how we respond to a source’s message will dictate how the rest of that interaction will
progress. If we outright dismiss what someone is saying, we put up a roadblock that says, “I don’t want
to hear anything else.” On the other hand, if we nod our heads and say, “tell me more,” then we are
encouraging the speaker to continue the interaction. For effective communication to occur, it’s essential
to consider how our responses will impact the other person and our relationship with that other person.
Overall, when it comes to being a mindful listener, it’s vital to remember COAL: curiosity, openness,
acceptance, and love. 41 We need to go into our interactions with others and try to see things from their
points of view. When we engage in COAL, we can listen mindfully and be in the moment.
Now that we’ve introduced the basic concepts of listening, let’s examine a simple taxonomy of listening
that was created by Andrew Wolvin and Carolyn Coakley. 42 The basic premise of the Wolvin and
Coakley taxonomy of listening is that there are fundamental parts to listening and then higher-order
aspects of listening (Figure 7.5). Let’s look at each of these parts separately.
The base level of listening is what Wolvin and Coakley called discriminative listening, or distinguishing
between auditory and visual stimuli and determining which to actually pay attention to. In many ways,
discriminative listening focuses on how hearing and seeing a wide range of different stimuli can be filtered
and used.
We’re constantly bombarded by a variety of messages in our day-to-day lives. We have to discriminate
between which messages we want to pay attention to and which ones we won’t. As a metaphor, think
of discrimination as your email inbox. Every day you have to filter out messages (aka spam) to find the
messages you want to actually read. In the same way, our brains are constantly bombarded by messages,
and we have to filter some in and most of them out.
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