Three levels of listening

In pairs, participants undertake the following three activities:

Level 1 Listening.
One person listens while the other talks. The person talking describes a holiday they took and what went well and could have been better.
The partner listens to the other person's story and interprets it entirely in terms of their own experience. This means commenting on what the person is saying and offering an opinion. The pair then discuss how it felt to listen and be listened to at level 1. Normally the partner is busy listening to what is going on in their own internal dialogue and making judgments rather than listening to the other person. This can leave the person talking feeling they haven't been listened to.

Level 2 Listening (sometimes referred to as active listening).
Working with the same partner - and the same story - this time the focus in on being curious about what the person telling the story is saying. The person listening asks questions, clarifies points and summarizes what they are hearing.The pair then discuss how it felt to listen and be listened to at level 2 and how it differs from level 1. In this instance people usually feel they have been better listened to and that they have learned more about the other person.

Level 3 Listening
Again working with the same partner - and this time a different story
- this time the focus is on listening to the emotions and words. The
task for the person listening is to follow both the story and the
emotions to get a more rounded view of what the other person
experienced. They then discuss the differences between the three
levels. This usually results in people realizing how much they
usually miss in a conversation and how great the experience is to be fully listened to.