Hello class, my name is Bryan, and I was part of group 1 and our presentation on public speaking. As a group, we presented on chapters 1,2, 3, and 5 with me specifically having a chapter on listening!

When Mrs. Sinkoff first came to us during class and explained that we would have to do a group presentation I almost fainted. It’s not that I have a problem talking or interacting with people but I just dread depending on them for my grade. I hate the idea that one person must do more than the other. I hate the illogical thinking of groups because I just don’t think a random group of people can work together. However… I was proven wrong. My group was amazing! As soon as we were placed in our breakout room everything felt great. We were talking, planning, and even having fun. We started off by introducing ourselves to each other and starting a group chat so we could communicate. From there we discussed who had what chapter and what our goals were. 

When I arrived home, I quickly started taking a deep dive into my chapter on listening. I took notes, broke down concepts, and planned how I would want to proceed with my slides. The first key feature I focused on was the components of listening. Why you may be asking? Why begin with this? I felt as if this chapter was that held a lot of information. So much so that I was finding it hard to organize myself in a way I could fit all my information into just 5 slides. However, every time I went back to my notes, the components of listening always stuck out to me. I feel as if it’s a perfect way to introduce us to the topic at hand. Furthermore, what are these topics? 

·      Hearing: physical reception of sound. 

·      Understanding: having the intent to listen and grasp what is being said. 

·      Remembering: Being able to recall what you heard.

·      Interpreting: the ability to assign some sort of meaning to sound and senses you feel.

·      Evaluating: a tool that allows you to thoroughly examine the message. 

·      Responding: being able to verbally or nonverbally respond to the speaker’s speech

 

These six ideas are what listening is from top to bottom, it helps you grasp the big idea of the chapter keyed in on. It continuously popped up in my notes in various ways. Is that being each component separated or all of them being brought up together? I felt it was important to emphasize it in the first slide. 

Moving on to slide number two I went more in-depth into what barriers can affect your listening. This in specific was one of the points in the chapter that I was really able to connect to my life the most. I feel that my biggest issue when it comes to listening is I get easily distracted. One that I didn’t even know I continuously did was pseudo-listening. As explained in the presentation, pseudo-listening Is the action of pretending to listen to be attentive but you’re not. This hit home because I can name countless times when I acted as if I was paying attention, but I was thinking about what I was going to have for dinner. Barriers are something a lot of us must face on a daily occurrence, it's hard to continuously stay focused on things when we have a thousand things racing through our minds. However, if we want to become better listeners, we must be able to block out and minimize these barriers to help improve. This could be:

·      Catching your mind wandering

·      Moving to a quiet side of a room

·      Asking someone to repeat themselves 

·      Turning off and silencing phones 

 

Furthermore, the following slide was on creating dialogue. Yes, I know, what does dialogue have to do with listening? Well, I was asking this myself and I got my answer fairly quickly. Someone who listens must be able to react. I like to think about it as Newton's third law. Every action (in this case every speech) has an equal and opposite reaction (an answer). We as a listener must be able to read a room and pose questions and challenges to speakers. This helps you as the listener further understand the speech and what it was on. Any questions, concerns, or even anecdotes you might want to say you should a hundred percent do it. However, you should do them following two rules:

·      Being respectful

·      Being honest

Following these rules, you’re able to keep a cool and respectable way of communicating your thoughts. The following two slides consist of a brief summary and a video that helped me further understand the chapter. 

Additionally, I felt the most important thing to talk about was the actual presentation in itself. I’ve always considered myself to be a good speaker. I have a good voice, attitude, and confidence (as I have been told). So, walking into this I felt at ease with presenting, but something felt different. I blame it on a Zoom call because unlike most people I like talking in front of people so it kind of felt weird talking to a bunch of black squares. But overall, everything felt good after starting everything started flowing and felt natural. Overall, I felt as if my group and I did an amazing job presenting our project and I loved how everything turned out.

                  Lastly, everyone in all the other groups did a great job presenting their projects. I loved all the different ideas, styles, and creativity that everyone showed.