Five Ways to Listen Better

Nur Indah Sari

Widya Gama Mahakam University
nurindahsari2261@gmail.com

Abstract: Losing our hearing is a big problem, because hearing is an access to understand a
communication. This journal is written as an assignment of research on the subject "listening".
The background of this research was that most people have lost their hearing that is accurate
and do not know how to keep what they have heard. The purpose of this research was an
observations on how people practices on good listening. The object of this research was a video
published by TED with a speaker named Julian Treasure on July 29, 2011 on YouTube. The
research data were collected by listening, watching and observing the video by Julian
Treasure. After watched the video for several times, based on the observation, the results of this
research was how to improve someone listening skills with some simple exercises mentioned by
the speaker and change the pattern of someone’s hearing ability in order to listen better. In the
other hand, we can find that the speaker’s methods practically can improve someone’s listening
skills.

Keywords: listening skills, sounds, exercise

INTRODUCTION

On this day, many people were losing their hearing. Mostly, they just receive about 25 percent
information from what they heard. Hearing is a process of communication. Whereas, listening is a
process of making a meaning from sound we heard.

Julian Treasure known as a sought-after and top-rated international speaker. Julian Treasure is
chairman of The Sound Agency, a consultancy advising worldwide businesses on how to design with
sound, especially in public or branded spaces. Julian also is the author of the book Sound Business and
keeps a blog on his own website that ponders such matters. His vision is to make the world sound
beautiful, by helping individuals to make and receive sound consciously, and organizations to discover
that good sound is good business. In the video that the researcher observe he told there are five simple
exercises to improve our conscious listening, those are:

1. Silence

2. Mixer

3. Savoring

4. Listening Positions
 5. Acronym

The speaker said from the problem above, there are some methods made by the speaker’s that
can be exercise to objects with a hope that the object can improve people’s hearing and listening skills.

FINDING

Listening is receiving language through the ears. Listening involves identifying the sounds of
speech and processing them into words and sentences. Listening in any language requires focus and
attention. It is a skill that some people need to work at harder than others. People who have difficulty
concentrating are typically poor listeners.

Generally, people spent 60 percent of communication time listening, but, they only remember
25 percent what they have heard (in minute 0:13).

From the video, the speaker was explained five exercises to listen better and to improve the
listening skills. Based on the video, the five methods are:

1. Silence (in minute 4:04)

The speaker said that it is a wonderful exercise to reset people ears for just three minutes a day of
silence so that people can hear the quiet again.

2. Mixer (in minute 4:21)

Even if people are in a noisy place they still can focus with one sound like in a coffee bar, how many
sounds they can heard, how many people talk to each other in it. People also can do it a beautiful place
like the lake, how many birds that they heard on it, where are they, what are they doing. It is a great
exercise to improving the quality of listening.

3. Savoring (in minute 4:47)

This exercise is about to enjoy the mundane sounds for the example are the dryer and the coffee grinder.
The mundane sound can be really interesting if people pay attention on it. This is a beautiful exercise
because it is around us all the time

4. Listening Position (in minute 5:22)

It is about what listening place that appropriate to people, people also can move to different places to
get conscious listening so that they can enjoy what they listen, it is the most important exercise of all of
these.

5. Acronym (in minute 5:54)

 People can use it in listening and communication. The acronym is RASA and it stands for:

a. Receive: pay attention to the person we talk with.

b. Appreciate: make little noises like “hmm,” “oh,” “okay,”

c. Summarize : the word “so” is very important in communication

d. Ask: ask questions afterward.

CONCLUSION

According to the finding on the previous part it can be conclude that those five exercises
are: Silence, Mixer, Savoring, Listening Position and Acronym can be used for teaching listening skills in
order to people can learn how to consciously listening all the time. Hopefully the generation nowadays
can listen consciously to get a connection to others in order to create the understanding so that they can
live in peace.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Treasure, Julian. (2011). 5 Ways to Listen Better. TED. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=cSohjlYQI2A&t=5s, 10 October 2016

Treasure, Julian. (2015). Julian Treasure: Master of Sound. Julian

Treasure. http://www.juliantreasure.com/about-julian/biography/, 23 October 2016