Self-Management of Depression

When we discuss communication, we primarily focus on speaking, writing, and reading. Listening is seldom emphasized as a primary form of communication, even though it enables us to satisfy an individual’s deep psychological needs – to be understood, affirmed, validated, and appreciated (Covey, 2020). We mostly listen not to understand but to prepare a response, judge, or interpret information through our own motives and frame of reference. These poor listening styles can be subsumed under these 10 categories (Covey, 2014; Harvard Business Review Press, 2019): 1. Spacing out or ignoring is when you zone out because you are too preoccupied with your own thoughts. This does happen to all of us, but you don’t want to be labelled as a spacey person if this keeps happening to you.  2. Pretend or removed listening is where you may be multitasking and give the speaker the impression that you are paying attention using fillers like “yeah,” uh-huh,” “right,” “cool” or throwing in “lol” or ...