Listening is perhaps the most important of all interpersonal skills. Effective listening is very often the foundation of strong relationships with others, at home, socially, in education and in the workplace. Listening not only can it help you process information on different levels, but it can also help you build relationships with others.That’s because listening goes deeper than just hearing.

There are several types of listening skills they are:

- Comprehensive Listening: Comprehensive listening requires language skills. Comprehensive listening involves understanding the message or messages that are being communicated. It is fundamental to all listening sub-types. Several other types of listening build on comprehensive listening.

Comprehensive listening is complimented by sub-messages from non-verbal communication, such as the tone of voice, gestures and other body language. These non-verbal signals can greatly aid communication and comprehension but can also confuse and potentially lead to misunderstanding. One can also use comprehensive listening when you receive feedback.

• Informational listening: When one listen to learn something, they are engaged in informational listening.
  It usually takes a high level of concentration to perform this type of listening. Informational listening is less active than many of the other types of listening. When we’re listening to learn or be instructed we are taking in new information and facts, we are not criticising or analysing.

If one know how to use informational listening, they empower themselves to become a better learner. By actively learning and improving oneself, they can become a more valuable asset in their place of work.

• Discriminative listening: Discriminative listening is developed at the younger age. It is the most basic form of listening and does not involve the understanding of the meaning of words or phrases but merely the different sounds that are produced.

Discriminative listening is how babies understand the intention of a phrase before they can understand words. If someone speaks to them in a happy and amused tone of voice, they’ll smile and laugh back. When discriminative listening skills are combined with visual stimuli, the resulting ability to ‘listen’ to body-language enables us to begin to understand the speaker more fully.

• Critical listening : Critical listening is used to analyze complex information. Critical listening is crucial when problem-solving at work. Critical listening is a much more active behaviour than informational listening and usually involves some sort of problem solving or decision making Using critical thinking while listening goes deeper than comprehensive listening. Instead of taking the information at face value, one can use critical listening to evaluate what’s being said.

Many day-to-day decisions that we make are based on some form of ‘critical’ analysis, whether it be critical listening, reading or thought. when listening critically it is important to have an open-mind and not be biased by stereotypes or preconceived ideas.

• Empathetic or Therapeutic listening: Using this type of listening, one can try to understand someone else’s point of view as they’re speaking Empathetic listening involves attempting to understand the feelings and emotions of the speaker.

Counsellors, therapists and some other professionals use this type of listening to understand and ultimately help their clients. This type of listening does not involve making judgements or offering advice but gently encouraging the speaker to explain and elaborate on their feelings and emotions. Showing empathy is a desirable trait in many interpersonal relationships one may well feel more comfortable talking about their own feelings and emotions with a particular person.
By using empathetic listening, anyone can tell how much pressure one is feeling. And can imagine themself having to break the bad news.

• Sympathetic listening: Sympathetic listening is an emotionally-driven type of relationship listening, wherein a listener processes the feelings and emotions of a speaker and tries to provide support and understanding in return.

Instead of focusing on the message spoken through words, the listener focuses on the feelings and emotions of the speaker. Sympathetic listening is an important type of listening to use when trying to establish a deep connection with another person, especially when that person is experiencing adversity. Sympathetic listening is crucial if one want to build a deeper relationship with someone in their life.

• Biased listening: Biased listening is also known as selective listening. Biased listening is a type of listening behavior demonstrated when someone is just listening for information that they want to hear.

People are often unaware that they are using a biased listening process. Biased listening can lead to a distortion of facts in the mind of a listener who is not tuned in to what a speaker intends to communicate. Biased listening can take place on the basis of certain stereotypes in the mind of the listener. A biased listener is quite judgmental for what others say.