INHE 2002 Week 3 Listening Self-Assessment Example

Six Skills, Six Ratings, Six Pieces of Evidence: A Listening Self-Assessment From Two Practice Conversations, Honest About the Two Skills Where the Evidence Ran Thin

Student Name

Walden University

INHE 2002: Introduction to Health and Wellness Coaching

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Six Skills, Six Ratings, Six Pieces of Evidence: A Listening Self-Assessment From Two Practice Conversations, Honest About the Two Skills Where the Evidence Ran Thin

Method

I rated my listening on six named skills after two recorded practice conversations with a classmate who played a client wanting more energy in the afternoons. The first four skills come from the core set taught in motivational interviewing: open questions, affirmations, reflections and summaries (Miller & Rollnick, 2013). The other two, attending and comfort with silence, come from this course's listening reading. I used a four-point scale: 1 means absent, 2 means present but weak, 3 means present and useful, 4 means consistently skillful. Each rating carries one piece of evidence, quoted from the recordings with the minute marked.

Ratings and Evidence

Table 1

Ratings with quoted evidence from practice recordings

Counts and quotations come from my own transcripts of the two recordings, each about fifteen minutes.

The Two Skills Rated 3

Open questions and reflections were my strongest skills, and the evidence for each is direct. Nine of my fourteen questions were open, and the best of them invited the client to describe a good afternoon rather than a bad one. My reflections were mostly simple, repeating content, but one in each conversation went a step further and named something she had implied. When I reflected the link between meetings and the afternoon slump, she said "Exactly" and then offered something new about her mornings. A study comparing listening responses found that people who received active listening responses felt more understood than those who received advice or simple acknowledgments (Weger et al., 2014), which matches what happened at that moment.

The Two Skills Rated 2

Affirmations and summaries were present but weak. I offered one affirmation in thirty minutes of conversation. My summary in the second conversation was accurate on the facts but left out what mattered most to her, the worry that her manager would notice her tiredness. A summary that omits the client's own priority tells her I was tracking the topic, not her.

The Two Skills Where Evidence Ran Thin

I could not rate attending, because the recordings had no video. Rather than guess from memory, I left it unrated. Comfort with silence is unrated for a different reason: I filled both pauses before she could use them, so I have evidence that I am uncomfortable with silence but none of what happens when I allow it. Rogers (1957) described empathic understanding as something the client must be able to perceive, and silence may be one of the ways that happens. My recordings cannot show it either way yet.

What I Will Practice Next

For the next practice conversation, I will record video so attending can be rated, wait at least five seconds after each pause, and end with a summary that names the client's main concern in her own words before any facts. Each change targets a rating I can test with the next recording.

References

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2013). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95-103. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357

Weger, H., Castle Bell, G., Minei, E. M., & Robinson, M. C. (2014). The relative effectiveness of active listening in initial interactions. International Journal of Listening, 28(1), 13-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2013.813234