Chase Adam

COMM 2110: Interpersonal Communication

Sarah Billington
December 8, 2019

Overview
This report serves as a summary of my personal change; noting where I have found success
and failure. My goal was to greatly improve my ability to attend to conversations, increasing my
capacity to actively listen and retain information. To meet this goal, I thought the best course of
action would be to limit my own self-talk, as well as improve the efficiency of how I understand
details in a conversation. The specific strategies I implemented to accomplish this were the
stop, look, and listen strategy (Beebe 8e, p. 126-127), “mentally summarize the details of the
message”, and “mentally weave these summaries into a focused major point or a series of
major ideas” (Beebe 8e, p. 129). I struggled with the constraints of not always having my goals
in mind during a conversation, and getting distracted focusing on the specifics of my strategies.
The results thus far have been positive, but there is still room for improvement. In the future I
will continue to use the strategies that worked, and expand them into every conversation until
the strategies come naturally.
Unwanted Communication Pattern
Recently, in the past few months, I have noticed that I have formed an annoying habit of not
properly attending to conversations. I would periodically catch myself losing focus mid
conversation. In turn I often was not fully understanding and retaining the messages of these
conversations, or the true meaning of the message, the meta-message (Beebe 8e, p. 127). The
details of so many conversations had slipped right through my mind, without me having properly
interpreted many of them. This is something that I have noticed at various points throughout my
life, but the frequency of the problem has increased within the past year or so. This has
understandably caused frustration for my girlfriend, friends, and family. It has been extremely
frustrating for me as well, as I don't want to see myself as being a selfish person, but my
listening habits in the recent past would absolutely define me as being such.
Since the root my communication problems is the attending step of listening, it was easy to find
the barriers that are causing my unwanted communication patterns. There are two barriers that
negatively affect my listening, and one of these barriers is the cause of the other. The first
barrier I was dealing with is that I was experiencing a differing speech rate and thought rate.
This occurs because the average person speaks at a rate of about 125 words per minute, and
the brain has the ability to process 600-800 words per minute. This means that you can gather
the message faster than it is spoken, tune out of the conversation, and completely lose focus
(Beebe 8e, p. 124). This was undoubtedly what was happening with me, as I have often found
myself assuming the meaning of a message before the other person is finished speaking. This
is a problem because I have incorrectly assumed a message’s meaning more often than I would
like to admit.
There are many instances where a differing speech and thought rate has caused me
issues, but one specific example happened early in my personal change journal, and
was significant enough to cause a conflict. In September, my girlfriend and her family
 were preparing to leave on vacation, and I had agreed to watch their house and dog
while they were away. I knew about this trip months ahead of time, and just before the
trip I was having a conversation with my girlfriend. She expressed her excitement for the
upcoming trip, and was giving me specifics. Somewhere in the process, she was telling
a story, and I began to anticipate the ending; this lead me to get lost in my own self-talk.
I kept nodding my head and saying “mhm” and “okay”; I was not paying attention as well
as I should have been. When she finished talking, I had to ask her again what day and
time she was leaving. She was very irritated because she had just told me all about the
specific plans, but I had distracted myself, and missed out on the important details. It
was embarrassing for me and I felt bad for not listening properly.
The second listening barrier I had to overcome was being a self absorbed listener. I was
frequently focusing on my own conversation goals rather than the other person’s. In a way, my
differing speech and thought rate was causing me to show conversational narcissism;
because I was anticipating the end of a message, I had already begun thinking about what I
needed to say next, drawing me out of the actual conversation (Beebe 8e, p.123).
The earliest recorded example of me being a self absorbed listener occurred in the first
week of documenting my personal change. I was talking to my girlfriend about how she
had been recording youtube videos of her playing video games, and she was very
excited about it. Seeing how happy she was also made me very happy, but I still found
myself anticipating what she was going to say next. I started engaging in self talk, and
remembered that I wanted to tell her about a project I was working on and excited about.
When she finished talking, I immediately hopped in with what I needed to say. I
completely changed the subject and squashed her enthusiasm. She didn’t call me out on
it, but I quickly realized what I had done and I felt bad about it. This is a prime example
of me being a conversational narcissist.

Strategies
The first strategy that I identified to be potentially helpful in achieving my goals was the strategy
of stop, look, and listen. This is a three-step process, and one of the most basic strategies to
improve listening comprehension skills (Beebe 8e, p. 126-127). The three steps of this strategy
are:
1. Stop. Stopping off-topic self-talk is the first and most important step in attending to a
conversation. This is where active listening starts, and this step includes putting
unrelated thoughts aside, being mentally and physically present, making a conscious
effort to listen, being patient with the speaker, and being open minded (Beebe 8e, p.
126). I was struggling really hard with this step in the beginning, particularly with putting
thoughts aside, being open minded, and being patient. My struggles reflect the source of
my issue, as this would later end up becoming the most important step.
2. Look. This step is where we look for nonverbal messages that can help us understand
the meta-message. This is where body language becomes important, as it is a crucial
nonverbal cue that can really help with interpreting the speaker’s thoughts and feelings
about said thoughts. The look step also goes in the other direction, as it encourages
making eye contact and using other verbal cues to let the other person know you’re
 listening (Beebe 8e, p.127). I had a theory that this step would come easily after the stop
step, and I was mostly correct in assuming this. I also felt that looking for cues was a
good way to stay in the conversation, and using my own nonverbals was a good way to
let my girlfriend know I was still mentally there.
3. Listen. This final step is essentially the basic mechanics of listening: don’t interrupt,
respond with appropriate verbal and nonverbal feedback, and contribute to the
conversation (Beebe 8e, p. 127). I assumed that if I could master the first two steps in
the process, then the third one would come easily; I learned later that being an active
listener is a little more involved than that.
The next strategy I planned to implement from the beginning is actually two separate strategies,
but I believe they work together as one. These strategies are mentally summarize the details
of the message, and mentally weave these summaries into a focused major point or a
series of major ideas. Mentally summarizing the details of a message involves categorizing the
smaller details in a way that makes sense and will help in recalling that information later.
Mentally weaving these summaries into a focused major point allows the listener to really think
about how the details relate to the message, thus helping them better understand the meta-
message (Beebe 8e, p. 129). Since recall is one of the things I’ve been struggling with, these
strategies seemed like an obvious choice from the beginning. This strategy would’ve been
particularly useful in my earlier example where I was discussing vacation details with my
girlfriend. Summarizing and making sense of the details would have prevented me from
forgetting them so quickly.
After starting this project, I found that the initial strategies were working, but still felt like I might
have needed some extra help, so I began to look at other strategies too. One problem I
encountered during my project is that even when I was properly attending to a conversation,
there were some times where it didn’t seem like I was. This showed me that I needed to
improve my responding skills in addition to my attending skills. After looking into how to
accomplish this, I found that Beebe, Beebe, and Redmond recommend the strategies of “ask
appropriate questions” and “accurately paraphrase”. When we ask questions and
paraphrase, we let the other person know that we are understanding the details of the message
(Beebe 8e, p. 135-136).
I also attempted the strategy of determining your listening goal. In theory this strategy works
because it forces one to focus on the details of a message, so that they can decide what details
are important to their listening goal. In the way that the Beebe et al. describe it, knowing your
listening goals should allow you to alter your listening style to best help you meet that goal
(Beebe 8e, p. 128). It sounded really good in theory, but in practice this felt really inauthentic to
me. Rather than being present in a conversation, I found myself searching for specific details
that would meet my goals. I ended up dropping this strategy.

Constraints
The main constraint I found to my own personal change was one of the reasons I was having
conversational problems in the first place. My mind tends to wander a lot, and sometimes it was
hard to keep my personal change goals in the front of my mind during a conversation.
I actually find some irony in this trying to overcome this constraint, because in many cases
where I was trying to focus on meeting my personal change goals, I found myself paying more
attention to the meaning of the goals themselves, than actually implementing them. For
example, one of my personal change strategies was to utilize self-talk as a way to summarize
information, and therefore have a better chance of retaining the details of a conversation.
Ironically, participating in such self talk, and thinking about how to properly implement it, caused
me to lose focus on the actual conversation. I was specifically called out by my girlfriend for this
more than once, and it interfered with conversations with friends as well. It’s hard to pay
attention when you have to think about how to pay attention. For example:
I first noticed this ironic constraint while playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friend
group, just a couple weeks into journaling my change project. One of my good friends,
who was running the game, was giving our group story exposition. It was full of detail,
and I knew I should be actively listening so that I could recall these details later. I started
engaging in self-talk to remind myself that I need to make a mental summary of the
information. In doing so, I was lost in my own self-talk and missed some of the info, and
had to ask about it again later. This was frustrating to my friend running the game, as
well as some other friends who had actually taken the initiative to remember the details.

Implementation
My very first step in implementing my change strategies was to inform other people what I was
doing. I thought about people who were most affected by my poor attending skills, and let them
know about my personal change project. In this way, I set up a check against myself. If I
seemed to be off focus, my conversational partner could recognize what was happening, and
remind me to stay on the subject at hand. The first person I told about this project was my
girlfriend, then also one of my siblings, and finally one of my friends. The fact that they knew
what I was doing was a good motivator in itself, because it can be embarrassing to be caught
not paying attention. Since I don’t want to be embarrassed, I tried even harder to stay focused.
Now that I look back at it, this was also a good way to avoid the constraints of me not always
being able to keep my goals on my mind, because now there were other people to remind me.
The first strategies I started out with were “Stop, Look, and Listen”, “mentally summarize the
details of the message”, and “mentally weave these summaries into a focused major point or a
series of major ideas”. In the beginning this seemed simple enough. I found the stop step to be
really useful in important conversations where I was caught in my own self-talk. Mentally
summarizing details was helpful when I could remember to do it.
When my girlfriend first returned from her trip (the same trip that I mentioned above), she told
me all about it. I did very well in remembering details, because I was mentally categorizing them
in a way that personally made sense to me. I felt like I was being an incredible listener, and it
felt good. This motivated me to keep trying harder and listen like this on a regular basis. Things
seemed to be looking better and better for a while, but there were periodic setbacks that
showed how inconsistent my listening can be.
I found that from the beginning, I was fairly inconsistent in implementing my strategies for
change. I began taking notes on my phone, keeping a tally of how many successful and
unsuccessful encounters I had experienced that week. I considered a successful encounter to
be one where I had explicitly remembered to use one or more of my planned strategies. An
unsuccessful encounter would be marked if I had repeated any unwanted communication
pattern, or if I was generally not mindful about implementing the strategies and saw any
noticeable negative consequences because of it. I didn’t remember to mark every single
conversation I had, but I was hoping that significant communication victories or losses would be
enough to remind me to record them.
In the first couple weeks of my personal change project, I had counted many more successes
than failures. The first week had 10 failures, and only 3 recorded successes. The second wasn’t
much better, with 9 recorded failures, and still 3 recorded successes. I figured that this would
get better, and it soon did. Week 5 had 6 recorded failures, and 7 recorded successful
interactions. I felt good to be improving, but week 7 was a setback; I had 9 failures and 4
successes. This showed me that, because I was not recording every single conversation’s
success, I could not rely on the tallies to show me an accurate level of improvement. After this
point, I started using the tallies as more of an outline to my success, rather than rely on them to
show the full picture of my improvement.
One of the most significant failures in my communication goals was in mid October. This was a
failure in regard to properly attending to conversation in a way that would help me recall
information. I had been housesitting for my girlfriend’s grandparents while they were on a cruise,
and my girlfriend was there for part of it. We don’t live together, and there are certain ways that
she likes chores to be done around the house. She let me know several times how to do things,
but I was a poor listener and some of the details slipped through my mind. This is frustrating
because it would have been so easily avoided if I had properly summarized the details of how to
do the chores. This led to a major conflict. At the time I didn’t see how I was wrong, because I
didn’t think it was a problem, the chores got done either way. I really should have used better
social decentering here, as the conflict was furthered by me not understanding the way she
was raised to do things, and therefore not taking her frustrations seriously (Beebe 8e, p. 130).
At the time I also felt like she was exaggerating how many times she’d explained how to do
things, but not that I look back at this situation, this could’ve easily been a case of my own self-
talk distracting me. Using the Stop, Look, and Listen strategy would have probably prevented
this conflict entirely.
After this conflict, I modified the Stop, Look, and Listen strategy into a specific shortcut that
worked for me (Beebe 8e, p. 126-127). If I found myself getting caught in my own self talk, I
would just repeatedly say “stop” in my mind. I would do this until I was back on topic in the
conversation, which would usually take just under a second. This functioned as a quick
reminder to cut the self talk, look for nonverbal messages, and actively listen to what the other
person was saying. This was the easiest way I found to curb the ironic constraint of not listening
due to thinking about how to listen.
In mid november, things were going pretty well. I had been regularly implementing my
strategies, and overall was feeling good about my listening abilities. I gradually felt like I was
getting better at attending to my conversations, but there was no single event that made me feel
like I had hit a goal yet.
Some time around this point, I was having a conversation with my girlfriend about Christmas
and what her family was planning on doing. I was doing my normal strategies, mentally
summarizing information and using it to better understand the meta message. At some point in
our conversation, my girlfriend told me I wasn’t paying attention. I was, I just wasn’t verbally
responding. At this point I had realized that I tend to use verbal responses like “mhm” as a
crutch, making it seem like I am listening when I wasn’t. So I had given this up for the most part,
and it caused me to not respond properly in general. This is when I implemented the “ask
appropriate questions” and “accurately paraphrase” strategies. Since then, I feel like it’s easier
for other people to understand when I’m actively listening, which in turn makes it easier for me
to pick up on nonverbals and adjust my listening when necessary.
Results
Being done with this personal change project, I can say that I am not entirely satisfied with the
improvements made; at least not yet. In general, I would say that I have achieved success. I
would consider myself now much more of an other-oriented person than where I started; that is
to say, I am much more aware of how my listening affects my communication partners (Beebe
8e, p. 2). This has also increased my general mindfulness as a communicator, as better
listening has given me a deeper understanding of messages in most conversations, and has
allowed me to make conscious decisions in regard to my responses (Beebe 8e, p. 32).
The main reason I would not say I have achieved total success is because I still struggle to
overcome the constraint of having my communication goals at the forefront of my mind in every
conversation I take part in. The strategies work great when I can remember them, but I’m
working against around 21 years of bad communication habits. At some points it feels unnatural
to have to consider the exact ways I categorize and remember details, but I’m still improving.
Every day it becomes a little easier, and as I outlined above, I’ve begun implementing some
strategies naturally, without even thinking about this project. When I feel that the strategies have
fully become ingrained in my mind, I will have considered this project a complete success.
Recommendations
In the future, I would like to implement these strategies in more minor communications as well.
Since I started this project with the idea that improved listening would improve relationships with
people who are close to me, I focused mainly on using my strategies in situations where the
conversations were longform, and had been defined by myself as being significant. I think if I
had implemented my strategies in more casual conversations with acquaintances, I might have
had an easier time adapting to using these strategies.
Seeing that I have gained some level of success over the course of this semester, I will consider
my success as a proof of concept for now. I am definitely going to continue using these
strategies. It may take much longer than I originally anticipated, or maybe I’ll be using my
strategies without knowing it by next week. I honestly have no idea how long it will take, but I
see it working now, which inspires me to keep practicing listening. Positively changing
something so significant as the very way I listen and communicate is definitely worth putting in
some more effort if it continues to make me a more other-oriented person. Change is a process,
and I plan to keep working on it.
Works Cited
Beebe, Steven A., et al. Interpersonal Communication: Relating to Others. 8th ed., 2017.