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Listening is as important to communication as speaking. Bad listening can devastate both nations and individuals. To climb the ladder of effective listening, we must first be able to hear a message, the discriminative phase. Thereafter, we must master the skills of focusing, understanding, and interpreting, the comprehensive phase. In the empathic phase, we share the speaker’s point of view, and in the appreciative phase, we enjoy the speaker’s ability to structure messages skillfully and to word ideas attractively. Critical listening requires us to have the ability to evaluate messages, and constructive listening, the final rung of the ladder, challenges us to find the value in messages for our lives.