Are you listening?
You must have heard of the three ladies in their golden years, and their conversation while hanging out on a park bench on a balmy, breezy afternoon. Martha: “It’s windy!”. Cynthia: “No, it’s Thursday!” Rose: “Me too! Let’s go get a drink!”
Martha, Cynthia and Rose had a valid reason in their aging ears for not quite understanding one another. But what about those of us whose hearing is working perfectly well? Are we hearing what is being communicated? Are we really, truly listening?
To truly listen, you need more than working auditory biological equipment. You need to be prepared to hear. You need to be able shut down your interpretation engine, your assumptions appliance, your denial device, and your very own all-important agenda.
We have an innate urge to categorize what we hear so we can better deal with it. We need to somehow solve any perceived problem we hear. We pick out those meanings that best fit our own experience, wants and needs. We will hear that which suit us to hear.
When you turn off the busy translation services that stop us from really listening, you will find an incredibly rewarding new world.
You will discover the warm wave of gratitude that will be flowing your way from he who feels heard and acknowledged. You will stare in amazement at what you may discover about someone you thought you knew really well. You will feel the freedom that comes from listening without worrying about how it may affect you, or what you might have to respond with.
For once, it is not about you. Listening is not about you.
So when you go home today, or return to the office after the weekend, practice really listening. Really, truly listening without the comfort of your friendly, busy, ever-protective inner translators. Turn off the automatic pilot.
Ask your child about his day, and listen to the unspoken words. Hear the excitement, the frustration, the joy of being a kid.
Call someone who loves you, and let her be the focus. Hear the sounds of her world without coming up with a matching anecdote.
Listen to that funny colleague’s jokes. Hear the underlying exhaustion of constantly having to use humour to overcome acute shyness.
In his acceptance speech, Barack Obama famously said: “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree”. It is as difficult as it is powerful.
Learn to listen. In this day and age of the split-second attention span, it is one the best gifts you could give yourself and those who matter to you.
Like the mighty Dale Carnegie once said; we humans are not creatures of logic, but rather creatures of emotions, pride, and vanity.
I would add one thing to this statement; we are creatures with a manufaturing defect, in the sense that certain areas of what is supposed to be “erasable” programmable memeory seem to be hardwired; once memories of certain experiences are “burnt” in the chip’s capacitive transistors, it is almost impossible to erase. We should have been fitted with non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) instead! (Darwin, if somehow you can read this, bugger off, I ain’t gonna call for a re-design, and it ain’t gonna happen by itself, so just go back up there and enjoy the rivers of Eden, or just go back downthere to the BBQ party).
Unless you are willing to coach me (for free, I’m broke!) on how to do this, I would stand where I stand that this is a biggest challenge for us, as humans described by Carnegie… Not only this, but I challenge if you could throw away that precious necklace you spent years making, out of rare and hard-earned experience pearls, of chromas of white, black, and grey…
I’m not promoting stereo-typing or prejudgements, but then again, we cannot ignore our benchmark tools; we need to have our own frames of reference.
Nevertheless, I do acknowledge the extreme importance of listening, but would humbly suggest to add the “see-look” to the “hear-listen” stanza, so as to contribute to a richer poem that addresses, unorthodoxly, the mind before the heart, to yield a better benchmark re-calibration or rectification, in the continuous learning lifecycle, towards a better, more accurate personal judgement.
The spoken word can be as dangerous as magic … Remember, hyponsis starts by blurring the eyes, while crossing to the mind, in both its conscious and subconscious states, through the ears!
[...] recently wrote about listening, really listening. In conquering that difficult skill myself, I was amazed at how much I was [...]
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