Ah yes! You might have guessed it. I am talking about ‘listening’. In fact, I’ll go further than saying listening is the forgotten skill and say it is a skill that most of us lack. We are never taught how to listen properly.

Hearing vs Listening: Hearing is a mechanical process. Sound reaches your eardrums as vibrations, travel through the middle and inner ear where it is converted to nerve impulses, then carried via the auditory nerve to the temporal lobes, the area in your brain where hearing takes place.  If you are not hearing-impaired, hearing simply happens. Listening, however, is something you consciously choose to do. Listening requires concentration so that your brain processes meaning from words and sentences. Most people tend to be “hard of listening” rather than “hard of hearing.”

How NOT to listen: This is how ‘hard of listening’ show up.  While ‘listening’ to the other person we are busy

• evaluating what they are saying,
• judging,
• jumping to conclusions,
• preparing our own responses,
• indulge in letting our mind wander,
• multitask,
• interrupt and sometimes we even
• talk over them,
• so anxious to say our piece, the minute they pause to breath and formulate their next thought, we’re in there with our opinions, thoughts, ideas, hijacking the discussion, showing how clever we are, making sure we get heard.

How to listen:  What to do instead?

• Be present, prepared to be nowhere else
• Give attention
• Listen with an open mind
• Tune in to feelings as well as to what is being said
• Keep quiet until the other person has said everything they want to say
• Watch for non-verbal clues
• Pay attention to how you talk to each other, as well as what you are talking about
• Ask the right questions at the right time. How will you know? When you have truly listened, you will know. Don’t take my word for it. Go test it.
• Skip the ‘why’ question. When you ask ‘why’ as in ‘why did you do that’, it begs justification. It is much better to ask ‘what made you do that’ or ‘what were you thinking?’ As a general guideline ‘Why’ gets you stories, ‘what’ gets you facts.  In my experience the question ‘What did you do that for’ gets you stories too, so be careful with that one.

Why? Yes, why should you listen?  Let me do that annoying thing and answer this with a series of questions.

• Would you rather be listened to in the way it is described under how NOT to listen or would you prefer someone paid attention and listened to you with their whole being?
• How do you experience it when you are not being listened to?
• How do you experience it when someone truly listens to you?   

If you have never had the experience of being truly listened to, go find someone who will do that for you, who will not judge you, cut you off, tell you off, ignore you or do any of the other annoying things that indicate they are not paying attention to you and only you.

Make sure you do the same for someone else.

Here’s your Challenge and it comes with a warning. Next time you have a conversation, practice listening, truely listening. When uncomfortable feelings come up, keep listening, let the words flow over you. Whatever it might mean, you could be wrong. Remember, best to ask the right question at the right time.

Warning. Truly listening creates an environment that makes the other person feel supported and safe. This means  they are likely to say things they would not normally divulge. Honour this trust. Take responsibility to keep it safe for you and the other person. If they say something that is hard to hear, you do not agree with or are finding difficult in any way,  breath to calm yourself. It is critical that you hold the space you have created. It’s OK to admit ‘this is hard for me to hear’. It’s OK to keep quiet.  As Susan Scott says ‘Let silence do the heavy lifting.’

Good luck and good listening!