The Importance of Listening

Being a great listener can win you friends, improve your marriage, boost your business profits or advance your career. It can make people feel so good about being with you that they'll literally follow you anywhere. Contrary to what you may have been lead to believe, listening is an incredibly complex skill to master. There's so much going on that doesn't meet the eye, that it's silly to even try to cover the subject in just a few short pages.

Listening involves not just accurately hearing what people say, but getting a sense of who they are, how they view life, what they want to accomplish, what concerns they have, what they're afraid of, how they're feeling, what they want from you, and more. It even involves "listening" to what people aren't directly saying, or what they might be too reluctant to say, or what they definitely don't want you to do in response to their communications. In order to become a very good listener, we can't just stop with hearing the words people say. We've got to attend to many other details and many other dimensions that don't meet the eye, but that are crucial nonetheless.

When people speak, they always reveal their deepest thoughts, ambitions, and concerns. Most of the time, neither the speaker, nor the listener, pick up on these subtle, underlying issues...but they are always there. Good listeners, on the other hand, frequently attend to these background, unspoken emotions and concerns. And when they "hear" them and empathize with them (either verbally or nonverbally) the speaker often remarks "Boy, you really know how I feel" or "Gee, you really understand exactly what's going on with me."

You can't be a good listener if you don't understand human beings. And I mean really understand human beings. How do you obtain this wisdom? I really don't know (it's probably part luck, part hard work and dedication, and part finding the right teachers or mentors). But you know what? When somebody's got it, you can tell in an instant. Thus, the wiser you become about life in general, the better a listener you invariably will be. No matter how many technical communication skills you master, if you don't have extensive wisdom about people, you won't come across as truly understanding them.

Many people fall prey to negative thinking and feelings. When they communicate with others, these negative states come through, and they may even want others to sympathize with them and agree with their negative points of view. You can listen to people communicate about a tragedy with a great deal of compassion. But you also can listen optimistically and with positive human regard for their inner strengths and human capabilities. Sometimes people are so entrenched in their negativism of the moment that they fail to focus on their positive human traits. As a listener, however, you can remind them of this positivity, provided you do it with tact, timing and sensitivity.

Translation: Stop talking, Start Listening!!