Are You Listening?
A funny thing happens when you don’t make a practice of listening to people. They find others who will. Anytime employees, spouses, colleagues, children, or friends no longer believe they are being listened to, they seek out people who will give them what they want. Sometimes the consequences can be disastrous: the end of a friendship, lack of authority at work, lessened parental infleunce, or the breakdown of a marriage.
What are the reasons why people fail to listen???
1. Lacking Focus
For some people, especially those with high energy, slowing down enough to listen can be challenging. Most people tend to speak about 180 words a minute, but they can listen at 300 to 500 words a minute. This disparity can create tension and cause a listener to lose focus. Most people try to fill up that communication gap by finding other things to do, such as day dreaming, think about their daily schedule or mentally review their to-do list, or watch other people.
2. Experiencing Mental Fatigue
Former president Ronald Reagan told an amusing story about two psychiatrists, one older and one younger. Each day they showed up at work immaculately dressed and alert. But at the end of the day, the younger doctor was frazzled and disheveled while the older man was as fresh as ever.
“How do you do it?” the younger psychiatrist finally asked his colleague. “You always stay so fresh after hearing patients all day.”
The older doctor replied, “It’s easy. I never listen.”
An eighty-nine year old woman with hearing problems visiting her doctor was told, “We now have a procedure that can correct your hearing problem. When would you like to schedule the operation?”
“There won’t be any operation because I don’t want my hearing corrected. I’m eighty-nine years old, and I’ve heard enough!”
So if you’re tired or facing difficult circumstances, remember that to remain an effective listening, you have to dig up more energy, concentrate and stay focused.
3. Selective Hearing
You have already stereotyped the people whom you are communicating with and this can be a huge barrier to listening.
“She’s just another woman. All she has to say revolves around shoes, handbags and clothes. Nothing will interest me.”
“She’s talking about her trip to Europe…oh yeah, been there done that. I won’t get anything new from listening to what she has to say.”
It tends to make us hear what we expect rather than what the person is actually saying. Most of us think that we don’t fall into this trap, but we all do to some degree.
4. Carrying Emotional Baggage
Nearly everyone has emotional filters that prevent him or her from hearing certain things that other people say. Your past experiences, both positive and negative, colour the way you look at life and shape your expectations. and particularly strong experiences, such as traumas or incidents from childhood, can make you tend to react strongly whenever you perceive you are in a similar situation. As Mark Tawin once said, “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. He’ll never sit on a cold stove either. From then on, that cat just won’t like stoves.”
If you’ve never worked enough through strong past emotional experiences, you may be filtering what others say through those experiences. If you’re preoccupied with certain topics, if a particular subject makes you defensive, or if you frequently project your point of view onto others, you may need to work through your issues before you can become an effective listener.
5. Being Preoccuped with Self
Simply said, if you don’t care about anyone but yourself, you are not going to listen to others. But the ironic thing is that when you don’t listen, the damage you do to yourself is ultimately even greater than what you do to other people.