We live in a world that advocates, advertises and glorifies “multi-tasking” (doing several things at the same time). Listening to music or radio while driving, watching TV and eating, business luncheons, browsing the internet while talking to someone on cell phone…etc are all so common in our daily lives. It may be a good thing to be able to achieve many tasks at the same time, but we have to understand that there are some things that need a lot more attention than we ever realize. It is interesting to note that we are taught how to speak, talk, lecture, preach…etc, but never are taught how to listen.
Did you ever hear about a class or a course on listening? Unless you are a psychology major or a person who is being trained to be a counselor, you will never have the opportunity to learn to listen. In fact we presume that listening just happens, we take it for granted that everyone in the audience or in the room is listening. For many of us listening is not an exclusive task, we are often doing something else while listening to others. Listening carefully, consciously and fully involved is a lost art for our generation; many young people see it as a waste of time.
Listening carefully, consciously and fully involved is a lost art for our generation; many young people see it as a waste of time.
One of the cries of the youth of this generation is that nobody listens to them. As human beings we all have a strong desire to express ourselves but if nobody is paying attention, we feel left out or rejected. Here is a possible solution for our problem of rejection or being ignored, instead of always complaining that nobody listens to me or nobody understands me, let’s try to listen or understand others. In the words of Francis of Assisi “O Divine master, grant that I may not so much seek to be understood, as to understand…” Listening is a very important part of understanding and one of the reasons why many of us lack understanding is because we are slow to listen. Sometimes I feel that we talk so much that our own tongue deafens our listening (a lesson realized from personal experience). To be very honest I think it is easy to talk but very difficult to listen, because listening involves discipline, focus, humility, willingness to put aside out prejudice and pay attention to what is being said.
“To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversations”
M. Scott Peck writes “An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, step inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually an extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener”.
Listening is so important that the earliest Jesuit missionaries made it a point not to speak for approximately six months when they entered new locations, they recognized the importance of understanding before attempting to educate. There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversations” Rachel Remen in her kitchen table wisdom mentions “The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention. … A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.” Careful and conscious listening not only helps us understand and learn, but also is a sign of respect and makes people feel valued.
Robert W Herron says “Good listening is like tuning in a radio station. For good results, you can listen to only one station at a time. Trying to listen to my wife while looking over an office report is like trying to receive two radio stations at the same time. I end up with distortion and frustration. Listening requires a choice of where I place my attention. To tune into my partner, I must first choose to put away all that will divide my attention. That might mean laying down the newspaper, moving away from the dishes in the sink, putting down the book I’m reading, setting aside my projects. Paul Tillich said “The first duty of love is to listen”. Remember the words of the apostle James “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak” (James 1:19). The next time you are listening to someone, resist the temptation of multi-tasking and just listen, you will be amazed to see the difference.
“Good listening is like tuning in a radio station. For good results, you can listen to only one station at a time…trying to receive two radio stations at the same time, I end up with distortion and frustration.”
– – Author: Rev. Francis Burgula – –
