Are You Listening?
Why our capacity to actively listen to someone else is facing extinction and why it could save us all [part 1 of 2]
Try this: take a moment to think about 5 pleasurable moments you have experienced in the last few weeks or months. Be selective about these. If you have a hard time finding five, it’s okay to pick three or four. No rush, take your time, but make sure that, however many you can think of, these are moments where you felt really good.
Once you have your moments selected, try to identify if they were situations where you were with someone else — doesn’t matter who. It’s probable that in the majority of your good moments you weren’t alone, after all human beings are social creatures, therefore we tend to get more pleasure when together rather than not.
Now, the tricky part: if you found moments when you were indeed with someone else, being a friend, your family, a neighbor, a colleague or even a total stranger, try to remember what in that moment made you feel good. It could be something you did together, like a concert you went to, a project you wrapped up, or simply a conversation you had. But whatever it was, try to narrow it to the interaction you had with that person. Then think more in detail, and ask yourself: how did that person listen to you?
The quality of our listening has a profound impact on how others feel. It’s a simple equation: the better we listen to someone, the better they feel internally. However, in spite of how straight-forward this may seem, the reality is that to listen to another person is not easy, and to effectively listen to someone is in fact extremely difficult. But why?
Hear vs Listen
Most people don’t know, but there’s actually a difference between to hear and to listen. Hearing is a non-intentional use of one of our natural senses — audition — where we don’t filter what’s being captured, we just hear stuff. Listening, on the other hand, requires focus and attention, and as an intentional gesture, implies that we can choose to listen or not.
Effective listening is a total different thing altogether: it’s a skill, and requires practice as such. It’s an active behavior, thus the expression Active Listening.
Shoot and reload
One of the single most difficult things to find these days: a true conversation. What we think are conversations have become in fact exchanges of statements, but not actually a build of topics based on empathetic understanding, or merely a decent acknowledgement of our current. Think about it: how many times have you found yourself immersed in a circle where people were just sharing their minds out in a non-stop loop, totally disregarding what was said to them first? The thought process seem to be something like ‘no matter what you’re going to say to me, I already have something to say to you’.
Product of an increasing anxiety (above all amongst Millennials) mostly coming from the explosive mix of a life full of choices we find harder and harder to make and a culture of immediate feedback constantly reinforced by a post-to-comment-to-reply repetitive motion that has insanely shortened our attention span and the capacity to be present in the moment with what has been genuinely shared with us by others. We have a lot of stuff in our minds, and are just about ready to shout them out, with no interruption, no pause — our tolerance has diminished incredibly. And when we speak too much, we listen too little. If you need any evidence, just wait until you next meeting at work.
Judging or lightening
More than just speaking their lungs out, people are often imposing their credos or values systems onto what’s being shared with them — most times without being asked to do so. Without realizing, we have grown more judgmental of others’ opinions and stubbornly hold on to what’s in our heads. Conversations have been polarized into debates. If you need any proof of this, just take a look at the presidential race in the US, the Brexit fiasco, the latest display of political animosity in the streets of Brazil or, better yet, the growing fundamentalism in some religions.
The opposite is also very true and frequent — we tend to “lighten” other people’s load. Our lives have become too rushed to go deep into more complex subjects attempted to be shared with us, so we smartly glide our way out in best 21st-century-ego-centered fashion with a gentle “Don’t worry about it, it’s ok.” Or easier than that, we just start messing around with our phones (I have personally experienced people asking me a question and turning their faces away before I finished my first sentence).
When our ability to listen is so limited, we are certainly narrowing our chances of feeling good, because of course, if you’re not listening to someone, that probably means that someone is not listening to you too. Therefore, we’re left in vacuum, with ideas in our heads waiting to be shared that never get their chance to; with thoughts that go unfinished; with the feeling that most people don’t really care about what we have to say — what they care about is what they have to say. We’re feeling more lonely and less understood. Not to mention that it gets harder and harder to get work done with quality due to the ephemerality of things, or not explored in the depth they need.
In great part of my former professional role as a marketer I thoroughly researched behavior among Millennials and what we now call the newest up-and-coming Generation Z, those born post-1990. Practically born online, these young adults grew up in households with a computer by the time they were 5 or 6, and by the time they were 15, Google had already dominated the internet and Facebook was alive and kicking. These kids grew up with a cell phone in their hands, monitored by parents that were working way more than 40-hour weeks in jobs in the modern life post downsizing era, where productivity had gone through the roofs — which essentially meant lots of social media, little of social presence.
Among some of the things I’ve noticed over the past 15 years, our overall capacity to concentrate on the task at hand, or to wait until our turn comes, or to let someone empty their glass has astonishingly decreased. Further yet, one could make the case that the very phenomenon of entrepreneurism is also a byproduct of a generation’s lack of patience to climb the corporate ladder (I do believe the corporate ladder indeed needs a full revamp, but reality is that Millennials want quicker feedbacks and quicker promotions than any other generation before them).
Digressions apart, the point of this first part is: if you did have a hard time finding moments where you felt truly good about something, that could be somehow related to the quality of your listening. If you feel it’s been difficult to receive the attention you would like and feel whole when interacting with someone, the answer might lie in you start giving it first. But how? That’s for part 2.
