Listen Better to Live Better: Unleash the Hidden Power of Your Listening Skill
10 tips to help you become a better listener
Listening is one of the most underrated and overlooked skills in today’s world. Listening is not just hearing. It is an active process that involves correctly interpreting and understanding the message being conveyed. It is key to effective communication. Without the ability to listen carefully, messages can be easily misunderstood.
Listening is an important soft skill that is essential for each and everyone be it a political leader, social activist, employee, media professional, judge, jury member, professor, student, top management officials in the corporate sector, etc.
In today’s fast-paced lifestyle, many people just listen half-heartedly to respond quickly. Most of the time they even interrupt the speaker, without completely understanding the entire context and intent of the speaker. This often results in misunderstanding and irritation. Listening requires patience and calmness which is often missing in today’s world.
Effective listening is key to having successful interpersonal relationships and a successful career.
Here are a few tips to listen better.
1. Don’t Interrupt When Someone Is Speaking
Interrupting someone while s/he is speaking disrupts the communication process and breaks the flow of thoughts of the speaker. If there are multiple people involved in the conversation, then it disturbs the other listeners also. Frequently interrupting someone in a conversation leads to the loss of the original message that was intended to be delivered.
2. Listen With An Open Mind
Listening with a premeditated mindset will not let you grasp anything that does not align with your assumptions. You will just hear that portion and tend to ignore it. Hence, it is very essential that you listen with an open mind. After properly interpreting and understanding what is being said, you may choose to Agree or disagree with that viewpoint.
3. Don’t Judge Too Quickly (Without Letting The Speaker Finish)
Sometimes you tend to start judging just after listening to only a portion of what the speaker has said (or has to say). Maybe after listening to the opening remarks of the speech, you get disappointed, as these remarks may not align with your ideology or seem displeasing to you.
In such scenarios, you will not be able to grasp the point of view of the speaker for the rest of the time s/he speaks (No matter what the content is) as you had already judged and made up your mind from the beginning itself. If you want to understand something better, then never start judging unless the speaker has finished.
4. Maintain Eye Contact
Maintaining proper eye contact with the speaker helps in being attentive and responsive to what is being discussed. It also acts as a kind of constructive feedback to the speaker and encourages him/her to continue enthusiastically.
5. Be Attentive To Gestures
While speaking, the speaker might be using some relevant gestures (Apart from just saying words) to make sure that his message is correctly received. When you are attentive and keenly observe the gestures of the speaker, you will be able to understand the message more clearly.
6. Use Adequate Gestures To Give Feedback To The Speaker (Maybe Nodding, If You Resonate With What Is Being Said)
When you are listening to someone, in order to give feedback to the speaker, you should not interrupt him/her by saying something in between (As pointed out earlier in this article), but that does not mean that you don’t need to give feedback either. If you sit in a static position while listening to someone, the speaker will be demoralized and will most probably think that you are not interested in what he/she is saying. So, as an active listener, you must use adequate gestures to let the speaker know that you are involved.
7. Ask Relevant Questions (When The Speaker Pauses/Asks You To)
Asking relevant questions at the right time acts as a catalyst to the conversation and makes it more interesting and engaging. It also lets the speaker know that you were sincerely listening when s/he was speaking.
8. Don’t Focus On Planning Your Reply While Listening To The Speaker
While listening to someone, when you start preparing the points to respond even before the speaker has finished, then it is highly likely that you will ignore the remaining part of his/her speech or misunderstand it.
9. Clarify Your Doubts
If you have confusion or doubts related to what the speaker is saying, then raise your hand (Or follow any other convention to let the speaker know that you have a doubt, without disturbing him/her) and when given a chance, clarify them. It will help you in understanding the further portion of his/her speech.
10. Don’t Get Too Emotional To Certain Keywords And Build A Narrative Of Your Own
Each one of us has strong emotions attached to a few words. Depending upon how our experience in life has been, we tend to feel certain keywords in a strongly negative manner (The meaning of the word itself might not be that negative but events from our past might have fed these strong feelings for those words) and mere discussion about them triggers our strong negative emotions.
For instance, if someone has a really bad memory associated with a particular sport, then he/she might get emotionally upset just by the mention of that sport in a broad speech about something else. If you get triggered after listening to a particular word, then your attention will be diverted to your own thoughts rather than being on listening to the speaker. You should always try to ignore such strong feelings towards those keywords and try not to get triggered (although it is difficult) by them so that you can continue to listen carefully to the speaker and get the maximum out of it.
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