Improve Phenomena of Listening before its Absolute Death

Ghulam e Hussain
Nov 7 · 5 min read

Listening is the lead to all effective communications. It is the absolute accuracy towards effectiveness of communication. I am experiencing the deterioration for long which we are doing with our listening. We are losing our listening. We roughly spend 60% of our communication time in listening. But we are not very good at it. We retain only 25% of it what we hear. That is generally true. Let us define listening from sound. It is a mental process. It is about the extraction of what we hear around. Human voice is the most powerful voice in the world which can probably start a war and can start love just by a say ‘I love you’. I believe that listening is the main trap of our flow from past to the future.

We are granted with a reason that we have invented ways of recording like audio and video. The premium of accurate and careful listening is simply disappeared. Secondly world is full of virtual companies where are minds are roaming around there like social media, traffic sounds, music sounds etc. which is making hard to listen. Tiring to listen. Many people take Headphones as a refuge. In short, we are surrounded by little tiny personal sound bubbles which are hampering people not to go for listening to everybody or nobody.

A lot of time it happened to me when I try to convey my point about something, I get the unexpected answer or just like some standardized set up about some person and it happened even before 50% of my talk. I intervene into the situation to hear them completely and when I’m done with my say, I see them in shame. It is because firstly they do not try to go for listening instead for answer. It is good that they feel it they are wrong to the perspective but I think the most important thing is to not be a repeater of the same blunder. I find some people losing their patience when they don’t get to the answer what they really do expect after every talk. They should ever be rendered good or right. It’s becoming like a norm of our societal mindsets or tribal mindsets where we think of our every talk perfect. I believe we are perfectly imperfect.

The art of conversation is losing somewhere. We are becoming absolutely biased to the situations around which is indirectly taking our peace of mind away from us too. And this is all rendering it to dangerously personal broadcasting. We are just like that of some media personnel where disidentify have to make the scree matter with headlines in order to get our attention like sensation, shock, scandal, fury, exposed etc. it means that it’s pretty hard for us to pay attention to the quiet, understated one. This is a serious problem. And this is not a trivial matter. Listening is all about understanding. Conscious listening always creates understanding. And a place where we do not pay attention or get conscious to our listening is a very scary place indeed. These are understated the places where misunderstandings are making their way up and we are making our way out of humanity.

How Can We Improve Our Listening?

But the question is how can we improve our listening? I would like to share with you some of the exercising which will surely help to improve listening.

· Silence

This is the best tool to optimize our level of listening. You just need to go for silence during the conversation to give some time to your mind to get better prepared for answering by developing some understanding of the point you are going to devise. This is an absolute personal advancement because most of the time in our communication, silence becomes a loser and loud wins the situation.

· Non-Verbal Cues

It is very important to pay attention to what is hidden in talk or which is not said… non-verbal. We can get a lot of detail about any person without saying even a word. Tone of voice speaks the better of taste. We can get to the maximum about a person even when we are on telephone. By experts, our 60–70% communication based on non-verbal cues. This is more about the non-verbal communication which can really help us to get to the maximum about any person.

· Mixer

You can develop your listening by going for a mixer of sounds. In this technique, you can go for multiple sounds at one time to get the experience of how many individual channels of voice you can hear at one time. As earlier described, there is a bubble of sounds around in our daily matters. Mixer is highly important for student community specifically because in a thrust of many extravagant activities, they really need to adopt this mixture technique. We can practice this exercise in our class rooms or any of the work places. Canteens, cafes can provide the broader picture where we get interacted to many voices around.

· Savoring

We can go for active listening by checking the potential in voices like during using a grinder or you are a person next to the value of the prospect around. This will help you to understand the vitality of your own sound which probably becomes more irritating when you lose your temper because of the sudden noisy situations around.

· Listening Positions

This may be the most important technique of all. Here you just have to move your listening position. The idea is to move your position of listening which is more appropriate to the prospect.

1- Active/Passive

2- Reductive/Expansive

3- Critical/Empathetic

These are just the filters of sounds to make you set for different positions. These are just the sum or means. There are many others too. We just need to have fun with these and it would be ultimately a great experience with amazing explorations.

· RASA

Finally, there is an acronym RASA which we can use it in listening and communication.

Receive

Appreciate

Summarize

Ask

Appreciate is to pay attention to the person you are in conversation. Appreciate is to make little noises like ‘Hmm, yes, yeah’ etc. Summarize is very important with the specific word ‘so’ which we observe from good scholars’ discussions, conversations etc. Ask is to go for questioning.

Live to listen. Its human attribute to pay respect by listening to other humans. I would really love to listen. This would be too much to have an ask. I believe that every human-being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully. Connected yourself in physical world and in space around, you must connect yourself with an understanding to each other. That is why experts are saying that it may have become impregnable to teach it as a skill in schools to save our generations from scary world of not listening. Do never listen to reply but to understand.

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