Listening : The difference between hearing and listening
There is two way to listen, hearing and listening. Most of the people don’t pay attention to them but can distinguish them.
When you’re focus and someone says something to you, you just say yes without paying attention, you know that you mainly just heard what this person said. In the other hand, when you have a conversation with a friend or a colleague, you probably know that you’re listening to this persion.
Well actually that’s not completly true, in both case, most of the people just hearing and not listening, at different level.
In the listening, there is also two way of doing it, the passive and the active way. And I’m not talking about something I’ve define by myself, you can search about it, there is a lot of research and experiences made about that.
The thing is that when people think that they listen to someone, they probably listen passivelly, and the true listening is the active one. I will quickly define what’s and active listening, and you will know that a passive listening is just the contrary of that.
When you’re listening actively, you’re completly focus on what the person says to you, all your brain is focus on it. You don’t think about what you will answer and what you want to say, just totally focused on the words of your interlocutor. Also it’s not only about the words, but also the tone of the voice, the way of talking, the gestures of the person… That’s a real analysis exercice. Actually, as it requires a lot of energy you should even be tired at a moment, when you listen actively (something that you can’t really, or with more time when you listen passively).
As I said listen passively is all the contrary, you think that yo’ure focus on what the person says, but you mainly already thinking about what you will answer, you don’t really observe the person, and sometimes, you even stop him/her during the talking, to answer, before waiting the end. That’s how most of the people communicate.
You should try sometimes to pay attention on how people listen in general, and you will notice that mainly nobody listen activily and they think about themselves first.
The main or real keys in active listening is to sh*t up and observe/listen, until your interlocutor really have finished to talk. Only at this moment, you can start to think about what you will answer.
Obviously that’s not something simple, so you should start to practice it step by step and with time, you will be able to listen actively more easily without it requires you too much energy.
