Live Quality
What is listening and the difference between listening and hearing:
Listening begins by being quiet while someone else is speaking. When they are quiet, many people aren’t listening, however. They doing something else, namely
1. Tuning out while pretending to listen.
2. Putting up with someone who can’t be challenged without risk.
3. Waiting to jump in with their own opinion.
4. Letting their attention drift.
These are the opposite of listening, and each one is easily detected by the other person. Since fake listening creates a bad impression, be quiet with a purpose, which comes down to one thing: paying attention. Paying attention is the key to the skill of listening. When you pay attention you are giving yourself over to learning. Simply focusing on the other person’s words is a fairly empty gesture, although it’s common courtesy, like not interrupting and keeping your eyes on the speaker (two hints worth remembering).
The art of listening also requires that you avoid the wrong kind of listening, meaning the kind that is unproductive. Listening fails when you’re just pretending, as was pointed out earlier. But it also fails in the following situations:
1. When the other person is only talking to hear himself talk.
2. When the other person has no interest in what you have to contribute.
3. When the other person is deliberately withholding information.
4. When the other person has no respect for you.
5. When your only function is to sit in a chair and pretend to be interested.
In these situations, you can rarely turn a bad experience into a good one, so there’s every reason to cut your losses and leave the room as soon as possible. Realize that you are exposing yourself to needless stress by making yourself the victim of someone else’s selfish or thoughtless agenda. Naturally, you can find yourself trapped in meetings, classes, and discussions that have almost no chance of being productive, which is why people automatically tune out. That may be the appropriate response, yet the drawback is that once the habit of tuning out sets in, many people fail to see how valuable real, productive listening can be. Just keep in mind that an essential part of success and a key trait in great leaders is a highly developed ability to listen, take heed, and act.
All this is knowledge and understanding of listening. But Mamtha will like to share with you all her own experience regarding listening.
Listening is the foundation to good communication, many of us think communication is talking, but for communication a good listener is needed, who will interrupt or question sparingly because they divert the conversation.
As a working women I used to spend less time with my son, didn’t have time to listen to what he had to tell me, angry, irresponsibility, irritations at little things were all seen in him. As we were moving to Delhi on my husband’s work I quit my job. Now I had enough time, the moment my son comes from school he used to tell all that happened in his school, I used to only listen till he completes and then tell him any suggestions at the end. This is been continued till today. Now my son takes full freedom to share every aspect of his life without any hesitation…. this has created a great bonding between us and he is become much calmer and responsible .
After doing this topic silk actually I also realised how silently listening allows the speaker to become aware of his or her own feelings to explore more deeply.
