The Art of listening and its immense importance

Listening is an awesome skill that the majority neglects in our days; people tend to talk more than listening, while it should be completely the opposite. I witnessed this in several situations, as an illustration, whenever the chance comes I and my friends met, we normally do what ordinary people do, which is indulging in a discussion. Yet, if you contemplate our discussion more carefully you would notice the same thing I noticed, which is very striking, in the middle of our conversation we reached the point where we no longer listen to each other, I mean the «effective listening», where you activate your conscious and start interpreting what the other is trying to say instead of preparing the astonishing thing that you will say once the other finishes his or her own speech. More precisely, we just turned the conversation into a competition, who talks most wins, each one of us is trying to show how skillful is in talking. And here where the main purpose behind communicating is missed. Mainly, what we have here is a failure to communicate.

If we stop for a second and think about this, it would become clearer for us to see that we truly need to reconsider our behavior while interacting with people, friends, or family members; remember that in every conversational event, the person who speaks least benefits most. I have always wanted to tackle this issue, since the chance comes now; I am going to break it down for you in more details by providing you with some helpful hints so as to help you boost and sharpen your listening skill.

1)    Be Open-minded while listening: this stands for the idea that while listening to what the speaker says, do not allow for yourself to be emotionally triggered, and avoid being so sensitive, instead of doing that you would rather try to be open to the difference and therefore provide more space for new ideas and insights to come in, and here where the growth takes place, to put it simply you accumulate knowledge. And KNOWLEDGE is Power.

2)    Watch your body postures: body language plays a very important role to show interest, for instance while listening to what the other is saying, try to make eye contact with him or her, that would help you to focus more during the conversation as well as it encourages more the speaker to open up to you and tell you everything. Your main duty while someone is talking is to process every single word he/she says even though the topic doesn’t concern you believe me one day will, this happened to me so many times.

3)   Ask questions: this tool is very helpful and it engages you as well, in order to be able to  ask good questions, it entails to pay a full attention to what the speaker is saying not only this but also interpreting what he or she is saying. In my opinion, by applying particularly this method certainly you will become a great listener. 

To sum up, this article is not encouraging you to remain silent, but it was just an opportunity for all of us to reconsider our behavior while conversing with one another or collectively, as I mentioned earlier. Don’t you ever underestimate that Skill!!!