Comprehensive listening theory1/22/2024 ![]() People avoided disagreeing with me on anything, even trivial points, because they knew it would balloon into annoyance and a failure to listen to their reasoning. On topics of politics or philosophy, this made me a bore and a bully. On bad days, this attentional autopilot constricted me. ![]() It was easy to listen to attractive women.īad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them It was easy to listen to debates on topics where I had a burning desire to be right. It was easy to listen to juicy gossip, particularly of the kind that made me feel fortunate or superior. It was very easy to listen to someone explaining what steps I needed to take to ace a test or make some money. If the subject was me, or material that might be of benefit to me, my attention would automatically sharpen. The exceptions to this state of affairs, I began to see, were situations where there existed self-interest. I had a horrible habit, I saw, of sitting in silent linguistic craftsmanship, shaping my answer for when my turn came around – and only half-listening to what I’d actually be responding to. Sometimes, I would zone out and tune back in to realise that I’d been asked a question. I had a habit of interrupting, in the rather masculine belief that, whatever others had to say, I could say better for them. I might be passively absorbing whatever was being said – but a greater part of me would be daydreaming, reminiscing, making plans. When it was someone else’s turn to talk, the listening could often feel like a chore. ![]() But a low, steady egoism meant that what I really enjoyed was talking. Among a smorgasbord of other patterns and quirks, what I saw was a self that, too often, didn’t listen. This is not to make some claim to faux enlightenment – simply to say that meditation is the practice of noticing what you notice, and meditators tend to carry this mindset beyond the yoga mat, and begin to see their own mind more clearly. The paucity of my listening powers dawned on me as a byproduct of starting to meditate. And though Rogers’s work was focused initially on the therapeutic setting, he drew no distinction between this and everyday life: ‘Whatever I have learned,’ he wrote, ‘is applicable to all of my human relationships.’ What Rogers learnt was that listening well – which necessarily involves conversing well and questioning well – is one of the most accessible and most powerful forms of connection we have. Listening well, it took me too long to discover, is a sort of magic trick: both parties soften, blossom, they are less alone.Īlong the way, I discovered that Carl Rogers, one of the 20th century’s most eminent psychologists, had put a name to this underrated skill: ‘active listening’. When the concept of listening is addressed at any length, it is in the context of professional communication something to be honed by leaders and mentors, but a specialisation that everyone else can happily ignore. It felt rare, it felt real I wanted them around.Īs a culture, we treat listening as an automatic process about which there is not a lot to say: in the same category as digestion, or blinking. I wasn’t sure what I was doing but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. ![]() On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard. Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people.
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