Listening is underrated. Many of us don’t even know how listening can be different from hearing. Here! let me make it easy; there is so much more to listening than just what catches your ears and not only in the dictionary that it is different from hearing, this skill has great relevance in the real world. Many successful people claim that listening is the most important skill to learn, after all it is the best skill to sharpen while you’re working out your observational skills.
Except for the “creative” part (which belongs to the speaking side of communication), listening has all the attributes of art. Meaning it requires skill, patience, and is highly influenced by perspective. So, you must now be wondering about what it means to truly listen to somebody or something? To master this form of art, you need to put aside any of your presumptions and accept that at least for the time being, what the speaker says is “true”. After all we all speak our own truth.
Learning to be a good listener means learning to embrace everything that comes in. With patience and perseverance, anything is analyzable. Even if it doesn’t match your principles or presumptions, you might have something to learn from the opinion of the person you are communicating with. I have felt this very often and believe that you have had some sort of similar experience too: someone is in the middle of a conversation and you remember something relatable, then ” bam!” your ears are off, you kind of zone out of the conversation and now all you are waiting for is the perfect instance to make your point, and until then every information bouncing on your ear turns meaningless. At this point, you are hearing but not really listening.
Listening can be called the most important part of a conversation. The practice of “true listening” in a conversation can light up a conversation and turns into what the pop culture calls “lit conversation”, where you feel heard and also get to learn something. They say every single person is an expert in something, and by listening, you get to learn something from the person who is trying to share something of their expertise. Isn’t learning beautiful? But what are the challenges of listening? And how do you listen ‘right’? How do you ‘master’ this art?
The correct answer is in ‘being at the moment’, feeling the depth of conversation and being present to what the person at the other end has to say. Trying to understand what the person is trying to communicate to you is necessary, keeping your point of view aside for a while and developing a perspective on how the speaker is making his point is crucial. When being presented with a different point of view, either you get to correct your point of view or you get to sharpen your viewing angle. Both are amazing.
Next time, just try to give it your all, to understand the speaker’s point of view even you are very polarized to that thought. Like art, listening can be mastered by only. You can be a good
listener too, just give your ears, be present and open your mind to learn anything new.
-Abinash Karki
