Have you ever noticed your thoughts wandering while you were trying to listen to someone? While most, if not all, people have had this experience, many don't appreciate the full impact their thoughts have on their ability to listen.
While listening to someone speak, the listener's mind is usually doing one or more of the following things:
- Judging — Deciding if they agree/disagree with the speaker, or if the speaker is worth listening to.
- Planning — Rehearsing what to say or do next.
- Speculating — Imagining how the future might unfold, possibly trying on an idea the speaker is sharing.
- Worrying — Wondering what others are thinking of them or their ideas.
- Remembering — Relating what the speaker is saying to their own past experience.
- Wandering — Thinking of things completely unrelated to the topic, like lunch or the next meeting.
- Striving — Working to remember and/or practice techniques they’ve been taught to be a good listener.
Notice how none of those things involve listening, but are instead forms of internal discourse?
Once a listener notices all that's going on in their head, the logical step is to try to dismiss these thoughts when they pop up. This results in an internal dialog that sounds a lot like, "You're not paying attention. Stop thinking about that. You can leave that for later." This internal dialog takes up its own brain space and only keeps the listener distracted.
So what are you to do if you notice your mind caught up in something other than listening?
Have you ever been in an elevator, or store, where there's music playing but you’ve tuned it out?
You can do the same thing with all of your mental chatter when you're listening to someone. You can let the chatter fade and become background noise by not paying attention to it.
It's a lot of work to turn off the judging, planning, speculating, worrying, remembering, wandering, and striving, but it's not so much work to pay less attention to it, to let it go by without notice.
The result is a deeper listening. It's listening with a quiet, but focused, mind.
This kind of listening allows you to:
- Get curious about what the speaker is saying instead of making snap conclusions.
- Connect more deeply with the speaker because they sense that they have your undivided attention.
- Appreciate the speaker's unique perspective and the information they're trying to convey.
- Listen beyond the speaker’s words, which leads to deeper insights about them and the topic at hand.
Once you've had some practice, you'll find that this type of listening is easy, natural, and incredibly effective.
Artwork: The art of conversation by Rene Magritte