Listening

I’ve found over the course of time that the greatest communicators are the ones that are very good listeners. A good communicator takes the time to really listen to what is being said. They allow the person speaking the time needed to finish their statement without interruption.

I find that many people don’t have the patience to keep their mind still while engaged in a conversation. I can often tell when they’ve tuned me out. They get very jittery and you can see the wheels spinning as their mind have gotten completely off of your wavelength. They can’t wait to interject their own thoughts to the conversation. They don’t mean to be rude, they just lack the patience of holding their thought until the other person has finished. When interrupted, the person that was speaking can’t help but feel like the other person didn’t care about what was being said.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “Most people never listen,” and I think at times that he was right.

I feel like I have to be like Marc Antony at times and shout, “Friends, Romans, and countrymen lend me your ear.”

I think that listening is an art and it takes a lot of work to be a good listener. You must concentrate on the speaker and not what’s running through your mind. You validate another person’s worth by making eye contact. You show your interest by asking questions which encourages and not stifles dialogue. Listen, to others. All of us yearn to be heard and understood.

Leo Buscaglia observed that, “Listening is love in action.”

Remember the 2-to-1 rule – listen twice as much as you talk.

To remember this rule, I think of what an old Roman philosopher once noted, “We have two ears and one mouth, so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”