Firstly, as so eloquently put by Stephen Covey, most of us spend a lot of the time in any conversation working out what we are going to say in reply. How many times in a conversation do you find yourself not really listening, but instead working out what you are going to say – to give advice, relate a similar (read better) story, to disagree? Whilever we are thinking about what we are going to reply, we are not really paying attention to what the speaker is saying.Ģ.
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So, what gets in the way of us using our listening skills?ġ.
![barriers to listening barriers to listening](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3ZjGlZ1II6Y/maxresdefault.jpg)
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So I approached the night with trepidation, not really expecting my ‘homework’ to have much effect. Since I had decided this guy was very boring, I thought there wouldn’t be much gold to find in anything he had to say. To me, it was plain reality that this guy was boring, and listening to him more was just going to be excruciatingly dull. But I was determined to do my homework properly, and made a real effort to listen to him as if he was the most interesting person in the world, with fascinating things to say.Īnd much to my surprise, and my husband’s surprise, it actually worked. I found out lots of stuff about him that I had never bothered to find out before, and we had the best evening we had ever had with that particular couple. I was amazed at how effective it was.īut the really scary thing about this exercise, was thinking about how often my judgements about all sorts of people affect how I listen to them. And how simply listening to them differently could change how they occur to me. Maybe people I had written off as obnoxious, annoying, stupid, self-absorbed etc etc weren’t really like that at all. As I developed my listening skills over the course of the leadership program, I found myself hearing amazing stories from the most unlikely people – the guy at the security desk at work, my child care worker, and other acquaintances I had never really paid much attention to before. Listening is a skill that most of us neglect, and we don’t practice it enough. I participated in a 6-month long leadership program several years ago, where most of the training focussed on listening. It’s amazing to realise how much of our lives we spend NOT listening.Īs part of this course, we learnt the practice of ‘listening for the gold’. The intent of this practice is to listen for the really great things that people say. The week we were given this homework, I had the perfect opportunity to practice. We had invited friends over for dinner. It was a woman that I had met through our kids, and we got along really well. But I found her husband rather strange, and frankly fairly boring. I didn’t feel like we had anything in common, and I didn’t really look forward to spending time with them as a couple. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand they listen with the intent to reply” Stephen Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989)