Listening is a gift

Listening is a gift that you give to your loved ones. When you listen intently, it calms other people. It heals them.

Kevin Kelly, in his book “Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier” says:

“Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love, keep asking, “Is there more?” until there is no more.”

You need to be interested in the other person to be a better listener. As the saying goes, “If you want to be interesting, be interested.” If you just become passionately interested in another person, you will be liked immediately.

Kevin Kelly has talked about in his book how even if we don’t say anything and if we listen carefully, people will consider us a great conversationalist.

Pay attention to non verbal cues

Active listening is more than just listening to the words. It’s important to observe nonverbal behaviors as well. If you observe people’s expressions calmly, you can understand what’s not being said. It helps understand a person’s emotions. And that’s when you are truly engaged.

“So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.” – J Krishnamurti.

Beware of self serving biases

Another thing that hinders listening process is our self serving biases. Have you ever felt while talking to a person that the other person only heard a small line in all that you said? That happens because our mind filters out words and focuses on only those that serve us well. Here is an example of a usual conversation:

As you can see, Chris filtered out all the sentences and observed only what was said about him. We all fall prey to such self service biases. We need to be on guard to look for it.

Here are some of the biases, you should be careful about:

• Self serving bias: listening/accepting to the part that serves us well
• Confirmation bias: accepting only the part that confirms our view
• Conformity bias: conforming to a group’s idea
• Anchor bias: using the first piece of information provided to make an assessment
• Affect heuristic: relying on emotions to make decisions

Listening requires intention. Without intention, you can absorb a small part of what’s being said; however, There are a few things you can do to improve your listening skills.

Pause thinking while listening

The first step to better listening is to calm your mind while listening. Your job is to understand what’s being said, and that doesn’t involve thinking or analyzing.

Don’t react immediately

Take a few second before you respond. This will allow you to observe what was being said completely

Notice for non verbal cues

This will allow you to understand what others are feeling while they are speaking.

Avoid interrupting

When we have active thoughts going on in our mind, we are in a hurry to stop other people and say what’s on our mind. We need to make a rule to never interrupt if we want to be better listeners.

Paraphrase

It’s ok to paraphrase what’s being said to understand the speaker better. It improves our capacity to absorb information and makes us likable.

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