“Listen to me.”
These words have echoed down timeless hallways of schools
and colleges, and are embedded in the minds of countless students. Everyone can
remember being encouraged to listen both in classrooms, and at home.
This childhood instruction has sorrowfully lost its way into adulthood.
Adults somehow conveniently forget the art of listening, having discarded it along with chalkboard, duster or building
block toys as an accouterments of childhood.
How often we listen, but don’t hear. Studies conflictingly
report that we remember 20 to fifty percent of what we hear. The rest is lost. The
ability to listen would involve honing our hearing skills with the following
steps:
1.
Paying voluntary attention: Putting aside other
things, looking at the speaker, setting aside other things, giving physical
feedback with verbal and non verbal signs such as nodding and saying yes.
2.
Actively remembering to file the information
received in your mind
3.
Clarifying points that are not understood
4.
Thinking or meditating on what was said.
5.
Replying relevantly
In our nanobyte world, our attention span lasts only 22
seconds before it flits onto some other bit or byte of information now programmed
to assault our senses. This is not conducive
to consistent listening. It encourages a
flight of ideas and does not let our mind concentrate constructively on
thoughts or patterns, but rather seeks to change them like constantly changing
tv screens.
Jesus seemed to know all about this, and in his course of
instruction, found the need to reiterate by saying “Truly, truly I say unto
you”, almost underlining the necessity for us to listen to what he was saying. Johns
gospel records twenty three times he repeated this phrase. He also bemoaned the
historical fact that humans, as a race,
tended to listen, but not hear[1]. The solution is in the mind of the hearer,
not the speaker, and it is we who need to cultivate the lost art of hearing.
Those who are deaf need hearing aids to augment the sound
arriving at the eardrum. Today we are also in need of techniques to enhance the information
arriving at our brains by allowing our senses to intelligently collect the
information and allow ourselves to hear what is being spoken.
One habit that we need to actively unlearn is the habit of
impatience. We are constantly encouraged to be impatient, as time speeds up our
lives. We need quick solutions, fast foods, faster vehicles, and even faster
technology as time warps our lives into impatient segments. We tend not involve
ourselves in things that call upon us to wait. Hence, when we listen to people,
our minds actively want them to finish up what they are saying quickly, and if
they take too long, our mind substitutes assumptions which we seem to hear, but
are not facts that the speaker is articulating at all. Hence we misinterpret
people. Those speaking to us are at a loss because we seem to have
completely misunderstood and misinterpreted what they were saying. Those hearing too are mystified because they
seem to have heard the speaker saying what they conveniently seemed to hear
them say. All communication becomes
cross wired, to the ultimate mystification of society. This is Babel
revisited.
The earlier tower of Babel collapsed because of the use of
various languages unintelligible to each other[2].
Todays tower of Babel rises by our not being able to hear the other person
speaking to us in the same language. And so our towers keep rising to the sky,
artificial constructions doomed by the basic lack of respect for ourselves, for
God and for each other.
Would we really want to be part of all this?
How can we choose to change?
It requires active and voluntary replacement of bad habits
with good ones, ones that remind ourselves to respect the one who is speaking
to us enough to allow them to complete what they are saying prior to
interjection or premature rebuttal. How
often we do this, little realizing that this actually stems from a crass
indifference and disrespect of others and selfish preoccupation with ourselves.
Active listening requires us to listen to what is being said
digesting the information both in terms of content and character, interpreting
the emotion and content of speech.
Active listening requires us to clarify with the speaker
what they are saying so that there is no miscommunication or misinterpretation.
And it demands a fitting reply from the resources we have to
allow meaningful communication and a sharing of ideas, not a indifferent
spouting of our own convictions regardless of those listening to us.
This new year, may be learn to be quick to listen, and slow
to speak[3].
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