Two Becomes One

Learning to Listen

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Two Becomes One

One of the most attractive traits that a person can have is the ability to listen. I’ve got to be joking right? After all, the vast majority of humans have the sense of hearing. What’s so special about listening?

Well, let’s start be defining listening. The kind of listening that I am talking about is not the relatively simple process of sound waves vibrating small bones in your head and transmitting impulses to your brain for decoding. In fact, the kind of listening I am referring to does not require that you be able to hear at all. When I say that listening is a fundamental characteristic for successful relationships I am talking about the ability to be attentive and responsive in a conversation.

For our purposes here, we will be excluding the physical aspect of the mechanics of sound and focusing, instead, on the aspect of signals being interpreted by the brain. In essence, what we are concerned with here is understanding in the realm of interpersonal communication (i.e. having a discussion). It doesn’t matter what medium that a conversation happens in, be it verbal, through writing, online, etc. The same set of listening skills apply to all possible forms of communication.

Why Listen?

It seems that many people (especially males) are of the mindset that listening when someone is speaking directly to them is optional. Rather than participate in the conversation they reply with disinterested grunts and nods. Many have developed the skill of pretending to listen to an art form – so much so that some are capable of having entire, lengthy conversations on profound subjects without ever uttering an intelligible word or, in fact, even having the slightest idea what was being discussed.

While the ability to seem attentive while not actually paying attention is a useful defense mechanism to prevent insanity in long office meetings. However, it has little place in the realm of personal relationships. Tuning your boss out may save your sanity, tuning your girlfriend out may wreck your relationship.

The problem is, many guys practice not listening for so long that they forget how to listen. If you are one of those guys, or if you just need a bit of a refresher course on what real listening is, then read on.

Listening begins, odd though it may seem, before the a conversation ever takes place. Listening to someone implies that you respect them and their opinions. Read that again – ‘that you respect them”. Not, “that you pretend to respect them.” You decide by deciding that you respect them and their thoughts/beliefs/feelings. If you cannot respect someone enough to listen or care about them enough to value their thoughts and opinions then you probably shouldn’t be dating them.

Proper listening is active listening. You have to be engaged in the conversation. This means more than making grunts or shaking your head. It requires that you respond to questions appropriately, ask questions yourself and interject thoughts of your own. Repeating back what was said to you in the form of a question asking for clarification or in other ways shows that you really are paying attention, not just blankly waiting for the talking to stop so you can get back to whatever you were doing. Paying closer attention in conversations leads to closer relationships.

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