We spend our lives being taught how to read, how to write, and how to speak. We generally have very little training on how to listen. This is big problem since listening is a top-level skill in a world where the spoken word is so important.
To understand the skills involved with listening, we need first to understand that our minds provide us with 128 bandwidth window to the universe. Any information from the outside world must enter through this window. The problem is that part of that bandwidth is used up with process functions things like I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m hungry, I need to go to the restroom. Do you remember how hard it is to pay attention to someone when you have to go to the restroom really bad?
The remaining bandwidth is used up with all of your other senses. What you see, what you smell, what you feel with your fingers. The practice of good listening involves moving these other senses to a subordinate mind function so that they are out of the way of incoming sound.
Good listening is not a simple function, although it is instinctual. Our ancestors on the savannah thousands of years ago relied on listening skills to survive. Movement in the brush could mean dinner had arrived or you were about to become dinner.
This began to change as language functions developed. The change was specific to what was being listened for: movement in the brush or fundamental language components or both. When you consider that language components also include the evaluation of emotion, the complexity of listening becomes evident. It is no longer just what is said, but how it is said.
The importance of contextual information, such as emotion, can be seen in the modern day court room. Lawyers and judges are relying more and more on reading court room transcripts to evaluate what was said and make life changing decisions. The problem is manifested in what is lost in a transcript. A transcript cannot tell you anything about tone of voice, voice inflection or emotion. To understand this problem, consider how many ways that you can say the words “shut up” and how the meaning changes with how you say it.
Listening involves several sub processes. There is the physical aspect of hearing, which is a physical process of sound waves hitting the ear drum. Listening also involves the processing of language and critically analyzing the received information. Lastly it involves formulating action. This can be a verbal response or maybe even a mechanical response such as “fight or flight”.
There are four basic listening strategies. These are “not listening”, “listening for reinforcement”, “listening with the intent to reply” and “listening with the intent to understand”.
The first strategy is “not listening”. Not listening is the process of tuning out sound coming into your brain. This is the most used listening strategy in humans. It involves tuning out one noise source in favor of another. An example might be listening to someone speak while sitting in the food court of your local shopping mall. You are selectively tuning out the noise coming from other people around you in order to selectively hear the voice of the person that you are communicating with. Not listening may seem to be a bad thing, it is actually essential to communication.
The next strategy is “listening for reinforcement”. This involves listening with little to no critical analysis. This is how you listen when you are being told what you want to hear. An example might be listening to political opinion or spin makers. Sometimes this is a listening strategy we apply when we are sitting in church. Its overriding characteristic is the lack of critical analysis. In other words, this strategy’s weakness is it failure to challenge the information that is coming into your brain in order to interpret its correctness or truthfulness. Does this sound familiar in your culture?
The third listening strategy is “listening with the intent to reply”. This is how you listen when you are emotional or in an interesting discussion. We utilize this strategy anytime we feel that what we want to say is more important than what anybody around is saying. An example of this type of listening skill would be a situation where you are arguing or you are listening defensively. You wind up subordinating the words of the people speaking to you in favor of the words you are formulating in your mind. The critical analysis applied here is not applied to the words you hear. It is applied instead to the words you want to say. This makes it very difficult to accurately get the other person’s meaning. Have you heard a person ask a question and receive an answer to a completely different question? If so, you probably witnessed someone listening with intent to reply instead of with the intent to understand.
The fourth listening strategy is “listening with the intent to understand”. Specifically, this is listening with the intent to understand more than the spoken words. This is how you listen when you watch television. Visualize how you feel when you are watching a program you are interested in on television and right at the moment that you are paying the most attention someone comes in and begins to speak to you. How does that make you feel? It probably makes you feel uncomfortable, stressed and maybe even angry.
This listening strategy involves listening between the words for meaning, truthfulness and motive. When using this strategy you are able to critically analyze the information coming into your mind. This allows you to get the speakers story, to fully understand their angle, their motivation and what their true needs and wants might be. In consultative sales for example, this type of listening is critical. You have to understand what the shopper needs, what they are afraid of, and what their potential objections are. Without this information, the sales person is not likely to close the sale.
The point to this discussion is this. Just like our ancestors on the savannah needed good listening skills to survive, we too must have good listen skills to survive. The specific strategy may have changed over the past millions of years, but the results of poor listening have not. Our ancestors might get killed by a predator if they listened poorly, we on the other hand will be used up by lies, missed opportunities and a general failure to recognize the predators in our culture.
I cannot finish this discussion without giving you a couple of ways to improve your listening skills. Here is a practice strategy that works for me. I practice evaluating what listening strategy I am using anytime I am involved in communication with another human being. Once determined, I will consciously switch to listening with the intent to understand. The idea is to understand the person speaking to me at a deeper level than they understand me. That places me in a more informed and powerful position than the other person. It also means that I am in a better position to help that person, explain my opinion or defend myself.
Another practice strategy is to go to a social function and learn as much about the people you talk to as possible, while reveling as little as possible about yourself. This exercise involves asking open ended questions that get others to talking while you listen with the intent to understand. People like to talk about themselves and you can learn a great deal about someone both by what they say and what they don’t say.
My last point. Do not misunderstand my motivation in writing this piece. The object is not to become a person who uses words to subvert others, to become a predator. Instead it comes from my desire to make a contribution to the culture in which I live. Imagine how the world would change if everyone began listening with the intent to understand.