Listen if you want to be heard

To listen is not merely to hear. We in life, hear but very rarely do we know how to listen. To Listen is to hear, with an intellectual alertness and attention of awareness.

Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.

"Are your conversations a competition in which “the first person to draw breath is declared the listener"? Not many people are good listeners. Research has found that "75 percent of oral communication is ignored, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten."

There is a huge difference between merely hearing and listening, Bolton notes. The word "listening" is derived from two Anglo Saxon words, hlystan ("hearing") and hlosnian ("waiting in suspense"). The act of listening therefore means more than just something physical, it is a psychological engagement with another person (p. 34).

How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby? Listening has importance only when on is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?

The ability to listen is as important as the ability to speak.

Listen. Listening is one of those dynamics that sounds like the easiest thing in the world to do, but in reality is one of the hardest.

Listening is a very active awareness of the coming together of at least two lives. Listening, as far as I’m concerned, is certainly a prerequisite of love. One of the most essential ways of saying “I love you” is being a receptive listener.

Listening and trying to understand the needs of those we would communicate with seems to me to be the essential prerequisite of any real communication. And we might as well aim for real communication.

Reden ist uns ein Bedürfnis, Zuhören ist eine Kunst.

More and more I’ve come to understand that listening is one of the most important things we can do for one another. Whether the other be an adult or a child, our engagement in listening to who that person is can often be our greatest gift. Whether that person is speaking or playing or dancing, building or singing or painting, if we care, we can listen.

And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing, and language in turn is crucial to human society.

I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said.
Thuli Madonsela1

Anyone can listen. All you have to do is stop talking.

But to be a good listener, you have to stop talking and be interested.

Genuine curiosity is the precursor to understanding, and a good listener helps the other person feel understood.