Shh, listen

You know the old saying about why we have two ears and one mouth?  To teach us to listen twice as much as we speak.  Trouble is, most of us don’t know how to listen with much skill or understanding of why listening is so deeply valuable.  It could be that people don’t listen as much as they talk because they simply don’t know what to listen for or why people talk in the first place.  We are used to giving advice.  We are accustomed to listening enough to formulate our opinion, objection, rebuttal, defense or supportive rant and we do that while we’re so-called “listening”.  That’s our culture.

The most important thing to most people, the thing that brings the most pleasure in life is not what our culture says it is.  It is connection to others.  We speak to connect with another.  But speaking is isn’t enough.  We need to be heard and understood to feel closer or more connected to the other person.  And conversely, when we listen deeply and understand an other person’s feelings, ideas, needs or wants, we feel more connected to them.

The neuroscience of our time confirms that emotion/affect serves an important purpose, namely to connect and communicate with others.  So…. when we listen, if we attend to the feeling states being communicated to us, we can reflect those to the other person.  We can feel the feelings too and share them.  These feelings can be felt in our senses, in our bodies.  These feelings can be communicated in words, or facial expressions.  These connector points are what to listen for and respond to.  Listening is a skill not only of the ears, but the body and the other senses.  We know when someone is sad, whether they say the word or not.  We sense their anger or disappointment with our whole being.

TRY:  Listen to your your 5 senses as you pay attention to someone else speaking to you and see what you receive and understand from this deep communication, with words and beyond words.