We
don’t listen. Really, we don’t. Listening requires us to be fully present, and
if there is one thing that seems to have become increasingly difficult to do,
it’s to be fully present, and therefore to fully listen. In her book Alone Together, researcher and
psychologist Sherry Turkle shares her findings that children are complaining
more about parents not listening to them than they have ever done. The increased
pressures of life appear to have shortened our attention spans significantly, reducing
our ability to focus on just one thing at a time. If someone who is speaking to
us doesn’t get straight to the point we lose interest and pull out our phone
‘just to check’; we check our devices for social media updates or emails if the
film we’re watching has a lull in it, and we text while we’re giving our child
instructions on their schedule, all the while convincing ourselves that we are really
good at multitasking, when what we are actually getting good at, is doing
nothing very well.
While
we have gained convenience and an ease of connecting that we couldn’t even
dream of a generation ago, we seem to be losing the ability for being fully
present with someone, for giving all our attention to listening and
understanding so that the person feels heard and felt. The erosion of this
ability is taking its toll on all relationships, but especially our
relationships with our children.
The
breakdown of listening as an ability or skill is also evident inside our own
minds where we are ‘multitasking’ while supposedly listening to someone.
Although we hear what is being said, we are simultaneously assessing the part
that resonated most, even judging it, and framing our own reply while a
multitude of other thoughts that have nothing at all to do with the
conversation are running rampant in our head; what we’re having for dinner, the
traffic report, the shopping list we forgot, the missed phone call and all the
emails we have to write as soon as we can get back to our device. I certainly cannot
listen successfully in this way, nor can anyone else I have ever met, yet we
all continue to attempt to listen and multitask simultaneously as if it were
actually possible, then wonder why we have so many misunderstandings and challenges
in our communications and capacity to understand each other.
To
truly listen requires attention, willingness to place our own issues aside, and
respect. It requires that we give the speaker (even if she is just a toddler)
our full and focused attentiveness, that we are willing to untether ourselves
from any agenda we might have while we listen, and that we respect the speaker
enough to consider his or her expressions seriously. Unfortunately, because
this doesn’t happen much today, we experience and witness endless frustrations,
misinterpretations, misunderstandings, disagreements, arguments and conflicts
in every area of life on an extraordinary, and I would posit unmatched,
level. In families, corporations,
organisations, groups, and relationships of every kind, the failure to listen well
is rampant and regrettably also forms the basis of assumptions that underlie
many important decisions that are made on all levels of society –assumptions
that were made because we didn’t take the time, nor did we have the focus, to
listen well.
Learning
to listen well and be fully present is a critical skill, and one that we need
to give a lot more priority to developing, more now than ever. Learning to master
our own emotions is key. The more we are masters of our own emotional state –in
other words, the better we can manage our own feelings and stress– the better
equipped we are to listen and understand others, especially our children well. It
is a significant gain that results from developing the self-awareness and
capacity for self-management that is emotional intelligence, and that Applied
Emotional Mastery™ facilitates.
