Good communication requires both skills: speaking and listening. Listening and knowing how to listen will help you gain more advantage and win more sympathy of colleagues, superiors, customers … Moreover, listening – this seems simple but not everyone can do it. So each of us must train ourselves to listen to others, listening to others is also a way to improve our value. People often say “Saying is silver, silence is gold”, I think it is better to say “Saying is silver, listening is gold” !
Communication is not simply about knowing how to speak.
To understand the concept, do the following exercise: Close your eyes for 1 minute. What do you hear? What you hear is called hearing. It was heard that the sound waves hit the eardrum and moved to the brain. Hearing that is a completely natural process since you were born. When you sleep, that process still happens.
Listening is one of the important skills in communication
Now do the second exercise: Close your eyes and try to see what the person in the next room is saying? This is the listening process. This process follows immediately after the listening process. It transforms sound waves into semantics. This process requires very high concentration and attention.
So listening is the process of focusing attention to decoding sound waves into semantics.
“Three years old enough to learn to speak but life is not enough to listen.” Having a mouth doesn’t mean talking. Having eyes doesn’t mean reading. Having a hand doesn’t mean writing. So having ears does not mean listening. We learn to speak, learn to read and write a lot. So where do we learn to listen and who teaches us? A skill that takes up 53% of communication time is not taught. From a young age, we are taught to speak, teach reading and writing. But listening to us is only taught with a few sentences: “You have to listen to your parents!”, “Can you hear me ?!” But how to listen effectively is never taught.
Nature gives us two ears just to use one thing to listen. Sometimes we use extra things like wearing earrings, or letting others pull our ears. There is only one mouth to speak, to eat and many other side jobs. Should we say less and hear more than twice. When we have good listening skills, the work will be more convenient, family life will be more fun, and conflict resolution will be easier.
“Talking is sowing, listening is reaping.” But the sad fact is that we use more than half of the communication time for listening, which is only 25-30% effective. If we actually go to reap that way then it must be … starving. So we still have 75% of the potential left untapped. If you are a wise investor, I am sure you will invest in this 75% potential land.
So what makes us hear ineffective?
The attitude of listening is not good: Deaf than deaf people are people who do not want to listen. We often admit that we already know so we don’t want to listen or just listen to part, but when we need to repeat, we don’t remember. Worse yet, we only hear what partners are wrong and bad to react to.
Unprepared: To say something we prepare all options very carefully. yet in communication we have never prepared to listen. No preparation is to prepare for failure. That is what makes us hear inefficient.
How to listen?
“The thousand-mile journey begins from a small step.” To hear the initial effect we need to change some small habits:
- Change attitudes: To listen effectively, you must first want to. If you don’t want to listen, all skills are useless.
- Change gestures: Instead of looking absent-minded, pay attention to the speaker expressing the desire to listen. Nodding with the speaker. The expression shows the excitement of listening. We can simply sum it up with one sentence: “The eyes blink, the mouth bites, the face is hot, the head nods like a Buddha”.
- Change the words: Instead of sitting still, show the speaker that you are listening to them with the following sounds: “Great! Great! Oh hey! …”; the sound: “Yes! Yes! …”; or the question: “Is that so? Really? What? What? Really? What? …”. Simplified we can summarize with one sentence: “Is that so! Really? Oh my!”.
How to listen well?
Sometimes you can still listen while your eyes are wandering elsewhere, or listening and doing other things like eating, drinking, for example. However, it is these expressions that will ruin the good relationship and turn you into a less communicative person in the eyes of friends, colleagues, superiors or customers, etc. So, to listen well, you should note the following tips:
- Making eye contact, looking straight into the eyes of the speaker: this is a gesture that shows their respect.
- Do not interrupt or rob the speaker’s words.
- Sit and listen.
- Nodding when agreeing.
- Fully focus on the story, the problem is listening.
- Repeat the information and ask questions that show your interest when the speaker has finished speaking.
A person who knows how to listen is when he focuses on the problem being heard, whether it is important or not. Let show interest not only in words but also with gestures and act.