Learn to Listen and Your Life Will Change for the Better
I recently bought the book, “How To Speak, How To Listen” by Mortimer J. Adler because I wanted to work on my communication skills.
The four operations involved in communication through words — writing, reading, speaking, and listening, are all skills that we have developed ever since we were babies.
I believe a good portion of modern people have a notion that they are above average in most, if not all, of these skills, and do not need to actively work on improving them. We have slowly convinced ourselves of this belief that these communication skills are naturally trained through occurrences and interactions with other humans throughout their lives.
Ever since the democratization of smartphones (or maybe we go back to its predecessor, the walkmans), we’ve been utilizing our ability to hear. Hearing is something that we are unconsciously doing all day — sounds travel from your ears to your brain and we process them instantaneously.
This makes us overconfident and believe that we are listening all the time. But there is a crucial difference between the act of hearing and listening. During a conversation, you might be hearing the other person’s voice, but if you’re not listening you will not understand what the person is trying to convey and why they are telling you these things.
You are not paying attention, and only pretending to pay attention. You are passively listening, which is not listening at all.
“The ears have nothing comparable to eyelids, but they can be as effectively sealed as eyelids can be closed. Sometimes both close at the same time, but it is often the case that the ear is turned off while the eyes are open. That matters little if, in either case, the mind’s attention is turned to other matters than what is being heard or seen. What the senses register are then sounds and sights that lack significance.
Listening, like reading, is primarily an activity of the mind, not of the ear or the eye. When the mind is not actively involved in the process, it should be called hearing, not listening; seeing, not reading.”
Mr. Adler points out that the most prevalent mistake people make about both listening and reading is to regard them as passively receiving rather than as actively participating. He notes that people do not make the same mistake as writing and speaking, because they are forms of communication that require the person to actively produce something (words on paper or words out of their mouths).
“They do not make this mistake about writing and speaking. They recognize that writing and speaking are activities that involve expenditures of energy, unflagging attention, and the effort to reach out to the minds of others by written or oral communication. They also realize that some persons are more skilled in these activities than others and that increased skill in their performance can be acquired by attention to rules of art and by putting the rules into practice so that skilled performance becomes habitual.”
He uses an analogy of a catcher and a pitcher to further describe how there is responsibility on both persons to pay attention and complete the play:
“The catcher behind the plate is just as active a baseball player as the pitcher on the mound. The same is true in football of the end who receives the forward pass and the back who throws it. Receiving the ball in both cases requires actively reaching out to complete the play. Catching is as much an activity as throwing and requires as much skill, though it is skill of a different kind. Without the complementary efforts of both players, properly attuned to each other, the play cannot be completed.
Communication through the use of words is comparable. It does not occur unless the reader’s or listener’s mind reaches out to catch what is in the mind of the writer or speaker. This has been directed to the reader or listener through the medium of written or spoken words.
If we use only our eyes or ears to take in the words, but do not use our minds to penetrate through them to the mind that delivered them, we do not perform the activity that is essential to either reading or listening.
The result is failure of communication, a total loss, a waste of time.
So while there is responsibility on both speaker and listener, writer and reader, don’t be disheartened if you feel like communication is not going smoothly. Sometimes it’s not your fault, and the other person in the exchange is not upholding their end of the bargain.
“Of course, the fault may not always lie with the reader or listener. The failure to catch a wild pitch is not the catcher’s fault.”
The Bad Habits That Interfere With or Detract From Effective Listening
While I felt personally attacked during this section of the book, I thought that others could relate and catch themselves if they realize they engage in these bad conversational habits (also I wanted you to feel the same guilt that I felt so that I don’t suffer alone)
“…A number of bad habits that interfere with or detract from effective listening. Among them are:
paying more attention to the speaker’s mannerisms of speech than to the substance of what is being said;
giving the appearance of paying attention to the speaker while allowing one’s mind to wander off to other things;
allowing all sorts of distractions to divert one’s attention from the speaker and the speech;
overreacting to certain words or phrases that happen to arouse adverse emotional responses, so that one is then predisposed to be negative in one’s prejudgment about what the speaker is actually saying;
allowing an initial lack of interest in the subject to prevent one’s hearing the speaker’s explanation of why it is important and should be of interest; and, worst of all, taking an occasion for listening as nothing more than an occasion for indulging in daydreaming, and so not listening at all.
Perhaps you have never committed any of these cardinal sins of conversation (I CAN’T BE THE ONLY SINNER HERE). However, I can assure that if you are not enacting these deadly sins then someone who you have talked with in the past has.
So this means that as you were pouring out your heart and soul to a dear friend who looked you in the eye and told you comforting words to save your wretched soul, he/she was thinking about the tub of Chunky Monkey waiting for them when they got home.
In a world where people do not respect the art of listening, your soul cleansing confessions will be no match for Ben and Jerry’s.
Dear God — How Do We Develop Rules of Effective Listening?
I’m glad I have your attention now.
Let’s get this clear — we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of listening effectively, especially if we want to do it in every conversation we have in our lives.
“Unlike reading, listening is subject to the limitations of time. We can only listen once to what is being said to us and the pace of our listening is determined by the pace set by the speaker.
We cannot stop the speaker and ask him to repeat something that was said earlier, as we can stop going forward to the next page to review pages read earlier.
We cannot hold up our hand to signal the speaker to pause while we ponder something he has just said, as we can put the book down for as long as we wish to ponder what we have just read.
Other things make active listening much less frequent than active reading. You do not have to exert any muscular effort in order to listen, as you do to hold a book in your hand. This at least gives some semblance of activity on the part of a reader. You do not have to keep your eyes open to listen, but this you must do to give at least the appearance of reading. You can be completely passive with your eyes closed and with your mind turned off and still pretend that you are listening.
All these differences between listening and reading not only explain why effective listening is much more difficult than effective reading; they also call for a much simpler set of rules to guide us in the effort to use our minds actively in listening well.
Mr. Adler tells us that a good listener, like a good reader, is “a demanding listener, one who keeps awake while listening by having in mind the questions to be asked about the speech being listened to.”
He has kindly formulated the four main questions that a demanding listener must ask of anything that is worth the effort of listening to:
- What is the whole speech about? — What, in essence, is the speaker trying to say and how does he go about saying it?
- What are the main or pivotal ideas, conclusions, and arguments? — What are the special terms used to express these ideas and to state the speaker’s conclusions and arguments?
- Are the speaker’s conclusions sound or mistaken? — Are they well-supported by his arguments, or is that support inadequate in some respect? Was the speaker’s thinking carried far enough or were matters that were relevant to his controlling purpose not touched on?
- What of it? — What consequences follow from the conclusions the speaker wishes to have adopted? What are their importance or significance for me?
These questions are also useful to keep in mind as a speaker, when you are formulating your thoughts and would like to work on effectively communicating an idea to another person or an audience.
Personally, I think the last question is probably the most important to remember. At the end of the day, we consume information through listening and reading because we want to know about something.
Maybe we want to know that we can utilize the information we just consumed to change something in their lives.
Maybe we want to know that we are the inheritors of secret knowledge unbeknownst to other humans.
We want to know that we haven’t just wasted our time listening to someone speak about something that does not ultimately tie back to an interesting, entertaining, or productive conclusion that is beneficial for us.
Imagine if we could have riveting conversations all the time. Imagine if we could effectively understand the ideas that other people are desperately trying to communicate with us.
We all have pieces of knowledge that is crucial and valuable for other humans.
It is our responsibility to develop our skills as listeners to extract that information from the people we come across in our lives.
