If you were asked to identify the Greatest of All Life Skills, the one thing that will help get you whatever you want in life, and give you happiness in your interactions with family, friends and other people, what would you pick?
Imagination? Visualization? Learning? Teaching & Coaching? Parenting? Making Things? Selling? Communication? Public Speaking? Having Empathy (EQ) for people? Caring & Sharing?
What's your pick? Is it something else? If so, what is it?
I pick Listening, which is to be distinguished from Communication. Aren't they the same thing, some may ask. No, because communication involves not just listening but speaking too. Listening is only a part of communication, though a very important part, without which there can be no meaningful communication. Without listening, I'd suggest, we also cannot do well many of the other things listed above e.g. parenting, caring & sharing, teaching & coaching, selling.
I sat in a workshop recently where some very wise and successful people shared this simple idea that all communication must have 3 components: the transmitter, the message and the receiver.
We need the transmitter to send out the message and the receiver to get it. There's never a lack of messages to send or receive in our information-rich world. Of the other two components, guess which one is under-developed or under-used: Transmitter? Or receiver? (Answer: Receiver!)
When thinking of the receiver, let's think of how the dial of a receiver is often not turned on full, or perhaps sometimes, not turned on at all, whereas the transmitter is often at work all the time, seemingly over-time. I often think about why we are created with one mouth and two ears but too often act like we were created otherwise? ;)
When I pick Listening, I don't mean listening as we habitually and carelessly practise it, but really listening i.e. listening with our heart, listening without jumping to conclusions, listening without passing judgment, listening without subjecting the message to personal processing and interpretation. Look at listening with heart this way: We let the message we receive enter our ears, go through our brains, and then sink into our heart and let it stay there. You can call that, taking the message to heart.
But how do we normally listen? The message enters one ear and we let it slip out of the other. Or we let the message enter one ear, subject it to a screening or interpretive process, and then register a message quite different from the original message!
If we could listen better, we would understand each other better. If we could understand better, we can relate to people better and connect more effectively.
In any session on life skills, how much of the time do you think we should train and workshop on the art of listening and how much time on public speaking? (I'd love to know what you think.)
By my reckoning, and you may or may not agree, the Art of Public Speaking is passe and over-rated. In contrast, the Art & Science of Listening is little appreciated, often neglected, yet holds the more important key to effective relationships at work and at home and happier, more productive communications and conversations in forums big and small, from the coffee shops to the United Nations.
If we would just learn to listen better, I believe, we can conceivably eliminate petty fights, socially costly misunderstandings, and big, destructive wars. If we'd just listen well, we'll inevitably learn to appreciate each other better, realize how similar people are, regardless of ethnic, religious, intellectual or socio-economic backgrounds, and then learn to accept and even love each other. What do you think?
One of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People exhorts us to "Seek first to understand, then only to be understood". How are we to understand, and then be understood, if we do not first listen well?
Motivational guru Zig Ziglar says help people get whatever they want and you will get whatever you want. But how would we know what people want, let alone help them get it, if we do not first listen and find out?
Can someone think of another life skill more powerful than Listening? This is not a rhetorical question that seeks to hammer home a point, caring not for an answer. It is a listening question that seeks out a considered response. Why? Because, I think, that whatever stands above or close to Listening as the Ultimate Living Skill, we better get really good at that one too.
Happy Listening - everyday, everywhere!
