What is Listening?
It’s the very foundation of civilization and without it we would be foraging in the forest like other animals.
Our supreme ability to communicate is humanity’s greatest accomplishment. Human beings are the only animals that communicate with their own kind. Other animals signal to one another, as birds do, as monkeys do, as howling coyotes do, but they don’t communicate in the sense that communing means to share thoughts and feelings, to share one another’s minds.
If listening is so important, why are so many of us not so good at it?
Because we take it forgranted.
Studies on the ways in which we communicate have consistently shown that we spend the majority of our communication time as listeners. The four forms of communication are reading and writing as one pair, and speaking and listening as the other.
If we include modern technology, such as listening to radio, television, the internet, cell phones and all other forms of listening, we spend close to 50% of our communication time as listeners.
We spend nearly 50% of our communication as listeners, and yet it’s highly unlikely you’ve had more than a couple of hours of cursory listening instruction.
I believe the reason for this lack of training is simply this: we confuse hearing with listening. We enter grade one with the basic ability to “speak” and “listen” but as yet, we haven’t acquired any skills in reading or writing. Therefore the given assumption is that speaking and listening are natural skills.
A poor listener is not an unintelligent person. A poor listener is someone who’s never learned effective listening skills. The typical student graduates from school with an “acceptable” level of reading skills, and an “unacceptable” level of listening skills. Students enter the workforce where their listening skills will be required about three times as much as their reading skills, which makes it easy to see why the effective listener has such a huge advantage over a poor listener.
When you tell someone a story, or give them instructions, how much of what you said do you think that person will usually remember? What percentage of information will they retain?
Did you come up with a guess? Think about this the next time you ask yourself; “Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?” or, if you catch yourself saying directly to someone, “I just finished telling you, can’t you listen?!” … then you’ll know that the correct, and honest answer from most people would be, “Yes I can listen, but I only listen at a twenty-five percent rate of efficiency!”
That’s right! Twenty-five percent! Our untrained listening ears will rapidly forget seventy-five percent of what we heard.
See – 29 DAYS … to becoming a great listener and communicator
