Listening- a very important gift

Listening is one of the very basic skills that most humans possess, but how many of us think that it's one of the very important qualities that we have? We all love to speak and express our opinions. Many of us take classes or courses to improve our public speaking skills, but not many of us are patient enough when it comes to listening. If we see our development from childhood, most of us first learn to listen and then slowly we learn to speak. We are born with the power of listening, without that it's very difficult to learn the art of speaking. As life progresses we forget that listening is an art and a very important quality to have, all of us focus heavily on speaking, and expressing ourselves but totally ignore the listening part. We take it for granted that whatever we speak people will listen and very often forget that we also need to listen to others.

Many times it happens that we are in some meeting or in conversation with some person or listening to a song, physically we are there, but our mind is somewhere else, we don't realize when one song ends and another begins or we wake up only when people start clapping at the end of seminar. So, it seems it's very difficult for most of us to focus our attention in one place while listening. Nowadays we love to multitask and we like to check our emails, update our Facebook page, or browse the internet while listening to seminars, sitting in a classroom, or even chatting with our loved ones. We are almost sure that listening does not require our full attention and many things can be done while listening, but the funny thing is when someone else does the same while we are talking then we get upset and blame them for not paying 'full attention' to whatever we are saying. Very often a nice discussion turns into a fierce argument when both parties involved in the discussion stop listening to each other and try to force their own opinion on the other person. One can see that a lack of patience (and listening requires a lot of it) can create troubles anywhere and believe me practice of listening improves our patience a lot.

Listening offers many benefits, one of the major ones is it improves our knowledge, you can rarely get in trouble because of listening, speaking can land us in trouble if we are not careful with our words but listening won't do that. It also improves our patience. I think we all will agree to the fact that it requires a great deal of patience to listen to what others say. Most of the time it's very difficult to control the urge to interrupt the person in between to refute his/her argument and prove them wrong, this attitude often turns most of the discussions into arguments and both people involved in this act miss the great opportunity to learn from each other.

I believe that we all need to work on our stamina to listen to what others say. If we learn to listen to each other I believe we will start understanding each other better, whenever we listen to anything attentively and with patience it is possible to understand many minute things that we might miss and many times these minute things make all the difference between understanding and misunderstanding. The easiest thing we can do to avoid most of the misunderstandings in our lives is to listen patiently and then think over it before responding. It's not very difficult to do but also not as easy as it sounds. It can definitely solve many of our problems, it's worth trying.

Thanks for reading and please share your views.

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)