What happens when we miss listening to another person and what can we do instead
What happens when we miss listening to another person and what can we do instead
I would always tell myself, I am a good listener. People on the streets, in conversations, they would tend to tell me their life story. I was there, I gave them the platform. But it took me a while ot realize that this does not make me a good listener per se. And it does not connect me to people. Real connection is something else. Going deeper. And only happens when we truly listen.
But what is “Truly Listening”?
True Listening is being there in the moment with that other person. It is deeply trying to understand what the other person is communicating. Listening in, asking questions if something is unclear, asking questions if there is a discrepany. And that sounds easy, is it not? It sounds like we do that. We actively listen to the other person, we care for their words, their perspective, their unique view on the world. And with that we interact and with that, we connect.
But aren’t we not doing that? Listening to another person? Connecting?
Yes, we think we do, but are we really doing that?
Why do we fail to listen to another person?
Because it is so damn hard. Because we can only listen to another person when we focus our attention to that moment. Focusing on what the other person says, what the person communicates.
And focusing our attention is hard, damn hard. Our mind loves to wander, thinking, dreaming, imagining. These are great capabilities, but not helpful, when we are in the middle of a conversation trying to listen in what someone else wants to tell us.
Just yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend about her time with her family over Christmas. She was telling me about her experiences, family dynamics and what she got as a Christmas gift. I was walking next to her, had my face directed towards her, but I realized that I was not fully there. My mind drifted away from time to time. I realized pieces of “emptiness” within her story that I could not recall. They drifted away without me being able to grasp them and hold them. My mind became pre-occupied with thoughts about a topic that bothered me. Over and over did my mind go back to that unsolved mystery instead of focusing on the situation at hand.
It was a constant circle of me listening to her, at one point realizing that my mind was off tinkering that mystery, catching my mind back to the conversation, realizing that I missed the pieces of information my friend shared with me while my mind was off, trying to catch up or re-asking what was going on, and repeating that circle several times.
Why should we practice to listen in?
It was an exhausting circle for sure. And one that I encountered several times. I was going back in my mind towards last week and tried to remember all the conversations I had and whether I could recall what happened and whether I was truly there. And then I went back even further and thought about all the conversations in my life that I had so far. How often have I truly been there, fully there with the other person?
Recalling was not possible of course in detail but I realized that often I was not fully present. Instead I was busy within my mind, thinking about a different topic, wondering how I would be perceived by the other person, looking for cues whether they like me, wondering what I would and should say next. Clearly, I was not there. I was somewhere else.
But what happens when we are somewhere else instead of with the other person? We are not with the other person. And when we are not with that other person, we cannot build any form of connection. Of understanding. Of knowledge about the other person. The other person, while being physically close to us, has no chance to connect to us on a more deep emotional level and neither do we. It is as if we are in two different worlds running in parallel but not intersecting, twingling, connecting, sparking and playing, dancing and twingling.
We simply miss to connect. And in these encounters we may miss to build friendships we could have otherwise and we miss to build rapport, trust and a sense of belonging we could have otherwise.
It is time lost. And this is the true tragedy. Time, encounters, the beauty of the moment, the beauty of connection that we cannot get back. The only thing we can do, is to practice to make it better from now on.
But how can we practice to truly listen?
How can we practice to deeply being there with the other person? To share moments together, to care for what the other person is saying.
Becoming aware
One way to practice being there and truly listening is to become aware of these patterns. In my conversation with the friend telling me about her Christmas holidays, I realized from time to time that I fell off the conversation. This is a great starting point you can take as well. Becoming aware of those moments when your mind wanders. The more you realize how your mind tends to wander off and which thoughts it moves to most often, the more you know your anchor points of what tends to occupy the thoughts of your mind and the more you will then have the chance to take yourself back to the situation at hand.
Taking yourself back
And you take yourself best back when you focus on the words your friends or whatever person you talk to say in that moment. Focus on it. If that does not immediately work, try to say “I am sorry, I missed your last sentence, can you repeat it?”. Asking something helps your mind to automatically focus on what you say and thus helping yourself coming back to the conversation. When you are more skilled with bringing your mind back, you can also try to connect back to what the other person says, a word snippet that you catch with your mind and build a question upon it and ask that. It will have a similar effect as the other question, that it allows your mind to come back to the conversation and focus on what is going on in that moment.
Learning and Practicing
There are several additional methods that you can try to bring your attention back to the moment you are in right now.
The most common and well-known practice is meditation, where you deliberately work on bringing your attention to your breathe, a mantra or some specific body parts of yours.
But basically anything works that helps you practice to focus your attention on one thing at a time and stay there for a period of time. You can practice it in each activity and action you do. Just while I write this text, my mind wandered off several times. I thought about that unsolved mystery that still bothers me, I was thinking about the things I want to do today after having finished this article, Ithought about another article I could write and I even thought about things for which I cannot recall the content.
All these are moments in which I can practice bringing my mind back to the here and now. And the more I do that in various situations, the more aware do I become about it, the better I can take my attention back to the moment at hand and the more spillovers I can create from one successful “bringing back” situation to another one.
With that in mind, try it out. Today, tomorrow, the next days. Become aware of the patterns of your mind wandering and practice bringing it back to the present moment whenever you realize that it wandered off.
What you will gain?
The practice is not always easy and it can be frustrating to realize how often we wander off. But the more you find yourself in the moment of the conversation, deeply listening and connecting with another person, the practice is deeply worthwile. You will feel a deeper connection, more trust, more beauty and more belonging with people, places and moments. And for that it is more than worthwile practicing to “truly listen” and truly being there with the other person.
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