Listening to Connect: Enhancing Understanding and Building Trust

A lot of times in our lives, we get into a situation where we are hurt by people not really listening and understanding us. There are days that we don't have good conversations with people, there are days when more issues start to creep in, there are days when we feel ignored, because someone's not listening when you are talking. I genuinely wonder during such days, what's the problem that's really happening? Is it the stress in someone's life that's making them not listen or maybe its just the attention span that a person has, or maybe its just that they are consuming too much media and they have literally filled their mind with so much dopamine that it becomes impossible for them to listen. There are various reasons that are seen in real life, maybe people fear something. But here's a small discussion on why listening is so much more important than talking or listening makes talking easy and then let's discuss how can we listen more and in a better way. 

Firstly, why is listening important. Let's think about it for a while, let's talk about listening to a lecture by a professor. A lot of people complain that they are not able to understand anything, but the question is are they taking the effort to really listen? Most likely not. Are they questioning why are they not able to understand? Probably not. So the point here is that listening will actually make you learn more things than talking will ever will. Especially in a work environment or even in a cultural setting. It makes you more and more learnable. Secondly, people don't like good speakers, people like good listeners and that's true for everyone. You can find someone good looking based on how they look, how much they earn but the attraction stays if you have a quality like good listening, especially for men. 

1. Learning : Imagine if you keep talking about how good you are or how you think of the world, the question is are you learning anything? Possibly not, but you are most likely losing something or the other. 

2. Builds trust and respect: When we really listen to people, they start trusting you more, they feel heard and valued, and they start respecting you more as well. 

3. Conflict resolution: How many times do we have that whenever we are in a conflict, we are more likely to put our own point of view, rather than listening and understanding from someone else's situation. We start understanding the root of the problem and we address that together rather than fighting about who's right or wrong. 

4. Improves communication: When we listen well to others, firstly, we understand a lot of stuff that we wouldn't but we also observe how others communicate and that's the reason we also improve a lot of our communication skills by just listening to others communicate. 

5. Reduces misunderstanding: By listening well, we reduce the chances of misunderstanding people as we listen to them, their needs and sometimes even their emotions. 

6. Listening helps learning a new language: When we were small, is it that you would know your mother tongue very well or you would know English very well, absolutely, not right? You learnt to listen to your mother tongue first and later on went ahead and learnt to speak in your mother tongue. So when the first interpersonal skill we learn as humans is listening, why do we forget it so easily and why do we undervalue it so much? 

7. Listening helps deepen bonds with family and friends: There's a strong correlation in building trust and respect, and deepening a bond with our family and friends. When we truly listen to people, their basic emotional needs that is to feel valued and heard is met and that further helps deepen the bond we have with our family and friends or even colleagues. 

8. Creates a positive environment : Whenever we listen to people and when they don't really feel threatened by us, we will be able to create a culture where everyone feels respected and heard. This will increase the openness within the team, we will be able to accept different perspectives and ideas, have more and better ideas because no one would really feel judged about it. Having a positive environment will help thrive a work culture and family culture to progress. 

So now that we know these are the real reasons why listening is such an important skill, the next question is how do we really develop such a skill. I would say there are multiple ways to do this. In my opinion personally, listening is just practice but the right kind of practice. 

1. Listen to understand, not to answer: A lot of times we put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure we keep the conversation going, we try to answer something straight away even if you have not understood what the speaker has to say. So whenever you don't understand something, ask them to explain or just ask them about what you didn't understand. 

2. Leave all judgments behind: Personally, this is the most important thing that I need to work on. At times, I am very early to draw a conclusion because I start judging. For an example, you might disagree to a person's opinion about something but just make sure you don't interrupt them while they are talking. It's really really important that you do that. Don't judge, criticise or say anything until you have understood the point. 

3. Never interrupt: This happens on certain days, especially when you have something extremely important to complete and you don't have a lot of time to listen, you can tell the speaker, sorry to interrupt and then say you need to go or do whatever. 

4. Be compassionate : A lot of times in our lives, whenever someones speaks about something very personal, we are very quick to judge and offer them solutions and show how intelligent or cool we are. But in reality, take a moment to listen with empathy, putting yourself in the other person's shoes, and really understanding what the other person has to say. Compassion helps you build trust and connection.

5. Be present : The problem with today's day and age is that everything happens within a click. You show how you like some xyz person by liking his/her picture on instagram, giving them a quick dopamine. You feel important just by that xyz person and in the real sense what you are doing is you are getting fake dopamine. In a world that's distracted by the outside noise of social media, be someone who really focuses on listening to the person by being present and having your thoughts focused on listening and not on the distractions outside. 

Remember people don't respect the one who talks the most, people love the person who listens the most.