Living Life Fully’s Daily Pick-Me-Up

I read two separate short articles on listening this morning, in two different books, so it seems that life’s sending me a not-so-subtle message.  One of the articles was “Creative Listening,” by Wilferd A. Peterson, in which he points out many of the benefits of listening, and strategies for doing so.  To him, the value in listening is what we can learn, and how we can change our lives in positive ways when we do actually listen.  He encourages us to listen to the beautiful and to the good, and to listen critically and creatively and with patience.  If we do listen, he says, we can get something out of what we hear.  He implies that if we don’t listen, we really won’t get anything at all out of what we experience.

The other passage was by Richard Carlson in Never Mind the Small Stuff.  His focus was on listening to the other person closely in order to make both of you feel better about yourselves.  If we spend our time formulating our answers and just waiting for the other person to finish so that we can speak, we won’t get much out of the interaction and we’ll probably make the other person feel a bit diminished.  When we do this, we’re not showing respect to either of us.

Whenever I come across material from two different sources that’s so strongly related, I take it as a sign that there’s something there for me to learn.  As far as listening is concerned, I’ve studied quite a bit about it, yet I still don’t practice what I’ve learned very well.  I do some things that I don’t like while listening, like formulate my response and avoiding eye contact; while I’m trying to change these behaviors, it’s coming very slowly.

One of my biggest problems with our current president, for example, is that he doesn’t seem to listen to anyone.  He always seems to have made up his mind already, and any input he asks for is irrelevant.  This behavior runs contrary to everything I believe about life and learning–a president has advisors because he’s supposed to listen to their advice.  How many of our people wouldn’t be dead now if he had listened to reason before he invaded Iraq.  No, there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, and the very people we had sent there to find this out said so, but he refused to listen.  He wouldn’t learn from their input, and many people have died, and have lost fathers and mothers and wives and husbands and children because of his refusal to listen.

While the repercussions of my own failure to listen aren’t nearly as drastic–and definitely aren’t life and death–I do still affect people in my life.  When I listen closely to them, I can make their day brighter simply by treating them with the respect necessary to listen to what they say.  And what they say is valuable, if not to me, then to them–I just have to recognize that value and respect it and truly hear what they say.  Listening is one of the most valuable contributions that we can make to our friends and co-workers and family members–true listening, not just hearing the words, but focusing on the meanings behind the words.  So my goal for today is to listen better, and to try to keep up that habit in coming days.