Communication - Listening

Listening, paying attention, making contact with the sender of a message is one of the most important parts of the communication process. The process involves three things, a sender, a receiver and a message. Listening is what helps to transmit the message from sender to receiver.

Listening is hard work. You are trying to control your mind and your thoughts while trying to decipher the communication code of the sender. Some people misguidedly think that listening is sitting on the chair and eyes focused on the pastor, the teacher or the person in front of you. It is much more than that. All you might be doing is hearing sounds and not listening for meaning.

There are two kinds of listening. There is active listening and passive listening. Active listening means your mind is engaged. You are listening with a purpose to understand. Your body language says it, your eyes say it and your verbal feedback says it. For example if you attended a workshop on how to extend your life beyond 100 years, you would have had questions in your mind that you need answers to, such as what foods do I eat, what kinds of exercise or what do I need to do to achieve this goal. With that purpose in mind, you will actively listen; hang on to every word of the speaker to get answers to your questions. You probably will jot down a few key points to ask the speaker to elaborate on later. On the other hand if you had no goal in mind, you just thought the workshop sounded good and decided to attend it out of general curiosity, you might find your mind wandering to other things such as unfinished work back at the office, or things you have to finish at home, tuning in between your wandering thoughts to the speaker, catching a few sentences here and there. This is what I call passive listening. Most people who listen in this way often hear a different message that the active listeners.

When you listen well you with your heart and soul and constantly try to decode the message, engaging the speaker with nods, smiles and cheers, the speaker knows that he or she is getting through to you at some level, that communication is happening and there is something wonderful that percolates when people are in sync, it's like dancing the waltz or the tango in perfect harmony.