Each Person Is Waiting To Speak His Or Her Mind

If you ask most people what the opposite of talking is, they will say it is listening. The truth, though, is that the opposite of talking is waiting to talk. Pay attention to conversations and you will see that there is very little listening going on. Each person is waiting to speak their mind, nearly heedless of what the other person is really saying.

Learning the art of listening can help you become more successful in business and in your personal life. You can develop deeper friendships, keener professional awareness, and a more meaningful understanding with your partner. You can experience greater fulfillment in your relationships due to conversations holding a deeper meaning.

Learning to listen means learning to actually pay attention to -- to concentrate on -- what other people are saying. Listening to their words as if listening to a favorite song, with your mind focused on what they are saying and what it means. Concentrated listening is also called "active listening" or "deep listening." Deep listening gives greatly increased concentration, enjoyment of music as well as other humans, and -- perhaps most importantly -- a profoundly positive shift in the quality of relationships.

Listening with concentration can be called active listening because we are not just passively allowing speech to enter our ears, but instead are bringing as much of our listening capacity into the act as possible. Our ears become hungry for the words they are listening to, and chew the words as finely as possible before digesting them.

The first step in learning to listen is to learn to be quiet. Make a friend of silence. This can be difficult because nobody wants to be thought of as dull. There is a natural desire to respond quickly, and to be seen as interesting and smart. But if you resist this urge even a little bit, a new thing can begin to happen.

Surveys show that workplace miscommunication has high costs, including lowered productivity, increased turnover, and higher stress. Most people want to be heard but rarely make the effort to listen to others. Effective, thoughtful listening can help avoid troubled communications that lead to such unwanted outcomes as:

Lawsuits and claims: One study found that poor physician/patient communication -- such as miscommunication or the patient not feeling heard by the physician -- showed up frequently in the details of malpractice suits. Another study links increased harassment claims with inappropriate workplace communication.

Low morale: In a time when retaining and recruiting top-notch talent is tough, alienating your employees can be very costly. Studies show that employees choosing to leave a company often include the poor interpersonal skills of a supervisor and/or coworkers among chief complaints.

Lost respect: A key trait of influential people is facility with listening and understanding another's perspective. Interpersonal skills are now high on the list of the abilities that make an individual successful in the workplace.

Misunderstandings: These can turn a discussion into a conflict, or sour a valued relationship. Other repercussions include a high percentage of time lost to personality squabbles, according to several recent studies.

You will actually feel smarter and more concentrated. Your mind is doing one thing at a time: listening when it's time to listen, and responding when it's time to respond. Thinking of your response while trying to listen is juggling, and causes you to lose a lot of brainpower to the juggling overhead. If everything you are saying to each other can be said with no actual reflection, then it's probably not that worth saying anyway.

As you learn to do this, try to listen more deeply while they are speaking. Dedicate the entire time they are speaking to actually hearing their words, not listening to your own mental reaction to them. If you practice this enough, not only will your concentration power begin to get quite strong, but you will have some of the best conversations you've ever had. And others will begin to slow down and listen to you as well.

It's human nature. We want people to listen to us … yet we rarely have the experience of being deeply heard by others. There are so many calls on our attention that, most of the time, we tune each other out in normal conversation. But when we actually listen to others, we can learn a lot. What's more, the people who are speaking perceive our attention as respect and validation.