0 The Lost Art of Listening

Published in The Edinboro Spectator: Feb 14, 2013

When I was a kid, to my parents it often seemed like I lived in my own world. I was imaginative and focused on whatever I chose to be focused on. 

However, on the flipside, living my own world often caused me to get into trouble. My parents said that I was a bad listener. My Dad would tell me, “Boy, you gotta learn how to listen.” My mother, more frustrated with me, would say, “You heard what I said, you just didn’t listen.”

As I got older I made a conscious effort to become a better listener, but I problem that I notice today is that it seems as if our generation doesn’t understand the importance of listening.

Hogan knows the importance of listening, brother.

Have you ever heard a group of friends have a conversation in which no one really listens to anyone else? Nor do they even think about what the other person is saying, they just all wait for their chance to talk.

Today we live in what I call a “my voice” society where communication is viewed from a largely self-centered perspective. We send tweets, make Facebook statuses, text and send emails, but one must ask, in this age of increased communication, do we know how to listen to people?

Aside from the obvious importance of listening to people in order to follow directions and rules, do people really understand the importance of being a listener?

Well, that is a question for you to answer; yet, I believe that listening to people is a lost art.

You can learn so much about a person just from listening to what they have to say and paying attention to the way that they say it. Every person that we interact with is like a new book, which means they all have their share of stories and important lessons to share.

But too often, instead of wanting to read the book of someone else’s life, we want the world to listen to us read our own book aloud. But this mindset is often a reflection of selfishness.

What people fail to realize is that listening to someone is also one of the highest forms of community service. To some, that statement may seem farfetched, I mean, after all, how much work does it takes to listen to a person? 

But what we fail to realize is that when we choose to listen to someone we’re giving them something, we are giving them our time and our attention. 

Those are remarkable gifts because in one way or another, we all just want to be heard.

But more importantly, people need to realize that in addition to listening more we have to learn how to speak less. One thing that I’ve noticed throughout my short, 22 years on this earth is that most people who talk too much are usually the ones who speak the most nonsense.

But as Abraham Lincoln once said, “It is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

Abe Lincoln: A wise man, with a impeccable taste in stovepipe top-hats.

So let’s all make a conscious effort to be better listeners, to use our ears in proportion with our mouth and listen twice as much as we speak.

As the old proverb goes, “The wise old owl sat on an oak, the more he saw, the less he spoke, the less he spoke, the more he heard, why aren’t we like that wise old bird?”

Now there’s a question to think about.