importance of listening
_12:55 PM
What I’m learning right now in communcations
If you’re at all normal, listening takes up more of your waking hours than any other activity. A study of persons of varied occupational backgrounds showed that 70 percent of their waking moments were spent in communication.
And of that time, writing took 9 percent, reading absorbed 16 percent, talking accounted for 30 percent, and listening occupied 45 percent. Other surveys that I found underscore the large amount of time that people in different walks of life spend in listening.
It’s important to listen effectively because of the sheer amount of it that you do each day.
Unfortunately,
Few people are good listeners. Even at the purely informational level, researchers claim that 75 percent of oral communication is ignored, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten. Rarer still is the ability to listen for the deepest meanings in what people say.
How devastating, but how common, to talk with someone about subjects of intense interest to oneself (this happens to me all the time) only to experience the stifling realization that the other person was not really listening and that his/her responses were simply automatic or mechanical.
Perhaps it was after an experience like this that Jesus was quoted saying, “Thou hearest in thy one ear but the other Thou has closed.”
Trinity Says:
Most people are poor listeners. I read Carl Roger’s (one of the creators of humanistic psychology) book, A Way of Being, for my research paper for psychology, and he made a multitude of good points about how we rarely receive empathy (true listening, an understanding of our thoughts and feelings) from people. And how if a person experiences that lack of empathy too often (which can, after a while, feel like rejection), thereby not really *connecting* with any human being, they will feel very alone, possibly leading to depression.
=)