Are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said? I feel like you’re not listening to me! I wish someone would just listen!
How many times have we strongly felt one of these sentiments? We try to tell our friends about a struggle that we are having and they don’t really hear us, or we tell our roommates about our day while they are distractedly playing with their phone or on Facebook. They may be physically present, but they isolate us with their inability to listen in a way that makes us feel unheard.
I believe that listening mindfully can change lives. It has the ability to empower another person, while it can change your perspective and enhance intimacy in your relationships. Listening is a two way street, and when it is our turn to listen we must be careful to not exhibit poor behaviors.
What does it mean to listen mindfully? According to communication scholar Julia Wood, listening allows you to engage with another without imposing your own thoughts, feelings, or judgments on them, and it engages the ears, mind and heart. This requires effort, concentration, practice and a change in our mindset. In many ways, this type of listening requires that we give up our own agenda so that we may learn about another person. It is antithetical to western culture’s value of personal expression. Put this in the context of your education and think about the classes you’ve been required to take. Many of them promote one’s ability to express herself well, but what about Listening 101?
I can imagine you saying that mindful listening could be problematic. What if she is truly wrong? Doesn’t she need to know it? What if I’m not able to tell her what I think, especially when I disagree? Mindful listening is a choice. You decide where and with whom to listen. You can at times willingly choose silence to encourage another to speak.
What if you are sitting across the table from a person that you strongly, no vehemently, disagree with on a logical and emotional level? How do you listen to her? To begin, you must know why you are engaging in the interaction. Many of the reasons that we listen to others are purely selfish. We listen to guide others to our side and even when we ask questions, we do so to lead our neighbor down our own path. We think that we listen well, while we are politely waiting for her to end her sentence so that we can interject our thoughts. Are we listening to learn from her, or at the very least to acknowledge her personhood? Many times, our motivation to fully focus on the other will deepen the relationship to the point that you will be asked to share your own thoughts and feelings in the future.
Mindful listening means creating space for others to express their thoughts, and to allow you to learn from them and their experiences, even if they are divergent from your own. Without this skill, we can even lose a great deal in our relationship with God. In our prayer time, we rarely create space for God, offering up a laundry list of petitions and voicing our concerns, while checking devotions off of our to-do list. We don’t take the time to listen, to sit in silence with God, to hear the small whispers of what He is teaching us and we become easily frustrated when we don’t hear God’s thundering voice. Our inability to listen is to our own detriment, creating separation between us and God, and us and the important people in our lives. We must move beyond our own agenda, so that when people walk away from us they know that we have listened with our whole heart.
