Keep your ears open.

Hi All!

With the heat of the summer, I am sure that reading about doing a lot of different things is tiring enough. So today, I thought of sharing a tip to keep your cool.

So far, I have talked and talked about speaking and talking. How does it feel to be on the other side? How does it feel to be a listener?

As a listener, most often we focus on the content or message that the speaker is trying to convey. This is not only when listening to speeches or presentations, but also in conversations.
We focus on the data points and try to make connections or put them in order. This helps us understand the data and even recollect it later.

However, there is another dimension to listening that is not often brought up into consciousness. Listening to the feelings or emotions of the speaker. As speakers we reveal more than what our words are saying. The tone, the emphasis points, the body language all together convey a big chunk of the message.

You might say "Hey! We are all adults here. If somebody is feeling something, they should just say it!" True, in an ideal world, it would work that way.

But in the real world? Nah.. it is too difficult to convey all our feelings in words. Why?

1. We may not feel comfortable with the time and place.
2. We may not feel that the listener can be trusted.
3. We may not have the right words to express our feelings.
4. We may not even be aware of all of our feelings.

As a listener, these are the four areas we must address, if we want to understand the person speaking. Of course, this kind of focus or depth is not needed in most conversations, but it is of tremendous value where we will be interacting at length, either at work or at home.

Happy Listening!

See you all next week.

Gayatri