LISTENING: Do We Take This Skill for Granted?

 

There’s an old Turkish Proverb that read: “If speaking is Silver, then Listening is Gold!”

Listening is a skill that doesn’t need a degree. Doesn’t cost a cent. It does affect you and I every minute of every day! Sometimes the world we live in at present - the one that with ever changing technology, gives us everything we need to know in less than a split second - has perhaps made people pay less attention to this all-important skill?

Listening can affect us all, whether you’re a college student taking in a lecture; an athlete going over the game planning with your coaches; a sales rep attending a client meeting or working the phones. Heck, listening affects most couples even at home. One or the other complains “you’re not listening to me”. My wife always gives me a hard time and says “when it comes to your job, if someone says anything, you never forget it!” Listening does really come down to conditioning one's mind to focus on the tasks at hand.

Ultimately, we are all judged by our body of work be it from educators, employers, coaches to parenting our kids and yet, one of the vital keys to becoming that “success” in your chosen field is through the power of “listening”.

What made me chime in and write this piece came from reading a GQ Magazine article on actor Clint Eastwood.  He was asked about his life as a child and a special moment from his Academy Award nominated (2008) movie "Changeling" where the GQ writer was struck by a particular scene Eastwood had directed in which a boy sits up in front of a radio to just listen in.

“Life was pretty simple then in my day because you didn’t sit and watch television all the time. There was the radio. Everything was listening, so you imagined everything,” said Eastwood. On the movie scene involving the boy and radio, he added: “There’s an art to listening. There’s not much of it going on in our world today. As an actor, it’s the most important single function”.

I will leave you with a terrific quote which is authored by Karl Menninger from the famous Menninger family of psychiatrists (who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas). He once said: "Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand."

Jim Loria