Learning to Listen

When someone is speaking, what is your mind doing? Is it listening to the person? Or is it feeling restless to get the chance to speak? Is it formulating what to say next?

More than often, almost always, it is so difficult to listen to someone completely without interfering, without going off into different directions in thought through association and without feeling the urge to say something, interrupt the person and blurt out what you want to say.

Why is it so difficult to listen? Even those who outwardly appear to listen are actually either thinking and evaluating what the person is saying or simply going off into their own reverie and ignoring what the speaker is saying.

What does it mean to listen?

Is listening the same as hearing? Just bring your attention to your ears and notice what you are hearing. It might be the fan’s noise or the horn of the vehicles on the road, or the dog barking on the street. This is hearing. It happens naturally. You are hearing all the time, unless you are thinking so much that the internal voice drowns the external stimulus.

So when someone is speaking, and if you are simply hearing, you will hear the words that the speaker is saying. But what happens when you hear the words? They cause associations in your mind – they bring up images, memories, thoughts and some of them trigger feelings too. When things from the past or future come up in the mind, automatically, other associations linked to them come up and very soon, you are diverted to your own inner track and lose the thread of what the speaker is talking about. Once in a while you come back to hearing the speaker. This is what is the normal experience. Real listening never happens.

Listening techniques

There are many techniques being taught to make you a better listener. Things like active listening that includes nodding frequently to show engagement, pay attention to body language, make eye contact, say nothings like hmm, umm, oh, I see, summarize and restate what the person is saying.

Such behavioral tricks do not really help in listening better. While you are practicing these skills, you are hardly listening to the speaker. And the speaker will probably notice your fake attempts to listen.

Real Listening

Real listening happens when you as a listener is not present (egoistically), there is only the speaker. It means you have no specific agenda in listening – you are not trying to understand, or trying to evaluate or trying to compare, or trying to judge. Your mind is empty. But you are not a furniture. Your mind is relaxed. There is no urgency to say something. In that relaxed state, the mind is active and listening happens in that relaxation.

When such relaxed listening happens, the response happens spontaneously. It is not pre-meditated. You will know the right question to ask. You will nod your head at the right time, not too much, not too less. But that is not important.

The real miracle is when you listen like this, there is something that happens within the speaker too. The speaker also becomes relaxed in his speaking. And something transforms within him during that period, which might be called inner joy. If there was any problem that the speaker was talking about, then that problem would simply dissolve away, leaving behind clarity.

How can you practice such listening?

This is simple. There is no technique to listen better. Just relax yourself while listening. Real natural listening will happen on its own.

Yogesh Lokhande
Zen Counselor | Inner Game Coach | Spiritual Friend