You are a rare person if you do. One of my friends read the first part of this post and sent me this;
“Absolutely love reading this, it really makes sense and I definitely think people even in our line of work don’t listen when we talk to them.
Sometimes clients forget what we have talked about, so what we do as a company is relate back to them via email what has been discussed in meetings so we are all clear.
This makes our projects run a lot smoother both for us and the client.”
They even bill themselves as the Builder that Listens! My thanks to P.A. Dance Builders in Hobart, Tasmania.
Most of the time when we are listening to someone speak, we drift off into an internal conversation or we interpret what they are saying, such as you mean to say this, or we can use a different word in place of the one the other person used. In family sessions, I have observed the simple replacement of a word set off fireworks, as people can feel patronized or belittled.
There are so many rewards for listening to what people are saying to you but we often have childhood experiences that have left scars about not being heard, or it isn’t safe to say what I really mean. If we have sore spots like that we are looking for danger or rejection and not really listening to the other person.
Almost everyone has some degree of filtering going on, we filter for evidence to prove what we already believe. It is possible to miss something that doesn’t fit our filters even if it is a compliment.
We are living in a society that barely connects with each other at home, at school, or in business, since we are more likely to take away our ideas of what was said than what was actually said.
Next time I will go further into how we Delete, Distort and Generalise unconsciously, according to our beliefs about life and our place in it.