ŷ������

Cited as the most frequent bad listening behaviours

*Interrupting
*Responding vaguely or illogically to what was just said.
*Looking at a phone, watch, looking around the room, or otherwise away from the speaker.
*Fidgeting (tapping on the table, frequently shifting position, clicking a pen, etc)



Foetuses can recognise human voices

We begin to listen even before we are born. Foetuses respond to sound at just sixteen weeks' gestation and, during the last trimester of pregnancy, can clearly distinguish between language and other sounds. An unborn child can be soothed by a friendly voice and startled by an angry outburst.

Attachment Theory

If we don't attach well with our carers when we are babies, we can form dysfunctional attachments not only as children, but also when we are older.

Our ability to listen and connect with people as adults is shaped by how well our parents listened and connected with us as children.

Attentive and responsive care givers set you up to have a secure attachment style, which is characterised by an ability to listen empathetically and this for functional, meaningful and mutually supportive relationship.

On the other hand, children whose parents were not dependably attentive typically grow up to be adults with an insecure anxious attachment style, which means they tend to worry and obsess about relationships. They do not listen well because they are so concerned about losing people's attention and affection. This preoccupation can lead them to be overly dramatic, boastful, or clingy. They might also pester people, rather than allowing them to have their space.

An insecure avoidant attachment style comes from growing up with care givers who were mostly inattentive - or perhaps overly attentive, to the point of smothering. People raised this way are often bad listeners because they tend to shut down or leave relationships whenever things get too close. They resist listening because they don't want to be disappointed or overwhelmed.

Finally people who have an insecure disorganised attachment style display both anxious and avoidant behaviours in an illogical and erratic manner. This is often the result of growing up with a care giver who was threatening or abusive. Intimacy can feel scary or frightening.

Of course not everyone fits neatly into one of these categories . Most people land somewhere along a continuum from secure to insecure.

Several programmes have emerged in the last decade to teach parents of young children how to listen and respond to their babies and toddlers, before dysfunctional neural patterns get grooved into their developing brains.

To listen well

To listen well is to figure out what's on someone's mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising or showing how it should be done.

Listening requires, more than anything, curiosity.

In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote, "You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people that you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you"

While you might think you'd be more likely to listen to a loved one than a stranger, in fact, the opposite is often true.

Things that help us talk to people.

The person shows interest.
They ask the right questions.
They were less judging
They didn't interrupt.

We are more open with people we don't know well

In an in-depth study of a cohort of 38 graduate students and confirmed in a large online survey of 2,000 people representative of all Americans, Harvard sociologist Mario Luis Small found that slightly more than half the time, people confided their most pressing worrisome concerns to people with whom they had weaker ties, even people they encountered by chance, rather than to those they had previously said were closest to them - like a spouse, family member or dear friend. In some cases, the subjects actively avoided telling the people in their innermost circle because they feared unkindness, judgement, blowback or drama.

The Closeness Communication bias

Also people in long term relationships tend to lose their curiosity about one another. They become convinced that they know the other person better than they do. They don't listen, because they think they know what the other person will say. This is called The Closeness Communication bias.

Nurturing Relationships

One of the most widely cited researchers on the topic of human relations is British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. He says that a primary way we maintain friendships is through "everyday talk" That means asking "How are you?" and actually listening to the answer. Dunbar stresses that there are hierarchical layers of friendship determined by how much time you spend with the person. Without consistent contact, friendships can easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. At this point, you are friendly, but not really friends, because you've lost touch with who they are, which is always evolving. An exception might be friends with whom you feel like you can pick up right where you left off, even though you haven't talked to them for ages. According to Dunbar, these are usually friendship forged through extensive and deep listening at some point in your life, usually during an emotionally wrought time, like a personal crisis.

Prying

Prying is the the quickest way to lose someone's confidence. In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, "Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends. He has other which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away"

We never understand one another fully

Daniel Flores, a Roman Catholic bishop in Texas, believes that expecting complete understanding is the root of many troubled relationships. "We all long to express ourselves to another, but if we thing there will be the perfect person who will be able to receive it all, we will be disappointed. Not that we shouldn't always try to communicate and give one another the gift of listening, for that is love, even if we aren't always able to understand.

Reflecting/paraphrasing is not enough, we need to display understanding

Research by Graham Bodie, a professor of integrated marketing communication at the University of Mississippi, shows that people are more likely to feel understood if a listener responds not by nodding, parroting, or paraphrasing, but by giving descriptive and evaluative information. Contrary to the idea that effective listening is some sort of passive exercise, Bodie's work reveals it requires interpretation and interplay. We want someone to respond in a thoughtful, feeling way. People want to the sense you get why they are telling you the story and what it means to them.

Active listening goes beyond just listening to the facts. You want to pick up the mood of the person who is speaking, how they feel about what they are saying.

You already know about you.
You miss out on opportunities when you don't take a breath and listen. Talking about yourself doesn't add anything to your knowledge base. You already know about you.

3 Questions to ask yourself after a conversation

When you leave a conversation ask yourself:
* What did I just learn about that person?
* What was most concerning to that person today?
* How did that person feel about what we were talking about?
If you can't answer those questions, you probably need to work on your listening.

Keep an open mind. You may be wrong

Disagreements and sharp differences of opinion are inevitable in life whether they are over political ideology, ethical issues, business dealings, or personal matters. When engaged in any kind of dispute, the father of listening studies, Ralph Nichols, advised listening for evidence that you might be wrong rather than listening to poke hole in the other person's argument, much less plugging your ears or cutting someone out of your life entirely. If you remain open to the possibility that you might be wrong, or at least not entirely right, you'll get far more out of the conversation.

This approach is backed up by science. The amygdala in our brain is what activates when we sense a threat, and the more the amygdala is activated the less we are able to listen. It also clouds judgement, rendering us unthinking and irrational.

To listen doesn't mean you agree with someone. It simply means you accept the legitimacy of the other person's point of view, and that you might have something to learn from it. It also means that you embrace the possibility that there might be multiple truths and understanding them might lead to a larger truth.