Listening and hearing, they aren’t the same. Listening and hearing are two different concepts. We take our ability to hear sound many times for granted. Hearing is the human body’s ability to register sound in the brain. Sound waves trigger nerves that say you heard a cat or dog, et cetera. Listening, on the other hand, is our conscious effort in understanding what is being heard and acting on it. For example, if you are at a party with many children, you will hear the sound of children playing and screaming. You may be talking with a friend at the same time you were hearing the commotion. At this point, you were hearing the children. However, when your child falls and is crying, your brain understood it was your child, and you react by getting up and looking for them to attend to their needs. You were listening for that cry or shout for help. Active listening requires an intentional focus on what is being said and processing the information. We can easily default to hearing if we are not careful. For example, you may be talking with someone, and your eyes start focusing on the TV in the background. Once your eyes become disengaged from the talker, you are most likely in hearing mode. To be a better listener, you must build good habits. Keeping eye contact and stopping what you are doing are the first major steps in good listening habits. For example, you may have someone approach you at your desk while you are working on something on the computer. You may be reluctant to disengage the computer and continue the conversation that way. But if you do this, you may miss important information, and you are sending the wrong message to the person talking. When someone approaches you to talk, do the following: Disengage from whatever you are doing and face the person, do not answer the phone when it rings unless it is one you were waiting for, and ask the person if you could answer the phone. Use a notepad to jot important things down. Summarize the conversation, keep eye contact, ask questions. Avoid thinking ahead or focusing on what you are going to say next. These behaviors will send the message that you are listening and improve retention of information.
