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by Cia Ricco We often assume that listening is a passive and easy activity. Actually, to listen well requires a great deal of focus and presence. In order to practice effective listening, I suggest answering the following question: what does the speaker want from me? It is important to determine correctly whether The main barriers I observe to effective listening are two fold: 1) specifically judgment, which creates a closed mind that does not really hear, and 2) generally thinking instead of listening. If your own mind is busy, even if it is busy thinking about what is being said, you are not truly listening. True listening is a full body experience. It requires all our senses. You are listening not only to the words but to the tone and to the body language and facial expressions. Most of the information we pick up actually takes place at the non-verbal level. A lot of what gets through comes through a kind of "direct perception" which means our body is listening to another person’s bodily communication. This process is so subtle that people often attribute it to intuition, yet it is a physiologically verifiable process if we had the tools with which to verify it. Usually we listen through a kind of shield. We listen with a personal bias. We listen to judge, correct or compare. All these activities use up energy that could otherwise go into pure attention. The act of engaging our capacity for pure attention creates aliveness and engages the creative capacity of our brains. It can even create a state of mild euphoria. What about listening to learn? Even if you think the "information" that is being imported is not something you need, there are so many ways in which you can learn. You can learn about the speaker, you can learn about yourself; you can learn about the act of attention! Celebrate an attitude of openness as you listen and see what develops. |