I Have To Take My Own Advice!

Folks in the healing professions are often long on suggestions but short on personal application; therapists in particular.  Since I made some pointed suggestions for 2019 I feel particularly on the hook, so I’m going to make January all about listening more and speaking less.  At the end of the month I’ll do an inventory and see how I’ve done.

Well, it’s now the middle of February, and looking back, I’ve noticed more than a few times when in social situations I’ve lost what others are saying due to a number of reasons.  A few times I found myself drifting off and thinking of what I might say in response…a few times I actively interrupted and made “additions to the conversation” that weren’t necessary… and once I was bored and distracted, but neglected to tell the speaker I wasn’t in a good place to really listen.

Clearly, when things like these happen, we’re not listening…and the speaker usually registers our “not being there”.  I think it’s valuable to note that when people get into repeating themselves, it’s often because they sense they’re not being heard and they’re repeating the message in another attempt to “get heard”.  It’s curious how we often know we’re not being listened to, either by watching our listener’s face or by some more subtle mechanism like our intuition alerting us that something’s not right…like that funny feeling you get when you’re on the phone with someone and you start to wonder if they’re looking at their computer.  I’m sure this has happened to most of us at one time or another.

So what can we do about this?  How can we get better at listening?  By practicing!  Think about it – every time we engage each other in conversation, we have the opportunity to truly listen.  Here’s a hint – when going into a social situation, take some deep breaths and relax. Remind yourself to take your time, don’t rush, just listen and share the interactions you’re going to be getting into shortly.  Remind yourself that our tendencies will be to talk too much when it’s our turn to talk, and also to run out of patience when waiting for our turn.  I have found that falling prey to the feeling of having to rush, coupled with a general sense of not being relaxed, push me in the direction of not listening.

In our next post, let’s review how we’ve made out on remembering to be grateful for all we have in life!