Communication...

We all, on some level, desire to be good communicators. One of the fundamental mistakes that we make is that we forget the communicating is more than just speaking, it also involves listening. While most of us can speak fluently enough to get our point across many tend to be poor listeners. I think if we can recognize and understand why we are poor listeners we can improve our communication skills immensely. Some reasons why we tend to listen poorly may be:

*We are distracted by other things/issues on our minds and we don't or can't switch those things readily off.

*We allow ourselves to get distracted by things around us.

*We jump to conclusions, which can lead to us interupting and/or talking to much (you can't listen when you're talking!)

*We dismiss what we're hearing as irrelevant, unimportant, or uninteresting.

*We try so hard to remember everything that we lose the main points of the conversation. And probably the biggest culprit to good listening-

*We stop listening because we get too anxious to rebut!

We need to concentrate on the art of listening if we indeed want to become effective communicators. Once we learn to listen we will be amazed at the amount of misinformation we receive each and every day. Rarely do we converse with someone without an agenda- people are always trying to line us up on "their side", or to get us to react to their "enemy", (whatever or whoever that may be), or to have us do them a favor, and usually they believe that if they disguise their agenda within their conversation they stand a better chance of success. Much of what we hear is weighted toward the needs or wants of the speaker, sometimes at the expense of the truth. We need to train ourselves to weigh all options before making decisions, to consider the "why" of what we hear as well as the words themselves. Learning to discern why will help us understand and respond to the motivations as well as the words and make us much more effective communicators... Food for thought...