Are you even listening to what I said? It is so exasperating when the person you are talking to is simply not listening to you! Listening apparently is an important life-skill that, strangely enough, a lot of us lack! Poor listening skills can be blamed for marital discord, lack of teacher-student engagement, and it might even lead towards arguments between colleagues at the workplace. When you step outdoors and visit the petrol pump, you ask the gas attendant to fill the tank with a thousand Rupees worth of Petrol, he assumes you had asked for Rupees five hundred worth! You get irritated, but then ask him to add another five hundred worth of fuel. A waste of time indeed. But then, this is a relatively harmless kind of disability. A more serious problem arises when a teacher in a classroom gets into a direct confrontation with his or her students and then things heat up. Things become so bad that a sense of hostility, animosity and aggression enters into the relationship between students and their teachers. This is more serious!
We have, in our eagerness to be more experiential than others, taught our students to be evaluative. Sometimes this is taken too far by the students. Some of them will simple question stuff, not even listening to what has been said by the teacher or the presenter! Sometimes these lapses appear to be too silly. "Did you listen to what was being said?" is a phrase that many a teacher would have said to his students. Unfortunately being too evaluative becomes a barrier to listening and the casualty could be a broken marriage, discord in the class or a hostile work culture. Over-analysis gives you a lopsided, selective perspective. You never realise that perhaps it was not meant as such, "they didn't mean to hurt you", "you assumed wrong!" Yes, constant evaluation leads to verbal duels that can really turn very ugly!
Sometimes people are so vulnerable that they become over-protective! They carry an emotional baggage that causes them to retreat into a shell. Such people will simply not listen to you even if what you are saying is sensible and rational. Such people will often repeat the same story about their emotional experiences with an intensity that will increase with each retelling. Often we might even become impatient with such people and decide to move on to the next person. People who are not open to sharing ideas might be people who are most vulnerable and they are trying to protect their themselves from being made fun of.
A lot of students in the class will jump the gun and answer a question before you have even framed it! They guess the answer or even assume the answer before listening to the whole questions. Their answers can be most surprising because they fall flat the moment you complete your question and everyone starts to laugh. This learning defect can be the result of plain impatience, boredom, or even a lack of being with the moment. In many cases, jumping the gun and assuming the answer before really hearing out the question might appear rather audacious and insulting to the teacher in class. It shows lack of respect for the teacher and might even appear presumptuous. The common laws of respect are brushed aside by the presumptive speaker.
Prejudice precedes all good efforts. Listeners who are biased against another person will never listen to him or her rationally or with an open mind. When you are prejudiced against another person, you block yourself to what he or she is saying, you counter, argue and simply put that person down because you've been told that that person is bad, a masochist, a sadist, or even a tyrant. Prejudiced listening is not listening at all. It often ends up in a total breakup of communication. The speaker often ends up facing an impassable wall of impassive listeners. Hostile eyes glare at the speaker and nobody wants to listen to a demagogue in any case.
Some people will criticize others just for the sake of criticizing and gaining attention. They are the judgmental listeners who take upon themselves the task of being critics ready to share their opinions without even listening to another person. In class is often happens that students gang up and pounce upon a fellow classmate who might have just begun to answer a question. They will not even listen to their friend complete his answer. Like the critic, the self-appointed judge will cause a lot of embarrassment to the speaker forcing him to retreat into a shell.
Selective listeners are those who will listen and agree only with things that they agree with. As long as their opinions are validated, they will continue to be active listeners, but then as soon as the conversation shifts to a topic that they are not interested in, they will withdraw from the conversation.
But then these are scenarios one observes not just in the classroom but also in everyday life. The ability to listen is an important life skill and it is even an important leadership trait. The basic unit of the society is the family and the family is built around an important set of rules. The family, a microcosm of the whole world is built around a mutual give and take mutual respect, love, and even sacrifice. A lot of clashes in the family result from lack of communication or perhaps even a misunderstanding of what is being communicated. When one of the partners shouts back, "But did you even listen to what I was saying?" it is a sign that there has been a breakdown in communication. In most cases, this because one of the partners was really not listening to the other one carefully! Sometimes, one of the partners might be in a better job and thus a better position. Being used to be heard at one's place of work might make one more judgmental and authoritative than one's partner. An authoritative position at work makes one assume that he or she is the authority at home too! Presuming that one might maintain one's authority at home and thus listening to the other as if one is an authority can make for a very unbalanced relationship between husband and wife. I would equate this tendency with authoritarianism or for that effect dictatorship. No wonder, a grown-up person referred to his mother as a veritable dictator (rather humorously) as she had worked as a matron in a well-known hospital in Delhi and she had had a large number of nurses serving under her!
A good listener is a good person, and a good person might be a good student, a good husband, a good wife a good teacher (in this case), a good father or even a good mother. The list is long and I have not added other professions because the list would be endless. As far as the importance of listening goes, we have come across anecdotes detailing how a patient who had to get his right foot amputated ended up getting his right foot amputated by a surgeon who had not listened to his instructions carefully. A student who was too zoned out ended up writing a speech instead of a debate for the very fact that he had not listened to his teacher's instructions carefully. The teacher who told his student that his answer was wrong had not listened to him carefully. The pilot who took off instead of aborting the takeoff had not listened to the air-traffic controller's last-minute warning carefully.
The above write-up is my take on the article: Are You Really Listening? 7 Barriers to Listening Effectively the link of which is attached below:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322563
A lot of students in the class will jump the gun and answer a question before you have even framed it! They guess the answer or even assume the answer before listening to the whole questions. Their answers can be most surprising because they fall flat the moment you complete your question and everyone starts to laugh. This learning defect can be the result of plain impatience, boredom, or even a lack of being with the moment. In many cases, jumping the gun and assuming the answer before really hearing out the question might appear rather audacious and insulting to the teacher in class. It shows lack of respect for the teacher and might even appear presumptuous. The common laws of respect are brushed aside by the presumptive speaker.
Prejudice precedes all good efforts. Listeners who are biased against another person will never listen to him or her rationally or with an open mind. When you are prejudiced against another person, you block yourself to what he or she is saying, you counter, argue and simply put that person down because you've been told that that person is bad, a masochist, a sadist, or even a tyrant. Prejudiced listening is not listening at all. It often ends up in a total breakup of communication. The speaker often ends up facing an impassable wall of impassive listeners. Hostile eyes glare at the speaker and nobody wants to listen to a demagogue in any case.
Some people will criticize others just for the sake of criticizing and gaining attention. They are the judgmental listeners who take upon themselves the task of being critics ready to share their opinions without even listening to another person. In class is often happens that students gang up and pounce upon a fellow classmate who might have just begun to answer a question. They will not even listen to their friend complete his answer. Like the critic, the self-appointed judge will cause a lot of embarrassment to the speaker forcing him to retreat into a shell.
Selective listeners are those who will listen and agree only with things that they agree with. As long as their opinions are validated, they will continue to be active listeners, but then as soon as the conversation shifts to a topic that they are not interested in, they will withdraw from the conversation.
But then these are scenarios one observes not just in the classroom but also in everyday life. The ability to listen is an important life skill and it is even an important leadership trait. The basic unit of the society is the family and the family is built around an important set of rules. The family, a microcosm of the whole world is built around a mutual give and take mutual respect, love, and even sacrifice. A lot of clashes in the family result from lack of communication or perhaps even a misunderstanding of what is being communicated. When one of the partners shouts back, "But did you even listen to what I was saying?" it is a sign that there has been a breakdown in communication. In most cases, this because one of the partners was really not listening to the other one carefully! Sometimes, one of the partners might be in a better job and thus a better position. Being used to be heard at one's place of work might make one more judgmental and authoritative than one's partner. An authoritative position at work makes one assume that he or she is the authority at home too! Presuming that one might maintain one's authority at home and thus listening to the other as if one is an authority can make for a very unbalanced relationship between husband and wife. I would equate this tendency with authoritarianism or for that effect dictatorship. No wonder, a grown-up person referred to his mother as a veritable dictator (rather humorously) as she had worked as a matron in a well-known hospital in Delhi and she had had a large number of nurses serving under her!
A good listener is a good person, and a good person might be a good student, a good husband, a good wife a good teacher (in this case), a good father or even a good mother. The list is long and I have not added other professions because the list would be endless. As far as the importance of listening goes, we have come across anecdotes detailing how a patient who had to get his right foot amputated ended up getting his right foot amputated by a surgeon who had not listened to his instructions carefully. A student who was too zoned out ended up writing a speech instead of a debate for the very fact that he had not listened to his teacher's instructions carefully. The teacher who told his student that his answer was wrong had not listened to him carefully. The pilot who took off instead of aborting the takeoff had not listened to the air-traffic controller's last-minute warning carefully.
The above write-up is my take on the article: Are You Really Listening? 7 Barriers to Listening Effectively the link of which is attached below:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322563
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