Taking control: How to evaluate your listening skill!

Listening is ability to hear with your ears and understand the meaning of each expressed word. It is hearing with your heart to discern the underlying feelings of the motivating factor behind each word, unsaid thoughts, and experiencing the totality of what the message encompasses.

Listening is the most underrated attribute of effective communication and learning; hence is not fully developed.  From infancy you learned your mother tongue and discern cultural norms behind words. As you grew up you tended to stop to encompass other relevant senses in communicating with others:

1.    Hearing with your ears: It is an ability to receive the wave length of transmitted message. When you have heard all words, you are able to apply non-physical mechanism to decode the message accurately; hence acquire knowledge when you relate such message with existing information.  This process will enable you to respond accordingly to the requirements of the message.

2.    Hearing with your heart: It is discerning the motivation behind the choice of each word which will elicit non-verbal response to the message.  For an example people hear or read one message differently hence will respond according to how they encoded the message.  This internal process triggers responses such as chills when the unsaid or expressed words are perceived negatively; or joy when such message carries positive energy. At this realm, hearing is assisted by other internal cognitive processes, which reveal the unsaid thoughts and are decoded through feelings.  

Listening is important to make decisions. King Solomon was able to judge a sensitive case of two mothers of male infants who were sleeping in one room. One mother had rolled over her child, thus killing it.  She replaced her child with the life one.  The mother of the life child pleaded her case that the dead child was not hers. The king brought the life child and the soldier with a sword to divide the life child. The real mother pleated that the child not be killed. That reaction enabled the King to know the real mother and judged accordingly.  Listening skills enables effective interaction and in similar cases, enforcement of justice.

It is through listening that we influence change.  Before the era of television, politicians and other social change agents communicated their ideas through radios and newspapers.  Likewise, you too are listening to me and establishing authenticity of the motivating factor behind the key message of starting over. In the context of taking control, listening denotes your rational hearing of what is it you need to change.  It refers to reviewing your actions and listening to your own heart or making choices whether you are equipped to find solution or you must seek professional assistance.

Listening enable us to be heard and to hear others.  You could be one of those who were denied opportunity to express your feelings in childhood and are therefore fixated in the area of not being able to connect with other people.  In my culture there is a saying that children may be seen and not heard.  It means raising children who are condemned to the world of silence; who would miraculously learn to live in the world of adults equipped to lead and influence others through communication. This is a paradox of socialization which I urge those who relate to this situation to shout from the mountain tops to advocate intensified efforts to learn to listen.