Ever since we were toddlers, we were taught to listen to adults and follow directions. When we became kids, we were taught to listen to teachers and learn the material they teach. When we became teenagers, we learn to listen to want we wanted to listen and turn our backs to anything that we don't like or don't care about. Now that we've become adults and learned about the responsibility we don't know what to listen for or who to listen to because there are so many people talking at once and we can't just turn our backs anymore. When we choose to listen to everyone, we become disorientated by all the different kinds of feedback, when we choose to ignore everything we become stubborn and ignorant. For the first time we're out of directions, out of clear instructions, and what's left is a judgmental society that's going to give you all sorts of suggestions and comments, some good, some bad, some that are out of malicious intent, and some with confusing instructions.

I'm currently enrolled in a communicative course that supposes to teach us about speaking, and one of the core aspects of becoming a good speaker is to become a good listener. We divided listening to six different parts or stages, and the first and most important stage, in my opinion, is discriminative listening, choosing what just noise is and what is worth listening to. We could choose what we listen to, and we should just hear, but what's the premise for that? What words should we be listening to and what should we acknowledge but not listen to?

There are two types of words, positive and negative words. There's also constructive comments and comments that are just personal opinions of others. Sadly most of the things that are sad today are simply opinions filled with negativity. We are judged negativity every day by all sorts of people because we deviate from their preferences and personal ideals; we accept those who are similar to us so we would rarely give positive opinions on people we approve of, thus the reason why there's so much more negativity.

Positivity comes in many ways; it could be a simple comment on how nice you look today or a genuine greeting towards someone and wishing them to have a great day. It could be a compliment on how well you did on something or a structural recognition of your achievements like an award. It can be positive feedback on the parts you did well on a project or assignment. When faced with the opportunity of a nice comment, take it; feel the pride that you own and let that good feeling make your day and motivate you. Being humble is important but what's more important is to recognize your achievements and when compliments come your way, embrace the things you've done and how far you've come. However, even with positivity, we must be careful not to get too far with it. Although nice comments can make us proud, too much of it could make us careless and ignorant. We become so full of ourselves and think that everyone thinks positive of us that we forget to reflect on areas we could improve on. Positivity is nice, but too much of a good thing could turn bad, so listen into the compliments and appreciate them as signs of success and recognition.

Negativity can be split into two parts, the good ones, and the bad ones. The bad negativity is when someone devalues who you are based on their opinions or value system. These people often offer opinions that have no constructive purpose behind it other than to hurt someone they disagree with. These negative comments are thrown out there for promoting their personal belief with poor structural argument behind it. When faced with this kind of negativity, ignore it. Every single person in this world has a different set of values, and each one of them is critical of others that differ from them. There's no possible way that you could agree with everyone's values so there would always be hate because people despise differences rather than appreciating them. The other kind of negativity is the good ones, the kind that serves a purpose of providing structural feedback and support for you to become better. We often confuse this kind of feedback for the bad negativity, believing that anything negative coming from someone's mouth is automatically bad, wrong, and should be ignored. However it's this kind of comment and suggestions that we should listen for not because it's nice and fulfilling but it's things that help us improve on, it's factual suggestions on how we could improve ourselves. It's like Yelp; it's feedback for restaurants to know what to improve on.

I've split what we listen every day into three general sections in this article. It's not instructions for you on what to listen for but rather suggestions on how you should approach everyday comments. The most important part of listening, however, isn't about listening to other people but listening to yourself. If we only listen to what others say, we let other people build us. When we listen to ourselves, we could then decide what's the best for us and live for ourselves and not for other people.