Think back to any time when someone close to you, or even a stranger, did something that made you so furious that both of you lashed out and nothing ended up being resolved. Do you remember how you reacted? Did you yell at them? Throw things? Try and get even? Or even a time when someone came to you to simply open up and get some things off their chest. Did you try to empathize with them by sharing an experience you thought might have been similar to theirs? Whatever you did in any of those two situations, the one thing you didn't do is listen to the other person. The moment they got on your last nerve or when you thought to yourself and remembered something similar that happened to you, you stopped listening to that person.
Listening, as sound expert and TED speaker, Julian Treasure, says in his "Five Ways to Listen Better" talk, is something "we are losing." But how is it that we're losing something that we do everyday and almost all of the time? Are we actually listening to each other or have we become desensitized to all of the noises around us that we lose interest in simple conversations? Unfortunately this could be all too true; especially for us who live in such a noise polluted city like New York. We are grabbed by so many visual and audial distractions, our technology being the biggest, that we have stopped listening because there is just a strain of having to listen to everything we come across. Perhaps we've become tired of listening. So what do we do now? We pop on our headphones and tune out the rest of the world to stay in our own little bubble. So now when we do that, we stop caring to listen and when we do have to listen, we grow impatient and nothing is understood.
Treasure defines listening as, "making meaning from sound." In other words, listening to meant to understand the other side. Therefore, when we fail to listen, we fail to understand and this leads to a variety of different emotions. The first and the easiest emotion to give in to is anger. It is the easiest to fall into, and the hardest to come out from, and as extreme as it sounds, it's primarily what causes hate and war in the world. However, we can't just stop listening to each other, because that would eventually become a catastrophe. So how can we better listen to each other?
One essential thing we should do, Treasure says, is to dedicate at least three minutes of just being silent with ourselves. Being silent can help us to "re-calibrate" our ears and prepare them to properly listen. Much like the scenario in the beginning of simply listening to someone else's problems, this practice of being silent may help in a situation like this. We're usually quick to give an experience we think is like theirs when, in reality, we have no idea how the other person feels. As much we want to or as much as we think we know how the other person feels, we truly do not know. Then when we share our own thoughts or opinions, we take away the focus from the other person and even though we don't explicitly tell them, we're implicitly showing them that their feelings are insignificant and that they don't matter because you and everyone else feels the same way. However, that isn't the case at all. Given the other situation, as hard as it may be to keep our cool, listening to the other person's point of view and understanding their argument is crucial to avoid any upset. It is so crucial that Treasure even believes we should teach listening in our schools. Learning to listen at an early age could cultivate generations of active listeners and turn around the problems in communities, cities and maybe even countries. Once we start with ourselves, it can only spread to others.
If we are aware of our listening and understand each other, then dealing with one another wouldn't be a pain as much as we think it is. It doesn't take more than a little bit of patience to stop and be conscious of what others have to say. In the end, it can stop hate, war, and ignorance and bring about agreements, love, and acceptance for everyone and this all starts with listening.
