What We All Should Know About Listening Skills

The wrong thing that we all do everytime.

Photo by Mark Paton from Unsplash
We all love to talk, express our views and air our opinions. And that is very good as it builds our confidence and it makes us contribute to vital ongoing issues.

Nowadays, we speak about the things that concern us— both offline and on the internet. And so far so good, that has been helping everyone. After all, we shouldn’t become mute about issues.

But has it ever dawned on you that we speak a lot, but is someone listening? And the real truth is that do we even care that someone is listening in the first place?

Communication—as I have known it to be—shouldn’t be a one way thing. Instead, it should be mutual, interactive and conversational.

And from my little observation, we all are missing something about Listening. And the more we keep missing it, the more we will keep missing intelligent and better views.
Yes, it is just one thing. Can you guess?

Listening To Attack

We may not notice, but sometimes we listen to attack. And it is not our fault several field or aspect that we find ourselves spurge us to do that sometimes.

As a law student who is worth is salt — in Moot Courts — you must always look for loophole in the arguments of the opposing counsel. Then after noticing that such person has flawed in a principle of law, YOU ATTACK.

We may not notice, but we do this even when we go for evangelism. You will wait for the person to misquote or misinterpret one scripture so you’ll bounce on him.

This is the litmus test to know if you listen to attack: whenever you’re more about making your point rather than reasoning along with the other party, you are listening to attack.

It doesn’t only happen in argument. And because we have been trained to be always on guard, this has been the mindset of most of us.

This is an urgent thing we all need to know about listening; I have seen quite a lot of people who keep repeating this mistake.

From our discussion so far, here are our main points:

• We should all learn to speak about things.
• We should care that someone is listening.
• Most times we listen to attack.
• Let’s learn to calm down and reason along.
• Let’s be more after mutual reasoning.

It is all part of growth: caring to listen and reason along. When we start to implement this, we will have smoother discussions, deliberate more peacefully and reach agreements speedily.

I love to see you grow.