Listening is a byproduct of curiosity
People don’t really listen, they just wait for their turn to talk, which is where the whole premise of this article comes from. We all have heard the saying “She doesn’t want a solution she just wants to be heard”. From my personal experience, I listen better when I’m curious about what the other person means.
Now that can mean a few different things, but for the intents of this article I want to focus on how curiosity sustains attention and how you can easily be an active listener and be the one people want to talk to.
First things first lets get the definition out of the way active listening is where you fully concentrate, understand, respond, and remember what a speaker is saying, rather than just passively hearing their words, now this can be really difficult when we have a generation of individuals with extremely short attention spans, but lets focus on some of the reasons why this is hard
You are not really interested in what the other person has to say
You find what they are talking about too boring or the tone is just too monotonous
You do not value what the other person is saying
You are thinking about something else.
You don’t quite understand the complexity of what the other person is saying
You are not in the state of mind to have that conversation
These are just some of the reasons that one would not be interested in having an active conversation. However the main obstacle that exists in conversation is attention and the thing holding your attention is curiosity. If I take you back to your school days where listening to your teacher talk about your favorite subject was something you could do with ease sometimes hours on end, and the reason for that was pure curiosity, you are simply invested in investing time towards that particular act even though that was a one way conversation.
As the years passed on, that ability has dwindled due to various reasons out of scope for this article, but the basic premise still remains if you want to be able to actively listen you need to be genuinely curious in what the other person has to say. one thing i have found helpful is to repeat some of the words being spoken by the other person, in order to fully understand and grasp what they are trying to say. Furthermore my experience with any conversation is generally the opinion I give is ill formed and not really adding any value if I don’t spend most of my time actively listening. Its a way of showing that i really care about the thing being said.
Internalizing the thing being spoken is something that can help you what this means is focusing on the details or nuance of the thing being spoken, even though its an area out of your interest. There is a ton of detail in those conversations and without having an open mind and interest every conversation would feel like scrolling on instagram and you would just forget it the next day.
Next time remember don’t just listen. internalize and be curious