Listening is a Superpower
They say listening is a superpower.
Whoever they are, I think they’re right.
It’s amazing that something so simple can be so rare to find in our everyday lives.
It’s hardly our fault though.
We’re all just operating with minds hewn from evolutionary processes.
Most of which are better suited to the African savanna than post-industrial civilization.
The Default
Do you ever get done with a conversation and realize you don’t remember hardly anything the other person said?
You can remember in detail all the things you said, but little else.
If this sounds familiar, you are most certainly not alone.
If you really pay attention to what’s going on when two people are talking, you’re likely to notice the following.
Most conversations basically consist of two people taking turns talking past each other.
And spending the time not talking, thinking about what to say next, and then waiting to interject.
When we’re in the midst of a conversation and we’re supposedly listening to someone else, we’re really just on the lookout for things that are personally relevant to our experiences.
“You took a trip to Kentucky? Wow, my Aunt and Uncle found a big rock in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky!”
To the surprise of no one, your mind is primarily concerned with you and how things relate to you.
We are all the stars of the show in our own minds so we should be forgiven for our default setting of self-centeredness when it comes to conversation.
The Superpower
Listening is a superpower that can be developed.
As mentioned above, our default is to barely listen while waiting to talk again.
The real superpower arises when we consciously focus attention on listening and not on thinking about what we’ll say next.
If you’re anything like me, this will not be easy.
It will also take a lot of practice as our minds constantly want to shift the focus back on ourselves and back to the default.
The benefits of doing so though will far outweigh the cost.
It’s really about being present in the moment when conversing with someone.
Succinctly, it’s the removal of distraction by focusing on not dividing your attention towards what you want to say next.
The Benefits
Isn’t it just nicer to work with someone who listens to you?
We all work better with people we like.
Conversely, we don’t work as well with people we don’t like.
And we don’t tend to like those who don’t listen to us.
The seemingly trivial act of attentive listening can make us easy and desirable to work with.
We bring more value to a project when we work well with many other personality types.
We generate less friction amidst the team and enable easy collaboration.
Another massive benefit to listening is how much we learn.
It’s so much easier to retain information when we’re actively listening instead of splitting mental energy thinking about what we’ll say next.
This is especially important for us remote workers.
We don’t have the in-person non-verbal cues to rely upon so we must overdevelop our other communication skills.
Listening is an absolutely critical one to develop.
Summary
Listening is a superpower.
It requires conscious effort.
Our default mental state is to relate everything we hear back to ourselves.
This often means we spend much of our mental energy thinking about what to say next rather than actively listening to what we are hearing.
The more we overcome this natural tendency, the more we will benefit.
People will like working with us more.
Others will find it much easier to work with us and we will become more valuable as a result.
Remote workers especially should develop our listening skills.
It’s important for us to excel in certain communication methods to compensate for the nonverbal cues that are unavailable to us.