Ding ding ding! The learning ship has now reached its destination 3 – the island of Arduino and Squarewear.
At this island, we discover a new treasure box named ‘Active Listening’. But, this treasure box has a lock that needs to be decoded for me to achieve this treasure. The crux is that this treasure box utters the hints out very subtly, and I need to closely listen to understand what it is trying to convey.
Similarly, in real life, there are situations where words are spoken loudly, but hints are subtle and need to be comprehended. Most of us do what is called ‘hearing’. We hear each other but we do not truly stop to pause and reflect on what the other person is saying.
Hearing v/s Listening
This tendency of merely ‘hearing’ is not entirely our fault. We are always expected to be on the go – doing something, planning something, and contributing something. Our conversations are no different. We’re expected to have a reply, to have an opinion, and to provide solutions to whatever the opposite person is saying, without really understanding what the opposite person is saying. We’re afraid to come off as stupid or to be misinterpreted as zoned out whenever we do not have a reply to something immediately.
However, that’s not how things should work in the real world. It’s important for us to think about the content of what the other person is trying to convey. Most importantly, we must understand whether the opposite person is saying something in expectation of just being heard or in expectation of receiving input from you. This is especially true in peer-to-peer interactions where the other person just wants to feel heard and does not want to be barged with a plethora of solutions or ideas.
And in order to do so, we need to listen to what exactly the person is saying. I believe that true listening can be done when we remove the pressure of responding from our backs. We don’t always have to have the most intelligent insights or the most intelligent inputs during a conversation. Rather, it is important for us to work towards genuinely understanding the content.
Listening to Respond Intelligently
This is particularly true for classroom settings where students feel pressured to sound interesting or intelligent with their remarks in the discussion. This pressure makes them think about their own response during the lecture, instead of actively listening to the lecture. The best way for students to overcome this tendency is to remove the pressure off themselves. We don’t necessarily have to pretend that we’re the most intelligent person in the class. Instead, when we actively listen, we’re able to detect points that are most relevant to the subject material and are able to constantly work towards our own learning goals. Just sounding intelligent shouldn’t be one of those goals. But listening to understand should definitely be one.