For the last couple of days, we have been reading about the death of Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Union Minister Shashi Tharoor and the tragic events that surrounded it. And I was thinking that so often, we react after it is too late. We begin to look for signs that there was trouble after it is too late to do anything about that. It seems to be a question of 'crying over spilt milk'.
It made me think about how we interact with people in our office spaces and those outside our offices as well. Do we listen to people when they talk to us? Are we hearing what they are saying? Are we able to detect when a colleague is reacting under tremendous pressure? Do we know the telltale signs of somebody taking a wrong turn, coming in a little bleary-eyed, knowing that all is not well with them? Do we recognize when somebody has made a bad decision and still not get involved or engaged? Why is it that we tend to live in a bubble, not really wanting to hear or listen to things around us?
I came across this interesting statistic that said that our brains are capable of hearing at the rate of 450 words a minute while we speak only at the rate of 125-175 words per minute. People who understand communication and the communication process tell us that this differential gap is what creates the problem. Because even as we hear something, we are hearing it slower than our mind is processing it and therefore, we have plenty of time to allow our minds to wander or go off on a rabbit trail based on something we heard, without really engaging. All this, because of all the time that the brain has while we are listening to somebody.
I remember an ad that came out many years ago for Maruti service station. Basically it said that you could find a Maruti service station in even the remotest place. It shows these guys driving in the mountains and they get to this place where there is absolutely nothing and they see this local person and ask, "Is there a Maruti station here?" The guy who asks the question is already getting back into the car thinking that it's going to be a no-answer, when the local nods and says, "There is." He then realizes that he had already pre-judged what was going to be said.
So often, that what we do, isn't it? We have a prejudice as to what we expect to hear. We prejudge a situation, we anticipate a response. It could very easily be the wrong response and somehow we miss those telltale signs that would give us a course correction or keep us on the right track to be able to do what we need to do in life.
I thought that I would just amplify what we need to understand about listening. Listening has three aspects:
1. The Linguistic aspect – which is the actual words, the phrases, the metaphors that are used to convey the feelings. That, I must warn you, is only a very small fraction of the listening process.
2. The Paralinguistic aspect – not the words, but the timing, the accent, the volume, the pitch, etc., whether the person speaks haltingly; something that alerts us to the fact that we need to listen more.
3. The Nonverbal aspect – the body language. It's the facial expressions, the use of gestures, the body position and movement, the proximity of touch in relationship to the person – all of these speak much more than the words that we have.
These need to be cultivated. It's strange! Research done by Johnson and Friedman and a couple of others says that listening is learned first. The first thing babies learn is to listen.
Learned | Used | Taught |
Listening 1st | Most (45%) | Least |
Speaking 2nd | Next most (35%) | Next least |
Reading 3th | Next least (16%) | Next most |
Writing 4th | Least (9%) | Most |
Somehow, we seem to have got it a little wrong. We need to overcome these issues. We need to be able to think what we should do in order to hear a little more clearly. So as we look at the listening process, we need to understand three things.
1. We hear what is being said. If for example, we are listening to a report on zebras and the speaker mentions that no two zebras are alike. If you can repeat that fact, then you've heard what has been said.
2. You take what you've heard and you understand it in your own way. That's the understanding stage. You go back and you think about what you heard and say, "No two zebras are alike. What did that mean? Maybe it means that the patterns of stripes is different for each zebra." Now we are at the engaging stage of listening.
3. This is the most important. After you have understood, then you ask yourself, "Does this make sense? Can I believe what I've heard? How can the stripes be different for every zebra? Is that true?" then you think that fingerprints of each person is different so it is plausible that each zebra has different stripes. Now you have a judgment or an opinion.
That's the 3-stage process of listening: you hear, you understand and you judge. All of this happens as you are listening. Your brain is completely focused on what you are hearing; not being allowed to go away and make use of that time differential as I mentioned in the beginning.
Even as we try to understand this, I thought that sometimes our office spaces can get so clinical, so myopic, so focused that we only think about getting the job done. Yet, as human beings, as people who live and work in community, we need to be able to also keep our antennae open for the things that are around us and ask the question, "Are there needs beyond? Can it be that I am here to do the work in the company, but also at a very humane level, to be able to hear needs of my fellow workers around me?"
I want to close with these 2 quotes that I heard. One is by the first century philosopher, Publilius Syrus who said, "I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence." I would take that with a pinch of sale because it is important to keep quiet and listen. The other one that I want to throw out to balance that is, "Silence isn't always golden; sometimes it's just plain yellow." Sometimes when we ought to speak, we don't.
I think we need to keep both of these quotes intentioned in our lives – be able to keep quiet when we need to so we can listen and then be able to speak when we ought to so that people can hear our opinion on something that is worth hearing.
There's a poignant song that we used when we did a program that we did to bring awareness for Nirbhaya, the girl who was gang raped in Delhi. It's a song by Casting Crowns that had this poignant line that said:
She is running
A hundred miles an hour in the wrong direction
She is trying
But the canyon's ever widening
In the depths of her cold heart
So she sets out on another misadventure just to find
She's another two years older
And she's three more steps behind
That could be your story or mine, but here's the verse that says,
Does anybody hear her? Can anybody see?
Or does anybody even know she's going down today
Under the shadow of our steeple
With all the lost and lonely people
Searching for the hope that's tucked away in you and me
Does anybody hear her? Can anybody see?
This line touched me – searching for the hope that is tucked away in you and in me. My prayer is that today, if a colleague should come and say, "Hey, do you have a minute? I want to share something." Or if you look at somebody and see that they are just a little off-color, maybe we can ask the question and listen empathetically to what they have to say. That's my prayer and hope for each one of us today and in the days that follow.
Let me pray with you. Almighty God. Help us to be good listeners. Help us to tune in to what You are speaking to us about people we are interacting with. you are God of all wisdom and You hear things that we may not hear through the humdrum of the day. Bring it to our attention. Help us to see beyond façades, hear beyond what is being said. Help us to be Your agents of love and compassion and wisdom in a hurting world around us, especially in our work places. For each one on this call, I pray for Your wisdom and empathetic understanding. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
• Sunanda Pushkar's death: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/sunanda-pushkars-death-no-foul-play-theory-may-leave-shashi-tharoor-unscathed/articleshow/29074746.cms
• Maruti service station ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EshYtJP4_6g
• Listening Facts: http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/unssc/unpan010392.pdf
• The Three Aspects of Listening, taken from "The Lost Art of Listening" by Michael P. Nichols
• "Does anybody Hear Her?" by Casting Crowns. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/castingcrowns/doesanybodyhearher.html
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