Conversation plays an important role in solving misconceptions between people or groups.
In a democracy, conversations between the government and the people plays a crucial part. In other words, conversation is one among the main foundations of democracy.
Listening is one among the two main parts of a conversation. Now, what is the speciality of listening over speaking? Speaking always states our point of view to others but narrows down our mind and thoughts to our own perspectives of viewing a problem or topic but listening on the other hand mostly enlightens us with more knowledge, helps us open up our minds to new perspective thoughts and almost always helps in solving major problems. A democracy should listen to its people well, in order to be able to solve their problems. One important thing to remember while listening: “Always listen like a Scholar and never like a King”.
What does that mean you ask? It means that when you are listening to something, be a scholar, a person who is open minded, who accepts his mistakes and who is open to new solutions or thoughts. A conversation between two scholars always ends with one accepting and understanding his mistakes and learning from the experience to never repeat the same in the future again. Taking the second case, a king always states his side/thought about a particular topic and asks everyone around for their opinions, but once a person opposes the king or suggests a new thought, he gets severely punished for the same. So, for mastering the skill of listening, always be a scholar.
Next important point when it comes to listening is that, listening is not just the process of signals passing from ear to our brain as sound waves hit the ear drum and the signals being converted to different sounds and being interpreted as different meanings by our brain. Nop, that’s hearing… Yes, hearing and listening are different. Hearing is just sensing the sounds around you, you may or may not understand what they are, and that’s the point where listening differs from hearing. Listening is a combination of hearing and understanding, you should not just hear the words through your ears but also understand them with your mind/heart. Majority of problems in everyone’s lives can be solved by the simple process of proper listening. Listen to actually absorb the thought of the speaker or narrator, analyse it within yourself. Choosing whether to accept or oppose comes only as the third part of the whole process. Allowing someone to speak is the first step and preconditioning of listening. Remaining while he/she is speaking is the next step. A mistake, which most people these days do is that, they don’t actually listen, they just wait for an opportunity for the nearby person to stop, so that he/she can start the talk. This diverts our concentration to making points for our upcoming talk, to make it the best among all. This is never a form of good listening, which can just be called a pre-judgemental form of hearing where the so-called listener has already come to a conclusion about the on-going conversation and is trying to force the topic towards his thoughts or ideas. This is one of mistakes to be understood by oneself and avoided in-order to become a good listener. Other similar mistakes include “vacant-look listening” were only the physical presence of the listener is maintained and the mind is wandering off in a totally different world.
Its easy to be a good speaker than to be a good listener and a good listener can always be a good speaker but a good speaker might not always be a good listener.
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Yadu Krishna
