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What is listening?

To understand what is listening we need to understand what is the difference between listening and hearing. Hearing is a superficial connotation of the noise or voices that we hear from outside seeping into your ears. It gives the essence of what the other person wants to say through hearing. You can hear a car honking, a baby crying, and at the same time, you can hear a person talking. But in listening it is something much deeper. You listen to a deeper meaning, a deeper understanding and into the heart and soul of the person who is talking as well as to yourself.

 

Explaining the difference with the help of a simple example:

A person is narrating his or her disturbance to you deeply, that means you are listening to him. Because in that story, there is something more than the person is trying to say which even you yourself will not know or understand. Then if you have to help the person in any way, you have to move his disturbance from his periphery, it means that you will have to listen to him carefully. Similarly, if he has to share his happiness, you have to look at the inner core, his inner self, feel the happiness and be happy about it. Understanding what the person wants to say and reacting to it in a proper way is called listening.
As being a leader, I have noticed that people come to the room, they sit, don’t say anything and just walk out from the room. They either look at you or they look at something else in the room and don’t come back again. Now when they do that and they go, you know that there is much more they’ve said without saying anything, they have expressed a lot more and moved out. It is not a perception, it is not an assumption, it is to know deep inside what the other person is. That is listening. Even unexpressed words or non-verbal communication can give us deep listening. The eyes can show you deep listening, a simple straight face sitting in front of you wanting to express but not able to express can give you a listening without interpretation. A deep listener would take things as his, without interpreting. And when you do that you have gone deep into the core of the person. You need to listen to the cells of the body, you need to listen to every part of the body, you need to listen to self-talk and then finally go down to the deep core and listen to the heart. If you can do that for yourself, you can listen to everyone outside. The more you listen to yourself, the better listener you will be.[see video]

 

Conclusion:

Now it is clear that listening is one step ahead of the hearing. The hearing is simply the ability to hear and listening is an acquired skill possess. While the hearing is involuntary and performed effortlessly, listening is done intentionally, wherein we are selective and pay attention to only those messages, we think important for us.