Not getting what you want? This is what you’ve been missing.

Listening is a skill. You are not born a greater listener and in fact, as you grow up your listening skills deteriorate. Charles T. Brown from Western Michigan University conducted studies and found that listening involves several sub-skills and attitudes and it can be refined in technique and teachings of listening.

Listening requires empathy, it requires openness, and it requires emptiness. Listening is not reserved for one special person or another, listening is for everyone, everyone who wants to be heard and understood. Listening is not done at people or to people, it’s done with people.

I want to make change happen, and I believe that it begins in the listening. Listening to your dreams, goals, and aspirations. Listening to your challenges and concerns and listening so you can be understood and heard.

Here I will lay out the groundwork on how to listen. But first, we must undo all the stuff you thought you knew about listening. Because what you were doing is mostly talking, talking at people, not with people.

If any of the following you can relate to, you have not been listening.

“I say the things I want and need, and no one seems to hear me”

“I had an argument with my friend or spouse because they just don’t understand me”

“I told them exactly what I want, but they didn’t hear what I said”

“I didn’t ask for that”

So, let’s start by undoing what you been taught about listening.

Consider that you have been listening from a place of I, me, myself. There is nothing wrong with that, you have absolute freedom and choice to listen from a place of what you think is right and how the world should be according to you. We all do it.

What I am asking you is to look at how you have been listening. Think back to a conversation you just had with anyone. How did that go? Were you asking for something? Projecting your belief onto someone else? Wanting them to agree with you? Maybe it was none of the above, maybe it was just a shallow conversation about how the person’s day went or how the weather is or what the sports teams are up to that your following.

Can you see that in every conversation you have with someone else you want them to want what you want, you want others to believe what you believe, and it’s not a far stretch to get that because the people that you surround yourself with already believe some of the things you believe, why? Well, why else would you have a relationship with them?

What about the people you often disagree with, or the people that don’t believe what you believe, or the people that you just don’t know?

Listening is an art. It takes someone courageous to ask for permission to be listened too.

I am not at all saying that through listening you must give the other person what they want. I don’t want you to give up whatever it is you believe or don’t want to give up, except for one thing. I want you to give up your old habitual way of listening. And listen to how you would as if it’s for the first time. My favorite Buddhist saying is “When the bell rings one thousand times listen to each ring as if you heard it for the first time”. Even if you heard it a thousand times before. Listen to what the other person is saying, and as soon as you hear what they say, confirm with them that that’s what you heard.

The secret lies not in the other person words, the secret that they are trying to tell you lies in the other person fears, desires, motivations, and emotions. The words are a cover-up. The words they use don’t mean the same thing that you believe them to mean to you.

When you are in the room with someone else you are not there alone. You are having a conversation with 3 other people all wanting different things, talking over each other. And no one is listening until you step up and listen than the other person feels heard, and the magic as that they get to be in your world. How could there be 4 of us in a room that has you and the other person there? You, your voice inside your head, them and their voice inside their head.

The minute you start listening to the people around they start listening too.

But no one wants to listen first, and so we are left in a noisy world, with everyone talking, and no one listening.

My desires, my dreams, my fears, my motivations, me me me. Them too.

Why do therapists have jobs? Because they listen. Then they take what you say, package it up nicely and give it back to you the way you said it, thought and felt it. They have been practicing the skill of listening.

The school of listening is all around us. It’s in every conversation we have with ourselves and with others.

You can teach and be taught to listen to every moment of every day. And how you do that isn’t up to me. It lies within your control, your choice.

Don’t think about what the other person has said because as soon as that happens you stopped listening. Listen, pause, and reproduce what the other person has said. You don’t need to parrot when you listen with intent, you will get what it’s like for them and when you say back to them the things you heard, you will step into a world were together both of you can be heard.

The guard is up. You are guarded and so are they. You have been building this armor ever since you were born. Maybe it’s time to reconsider what you already know and take this one practical prompt that will get the other person to hear you too. Hear the words that are being said and stop that voice in your head from thinking, saying, suggesting, yelling. How you do that? Well, you won’t get it every time, but I know that when you realize that what you heard wasn’t the words but the meaning you attached to those words, then it was your voice in your head muddling the listening. At that point step up and apologize and ask them to say what they said again because you weren’t listening to them.

You may or may not get what you want, but I promise you this, whatever you say, they will listen to you because you have made yourself available to listen to them.