To Listen Is To Be Strong
My youngest granddaughter Evelyn just started Kindergarten. She did well in her science-oriented nursery school (her father is a bit of science buff), but as the younger of two sisters, we don’t tend to think of her as the brilliant sister. She has the image more of the spunky sister. But truth be told, Evelyn is actually very smart. I’m glad I said it that way since the word “actually” is actually one of her favorite words. Actually is an adverb that means a word used to emphasize that something someone has said or done is surprising, and almost everything that comes out of Evelyn’s mouth strikes me as surprising. During the meet and greet the day before classes started, Evelyn wore a special flouncy dress with an orange skirt made of a stiff organza fabric. She wore it to stand out and make an impression. Why be boring, right? One little girl, Rocky, noticed the dress and told Evelyn how much she liked it. This left an impression on Evelyn because she wore the dress for just such an observation. She came home and said that she thought she might have made a new friend.
I asked Evelyn to tell me about her new friend. She explained that Rocky was a bit chubby, but she would still like to be friends with her anyway. Now Evelyn does not quite qualify as chubby and she is quite active, but she does lean more towards the solid rather than wispy side of the spectrum, so I found her observation about Rocky unexpected. Evelyn doesn’t have an unkind bone in her body, but she was simply making an observation about Rocky. The anyway comment was borderline cruel, but I am convinced it was said in candor and without reservation. In fact, Evelyn went on to say that she would never tell Rocky that she was chubby because then she wouldn’t want to be her friend. I think that’s good thinking for a five year old. Emotional intelligence is critically important in life and anticipating how people will react to things you say to them shows a decent level of emotional intelligence. A perfect level would have involved not thinking out loud about the whole chubby part.
After her first day of school I asked Evelyn how things were going with her friendship with Rocky. She said she was not going to be one of her friends. I asked why not and she explained quite matter-of-factly that Rocky was not a good listener. This comment also showed a high degree of emotional intelligence. Good friends have to be good listeners, otherwise they are just people you hang out with. Friends pay attention and listen because they care. It may be too judgmental for the first day of Kindergarten, but Rocky apparently didn’t care.
It is said that everything you need to know in life you learned in Kindergarten. So, I hope Evelyn is paying attention to the lessons Kindergarten is dealing her. Being a good listener may be one of the most important lessons. And it’s so simple to do. You close your mouth, open your mind and concentrate on the person talking. There is nothing hard about it and yet it is so often overlooked. Smart people spend their time thinking about what to say next, but really smart people know that their time is best spent listening carefully to others. It takes a humble person to recognize the value in what others are saying over what you want to say.
This practice is critical in many disciplines. Doctors need to listen to patients. Lawyers need to listen to clients. Teachers need to listen to students. Bosses need to listen to employees. But mostly, friends need to listen to other friends. I’m not sure how often any of us really listen to one another. Every once in a while you will hear someone describe someone else as a good listener and you wonder, how do they know and does that mean others make a habit of not listening to them? We, as humans, are blessed with five senses; sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing. There are supposedly two other senses, but I find them a bit whacky. One is called vestibular and its about our sense of balance. The other is proprioception and its about how our body parts are positioned relative to one another and how much force that allows us to exert on any task. To be honest, I had never heard of those two and if someone had told me there were two extra senses, i would have gone in the direction of ESP or some such thing. But if we force ranked our five basic senses in order of importance, I imagine we would all start with sight and probably end with smell (not realizing that the sense of smell is what gives us much of our sense of taste). The point is that I bet almost everyone would put their sense of hearing right behind their sense of sight in importance to their enjoyment of everyday life. When we think of people with disabilities we don’t think of the smellless or the the tasteless. We think of the blind and the deaf.
But we are not talking about the absolute absence of a sense, but the decision to not use it to its fullest. The King James Bible says that there are none so blind as those who will not see. I would paraphrase that in a more common way and suggest that there are none so deaf as those who will not listen. To not listen is less a conscious choice as it is a lack of attention to the importance of paying attention and giving respect to the person talking.
In fact, that is the essence of the listening problem, lack of respect. We probably mostly think a lack of respect is an active choice to disrespect, when, in fact, I would claim that it is more often about egocentrism or, in the extreme, narcissism. That puts respect into the category of something that evaporates unintentionally. Nonetheless, in the absence of giving respect to whomever you are talking with, you are probably not listening to them.
So, if we accept that listening doesn’t happen by itself, do we know if its important and if so, why? It starts by acknowledging that we are none of us, all knowing (except, of course, for Donald J. Trump). From there we can go the short distance to realizing that sometimes we need to know what others think. They not only understand things we do not, but they often have critical information that we need to solve whatever problem we are seeking to solve or at least information that moves us closer to resolution. The older I get the more I recognize how little I know and despite being a relatively well-educated man, the fact that there is value in my constant and ongoing quest to know more. I think they call that the life of the mind and I think it plays into my fundamental theory that people with complex minds are burdened with an insatiable need for more information where simple-minded people (note that is is distinctly different than stupid) are happy to live their lives with what they already know.
This is the difference between people who are deep and people who are shallow. Neither is better than the other, but they are quite different. I suspect that shallow people do not feel the need to listen where deep people understand its value better. Nevertheless, it still takes effort to both remember to do it and to do it diligently. The rewards for doing it are very basic. To listen is to be stronger.