It occurred to me today that I need to be a better listener.

Because I am in the business of helping people, you would think that I would understand how important it is to listen. And, to a certain extent, I do a decent job at listening, but I think I probably listen more for my purposes than I do with the intention of hearing someone.

When I listen for my purposes –and my purposes are to fix problems, to accomplish the goal, to alleviate the issue– I am paying attention to the details of the matter, the symptoms that could indicate a possible cause or causes that can then be addressed in a standard problem-solving approach.

As far as that kind of listening goes, I’m pretty good at that kind of listening.

But, beyond the importance of listening for the gathering of information in order to offer someone some assistance, many times, the problem is something else.

People just want to know that they’ve been heard.

For me, listening to hear is a little bit harder.

The better I get at understanding people and the problems that they have as they use technology to accomplish their goals, the more I have come to understand that many people are just operating from a position of insecurity and weakness. While I can say pretty certainly that I have only met a few people –ever– who are technologically incapable, I know of a much larger number of people who think that they are tech-challenged.

When someone has a lack of confidence or a perceived ineptitude, that doubt causes more problems –much of the time– than any missteps or errors that they make. They are operating from a belief of inferiority that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

In situations where people feel insecure, it is even more important for them to feel heard.

* * *

One of the reasons that this is hard for me is that I am just too darn busy. It is what it is, and I’m not looking for pity or anything like that, but I only have so much time to stop and really spend some time listening to hear. In fact, I think the whole twenty-first century world in general is too busy to be able to take the time to slow down and to listen to people, so that we can really understand each other, so that each of us can feel like we are really being heard. I just don’t have the time.

I’ll bet you don’t either.

Another thing that happens that keeps me from really hearing people is that I make assumptions. When you’ve heard seventeen people this week, telling you that they’ve jammed up the copy machine in the teacher’s lounge, and you know that each of those seventeen people have jammed the machine by putting their originals in askew, and then that eighteenth person comes to you and says that they’ve jammed the copy machine in the teacher’s lounge, what are you going to think? So you turn to them and you say, “Did you put the originals in askew?” and you do this without even listening to that eighteenth person. Assumptions are coping mechanisms, and they speed us up to be able to handle more tasks faster, but they are often very wrong, as well.

I had a perfect example of this happen to me today. A student came to me with a problem that dozens of students have come to me with before, and I shut him down. I told him the same thing that I told all of those other students because I was running under the ASSUMPTION that he was having the same problem as all of them. And, while he was desperately trying to explain to me today that his problem was different, I even more desperately told him that all he needed to do to fix his problem was to do the same thing that I told all of those other students to do.

Then, later this afternoon, his dad emailed me. With screenshots. And a detailed explanation. And I discovered that the way that I handled the situation was all wrong.

I think I’ll take the chance to find the kid and apologize tomorrow. In working with his father this afternoon, I was able to solve a problem –again, with the father’s assistance– that was likely causing problems for a number of my students.

After ditching my assumptions.

Finally, somewhere down the line –I’m not sure when it started– I started thinking of myself as a bit of a misanthrope. The people with whom I tend to get along really well often tell me that they don’t think of me like that at all, but I look at myself in this way, and I’m afraid that it gets in the way of me being the best listener that I can be, sometimes.

* * *

At the end of the day, so much of our regular daily experiences with other people is about relationship. The better your relationship is with other people, the better you tend to get along with them and are able to sympathize with them. The better your relationship is with other people, the more likely you are to understand what is going on in their minds, and the more likely you are to be able to trust them.

The better your relationship is with other people, the more likely you are to be able to listen to them, in an effort to truly hear.

When you’re in a relationship with someone, you do things for reasons that are more likely to be selfless, more likely to be other-centered. In a relationship, I don’t listen so that I can gather information; in a relationship, I listen because I know that the other person sometimes just needs to be heard.

In a relationship, when I listen to help someone else feel like they’ve been heard, it fosters the relationship.

Let each of us find someone who needs to feel heard, and truly listen to them.