Communication is about understanding the communicator. Without effectively listening to others, there is no way to have a quality conversation, none the less to understand a person. To become more effective listeners, you must become aware of your barriers and bad habits when it comes to listening. Your unhelpful habits interfere with your ability to effectively understand a person, which is the ultimate goal of listen. Here are 11 barriers that affects your hearing.
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1. Listening to more than one voice at a time.
Prioritizing what someone is saying to you is tricky in this noisy and busy world. You are always receiving emails, texts, phone calls and notifications when you are out and about, or even just at home with a friend, family member or partner. When you are distracted with all the other noises around us, you can fall into bad habits of listening to your own thoughts more than what is being said. Because of this, you fall into a trap of listening more to give a response than to listening to hear and understand what someone is saying: this is not a dialogue, but a disguised monologue.
2. Listening only because you are attracted to a person.
Attraction is not always about physical appearance: it can also relate to what is being communicated. Conversations can open us up to emotional, physical, and spiritual attraction and chemistry with another person. This type of attraction is inappropriate in a professional context, it is also a bad habit to fall into regularly because it usually leads to daydreaming or fantasizing about the person you are talking to, rather than listening to what they have to say.
3. Not listening because you are not attracted to a person.
On the opposite side of the scale, being put off by someone for who they are, what they believe in, how they look or what they are saying is inappropriate behavior. However, all are guilty of this to some degree. Whether it is someone’s style of fashion, skin color, weight, beliefs, opinions, accent, hygiene or whatever, disconnecting with someone on an undeveloped bias is inconsiderate and the sign of a poor listener. People need to learn how to fundamentally understand others by making peace with who people are and the imperfections that come with them. Everyone deserves to be heard and understood.
4. Desiring to ‘being right’: uninterested in hearing and understanding.
We all operate out of a fixed set of beliefs, but this behavior tends to show itself more frequently to those who operate mostly from the rational side of your mind. Your beliefs are a set of ideas you invested in when you were younger and what you have built your lives upon today. When you are rigid in your thinking and are unwilling to acknowledge that there is any degree of truth outside your realm of knowledge, life becomes more about ‘right and wrong,’ rather than about understanding. Wisdom evolves from taking the time to compare what you know with what is outside your realm of understanding.
5. Dismissing an idea instead of trying to relate.
This is something which happens with those you operate more out of the emotional part of your mind. When you cling onto ideas and information as an ultimate truth, your small thinking prevents you from understanding more. Sometimes, people will spend more energy defending the little that they think they know instead of investing energy into deepening their understanding and allowing that understanding to be challenged. You end up rejecting anything which threatens or contradicts your frame of reference, cutting off the communication entirely and not listening. Maturity is about developing a more grounded set of world views and beliefs which allows you to understand others better.
6. Not implementing: trying to remember to impress.
Today’s education system promotes the idea that learning consists of digesting and regurgitating information for specific periods of time. Let see that many people have studied for school trying and pass exams, but you forgot the information you crammed into your head within a few weeks after our exams. Growing the rational part of your mind does not help you grow your relational skills unless you apply the knowledge to yourselves and grow through the process. Applying principles to yourselves is a more effective learning method than trying to remember everything.
7. Not empathizing, but sympathizing.
Sympathy is a false form of empathy. When you extend your sympathy to someone, you are doing nothing for a person other than feeding an unhealthy need they have. Empathy, however, is when you extend yourselves to ensure that you understand another person’s experience as much as possible. Empathy seeks to understand another person’s perspective and uncover how their experience is holding them back mentally and emotionally.
8. Allowing preferences and expectations to undermine the experience process.
When you allow your own prejudices to undermine the learning process, it comes at the cost of your life experiences. Let’s say you were meeting up with an old friend that you have not seen in years and you start fantasizing about the meet-up. You have told all your other friends about how great this old friend is: recalling old memories and re-living old situations of how great they are and that they are your best friend forever, despite not having seen each other in nearly a decade. Finally, the day comes when you meet up for drinks and the two of you have no chemistry. You both don’t know what to say to each other and you find they have some mannerisms which bothers you. You come away from the meet-up heartbroken and disappointed. then subconsciously blame your friend for not being as good as you thought they were. Disappointment only ever arises when our expectations are not met. When you put too much emphasis on meeting your expectations, you overlook and ignore all the lessons and experiences you are going through in the moment and totally miss the experience itself.
9. Already having expectations about what you will hear before you hear it.
This concept is like the previous involves listening and selective hearing. Example, people with a negative self-image and low confidence will go around with a high sense of awareness to criticism and negativity. When they are confronted in any shape or form, they will amplify it in their own mind to be bigger or more serious than it was. If they get called into the boss’ office, they prepare themselves for a negativity and come out feeling scolded when all they had been given was gentle constructive criticism. The same can happen in reverse: a parent overlooks what a teacher tells them about their child’s behavior because they went into parent’s conference expecting only to hear adoring praise of their beloved child. Also, an insecure person does not hear their partner’s fair and nice comments because they only listen blindly for the bad. This also affect long time managers who have been in position for a long time, they feel like they have ‘heard it all before’ and expect the same backstory and emotional responses from people who are dealing with similar or the same problems.
10. Being overly aware and concerned by obvious outside distractions.
It is easy to allow yourselves to be distracted by things you do not need to be focusing on such as the cars outside, a conversation happening at another table, a dog barking, your phone vibrating in your pocket or the smell of some delicious food passing by. People will notice when another person is distracted when they are speaking to them and will close themselves off more in response. The second you demonstrate you are a distracted listener; you lose the trust of the person speaking and they will withhold more intimate details from the conversation and keep it surface level. You cannot allow the world going on around us to impact our conversations with others, especially in a helping environment.
11. Listening more to what might be said instead of actively listening to accurately hear what is being said.
People who are more rationally minded do not believe in the significance of simple and straightforward words; they prefer to invest in complicated confusing conversations. These people may hear a sentence such as ‘this couch is nice’ and insist the person to explain by responding with, ‘are you saying my couch should not be nice?’ These people add meaning onto what you are saying either by reading too much into it or by imposing their insecurities, judgements or perspectives onto it. Sometimes a sentence is just a sentence.
You may sense backhanded compliments ones which was insinuating something else, or someone’s remark was passive-aggressive while seeming polite, there is little to no benefit imposing meaning on words because we will never be able to deny or confirm our suspicions. We cannot access someone’s psyche, and we cannot read minds – we can go based on what we hear, the energy or vibration we feel. You can always ask for clarification by asking, “what do you mean by that?” If you are confused by what a person is saying, imposing deep meaning into a dialogue overcomplicates a situation to the point that it can be deemed confrontational and dismissive of what a person is saying.
Check out How the Psyche Works with our own Core Beliefs
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