Habits That Break Your Listening Ability

Maybe you have, over time, developed the habit of talking or thinking ahead when you should be listening. If this is the case, you can treat this habit like smoking; you can quit.
Changing this behavior pattern is difficult because you have to do it on your own. No nicotine patch is available for effective listening. The more status and power you have, the less likely people are to tell you that they think you’re not listening. They notice. They react. They just don’t tell you. It’s like bad breath; many notice, and few comment.
Habits are hard to break, no question about it. Just think about all the money that has been made trying to get people to break the smoking habit or change eating habits or stop a drinking habit. You won’t find many courses on changing listening habits because bad listeners usually aren’t so self-aware, and their behavior isn’t so noticeably and immediately destructive. If you really want to break the habit of not listening, you can use the following steps to improve. Don’t be too hard on yourself if your improvement isn’t as a rapid as you would like. You’re way ahead of the pack for even trying.

1. Be aware of how you listen whenever anyone talks. Do you actually turn physically toward them and look them in the eye, or do you continue multitasking in some fashion or other?
2. Monitor how often your mind wanders, thinking of something else. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if an audible alarm went off every time your mind wandered during a conversation?
3. Actively work on bringing your mind back to the conversation at hand each and every time it wanders.

No matter how boring the speaker is, bring your mind back, and then try to use questions to keep things more interesting. One of the best uses of questions is for turning the boring into the interesting.