Attentive Listening

MitchM

I've spent the past ten+ years [some time earlier in my life as a teacher] in disciplined study of how to listen - what listening really is - and keeping it clear. Today I'm very good at it - a few books helped but I won't post any names here.

Multi-tasking is contrary to clear and intent listening.

MitchM

Marcus

How can you pay attention to what is not being said if you're multitasking?

MitchM

Susana- my reply is fact - neither what's being said nor not being said can be clear when one is multi-tasking.

Often the notion of multi-tasking is in reality doing many things one at a time but overlapping and occasionally doing two at the same time more or less.

There are also many urban myths about multi-tasking including one gender's brain being able to listen to more than one thing.

MitchM

Marcus

Do you have any good advice on how to listen?

MitchM

How to listen is a study I really only began taking seriously in the past ten years and not with complete dedication most of the time. So I'm still in this study and it requires the discipline of practice.

Practice includes catching one's self - for example - listening to one's thoughts rather than the noises around -birds, air cooling systems, horns honking, people talking. Not that listening to one's thoughts doesn't have a purpose and value. BUT catching one not paying attention to external sounds and then learning to tune out the mental sounds and listen is one study that requires extreme focus and concentration in the beginning. Typically within thirty seconds the mind begins to sound again and thoughts block out external sounds.

That practice is important because it can be taken into conversation when the other person is talking and we learn to listen to that rather than our internal rambling dialogues.

That's one way to begin to learn and it requires constant effort to master nomind, no internal sound - I haven't mastered it yet for long periods of time.

MitchM

Marcus

I really need to work on that. Are there any training exercises or something for this?

MitchM

There maybe, Marcus. My experience comes from lots of reading all kinds of things, lots of personal considerations of what's important to improve myself, and a study of many Asian martial art's [as a home amateur] forms and thinking forms.

For most of my life I've considered turning off the mind for clarity and for listening - BUT my discipline has been off and on through out the years.

I'd suggest just doing as I posted - begin to cultivate an appreciation for external sound and catch yourself going back into the internal - the mind's sounds - then go back outside again.

Do that in conversations, at work and home, in traffic, walking - it's a very simple exercise but also very challenging to keep thoughts from forming.

What you find in conversations including sales is that you don't need to be prepared to dialogue with approaches or closing techniques or pat answers - what happens is that you actually begin to hear subtle and obvious messages and ask for clarification of them - you engage in a real conversation.

MitchM

Marcus

I will do that today. Thank you.

Agent Smith

That is an excellent exercise MitchM.

MitchM

It is AS, and it's frustrating when you realize that you're back into thinking rather than listening to external sounds - last winter I held that total mental blankness listening to sounds while walking one morning for what seemed like fifteen minutes - that's an eternal amount of time without thinking a thought.

There are other exercises - the chanting OM pronounced AHM and deep and from the mid section besides a breathing exercise stills thought.

My discipline is imperfect but daily - in conversations I find impulses take over and that's another part of stilling the internal.

MitchM