Listening: The Struggle Is Real

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

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Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Listening: The Struggle Is Real

I struggle with listening.

I experience hearing loss. So hearing, and by extension listening, are difficult for me. Really listening means I am absolutely present to a situation. Honest to goodness presence (which is a true gift we can give one another) means I turn off the noise in my brain, and pay attention with my entire being.

In my search to be a better listener, my researcher instincts kick in.

In a TED talk focused on listening by sound expert Julian Treasure, Treasure explains the things he has found that we can do to make us better listeners: experiencing silence, sorting out sounds when there are multiple sounds being “mixed” in an environment, savoring sounds like appreciating crickets in nature, and listening actively. Treasure summarizes his thoughts on listening with the acronym RASA (Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask).

Career Coach and writer Marty Nemko writes in Psychology Today, that to be a good listener we must: “comprehend what is said, notice things not said, recognize changes in tone and body language, consciously decide whether to add input, accurately determine whether to think ahead, think before responding, and know when its wise to interrupt.”

Communications Specialist and author, Sunny Sea Gold writes about listening in an article for Scientific American . She asks us to: check our assumptions, get curious, suspend judgment, and know when to “tap out.” (Meaning, know when circumstances are such that truly listening is tough, and the wise choice is to say, “Can we talk about this at a time when I can focus on our conversation?”)

Here is my take-away about listening.

Presence is the heart of listening. If we are present we are not two steps behind or two steps ahead during a conversation. We are not thinking about what we are going to say, no matter how clever what we will say might be. We are not interrupting (which I find myself doing far too much, though I absolutely hate to be interrupted). I love good listeners. I love to be listened to. I love curiosity. I love the dance of active listening. Once again, I am learning taking that second to breathe and to think is critical – to listening, and life.