Why Listening Is The Most Effective Tool To Improve Relationships
Many times people talk about social skills as if they were reduced to our ability to get our message to others, to make our ideas and points of view prevail when dialoguing with others. However, to believe this is to miss a good part of what it really means to develop good social and communication skills in general.
In fact, Listening ability is a key element to improve our relationships and establish more stable ties with our interlocutors, regardless of whether they are part of our personal life or our work life. Let’s see why.
Knowing how to listen allows us to connect emotionally
There are many who fall into the trap of assuming that, in most cases, the time they spend listening to what the person they are having a conversation with tells them is, in reality, wasted time. This sensation occurs when we believe that we already know in advance what the other person will say, when we get the feeling that we are good at capturing the ideas and intentions behind our interlocutor’s speech: We assume that what we are hearing could be summarized much more reduced to less textual information.
However, these types of experiences are a mirage that leads us to underestimate listening, mainly for two reasons.
The first is that We are never able to know instantly and at all times what another person thinks and wants The belief that we can “read minds” is based on a cognitive bias, the confirmation bias, which predisposes us to see what happens around us as a confirmation of our preconceived ideas (in this case, our hypothesis about the mental processes of another individual).
We may be relatively good at “reading between words” because at the end of the day Homo sapiens is a social animal, but we will never be perfect at it; The worst thing is not making these mistakes, but not expecting them to occur or not knowing how to detect them when they have occurred. Overvaluing our ability to anticipate what the other person is going to say can cost us very dearly, by causing misunderstandings or generating offenses.
The second is that having a conversation is much more than exchanging information in turns, as if it were a task that is carried out sequentially; we must adapt our ideas and our perspective of what happens When we interact, we are not only expressing what is on our minds, we also learn from others, but we will be worse at doing so if we do not have an open and humble attitude in conversations. Seeing dialogue as a more symmetrical experience, in which both give and receive in the communicative process, helps us live more nuanced and richer relationships.
Main benefits of listening when improving relationships
We must keep in mind that we should not highly value the ability to listen just for what it represents morally. It is not that knowing how to listen brings us closer to the idea of “the good”; is that really, from a pragmatic point of view, it is also very beneficial to know how to listen, it helps us establish healthy bonds with others both at work and in our private lives. It could be said that Listening is the visible face of empathy and empathy is the basic pillar of the relationships we maintain on a daily basis.
Thus, the benefits of apply our listening skills Social interactions have several ramifications to take into account, and the main ones are these:
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