The Art Of Listening

You front up to meetings, keep coffee dates with friends and call your mum at least once a week – but how much of the conversation are you really taking in? Meg Mason stays focused long enough to uncover why conscious listening could be the key to strengthening your relationships and getting ahead

We’re in a cafe. I’m describing a work issue involving company tax, internal auditors, something. You’re tired, and at the table next to us is a pair of loud talkers, one of whom has the cross-body bag you’ve been thinking about. Weird that she’s just dumped it on the floor when you know from MatchesFashion.com it’s $800. Feel like another piccolo? You probably shouldn’t because of that headache you’ve had for days and, oh, that’s right, you were going to make a doctor’s appointment. Anyway, shit, what was I saying?

“So then, I realised the spreadsheet just couldn’t be showing the right totals...” “That reminds me, I still have that headache I was telling you about, remember?” Um. No. Because I wasn’t listening and neither were you. We might be hearing, we might even be giving each other sweet, sweet eye contact, but admit it – you barely caught a word of my killer accounting story and I have no record of said headache. Still, we shouldn’t feel bad. Neither my monologuing or your wandering mind is to blame or the quality of listening that, according to extensive research by the University of Minnesota, will have us catch and retain about half of what has been said. Within eight hours, we’ll be able to recall less than a third of the content, and in two months we’re down to a quarter, meaning our memory of the event will be skewed or a patchy construct, but either way wholly unreliable.