Why are you listening?
What do you want to hear?
Are you listening with genuine curiosity and an eagerness to discover? Do you really want to hear the other person’s perspective – your team member’s, your customer’s, your boss’, your family member’s, your neighbour’s, or even your rival’s?
Or are you listening to hear the perspective, beliefs, and values you want to hear? Are you listening for confirmation of your own views or for the other person to simply stop talking so you can share them?
Deep listening requires the humility to put aside our own perspective, judgment, assumptions, and desire to be proven right so we can get curious and open ourselves up to the possibility of discovering the horizons of the unfamiliar.
