The Art of Listening

I want to write a book called "Listening can save your marriage." I am not married, personally, but I know the power of listening and the equal and opposite power of not listening. "Listening" to whom? You ask? To God, and to your fellow man, for starters. I find as I go about my day that oh-so-few people are really practiced at looking me in the eye, shutting up, and taking in what I'm. I am not the master at this, but I'm trying my best to learn. Sometimes I feel like the only one. We all have an "inner conversation." As Jerry Seinfield called it, "that voice in the back of your head saying "What did I forget to do?'" How often does yours pause so as to take in some new bit of information, some new sight, or sound, or thought? I don't mean pause like "we hear the crickets chirping" pause, but pause to attentively and actively ingest some part of the real world. I will assert to you that the cultivated ability to attend to the world, another person, or yourself... Simply to attend, without speaking... Is one of the single-most important abilities human beings have. It effects all your friendships, all of your business relationships, and, for those of you who buy into his existence, your relationship with God. By way of facts, for starters, research identifies that marital satisfaction is closely related to sexual satisfaction. Sexual satisfaction is necessarily correlated to emotional satisfaction. And emotional satisfaction rests almost entirely on how well or poorly one person successfully listens to the other. That's why I am so motivated. If you want to join me in my ear-enlarging efforts, I encourage you to pick up this handy little skill and see how it works for you. I will give you everything you need to be off and running. Step one: Practice. There. Like everything else, from knitting to talking to riding a bike, the art of listening comes with time and practice. Even if your attention span is 3-seconds, focus on something, a book, a piece of music, a friend, for 4-seconds at a time until your head hurts. Then rest. Repeat this activity until 4-seconds becomes your natural, effortless attention span, then try 5. Continue until you notice that all of the people in your life love and appreciate you and feel heard, valued, and understood. This is a crash course, I understand, but I thought I'd better start somewhere. I challenge you to test my theory. Let me know if it works or not.