Listening With Open Ears And An Open Heart

How Listening Can Build You and Your Relationships Up

This blog post was inspired by a walk Kaid and I had today. We both agreed that listening was a key component to communication. While we journey through the experience of covid-19, being engaged, and working together, we understand more and more each that listening is critical for a healthy communication line as well as a smooth workflow.

Below are some points we thought were important to recognize about listening..

Practice, Practice, Practice

A lot of us learn our most fundamental listening skills at a young age, but practice is a key part of maintaining any skill. Take learning a foreign languages for instance. While there are outliers in any situation, most people see a large decrease in their language skills of a foreign language if they aren’t practicing consistently.

Be honest, how much of your high school foreign language do you still remember? I know personally I’ve re-visited Spanish and after 2.5 years of not practicing, I was rusty! So, I’ve learned the hard way that it takes practice to be good at something and listening is no different.

Before this article, you may have never even thought about the skill of listening so intently. I know I hadn’t given it much consideration. As Kaid and I have grown as a couple, listening and communication have become two key pillars of practice for us, because we recognized there was space for improvement!

Try to practice your listening skills on someone you’re close with and comfortable listening to. Focus on how you’re processing their words. Are you catching your attention trailing off? Every time you notice you’ve been distracted and not paying attention, make a note for yourself so you can reflect after the conversation.

I find that pushing myself to ask questions helps me stay actively engaged in the conversation, but do what works for you! The idea here is simply to practice!

Build Up Your Relationships

Having great listening skills is a huge catalyst for great relationships. Showing genuine focus on someone while they share something is a basic matter of respect. With that in mind, I know I’ve been unfair to those that I care about, which is why I wanted to share this post with you all.

Listening is KEY.

Listening with intention also helps you remember things better, which really helps build up relationships. Remembering a small comment someone made in a comment the next time you talk, recalling someone’s favorite thing or color, knowing their pet’s names the next time you stop by. All these things make people feel GOOD and it starts with listening.

Collect Feedback

This one can be a little nerve-wracking, but I’ve learned, even in just the last couple months, that collecting feedback on yourself helps you grow and develop faster. Feedback provides a sounding board for where your strengths and weaknesses are.

Ask someone you talk to a lot how they think you do at listening. Do they feel listened to when they talk to you? Do you demonstrate that you’ve remembered things they told you?

Now, if you aren’t currently a great listener, this feedback might be a little hard for you. But just know that no matter what the feedback, it’s helping you grow stronger as a person and a listener!

That’s all for tonight folks. Remember everything will be OK! Bye for now!

-Olivia & Kaid, the OK in @okworldtravel