We are terrible listeners

I've been reflecting about my own social skills lately. I would consider myself, by all means, a sociable person, since I interact with many people everyday (both online and in real life); but in contradiction with that, in many moments of my life I found myself isolated, as if there was a wall between me and the rest of the world that prevents me from getting too involved with them. I fought this feeling for many years, and this year has been much better for me, but I still have the sensation that this is a mere stalemate, not a victory.

 I want all of you to remember the last face-to-face conversation you had. ¿Did you left that conversation feeling heard, or was it like talking against a wall? During my years on the internet, I was that many of us shared that second feeling. But why was it like that? Probably, it was because you felt the other person wasn't really paying you attention. You may think, as I once did, that it is because you are "boring", or that other people are inherently jerks, but I found it to be quite deeper than that. The truth is that we don't know how to listen to one another. 

 After pondering on this statement for a while, I was forced to realize some hard truths about me: I'm also part of the problem. I find myself avoiding people a little bit, taking paths that make me avoid interacting with others, while also not always being a very engaging person to speak with. So I asked myself: ¿What constitutes a good listener, and how can we become one? To fix a wrongdoing you have to understand what you did in the first place. So, in this first blog post, we are going to try (and probably fail) to answer the title of this article. 

 Honestly, I think that electronics are half of the problem. I was talking with a friend of mine a while ago, and she told me about a study that found a dramatic reduction in the attention to a conversation when a phone was in your range of view, even if you are not using it. Electronic devices (being TV, Computers) have always had arguments against them regarding isolation¹ (some of these arguments being more convincing than others). But I doubt there has ever been a technology that is targeting so specifically our attention span as Smartphones, with Social Media being it's greatest soldier. ¿You want to do better in conversations? Leave your phone aside, and don't hurry conversations to get back at it.

 Also, we always have the question: ¿How actively are we listening to people around us? Like, when some person tells us about themselves, ¿How much are we really interested in that they are telling us? In my case, the answer was a bit dire, considering I hardly could remember half of the things people told me a while ago. That's, in my opinion, the second biggest problem, but one that is much bigger to tackle. We will try to make a mental framework to solve it in the next essays. 
 For a lot of people, this disinterest in other people usually comes from feeling like other people have nothing to offer, or that they don't have anything in common with us. As one may imagine, this is hardly true, and there are huge benefits to understand the one in front of us that will lead to having a richer life (in the spiritual sense, of course. Knowing how to be a good listener may bring you monetary gains, as some self-help "gurus" may preach, but I'm only interested in the richness of our spirits, which is the thing that truly brings us happiness). 

 There are many other things that I'm leaving out of this article, but it'd be boringly long (and I doubt anyone is going to read it at this point LOL). But anyone that wants to talk about this topic can do it in the comments! And also, if you feel lonely, you can talk to me through my IMs :) we may have more in common than you think!

See you later, 

G. 

FOOTNOTES

¹A good movie I saw recently regarding this topic is Kairo(2001). PSA: It's a (quite scary) horror film, and you don't understand a lot on the first watch, but it left me thinking A LOT, to be honest.