Not long ago, I was at a shareholders’ meeting of a company that I was a part of about a year ago. There were many of us there, but I have not met most of them, as communication was mainly through text messages and there was one key person I communicated with the most.
We were trying to solve the problems the company was facing and sometimes the discussions got heated and generally everyone was there with the intention of making sure everything went smoothly.
At one point, someone took over the situation and began to “chair” the meeting. I wanted to know who this person was, so I raised my hand and politely asked who he was. Now this is where it got interesting for me.
He was very defensive at first, saying that he was a shareholder like everyone else and that he felt he had to do something. against which I was not against. But in his mind, he thought I was questioning him, and he went on to say, then why don’t you take over! Wow, I thought.
Luckily someone told her: she just wants to know who you are because she has never met you. So everything was fine again.
I can’t boast of knowing what was going through his mind, but I can say with certainty that he didn’t hear my words through his ears.
Have you ever personally had the experience of assuming that someone is saying this instead of that? I have. We all have. And this inevitably caused unnecessary communication problems.
Why is it so difficult for us to listen to others through our ears?
It’s because we filter everything through our minds, through our experiences, our present mindset (including moods, mental stability), our past, our future goals, our education, etc. The filtering process is quite complex, and that is why two people can never have identical thoughts about something. The filtering process is quite sophisticated and it makes us who we are, it molds us to become what we hope to be if we take control of this filtering process.
That is why it is often said that we can know a lot about a person just by the things they laugh at, or not. In my training, we use this method to see:
- if they have a sense of humor
- at what level of consciousness are they (in other words, how evolved are they at the intellectual level),
- if they are ingenious,
- Are they blinded by cultural / racial / religious differences,
- how clear they are psychologically,
- and what are your blind spots?
It’s a complex system, right? It’s almost like psycho-profiling someone just because of what they laugh at. I have found this to be invaluable in how I can help someone through the training process. Of course, we don’t just use humor; We can also learn a lot just through normal conversations.
So in fact, the key to communicating and listening to others is to listen openly and not allow our filtering process to take us by surprise. By doing so, we can truly listen and make communication count.