The two are very different...
Sometimes we choose not to listen, yet don’t realise that we’re not.
There was a wonderful moment in Mr Thing, a comedy chat show I recently saw in the Waterloo East theatre, when the host ’s mind drifted away… admitting to his guest, through an addictive sing-a-long and flag-waving musical number, that ‘you’re not dull but I'm not listening’.
And he wasn’t, the host was simply going through the motions and giving predictable responses. Hearing but not listening…
How often do we all do that?
From the moment we’re born we create and embed in our brains a personal database of what we learn through our experiences, what’s hot, what’s cold, what’s good, what’s bad etc.
We put everything we hear through this database, filling it with our experiences and it increasingly becomes the way we process information. It’s the easy way.
By the time we’re teenagers it’s full and that often causes angst, as we don’t yet have the maturity to manage the content.
Curiously this challenge stays with most of us throughout our lives… in fact, we tend to initially put what we hear through a filter of what we already believe, without necessarily adjusting those beliefs against the current reality. In other words, we hear through our experiences, assumptions and perspectives not our ears.
So, as we often make the majority of our choices and decisions using this filter, finding a way of truly listening and balancing our database, could be hugely beneficial.
Companies and organisations are just the same… mainly because they’re lead by us!
They too can find themselves being managed through the trusted filter of a database that is over-whelmed with information, but changes very little… continuing to operate with what was previously being ‘heard’ and therefore believed to be true.
As a result, 'how we do things’ can remain dangerously stagnant, in fact, pretty much the same… while the world around us is changing.
And changing fast… we’re making our choices and decisions surrounded by financial, political, social and environmental change.
Therefore, the need to both balance and better manage our own decision-making process, in service of successfully moving forward, is critical.
And balance is only achieved by adjusting how we do things, in response to what’s going on around us.
Reviewing those long held beliefs, listening not dismissing, freshening our thoughts and identifying the real challenges and opportunities that are there.
Creating balance involves understanding who we are, what we do and why we do it… then listening carefully to the reality around us, so we can help navigate, adjusting and re-packing what’s needed for the next episode.
Truly listening to the honesty of your current reality, enables you and your organisation to move forward.
Of course you are, we always do don’t we?
Truth is… possibly not.
We’re certainly hearing but are we listening? The two are very different...
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