Not too long ago, I was at a shareholder meeting of a company that I was a part of about a year ago. There were a lot of us there but I haven’t met most of them as communication was mostly via text messages and there was one key person I communicated with the most.
We were trying to solve the problems that the company was facing and sometimes the discussions would get heated and generally everyone was there with the intention of making sure everything went smoothly.
At one point, someone took charge of 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 charge! Wow, I thought.
Luckily someone told her: she only wants to know who you are because she has never met you. So everything was fine again.
I can’t presume to know 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? Have. We all have. And this inevitably caused unnecessary communication problems.
Why is it so difficult for us to hear 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, molds us to become what we hope to be if we take control of this filtering process.
This is why it is often said that we can tell 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
- what level of consciousness they are at (in other words, how evolved they are at the intellectual level),
- if they are clever
- Are they blinded by cultural/racial/religious differences,
- And what are your blind spots?
It’s a complex system, isn’t it? It’s almost like psycho-profiling someone just by what they laugh at. I have found this to be of great value in how I can assist someone in 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 let our filtering process take us by surprise. By doing so, we can truly listen and make communication count.