 If you've been following along in our discussion on listening, then you know, I've said a number of times now that listening is not easy. It's not a natural process. There are all kinds of barriers that end up being put in our way to effective listening because it's not just a thing that happens naturally for us. So let's take a moment to talk about some of those barriers to effective listening. What are some of the things that keep us from being the most effective listeners that we could? So let's start by talking about some of those challenges. Beginning with the fact that listening, as I said, does not come naturally to us. It's not something, you know, effective listening is not a skill that we're just naturally born with. We can hear, we're born with hearing, unless you have some sort of hearing impairment, we're born with hearing. But there's a difference, as we know, between hearing and listening. So listening, hearing comes naturally to us. Listening does not. Listening is something we have to work at and be actively engaged in. Like many things, if it doesn't come naturally to us, it's a challenge. It can be difficult. Listening doesn't come easy. As I just mentioned, not only is it not natural, but it's not a simple process. It's a challenge for us. It takes energy. It takes focus. It takes an active engagement. And none of that is simple or easy. So that makes listening a challenge as well. We also just, over time, we develop poor listening habits. And so we get in the habit of not listening well. And then that makes it more challenging down the road because we just, we don't talk these effective skills. And so we develop a lot of negative skills or a lot of poor listening habits that get in the way of effective listening. And then of course, another challenge is that noise is ever present. So let's take a moment to talk about noise and how it impacts listening here just for a moment. So first of all, when we talk about noise, there are three different kind of categories of noise. And remember that noise isn't always just things we hear. It could be other things from the environment as well. So let's start with physical noise. Physical noise is anything that comes from the environment around us. So anything that's outside of our body and interferes with the sending and receiving of a message would be physical noise. Now noise could be that you're at a crowded concert. And it could be not only the volume of that concert, making it difficult to hear, but the fact that there are people bumping into you and it's maybe hot or maybe you're hungry or thirsty or whatever, whatever the case. That environment is creating a challenging situation for you to try and listen to anything. Probably not the best opportunity to have a really detailed conversation about things, because it's going to be difficult to listen with all of that going on around you from the physical noise. Physical noise could also be things like if it's too hot or too cold in the room where you're at or in the environment where you're at, your focus is there and it's not on listening. It's easy to get distracted by that. Or if you're in a classroom and the chair's not comfortable. If you've all been in a classroom like that, right, with those plastic molded chairs, it just aren't very comfortable. So that can make it a challenge to listen when you're really that uncomfortable. Or when you're too comfortable, if you're in a lazy boy right now or whatever, then that could be a problem to you. Maybe you're falling asleep. And so all of that, those physical noise, it's from our external environment around us. Another type of noise that we have is physiological noise, meaning it comes from our body. Physiological has to do with our body. So any noise or interference that extends from our body, things like being hungry, it's hard to listen effectively when you're hungry, right? That's all you can think about is how hungry you are. Or when you're sick, when you're not feeling well, it's really hard to focus, really hard to listen. When you're tired, when you're exhausted, when you're fatigued, or even when you're stressed out, things like that, that can be physiological noise, your body is not cooperating in such a way that makes it likely that you're going to be able to listen effectively. Finally, we have psychological noise. And this comes from our mind, our mind. Just times when we're daydreaming, we're thinking about something else, we're not really focused. Our mind is on other things, either we have some personal concerns going on, or we're thinking about what we want to have for dinner, or we're just daydreaming and wandering off in our mind. All of that could be psychological noise. It's things from our mind that are keeping us from really focusing and paying attention to that message and listening effectively. So, noise can come from all these different types of things. Obviously, it's a massive issue for listening and a massive challenge for listening to have all these different types of noise. Some of the common barriers that we see, like more specific common barriers that we see, first of all, our information overload in our present day and age, we are overloaded by stimuli. We have all the time, not only people talking to us and things going on, and traffic going around, but we've got our phones, we've got our computers, these constant distractions, more constantly bombarded with stimuli. It's really hard to focus on or pay attention to any one thing at times. We also have just rapid thought. The average English speaker in the United States speaks at a rate of about 150 words per minute. But our brain works at a rate of closer to 450 to 600 words per minute. So, our brain is working three or four times faster than the other person is speaking in a typical situation. So, our brain gets ahead of it. We start jumping ahead. We jump to conclusions. Our mind drifts off to something else. Our rapid thought just takes us away from that focus. We also, another common barrier is just a lack of preparation. We're just not prepared to listen. We come into this situation. Maybe you've had this in class before. You've got other things going on. You really don't like the class. The professor's not that interesting. So, we don't come in with a mindset of, I'm going to listen. I'm going to pay attention. We're just not prepared. We need that preparation. Our mind, again, it's not a natural ability for us. So, we need that preparation. We need to prepare ourselves to listen effectively and remind ourselves what we're doing and why we're doing it and why it's important. It could just be two that you got a bad message or a bad speaker. Messages that we don't want to hear make it difficult to listen. That's a common barrier. Or speakers like the teacher from Ferris Bueller and Ben Stein. Bueller, Bueller, Bueller. Just not really interesting. Very monotone. Those types of things can make it really difficult to listen. Listening is a challenge under the best of circumstances. And when you've got a bad message or a bad speaker, that really makes it impossible to pay any attention whatsoever. This idea of perception or interpretation can be a barrier. If we're seeing things differently, you know, an optimist sees the glass half full. A pessimist says the glasses half empty. An engineer says the glass needs to be twice the size that it needs to be. Or the class says twice the size that it needs to be. Too much glass, in other words. Our perspective can be different from other people. Giving us a different interpretation of that. And leading us to not listen very well. If we think it doesn't apply to us. If we think it's not interesting or whatever. If we're just seeing things from a different perspective entirely, that can really be a strong barrier to effective listening. And then finally, a lack of instruction. We talked about this. We touched on this earlier. We just haven't had much training. We don't get much instruction in listening. And as a result, the result of a lack of instruction is poor listening habits. Poor listening habits are massive issues. Wait, that's a typo. Sorry. Not poor listening habits. Poor listening habits are a side effect of a lack of instruction. You know, we develop all kinds of poor listening habits. Things like pseudo listening. Well, we pretend we're listening. We give every indication that we're listening, but we're not really. We're nodding our head. Yes, okay, sure. But we're not really paying attention. We're giving every signal, but we're not. That's pseudo listening. We're interrupting. You know, when we interrupt somebody, it gives them a very clear indication that we're not really listening to what they're saying. If we were, we wouldn't have interrupted, right? And we're interrupting gives the message as well that what I have to say is more important than whatever you're talking about. And so clearly I'm not going to listen to that. So interrupting is a poor listening habit that we have. Stage hogging or bringing the attention constantly back to yourself. Oh, you had a bad weekend. Well, let me tell you about my weekend and how bad it was. It was way worse, right? We constantly bring the attention back to us. That's not a good listening. That's just a listening with the intent of how can I fit myself into this? Selective listening or just hearing those things that we want to hear in that message. Hearing the good news, but not the bad or hearing it in a way that we want to hear it. So being selective about what we're listening to. Some other poor listening habits that we have are filling in the gaps. Again, our mind jumps ahead. And so we just kind of make assumptions. We jump ahead and we kind of drift off and stop paying attention. We can just fill in the gaps because we've already got it figured out in our mind, right? We're listening defensively with the expectation that this person is attacking us. So we listen and put that spin on everything. Ambushing is kind of the same thing. We're listening really well. We're listening very effectively, but only so that we can then use that information to attack the other person. We're trying to find some loophole, some way that we can trap that person or attack that person. And that's not effective listening if we have that kind of specific thing built into it. Or maybe we're just spending the time while the other person's talking. It's really just an opportunity for us to prepare our own response and to decide what we want to say. We're not really listening to them. So much as thinking about what it is we want to say next. All of these extremely poor listening habits that develop because we don't receive enough instruction and we don't put enough practice and intention into developing our listening skills. That's something that we've got to change. And we will be working on as we work through this series. If you have questions about listening, any part of it, whether it's poor listening habits or barriers to listening, effective listening, please let me know. Feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you that way. In the meantime, I hope that you will really think about, okay, what are some areas that I have the most opportunity to improve? And we all have areas that we can get better as listeners. So what are some of yours? And begin thinking about how we can break down some of these barriers to listening.