 I'm a long time fan of the game Mario Kart on the Nintendo I've been playing it for years and years love racing with my friends love racing with our family We do that a lot and just enjoy the game for a long time shout out to my main man while Luigi no idea But he's my favorite guy on there. That's why I always pick you know Sometimes those tracks can be just really difficult though. Can't they they have some really tough tracks My hand-eye coordination isn't as good as it used to be and sometimes I really just struggle with the track on its own and then you throw in all these different items that they have and There's obstacles all over the road right that really just can throw you off from and make the game even more challenging and more difficult You know, it's not exactly Mario Kart, but listening can offer the same kind of challenges, right? There's there's a lot of difficulty Involved in listening. It's not easy. It's not natural. So in this video I just want to talk about a few of those challenges of listening What are some of the things that can throw roadblocks up as can throw some hurdles in our way as Listeners and we can focus on those maybe try and work around them a little bit in the process. So We look at the challenge of listening first and foremost. We need to acknowledge that listening is not easy There it's just not easy. It's not natural for us. It's not something that happens Easily for so so there are a variety of things that make listening not easy though For example in our modern day and age, we've got information overload We have information coming at us at all times and from all directions and from all of these different devices that we have It's hard to pay attention to any particular stimuli. We've got all these other things that are distracting us, right? So we've got really a situation. We've got almost too much information We've got information overload and that can get the way in the way of effective listening We also sometimes just have personal concerns You've got things going on in your life and somebody else is trying to talk to you And and maybe it's about something personal. Maybe it's about something at work Doesn't matter you've got something else on your mind that can make it Psychologically can make it very difficult to be an effective listener So we can't really put our full focus into it and our full energy into it and really flip that switch to be an effective listener If we've got other things on our mind that makes it really really challenging We also have the issue of rapid thought quite frankly our brains work faster than most other people speak Typically the average English speaker in the United States speaks at a rate of around 150 words per minute But our brain works more at a rate of 450 to 600 words per minute So our brain is working three or four times faster than the other person is speaking That makes it very easy for us to just start daydreaming or you know get on a different train of thought or Jump to a conclusion because we have this rapid thought happening And finally just noise can get in the way whether that's Physical noise or physiological noise or psychological noise anything that interferes with the sending receiving that message and It can just make it really really hard We've got a lot of noise again information overload and personal stuff going on and and we've just got all these things happening That create noise for us and make listening not easy So it's not like this is really set up for success listening effective listening is not necessarily You know just primed for some for success in the natural state of things So we first need to acknowledge that listening is not easy now There are some things we can do to kind of remove some of these obstacles certainly within you know To whatever within our control we can limit information overload limit these things But what we have to acknowledge first that they do create challenges because they increase the difficulty level for listening So not only is listening that easy, but then we get into this idea that listeners don't all receive the same message mostly this has to do with You know we've talked about frame of reference in other videos and in prior videos So frame of reference that filter that exists and that is made up of your beliefs and your experiences and your knowledge And that's totally unique for every person, right? So 10 people listening to the same speaker may come out with a different idea because not all listeners receive the same message We've also talked about how you know we we don't receive a lot of instruction in listening Until as a result we can develop a lot of poor listening habits Just things that we do poorly as listeners things that we don't do well because we haven't received a lot of instruction We haven't put a lot of focus into this developing that skill and and if you don't do that Then you're gonna have poor listening habits that result things like pseudo listening, which is just kind of pretend listening Maybe I'm sure we've all done this right where you're giving the average signal that you're listening You're nodding and you're maintaining eye contact and you may even be saying mm-hmm. Yes, right go. Yeah, of course Sure. Yeah doing things like that, but we're not really listening We're giving every signal that we're listening, but we're really making our grocery list or we're thinking about the move TV show We watched last night or you know, what else we'd rather be doing we're pseudo listening Or we could be stage hogging meaning that in that conversation We're constantly bringing things back around to ourselves Somebody's telling you about their bad day and your responses basically. Oh, you think you had a bad day Let me tell you about my bad day and you're trying to kind of one-up them Are you constantly bringing the focus back around to yourself that stage hogging? Are we engaged in selective listening only hearing those things that that we want to hear? We feel really pertain to us and not getting the full picture the full context We talked about filling in the gaps in terms of our brain works faster than the other person is speaking So we just kind of let our mind drift and we just assume different things You know, they have all these different bad listening habits that we get into because because we Don't Train up that skill properly, right? We we we don't don't effectively practice that skill in our early days And as we're learning just like you know, we learn we practice how to write and we learn to get rid of some of those Bad habits. We don't do that in listening. So we develop all these different poor listening habits So, you know as a result listening has a lot of challenges a lot of things that are difficult for us as Listeners some of them are the result of things that we do and we can control Other times it's not so much But we need to be aware even if there's some if there's noise out there that we can't control Then we can be aware of it and be more focused on shutting it out and even focus harder on what it is We're trying to listen to so they're you know lots of different challenges But there are also lots of different ways to overcome those challenges If you have questions about the challenges related to listening or what we can do to overcome those things Please feel free to email me. I'd love to chat with you in that form In the meantime, I hope that you will keep these things in mind start to avoid some of these bad habits and really Work on developing that skill because the more we practice effective listening skills the more effective we will be as listeners