Five educated, successful professional women are car-pooling to a seminar. It's a two hour drive. The din inside the vehicle is reminiscent of an orchestra tuning up. Several women are talking at once—each with an idea to express concerning the issue under discussion. When any is determined to make a point, she cranks up her volume, trumping competing ideas with decibel power.

Is any of these women listening? Can any repeat back or summarize the ideas of the other women in the car? Probably not. And if not, what's the point? Competition? Catharsis? Communication it's not-—without listening there is no communication.

Listening is a master skill

Listening is rarely taught in schools because educators (along with almost everyone else) assume listening is tantamount to breathing—automatic. But effective listening is a skill. Like any other skill, competency in listening is achieved through learning and practice. The scarcity of good listeners is self-perpetuating; if you didn't have good listeners to learn from and (especially) models to emulate, you probably didn't master this master skill. Instead, you learned whatever passed for listening in your environment: distracted half-attention, constant interruptions, multi-layered, high-volume, talk-fest free-for-alls with little listening at all.

Barriers to listening

Listening takes time or, more accurately, you have to take time to listen. A life programmed with back-to-back commitments offers little leeway for listening. Similarly, a mind constantly buzzing with plans, dreams, schemes and anxieties is difficult to clear. Good listening requires the temporary suspension of all unrelated thoughts—a blank canvas. In order to become an effective listener, you have to learn to manage what goes on in your own mind. Technology, for all its glorious gifts, has erected new barriers to listening. Face-to-face meetings and telephone

conversations (priceless listening opportunities) are being replaced by email and the sterile anonymity of electronic meeting rooms. Meanwhile television continues to capture countless hours that might otherwise be available for conversation, dialogue, and listening.

Other barriers to listening include:

• worry, fear, anger, grief and depression

• individual bias and prejudice

• semantics and language differences

• noise and verbal “clutter

• preoccupation, boredom and shrinking attention spans

Listening out loud

A good listener is not just a silent receptacle, passively receiving the thoughts and feelings of others. To be an effective listener, you must respond with verbal and nonverbal cues which let the speaker know—actually prove—that you are listening and understanding. These responses are called feedback.