Therapy.  Something many people find really beneficial to get them through their days, weeks, months, years etc.  What do you get when you go to see a therapist?  Do they say the magic words that make it all better or wave a magic wand to make all your troubles go away?  Nope, all they do is listen and listen and listen some more.  Why is this so important to us simple humans?  Honestly I don’t know but it is.  The simple act of having someone truly listen to us is invaluable.  Now the catch to that sentence it ‘truly listen’.  If you are talking to someone and you know they are making a grocery list in their head or calculating the square root of pi you don’t get that some “Ah…..someone is listening to me and my thoughts are valuable” feeling as you do when someone actually listens to what you are saying.  When you are interrupted while talking or they spout out “Here’s what you SHOULD do” it not only negates the warm fuzzies you almost had but it also makes you feel WORSE.  That warm fuzzies you should have received from the friend, family, lover, random stranger on the bus has basically just told you that you are either not important enough to let you finish your thought or you just don’t understand what you are actually thinking and let me break it down for you in slow monosyllabic words so you can.  Silly human, doesn’t understand how to think right….let me help them.  Yes, sometimes it is not a pleasure cruise to listen to someone talk about their thoughts but consider this….they also found you worthy of sharing their thoughts with you.  Yes, sometimes you have already heard the same thing from them but think about what that tells you.  If they are saying it again it either means they didn’t think you truly listened the first time they said or that it is so important to them they feel the need to say it again.  You are important enough in my life that I want you to truly hear this or you are worthy enough to know that this is important to me.  Now let’s bring this all back full circle to how we started.  Even though we are surrounded by friends, family, fellow cube dwellers etc. we still have to pay someone our hard earned cube dweller cash to PAY in order to have someone to listen to us.  There is something fundamentally wrong that this is the surefire way to ensure someone listens without tweeting, surfing or checking Facebook for what their friends had for dinner.  We pay a complete stranger that isn’t concerned with anything more than if our check clears*.  Yet, somehow this is more comforting because we know they will listen and not interrupt.

* (For those young people out there, checks are pieces of paper that allowed the recipient to take money from your bank account into theirs.  Like  PayPal for the dark ages.)

Now it would be irresponsible to make these types of statements without providing some tips on how to improve the situation.   But wait, the responsibility falls on the listener AND the listenee.  (Spell check claims “listenee” isn’t a word but since you just read it and understood what I meant I declare that it is a word.  If “twerk” can make it into the dictionary “listenee” should be an easy one to add.    Back to the point…

Responsibility of the listener.  Your mission is to listen.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Well it’s not.  You need to truly listen, not only to the words but to the tone, body language and the message being conveyed.  Stop thinking about whether or not you paid the gas bill or what just beeped on your cell phone.  Little known fact, texts do not self-destruct after 90 seconds.  The fate of the world rarely depends on you responding to ‘What’s up?’ in under 4 minutes.  And no one ever actually died of chronic text, twitter, Facebook, snapchat ignoring.

Responsibility of the listenee.  Bet you didn’t see that coming.  Alas, there are responsibilities involved in expecting someone to listen to you.  Number one is to keep the emotional vomit to a sensible amount.  Having someone truly listen to you is like heading to the buffet.  You can keep going and going until you are feeling pukey or take samples and just fill up on the stuff that matters. When we head up to the buffet, don’t fill the plate heaping high, take/talk just enough that you are satisfied and the buffet owners don’t hang your picture in the kitchen.

Responsibility of the listener.  Ummmm listen.  That’s much easier said than done though.  In order to truly listen to someone, you must listen to their words and tone and body language.  Seriously it’s like trying to juggle an orange, a banana and a rabid crocodile.  Remember that this person thinks you are worthy of hearing what they have to say so shut up and listen.  Do NOT check you phone, think about the grocery list or try to formulate a response.  That last one is a doozy.  It’s natural when someone is talking to think about what to say next.  Fight the urge and let them finish before you respond.  Often halfway through the conversation I tend to trail off and start thinking about how to respond to something that has been said and completely lose the second half of the conversation.  When I catch myself doing that I try to repeat what the listenee said in my mind to keep it occupied when it decides to wander away.

In other words, I’ll end this just like I started it:

Shut up and listen.  You will both be better for it.