It seems in this age of telephone, radio and television, most of us are spending more and more time listening, but that doesn’t necessary make us better hearers.

Researcher Paul T. Rankin made a 2 month study of the personal communications of 68 people in different occupations. He found on the average 75% of his subjects waking day was spent in verbal communication, 30% in talking, 45% in listening… but still, the discovery was that most of us don’t know how to hear, when we listen.

For several years the University of Minnesota has been measuring the listen ability of thousands of it’s students. They said, our general conclusion is the average person is a half-listener. They retain only 50% of what they hear, right after they hear it. He goes onto say, “We now give listening courses at the university of Minnesota, and every group we ever trained has averaged better than a %25 gain in proficiency.

It seems listening is a skill. There are so many things inside us that will divert us unless we learn to discipline and skill of active participation in the listening process. Why is it so difficult?

Well the rate of speech of most of us is about 125 words a minute, but we actually think four times faster than that. This means that in each minute a person talks to us we normally have about 400 words thinking time to spare, and how can we focus that? There are ways.

It’s by developing the skills of listening around the message – not to analyse what he’s saying, but to understand whether his facts are accurate. Do they come from an unprejudiced source? Am I getting the full picture, or is he talking only to prove their point? What are the feelings that are coming through in the message?