As life moves faster we tend to lose one crucial ability in order to connect with others and that is: listening. Do you remember who was the last person you were consciously listening to? And what do you remember from his/her talk at all?

Julian Treasure, a business sound expert from the United Kingdom, gives us some guidelines on how to listen better. He stated that even though we are spending over 50 % of our communication on listening, we can not retain 3/4 of it. From his perspective, listening is defined as a rather mental process where the individual hears the sound and interprets it. We use different extraction processes for that, i.e. pattern recognition and differentiating, where, if someone calls your name, your mind recognizes immediately that it is you who are meant.

But he also points out that we are losing the skill to listen. It started from inventing recording ways such as writing, audio recording and visual recording. We no longer have to rely on our listening skills if we can simply rely on recordings, right? Another factor that Julian mentions is that the world has gotten so noisy, that it is difficult for someone to listen carefully without getting tired. Besides that we are getting impatient and accept only small sound bites of information. All of this constitutes a major problem because listening gives us the opportunity to understand. „Conscious listening always creates understanding.“

However there is always the possibility to get out of that dull, unconscious listening pattern!

Julian Treasure has five simple and concrete suggestions you can follow immediately. You only need to watch his TED Talk first: