LISTENING: DO WE TAKE THIS SKILL FOR GRANTED!

There’s an old Turkish Proverb that reads: “If speaking is Silver, then Listening is Gold!”

I am sure most all of you that are reading this Blog are connected in some way to a career in marketing, public relations, sales, etc. You’ve possibly read a paper or two on the subject as well as glanced over at a few other sites to see what the professionals are stating each and every day. Most of my pieces play up the importance of communications and follow through more times than not, but there’s another skill set that we often find ourselves taking for granted and that is simply just “listening”.

Listening is a skill that doesn’t need a degree. Doesn’t cost a cent. It does affect you and I every minute of every day! Thanks to technology that changes by the day, the world we live in at present gives us everything we need to know in less than a split second and has perhaps made people pay less attention to this all-important skill?

Listening can affect us all, whether you’re a college student taking in a lecture; an athlete going over the game planning with your coaches; a sales rep attending a client meeting or working the phones. Heck, listening affects most couples even at home. One or the other complains “you’re not listening to me”. My wife always gives me a hard time and says “when it comes to your job, if someone says anything, you never forget it!” Listening does really come down to conditioning one's mind to focus on the tasks at hand.

Ultimately, we are all judged by our body of work be it from educators, employers, coaches to parenting our kids and yet, one of the vital keys to becoming that “success” in your chosen field is through the power of “listening”.

What made me chime in with this piece today came from reading a past edition of GQ Magazine that featured actor Clint Eastwood on the cover. Inside the article, Eastwood was asked about his life as a child and a special moment in his Academy Award nominated (2008) movie Changeling where the GQ writer was struck by a particular scene Eastwood directed in which a boy sits up in front of a radio to just listen in.

“Life was pretty simple then (in my day). Because you didn’t sit and watch television all the time. There was the radio. Everything was listening, so you imagined everything”, said Eastwood. On the movie scene involving the boy and radio, he added: “There’s an art to listening. There’s not much of it going on in the world. As an actor, it’s the most important single function”.

I will leave you with another favorite quote of mine which is authored by Karl Menninger from the famous Menninger family of psychiatrists (who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas). He once said: "Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand."


Jim Loria, Career Planning Expert for Sports Professionals
Email address: loria@sfstampede.com