THE ART OF LISTENING

When someone talks to you or tells you something, how do you usually
listen? Do you continue doing what you are doing? Do you interrupt
them? Do you go off on a tangent? Do you offer them solutions even if
they haven’t asked? Do you share a similar experience with the?
Did you know that there are different levels of listening? Well, there are 6!
Yes, six and I will break them down here:
If we start from the bottom up, as if it was a stairs, the first level is
IGNORE, which is, directly not paying attention. This is a conscious
decision. The second level is BIOLOGICAL, which is, HEAR. It is purely
physiological and is a passive process. The third level is PRETEND. It´s
where you think you give the impression that you are paying attention,
when in fact you are still thinking about something else (a very real
example today is when children tell us something and we are looking at
our mobiles). The fourth level is SELECTIVE, and this is where you

choose what information you retain and I turn on and off when I want. The
fifth level is ACTIVE, where you do pay full attention to the person and the
content and this is what we want to find when we really want to
communicate something to someone else as we consider it important for
us. We must become aware of this and practice it A LOT! The sixth level
is EMPATHIC and this requires training. It is what a qualified coach
should do in each session with their coachee, making sure to ask good
questions that encourages an open honest communication.
Now it’s time to reflect. At what level do you think you are at, depending
obviously on the occasion? Well, to help you with this reflection, here is a
sentence that marked a before and after for me: “The quality of attention
that one person pays to another will determine the quality of the latter’s
thought.”