Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, we wrote about how your acceptance needs to go beyond the words to their deeper meaning. Here are some perceptive discussions on various aspects of listening.
We Are Using the Same Words, But Are We Speaking the Same Language? “… it becomes entirely clear that while we may all be using the same words, we absolutely positively are not speaking the same language. We use words to represent our thoughts, feelings and ideas in this culture, but the meanings that we attach to these words are always different for each person using them. We have different educations, memories, associations, experiences, traumas, preferences etc., and all of these differences affect the meanings and interpretations we attach to our words.”
12 Ways to Be More Understanding in Relationships “Understanding relationships is tough! Two people together, emotionally connected, and trying to navigate adulthood side by side is complicated. It gets even harder if there is a lack of understanding between those two people. The idea of understanding each other in a relationship seems simple enough on the surface, but it can be challenging to execute well. I hear clients often lament that they don’t feel understood or struggle to understand their partner.”
Listening to People Although this article is oriented toward businesses, it contains a great deal of wisdom. “It can be stated, with practically no qualification, that people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening. For several years we have been testing the ability of people to understand and remember what they hear. At the University of Minnesota we examined the listening ability of several thousand students and of hundreds of business and professional people. In each case the person tested listened to short talks by faculty members and was examined for his grasp of the content.”