(no subject)

[eiblyn]

And so I'm wasting time at work until I can go pick up the Linux install CD I need and get on about my business.

I'm feeling a lot better today than I have been for the last week or so. It's amazing to me that I watch my sense of self and self-worth steadily improve as my viewpoint continues to become more realistic. *grins* It's nice to be ok with my life/world not being perfect. It's nice to be taking responsibility for my own feelings and realizing that other people don't force me to feel anything.

In some ways its also very daunting. Not everything I feel I'm proud of...there's a bunch of resentment, anger and jealousy in there and I know that it's mostly coming from myself and my own perception of things. But it's so damn hard to realize that it's just me with my head in the sand than anyone else's ill-will. It's a ton easier to blame your dislike of someone on them or to blame your discomfort on someone else when the reality in my cases are that it's often that I perceived they communicated something negative to me rather than they actually communicated something negative to me. If people don't hear what each other is saying in reality, it's difficult for any real communication to happen.

I think I need to change the way I listen. I think active listening would be better than the passive listening I seem to stuck on now. In many ways what people say to me doesn't actually penetrate beyond my own thought processes. Of course, there are times when I make a conscious effort but most of daily conversation just flows over me and none of it sticks.

Comments

[breimh.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is a difference to what you hear people saying and actively listening to them. It's a skill that I really feel would be best to be taught in primary school, and reenforced in the home, once these children and the teachers got their parents to realise the difference too.

Of course you won't be able to get everyone to understand, or even bother to pay attention to the fact that they're not helping when they only passively hear what someone is saying to them.

I also believe we wouldn't have as many children with issues of feeling neglected and having behavioral disorders because of such feelings, if their parents and other adults around them would actively listen to what the child is trying to say to them.

But then another part of communication is physical, as well as verbal. We can communicate here, in this medium, and you would never know the tone I was trying to convey without hearing me speak these words aloud, or without seeing my posture or gesturing... facial expressions... or other forms of body language, as well. So, how you read something might also make a big difference on your abilities to actively listen, as well; particularly as most people don't use capitalization, punctuation, highlighting/illuminating words or sections of script that they feel are important in the conversation, et. al.

Changing habits of listening, also means looking at habits of communication and trying to find where one might better themselves in all areas of the ability to converse with others. I hope things continue to improve for you, and that you'll be successful in becoming a more active listener! :)

[eiblyn.livejournal.com]

I think you make an excellent point about the necessity of looking at how I communicate as a whole. I find that most of my misconceptions of what people are communicating to me comes from misreading body language. Tone and volume sometimes mean more than the words themselves. At times I have wondered if some people I know didn't have a sort of learning disability tied to understanding body language. There are many people who do not seem to communicate with their whole bodies or understand what others are communicating to them.

It would be a wonderful thing if everyone took the time to add emphasis onto the parts of written conversations that they find important. But I fear that would just lead to skimming. I'm not quite sure how that is different from what most people do anyway. Perhaps I'll start adding my own emphasis and see how I like it and how effectively I think it communicates. Certainly an idea at least.

[draloreshimare.livejournal.com]

As an addition to this bit of conversation, I find myself consistently able to read people's emotions by their body language. I also find that any empathic abilities I have strengthen my ability to read meanings. That is, reading what they've got out there.

I don't think you have a learning disability tied to understanding body language; I think that misunderstanding may be tied to your habit of passive listening. More active listening, for me, requires continually watching the person as they're talking, which means while you're picking up on tone and volume, you're also picking up on if their muscles are tensed or not, their eyebrows raised, etc. so that one is also observing.

[eiblyn.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have the learning disability but I do know a lot of people that seem to behave this way. I wonder if that comes from their passive listening also. In general I find that this tends to happen with people who have a limited amount of social interaction.