Listening is hard.

I was dealing with someone today (read: exchanging reply-all emails), and I was overwhelmed by this rage of "Why won't you just listen?" Later, I did the usual corporate thing (read: banged out another email), except it was after work hours so I decided not to send it.

Not sending led to an unexpected wealth of time to reflect--this time, mainly, to consider my history of listening. Not so good. I tried to think of the best personal examples of times when I listened. The best I could come up with was the second half of undergrad, when I would fiendishly scribble notes, trying to not just catch the things on the slides and the things written on the board, but the additional information and context that was said between all those written words; and following all that I would rewrite the notes on yellow engineering paper. That's good, sure, but taking notes is fairly deterministic--the information flow is one-sided and defined by the lesson on the agenda, and there was really no penalty to missing anything.

Real Life is quite different. Listening well is quite indeterministic. There may be some contextual boundaries, but they're not hard boundaries. And it's not one-sided. You have to hold up your end of the conversation, absorbing what you hear, not spending that time formulating a response but actually absorbing, not posturing as if you're listening but actually listening.

All pretty obvious stuff, really. I wouldn't bother typing it if I was any good at it. I was hoping that considering the steps in listening would help me find the area where I'm getting it wrong. But like a lot of ego-induced incidents, the problem isn't getting the steps wrong, but rather the viewpoint you bring to a situation. If you try to protect your ego, you're going to listen poorly and allocate your attention to surface features, to look like you're listening, to concocting a response. But if you can subsume your ego, you might feel comfortable with the possibility that you're not going to look smart, that you're not going to have any witty answers, and your attention can be focused on the other person instead of yourself. So maybe there is no training for listening better, only practicing the subtle art of not taking yourself so damned seriously.