The Importance of Listening Skills

In today's day and age, the practice of being a good listener often seems to fall by the wayside. Things move fast today, and people are continually plugged in to technology and to the latest-and-greatest events and happenings. Twitter, social networking, 100s of cable channels and online and digital methods of connecting have made in-person interactions seem almost dull and have made it difficult for many people to truly connect.

With all of this going on in the world, it is no wonder that so many people have poor listening skills and are not able to communicate effectively with others. Unfortunately, if you are lacking in listening skills (LS), this may have a significant adverse impact on your life.

Why Are Good Listening Skills so Important?

Good listening skills are extremely important for many different reasons:

• Good listening skills can help you to build stronger relationships. If you do not listen to your partner or your friends, you will never truly know what they need or what they are offering you. You can't make a real connection without listening and getting to know someone. With good LS, however, you can connect on a deeper level and you can make your relationship stronger than it ever was before.

• Good listening skills can help you to better understand people. You can learn a lot about people by sitting back and listening to what they have to say. Knowing what makes someone tick is a great way to become friends with that person, or at least to appear as a positive and worthwhile individual in their eyes. This can help you advance professionally and help you to become well-liked in your personal life. Ultimately, this will make your own life happier.

• Good LS help you to be a better partner and friend. When you actually take the time to actively listen to people in your life, you will have much more to offer to them. You owe it to the people you care about to really listen and respect their needs.

• Good listening skills help you to head off conflict and encourage more positive interactions. By listening to what people really want and need, you can understand the essence of a situation and know how to respond when conflicts arise. Listening is the first step in compromising and many conflicts can be avoided if people really took the time to actively listen.

With so many reasons why good LS are important, it is essential for anyone and everyone to take the steps necessary to learn and cultivate the ability to listen.

One of the best ways to do this is to attend workshops, schedules or courses that teach effective LS. By working with and learning from trained professionals, you can solve problems that you may have with listening or you can simply learn to become a better listener than ever before. This is sure to lead to a richer and more fulfilling life, stronger relationships and increased personal happiness.

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Your Goal Must Be In Alignment With Your Values

Goal setting is usually very straight forward. You write down a clear, concise goal and then begin to move forward to achieve it. The problem comes when your values are not in alignment with your goal.

A value is a standard of behavior, thought or belief you hold dear to you. This could be the importance of caring for others, integrity, friendliness, and spiritual connection to name a few. A goal is something you wish to achieve. Your values will help you make it to your named destination.

One common area of conflict between values and your desired achievement occurs is in the area of prosperity and abundance. People who grew up in a strict Christian environment may have a conflict between being prosperous and achieving a spiritual life. They may have a fear that riches could lead them away from God. This sets up a conflict on the subconscious level between abundance and spirituality. For the conflict to be resolved, either the goal or the value needs to change.

Another value could be to live life simply. This belief holds that the simpler you live, the fewer resources you use and the more will be available for other people. You could say the belief supporting this value is that resources are limited and there is a direct cause and effect between what you use and what others don't have. If you want a new car, you may run into conflict between your value of simplicity and your desire of the car.

The struggle between values and goals can also be seen in the corporate world. If you grew up in a family where being considerate of people was paramount, the cut-throat mentality of the corporate world can result in deep inner conflict. This can lead to physical issues such as ulcers, high blood pressure and heart disease. You either have to change your values or find a way to bring your actions into alignment with your values.

When setting your goals, do some soul searching as to any unintended consequences of achieving your deeply help desire that are not in alignment with your values. When you find conflicts you need to do some problem solving. What do you want more, the goal or the value? Is there a way to have both and thus remove the conflict?

Does what you hold dear to you have contradictory beliefs within it? For instance, one value you may have is the importance of caring for you and your family. At the same time you may believe having abundance is not spiritual. Is your adherence to the value resulting in fear that abundance will lead you from God prevent you from caring from your family? These types of inconsistencies can result in inner turmoil.

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Real Change Begins With Honest Self-Investigation

Nothing seems harder to accept than the fact that we are responsible for so much of what proves to be unnecessary suffering. But we must challenge this involuntary, often intractable refusal to consider such ideas. The truth is that we are actively involved with unseen thoughts and feelings that compromise us. Without the self-knowledge we need to nullify this conflicted condition in our psyche, how can we hope to end the heartaches that begin there? How can we hope to heal something we won't even look at!

On the other hand, nothing is healthier for us than the beautiful process of awakening to how we have been unwittingly involved in our own suffering. We stand in good company when we consent to see these truths within ourselves. All truth teachings agree: freedom from compulsive or otherwise self-wrecking behavior begins with recognizing that we have been unknowingly serving what makes us suffer. Yes, awakening to what has been an unseen conflict in us is a challenge, but this interior work of self-realization is more than offset by the rewards gained for our efforts. Here's why:
Conscious awareness of ourselves is one and the same as living in the Now. It is the seed of a new action whose flowering is a self-wholeness that is inseparable from the higher freedom we seek. Most of us have felt, somewhere along the line of our life, a silent prompting to realize the truth of ourselves, even though we may not have recognized it as such. For instance, at some point we have all felt, intuitively if nothing else, that we are not created to live with mental torment of any kind -- that we are meant to be more than hapless victims forced to yield to passing conditions. This is a true intuition.

We are not made by that Great Intelligence that balances whole star systems, to suffer from the conflict that arises from an unbalanced understanding of our own essential nature! This is why if we ever wish to gain conscious control over our present nature -- along with what it attracts into our life -- we must gain what the great saints and mystics have always held in the highest esteem: true self-knowledge. But this needed higher knowledge cannot be acquired from sources outside of us; it must be gained through personal self-discovery. Only real changes in the level of self-understanding can help us effect real changes in our present nature, for the two are very much related. Change one and we change the other, including what it has been attracting into our lives.

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