Start Paying attention or you'll miss it.....

As I try to carefully listen to my youngest son telling me all about his football game at lunchtime and how someone cheated and then why the ball was in and not out and .......My mind has drifted to the time I once wrote an piece for a conference about communicating in business, it was meant to be all about how we can do it better so I wrote the following :


"If you force people in to accepting the message in the way you communicate, they lose the ability to choose how they  receive the message and therefore lose control of how they want to be communicated to and will therefore lose some /all of the meaning you are trying to convey."


It was certainly a long sentence and quite frankly I should hang my head in shame.What a mouthful. 


Maybe what I was actually trying to say -" Don't control how people receive the message, control their preferences on how they want to be communicated to."

What I should have told the delegates is " No one listens properly". Take a lesson from how you communicate with your kids and go from there.

image courtesy of fixpacifica.blogspot.com

So lets do just that. Lets look at how kids listen to their parents.After all who hasn't had the battles with their kids and not listening ?

What on earth makes them continue on well after you have told them clearly to stop ?

Why does the phrase "Stop it you'll hurt someone / knock something over" get ignored until you are pouring litres of soda water on to a red wine stain in the vain hope it could be removed.
In the mean time time your rug now looks like it once held a homicide victim complete with a blood stain from a crime scene on CSI.

Well probably because of a couple of reasons, your kids are a direct reflection of you so if you don't listen to them they probably won't listen to you. Also asking your kids 10 times to do something gives them a good indication that your going to nag them anyway and they have 9 more times to do something after you've asked them the first time.

Ask yourself if you listened when your parents told you not to throw the cat off the garage roof to see if it landed on its feet. Again.

Exactly my point.

But I digress. So how does that apply to us? Same principle.

How frustrating is it explaining something to someone and then someone else says the same as you did and they agree with the other person and tell you they're right ?

Every ones in a rush so they don't listen properly. They all assume by the first few words you say what the rest of the message is going to be. Kinda like speed reading, you read the first few words of the phrases and go from there.

It's frustrating - but deep down we all do it. Hell -  I do it all the time and then have to make a decision based on what I thought I heard after the person (usually The Beloved) says " What do you think?"
And after the first time not listening, I ended shopping for clothes - I learnt my lesson.

Maybe that's all it needs for someone to listen properly, a lesson in what happens when they don't listen.

 I wonder where the cat is..........

image courtesy of reactionface.info