Out of Practice

I've noticed something about myself since becoming a stay-at-home mom (SAHM). Being a good listener doesn't come as easily to me as it used to. Any other moms out there feel it too? I find myself exhibiting, in my opinion, very poor skills. My freshman year in college I was hanging out with an upper classman that I really admired. We were sitting in front of the dining hall one evening talking. At one point he looked straight at me and said, "Heidi, you're a bad listener." I about died, but the more I grew (matured), and the more I learned about the ebb and flow of communication, the more I saw he was pretty much right. Heck, I even took a class in college, Interpersonal Communication, to teach me what good listening was. I got an "A", but lately I'd give myself a C at best.

For me, being the listener takes discipline. Areas where I know I struggle: good eye contact and body position, not interrupting or talking over the speaker, asking good follow-up questions, not daydreaming about what I'm going to say next, and sometimes just plain staying interested in what's being said. When I initiate the subject then chances are I care about the topic enough to stay engaged, but when it begins to drift another direction it takes effort for me to focus. Perhaps it's because I travel in more unfamiliar territory now with people I don't have conversational history with. So much of establishing new friendships is about getting information needed in order to ask better questions, the heart questions. I think A LOT of it has to do with my daily interfacing with my little ones. They're not conversational geniuses yet, so I'm sloppy, and a bit unprepared when interacting with grown-ups. Big people have different needs than little people, and those needs pull on different muscles in me. Needing to do more listening than sharing also triggers different feelings in me too: Am I being heard? Am I understood? Am I liked because I am or am not understood? Good listeners are such an inspiration to me. They hear the underlying feelings and address them, sometimes very directly. I like to be concise with information, so a lot of times I leave out the feelings in the conversation to save on time. But good listeners come back around and say, "You're a good mom." "You're a good friend." "You can survive this period of time." "You're not screwing up." What a blessing it is to be heard. What skill it takes to be a good listener. (BTW, my husband is a really great listener.)

I've been in and out of the book of James lately. The quintessential book on controlling the tongue. A book that's easy to read, but hard to hear. Maybe that's why I keep putting it down and re-reading it over again the next day. I've got to get back in practice, get those muscles back, and take listening seriously again.