How to Really Listen to Someone

By Tina Su Published in communication, relationships

To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other person will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments. ~Dale Carnegie

Everyone desires to be heard. When we listen to others, we validate their need to be acknowledged and understood. Deep down inside, we all want to know that we matter, that we are important. Don’t you find that meeting someone who shows interest in what we have to say, we tend to take a liking to them instantly?

I’m not asking you to pretend to be interested in hopes of being liked, but rather to pay attention to this often overlooked and forgotten skill. In addition to improving your personal and professional relationships, listening also helps to prevent misunderstandings and facilitates cooperation.

The following are techniques to being an effective listener. I have learned these from communication courses, seminars and books on personal relationships. These are ones I’ve personally found to be useful when engaged in a conversation with other people:

How I Ended My Relationship with Coffee

By Tina Su Published in health

Let me just start by saying that I loved my cup of ‘Grande Soy Latte’. But, I didn’t like how it made me feel after the ‘kick’ worn off. I live in Seattle, the home of Starbucks, where coffee culture is BIG, and coffee shops are sprinkled on every street corner. Every day, I walk past seven coffee shops on my short eight-minute walk to the office. Deciding to quit was a personally challenging one, and I am very proud to announce that I’ve been ‘clean’ for 8 months.

Caffeine can be a sneaky little pick-me-up. I hated how it made me feel afterwards and how much I was dependent on it. Here are other reasons why I decided to quit:

I was sweating more.
I would get nervous for no reason.
I would feel dehydrated
I felt mentally “numb,” less sensitive to my surroundings, less intuitive and less creative
It was hard to truly relax and be calm.
Headaches from lack of caffeine.
I saw my friend hospitalized from too much coffee on a regular basis.
I learned that coffee is highly acidic (I’ll cover acidity and alkalinity in food in another post)
Caffeine masks both our true physical and emotional states. Giving my body a false boost of energy made it harder for me to tell what I really needed: more food, more sleep, more calmness?

So, I decided to end my eight year ‘love affair’ with coffee (who I ‘saw’ at least twice daily). How did I do it? The answer lay in restructuring my habits. I started with staying off coffee for two weeks, and then another two weeks, which eventually turned into eight months.