It is something I am not used to. Of course, having difficulty speaking makes it tricky to interview people for stories.
The reason is due to the new dentures and very sore gums. My poor wife has had to learn to translate grunts the way dentists do after they’ve shoved instruments in your mouth and ask questions.
My trouble speaking coherently will go away in time, but the experience of listening and having trouble talking has been challenging. It has forced me to simplify my answers to questions to one or two words.
Being forced to hold my tongue, I started to wonder how much of the time we spend listening versus talking. So, I did a search. According to a Psychology Today (psychologytoday.com) article printed on August 4, 2021, we are not very good listeners. “We’re Worse at Listening Than We Realize,” by Clay Drinko, PhD., says that while we might be listening to people talk all day, we only retain about half of what we hear.
Part of the problem is that people are often more focused on what they’re going to say than on listening to what is being said. Ironically, the Psychology Today story cited a survey where 96 percent said they were always or sometimes good listeners.
Speaking and listening seem like they should be easy for us. But I remember a diagram one of my college communications professors drew to show why we don’t always get the entire message being sent. On a blackboard, he wrote sender and receiver. Then he drew a line between the two words to represent the filters that garbled the message. Filters might be personal prejudices and experiences.
There are communication specialists who spend their careers on the sender, filter, and receiver diagrams. The goal is to make people aware of the filters they carry with them.
Will the experience make me listen more and talk less? Well…. maybe
And Then Some…
Dixon’s Saturday morning farmers market debuted at its new location on May 2 at John Dixon Park in the five hundred block of North Galena Avenue. The season is still too early for the garden vegetables and sweet corn I like, but I am looking forward to walking past the booths on shaded sidewalks that go through the park.
