I believe in listening to people.
As a typical teenager, I was never patient enough to listen carefully to my parents’ words. When they spoke to me, I always wished the boring conversation would immediately jump to the end.
I never realized how important listening was, until I was far away from my home, Beijing. As an international student, this is the third year I am studying at Penn State. For most of the time, the communication between my parents and me is through the phone. There is a 12 hour time difference between us, so we have to calculate to find the common spare time in our schedule.
I would never expect before that long distance actually enhances the value of listening in our conversation. Those words normal words, which I never had patience to hear before, became much valuable to me now. For example, when I hear she says, “Eat healthy and do more exercise”, or she hears me say, “Do not work too late”, those sentences are not perfunctory, they are something we really want to say to each other. Now, as a routine, I make a phone calls with my mom once or twice per week, I always try my best to listen to her carefully, and I believe she does the same too.
As time goes by, the more phone calls we made, the more we understand each other. Sometimes, because of the long distance between us, my mom and I always try to do not let each other worry about the things around us. The content she says is the same; I can still tell her emotion change by hearing from the way how she says that sentence. For example, if she says the first several greeting words in a lightly rising tone, I can tell that she’s in a relaxing happy mood, and she might be just sitting on the couch watching evening talk shows at home. However, if her greeting voice is in a quick lower tone, I will know that she must be sitting in front of her computer dealing with some of her business work.
Similarly, for another time, I felt a little stressed out and not in a very good mood, so I decide to make a phone call with her. I didn’t mention how bad I felt; instead I just make some normal conversations. However, the next day, I received an email from her telling me to release my pressure. She said she knew I was upset because I hardly make phone calls on weekdays.
Those are things that I that I never noticed before, which make me believe that being a good listener is the easiest way for us to understand other people. Also, I now believe listening to people is a comprehensive process, and we need to put our heart to listen in order to figure out the entire story. Listening to people is not only about the words they say, but also the tone of how they say it, and the time, place, etc.
In this fast-paced world, we use so many social networking services to express ourselves, and communicate with our friends, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. It seems that we are getting more connected with other people, but actually, we just spend more and more time to sit in front of the computer and selectively choose the information that we interested in. Sometimes, I felt people are more isolated compared to the old time when people communicated by phone or snail mail. Because when we search for interesting stories, we actually lose some our patience to listen to entire story.
As a journalism major student, I understand the importance of good communication. I believe that being a good listener is the first thing that we need to do when we talk with other people.