Be Ready To Listen

A famous guru was once asked, "How should I be your disciple?  Should I worship you?  Should I accept every word as truth?"  The guru replied, "Neither one.  Just open your mind to the possibility that what I'm saying could be true" - From the book "The Future Of God: A Practical Approach To Spirituality For Our Times" - Deepak Chopra

You are probably wondering why I am writing a post that has the same title of the blog after many initial posts.  I don't know the answer.

I have found with my children that they are not always willing to listen to advice when I want to give it.  That is one of the reasons I am writing this blog, so they can read it later when they are ready.  They will be given advice throughout their lives, and it will be up to them to decide if it is worth following.  But first, they must listen.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear - Famous Old Quote (Not sure who)

My understanding of the above quote is, until the student is ready to listen, there is no need for the teacher to show up and start teaching.  The teacher is wasting time being there since the message goes straight through the student's ears.  There is a huge difference when the student's attitude is set to listen and learn instead of set to "I have to be here, I don't want to be here".

In today's world, we have many distractions like email, texts, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, news alerts, etc that take us away from where we are in the present moment.  When we jump immediately to the notifications, we basically are telling the person that is talking to us that our electronic world is more important.  It is a strange thing considering that after the person walks away, the notification will still be there.  Jerry Seinfeld, starting about 40 seconds into the following video talks about this.

Sometimes when a child is upset, you will be wasting your time trying to instruct them if they are not ready to listen.  A child (just like an adult) needs time to reflect and calm themselves down before they are bombarded with advice.  When the child is ready to listen, you need to be ready to listen as well.  This post is not just about a parent trying to insert some wisdom into their child, but also the need for the parent to listen as well (and possibly receive some wisdom too).

With your child, you will have to find out when they are most willing to talk to you.  Often when a parent arrives home, they want to grill their children with questions.  This is our way of saying that they must comply with our schedule and answer when we want them to answer.  They may not be in a mood to do that (doing homework, playing, etc) so you have to test different situations to find out what works best.  Picking them up from school or meeting them when they get off the bus seems to be a good time for my children to open up about their day.  They actually compete with each other to tell about their day first.

I once heard the advice that if you have a child that is difficult to put to bed, that is a good time to sit on their bed and ask them about their day.  It gives them a chance to delay bedtime and gives you a good opportunity to sit and listen.

When a child wants to talk to you about something, you need to drop everything and listen (within reason, not when you're bench pressing 200 lbs).  This window of opportunity doesn't always last long.  You need to remember that every child is unique and what works for one child may not work for the other.  Even if the child is talking to you about something like a new video game or an episode of Spongebob that you don't know anything about, listen, this discussion is important to them and will make them feel comfortable to talk to you about other things in the future.

One of my pet peeves is when someone asks another question while the person is answering the first question.  This is another way of saying that you are not listening to their first answer (since you are thinking in your head about another question).  You most likely will miss out on a lot of information if this is your common practise.

We have two ears and one mouth.  We should listen twice as much as we talk.

Our children only live in our homes for about 18 years and then they typically move out to start working or start some form of post secondary school education.  18 years is not very long, don't wait until they have moved out to be ready to listen.