How many things do you hear at the same time? Do you process all of them with same quality?
Chatting with someone on the phone while hearing someone else at your side, or talking with someone while attending a call, hearing an audio, or simply reorganizing your pending list mentally, forces our brain to split its attention, reducing our reception, and retention abilities for details.
Our brain is great at turning on the automatic mode to keep track off both events by reacting only to significant words but skipping overall context.
Comprehension and concentration require a well-built level of details and context. Otherwise, our level of reaction would be poor and inaccurate.
Hearing multiple things at the same time, from noisy music in the background until keeping two separate conversations at the same time, it is a trending but fake skill, as is not a powerful capability but an abusive demand to our brain.
It can be trained to keep track of separate things and get better at the response time while switching in between two or more different topics, but that is useful for moving numbers, not for increasing our performance as it is not necessarily improving the quality of our results.
Listening requires attention to detail, comprehension of context, focus, and time.
Listening would require us to remain present for one thing at a time. One conversation, one event, one task. With that being said, listening would require to avoid multitasking, but this habit investment will reduce rework and misunderstandings and will increase quality communication and valuable collaboration.
It is not about time or quantity. It is about quality conversations; and it is about respect for you and others.
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