Listening vs hearing

A lesson I learnt a couple of years ago was the art of listening, we so often hear things but don’t actually listen. What’s the difference? Well listening is the active perception of hearing what is around you for a purpose while hearing is the unintentional effort of hearing things around you or hearing without taking action. So you more often than not hear what is being said rather than listen to what is being said.

I’m sure any coach will agree with me when I say a lot of players hear you but don’t listen and I don’t think that’s to say they don’t want to but more because they are looking to get the job done. For example, I explained to my team how to do a defensive slide drill and how they did it showed they were just hearing me out so they can just hurry up and do they drill. BIG mistake, for me this showed a lot of quantity rather than quality, the kids just wanted to get stuff done as quickly as possible so they could go and scrimmage but what I had to explain to them was two things, firstly, execution, take the time to learn something and do it properly, because if you rush through it you wont learn anything and don’t achieve much. Secondly, they were hearing me out so they could quickly get into the drill.

One philosophy I have is that when you’re learning something new, take you’re time and execute properly at first, even if you have to do it really slowly. I would rather do something slowly and execute than wing it and just go “willy nilly” haywire. All good things take time. And the better you get at doing that one thing you can pick up the pace, and get faster and faster.

A quote I read online went “the biggest problem we have is that we listen to respond and not to understand” and I think this rings true in so many aspects of present day life. We are so quick to respond instead of understand what is being said that we miscommunicate and things go south. Again, this comes down to hearing vs listening, if we just listen to a person and understand what they are saying even if it is criticism, we will find out a lot about ourselves. But most of the time I think pride gets in the way and we wait until we hear what we think is an insult and immediately jump to the offensive. All it takes is time, just take the time to understand what is being said.

That’s all for today

Feel free to get in touch and let me know what you think.