I am delighted that the distracted driving law has become effective in Georgia, my residential and commercial base. Wherever you live, I imagine you’ve read about car accidents caused by drivers texting or talking on their cell phones, diverting their attention from the road, sometimes with deadly repercussions.
However, I wish some government agency somewhere could make distracted listening illegal as well. As acclaimed author Stephen Covey so accurately put it in his seminal book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Most people do not listen with the intention of understanding; they listen with the intention of responding.”
You can spot distracted listeners so easily. They look over their shoulders at a business’s front desk after hours to find someone they think is more deserving of their attention than you.
Another sign: You are repeatedly interrupted, before you finish your sentences. At worst, they even finish your sentences for you, often making inaccurate assumptions about your thinking.
Distracted listeners make comments that show they didn’t pay attention to what you said two minutes ago. They pick up their smartphones to check messages. They shuffle papers at their desks. They scribble. They start to walk away while you’re still talking.
Business resultsDistracted listeners offend potential buyers, annoy current customers, disrupt meetings, damage team morale, misinterpret instructions, start rumors by misquoting corporate officials, and miss important details. As a result, in many cases they reduce corporate profits.
Personal results: Distracted listeners weaken friendships, marriages, parenting opportunities, and groups they volunteer to join. Over time, they are likely to damage their own self-esteem when they see how people react negatively to their poor communication.
Too much to talk about this problem in general. How can we stop ours? listen distracted? Here’s a clue communication consultant Deborah Boswell told me. She noticed that the word listens contains exactly the same letters as the word be quiet. Coincidence? OUI well south. Still, learning polite silence can become the cornerstone of our professional and personal interactions.
And this reminds me of the wise observation I overheard an executive make about a colleague: “He misses a lot of good opportunities to just shut up.”