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Selective Listening

A colleague stops by your office to chat and shares exciting news: a coworker to whom you’re romantically attracted is similarly interested in you. As your thoughts become riveted upon this revelation, the remainder of what he says fades from your awareness, including important information he shares with you about an upcoming project deadline.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to active listening is overcoming selective listening, taking in only those bits and pieces of information that are immediately salient during an interpersonal encounter and dismissing the rest. When we selectively listen, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to learn information from others that may affect important personal or professional outcomes, such as a missed project deadline.

Selective listening is difficult to avoid because it is the natural result of fluctuating attention and salience. To overcome selective listening, you shouldn’t strive to learn how to listen to everything all at once. Instead, seek to slowly and steadily broaden the range of information you can actively attend to during your encounters with others. The best way to do this is by improving your overall level of attention, through practicing the techniques for enhancing attention discussed earlier in this chapter. Through these means, you boost your chances of noticing information that has important short- and long-term consequences for your personal and professional relationships.