Dating - The Importance of Listening

Are you an effective listener?

Hopefully by now, you’ve had an opportunity to read our last week’s post, “Dating: Read Between the Lines” and have a better understanding that in order for a relationship to be successful listening is imperative! urbanlandmedia.com, dating

Research shows that effective listening improves relationships, reduces conflict, and builds trust! Who wouldn’t want those things in a relationship! I know I do!

As a Financial Corporate Trainer I learned a valuable lesson, listening is a skill and requires constant practice. To help you in your efforts to become a better listener I have attached a poem that helped me understand what listening means to a relationship.

If you haven’t read my previous post, I recommend reading that first before reading the poem. Hopefully when you read the poem, you’ll have a higher motivation to become an effective listener.

Please, just listen. When I ask you to listen to me, and you start giving advice, you have not done what I asked. When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way, you are trampling on my feelings when I ask you to listen to me, and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem, you have failed me, strange as that may seem. Listen! All I asked was that you listen, not talk, or do… just hear. Advice is cheap: twenty-five cents will get you both dear Abby and Billy Graham in the same newspaper, and I can do that myself. I’m not helpless. Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not helpless. When you do something for me that I can, and need to do for myself, you contribute to my fear and inadequacy. But when you accept, as a simple fact, that I do feel no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to convince you and get about the business of understanding what’s behind this irrational feeling. And, when that’s clear, the answers are obvious and I don’t need advice. Irrational feelings make sense when we understand what’s behind them. Please listen and just hear me, and if you want to talk wait a minute for your turn, and I’ll listen to you. — Ray Houghton, M.D. Teen Times, Nov/Dec 1979

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Corey Wesley

President at BlackOutEndeavors LLC

The man behind Urban FLRT. COREY WESLEY is no stranger to hard work and what it means to go after your dreams. COREY had a successful career in the financial industry as a senior corporate trainer, however, with the downturn in the economy he had to switch gears. He turned being laid off from his position into an opportunity to create his own job and pursue one of his passions, fashion.