knowledge

Turn It Down Already! (The Essence of Listening Skills)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

I’ve struggled to accept this fact for almost the whole of my life, but for the most part, we are bad listeners. Communication problems are often at the heart of the issues most of us deal with – at the office, in the car with the kids, over dinner with our spouse, and pretty much everywhere we go.

Listening skills should NOT be a latent talent that only a few of us possess, something that is mocked or worse, both of those things. We need beacons of light to demonstrate the awesome prowess of listening, and I know examples exist – I’m looking at you Steven Universe, and your genius creators for one!

Why You Are A Bad Listener

I’m not going to pretend to know what makes people into bad listeners, but I can tell you that there are behaviours out there, which I am just as guilty of as the next person, that contribute to bad listening, and even moreso, bad communication. I’ve gone over the basics of communication already, and I’ve even dedicated some efforts to addressing the ever-so-subtle interpersonal communication, but stopping behaviours can be just as important as starting up new ones, dear readers.

Have you considered that you think of yourself too much, for starters? We all do it, we think of how information is going to impact us, but when you only focus on your own challenges, it just won’t jive in good listening. On top of that, your mind can wander from one topic to the next if you don’t concentrate, and when you do focus on what’s being said, you risk getting caught up in the topic, and completely missing the point at hand. Also, being distracted by other things can make it worse – deadlines, illness, problems in other life arenas all vie for your attention. You need to do yourself a favour and put a pint in it until the chat is over.

And we haven’t even considered how nurture, in the eternal struggle between nature, screwed the pooch on your listening training growing up. What, you say? There was training on listening skills? Well not exactly, etiquette isn’t a universal truth shared with all students.

Of course if someone decides to start cutting you down, you might get defensive, and that’s when you fail to hear what has been shared. On the opposite side of the equation are the helpers who assess a problem, and attempt to fix, without an invitation. And so Mr. Fix-it stops properly listening.

The Types of Listening Skills

Now that you’ve gotten a good dose of where we fail to listen, I think it might be a good time to address what kinds of listening you will need to apply to improve your social standing.

Critical – this for is when you need to evaluate information and either formulate a solution, an opinion or make a decision.

Appreciative – listening for the sake of personal growth and enjoyment. Movies, music and theatre all come to mind.

Discriminative – you need to determinate a dialect, members in a group, if a conversation is amicable or turning violent and a host of other nonverbal cues related to someones feelings.

Relationship – listening to understand someone, whether they need to vent or not, you have to show your support by retaining the details and feeling what they feel.

Comprehensive – focus on the speaker and the message they are sharing, in order to take direction and then apply it to your own role.

How To Become An Artful Listener

Ultimately, if you want to become an excellent listener you are going to have to learn how to be present. This is not a metaphor for becoming a present, but it is a gift nonetheless.

Forbes wrote a great article on the 10 key steps to skillful listening, and the brilliant thing about this post is that while you may need to practice one or all of these steps to get better, you can totally fake it till you make it, because so many of us are terrible at listening already.

But what are the steps you ask?

  1. Face the speaker and maintain eye contact
  2. Be attentive, but relaxed
  3. Keep an open mind
  4. Listen to the words and try to picture what the speaker is saying
  5. Don’t interrupt and don’t impose your “solutions”
  6. Wait for the speaker to pause to ask clarifying questions
  7. Ask questions only to ensure understanding
  8. Try to fell what the speaker is feeling
  9. Give the speaker regular feedback
  10. Pay attention to what isn’t said – to nonverbal cues

You’ll notice that these steps all relate to the previous symptoms of bad listening AND simultaneously recognize the 5 types of listening skills we need to employ. On top of that, the author suggests that at the end of your conversation, to summarize any actionables and agreements that were made.

It might not feel comfortable at first, but over time it will become second nature to you. And lastly, while I didn’t spell it out above,you need to create a receptive environment for listening – turn off all the digital distractions and refrain from bad habits like yawning, frowning or fidgeting.

theories Summarized

Silence might be golden, but it is not guarantee of authenticity. Fool’s gold can look just as valuable to the untrained eye. The skilled person takes on listening as an active skill which will always need to exercised to maintain your health and wealth. It shouldn’t be a mere theory that there is gold in them hills, let’s get out there and level the playing field folks!

And that’s all the wisdom I’ll dole out today.

Tim!

The Great Digitization (Lucien X. Polastron)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Labels are a double-edged sword, if you ask me. They can provide you with valuable information about products, people, and places. But sometimes they are too simple and limiting with their direction.

Specifically when it comes to imposed labels we make for other people and ideas. What many call common sense, I call limiting perception. When we think on these labels of society, we might gain better perspective into our own assumptions and the world around us. Which is why I chose to read a book in the LABEL category this month. I wanted to think on something we are definitely taking for granted.

As always I’m going to offer up some information to remind of this ongoing process of mine, also known as the The 5 L’s of Language –

I will read one book a month from the 5 groupings below, slowly expanding the number of books read so that I reach the point of 5 books a month. A book for each group

  1. LIFE – Biographies/Art/Music
  2. LOVE – Classic Fiction/Non-Fiction/Graphic Novels
  3. LEARN – Business/Leadership/Self-Help
  4. LABEL – Philosophy/Sociology/Psychology
  5. LEET– The Internet

My goal with this of course is to share information with you that might help you avoid mistakes, stimulate your mind, and encourage you to think outside of your typical modus operandi.

Lucien X. Polastron, The Man Who Read Too Much?

Lucien X. Polastron is a French writer and historian who has focused his attentions on paper, books, the process of writing, and the history of libraries. When the National Library of Sarajevo was destroyed in 1992, it triggered his research into the history of libraries and the many examples of libraries which have been destroyed. This is something he had previously observed while working on research of history of paper.

His two most famous books are Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History, a historical survey of the destruction of books from Babylonia through to modern society, and The Great Digitization and the Quest to Know Everything, which examines the consequences (both good and bad) of the digitization of books.

Polastron posits that while the digitization of books is an excellent way to move forward the exchange and breakdown of knowledge, it can very easily creates parallels between book burning by restricting access to books and destroying their autonomy. Effectively removing the idea of free books altogether. For instance, if internet service providers charge for their services and publishers hold the rights to books, who polices the quality and authenticity of the information being shared.

After all, if libraries become obsolete, that means that local governments will have to fund services which they cannot control or leave very easily. It is up to us to not only move forward with technology but to also be conscious of and protective of the accuracy of these words.

It’s books that feature intelligent content and do not dumb down their theories for the reader which allow for proper mental exercise. And while this book is now a decade old, and we still have access to free information, the thoughts which echo throughout are still cautionary and relevant for a globalized marketplace.

Let’s close out this post without resorting to simple labels. Of course digitization has great many benefits. It opens up the world and creates a level playing field of information for many who don’t have access to money. Our education levels are increasing all over the world as this technology flattens and creates transparencies. With that said, I’m going to leave you with this thought.

If knowledge is power, then who is holding all of the cards?

I’m out of theories for today friends, but check back tomorrow when write something timely about Halloween. Should be spooky.

Tim!

Contest, Context, Concept (Fairness In Art)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

My parents tried their very hardest to impart ideas of fairness in us from a young age. “Share with your brothers and sister”, “make sure that everyone gets a taste of that pizza”, “you all need to do your part to keep the house clean”, “don’t forget that it’s your turn to do the dishes”, and so it went, on and on.

joeydoesntsharefood

Every family deals with these challenges.

But I more time I spent with fairness and other moralizations as I grew into adulthood, the more I struggled with that notion of fairness, because each of the four of us had unique interests, talents, and levels of influence within the family hierarchy.

Fairness is supposed to represent a way of making value judgments that are impartial, and many well defined roles and responsibilities are given their own value sets to help establish fairness, in particular for activities and institutions which revolve around instruction.

For example, I often think of teachers and their responsibility to uphold an objective. Yes, anyone can take on a teaching role, but professional teachers are the group I’m going to focus on.

Back to the objective of teachers.

The objective of teachers is to educate students in skills and knowledge. Where it falls down for me though is through the method of instruction employed (pedagogy) by many teachers – that they know best because they’ve been trained to know the best. Pedagogy assumes that there is an ideal way to learn and an ideal way to teach, and thus the practice concerns itself primarily with how best to teach. Professional teachers are trained in pedagogy. Now, let’s put a pin in that idea for a second.

When we come out of post-secondary education, no matter our specialization, many students with a bachelors, masters or doctorate, assume an expertise in that particular field.

And we each gain a sense of fairness particular to that subset of knowledge, but going back to the family example from earlier, the problem is that if you have four children who all grew into unique roles, for example a BFA Art & Design, a BSc Psychology, a BFA Drama and BE Drama and Chemistry, and lastly a BSc Physics and BE Physics and Drama, each family member has refined their “fairness” through a different learnt pedagogy.

So almost all university graduates walk away with a sense of rightness or righteousness, depending on how you look at it. Then some time passes, and hopefully that code eases off somewhat, because another skill that post-secondary education is supposed to teach you is to continue to pursue education throughout your life.

Which leads me to my theory for the day.

I don’t think that fairness exists in life. Shock. Gasp. Awe.

whoa_ho_ho_omg_double_rainbow-14301

From a young age we are told to do our best and worry about ourselves, but that still stimulates us to try harder, and in a family setting, it can simultaneously instill a sense of competition amongst siblings.

Which is actually a good thing. Because life is competition.

We compete for grades, jobs, sexual partners, games (sport, video, tabletop), and status. But that ideation of fairness is just part of the conscious desire to simplify the world around us. Which lets us determine what is right and wrong, and gain a sense of control over the world.

But the world functions purely on those levels of success, so whatever morality we put into art making, education, business, and any other aspect of life is purely personal. When we stop to reflect on the problem at hand and look at the scale, it comes down exactly that.

Individually we might love something or someone, but that doesn’t mean that song is a popular song or that person should love us back. Decision-making is not resigned to one person or one subset of people, but to the broader picture of humanity.

So stop considering what you internally feel is correct or worthy, and consider what you have done for your community or the people around you and that will help guide the art you create.

It’s about impact.

The greater the impact, the more people who want to reward the efforts of the person who created that ripple. If you can move a stadium of people with your music, or entertain a crowded street with your improvised unicycle and ball juggling act, or even divide a whole city with your graffiti that addresses the automation of industry and complacency associated with it, you’re going to get recognition.

If you share your song with one person, one person cares, but if you shared it with influencers on YouTube, then you are all of a sudden an instant success.

Someone once said that life is unfair, but that’s not really true. Life is very fair, but we try and assume authority over fairness and change it. Fairness is competition, realized by what we are able to accomplish in our community.

Going back to the point I made earlier about families and fairness, I think families should work to achieve the workload, but we should cut that word right out of instruction, children need to learn their strengths and contribute to society in a way that they are best capable, and educators need to facilitate this via models of instruction, with tempered positions of authority.

But that’s just a theory.

Tim!

 

I #Love My #Dad (Father’s Day)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

That’s right, we’re doing my first-ever reaction post to my own post. I’m sure it’s been done before, but this is exciting for me, because I get to refresh you memory about my Mother’s Day post, all while celebrating the fathers in our lives.

Even better for me, because Father’s Day is a very short 3 days away, so there is still time for you to reflect on this holiday before it happens, and hopefully do something meaningful for all the dads you know.

In anticipation of writing this post, I did basically nothing for research, and at first I thought maybe it was because I was tired from the work day, or maybe it was because my girlfriend is working out of town for the summer or maybe it’s because I was scared to write about Father’s Day because we don’t communicate with our dads very easily anymore.

I’m going to share a commercial with you dear readers. This time it won’t be a satire of Mother’s Day, because all of the comedy channels seem just as ill-prepared as I am for this holiday.

See, I promised something of a mirror post, and so far so good.

The ad we just watched explicitly pointed out how disconnected we are from our families, how little time we all appear to be spending on communication and teachable moments.

Dads have always been shown to be the solid figures in our lives, whether they are there for us or not, they are stoic in their presence and reliable. But this Gillette ad uses emotions to prove that all over the world children are leaning more and more on the internet for sage wisdom and less on one of their best real-world teachers, their dads.

I have a theory that the reason why the first few things that come up when you type “Father’s Day” into Google are gift ideas is that we don’t give our dads the real gifts that they would like communication and intimacy. When you go and ask your dad for advice, your giving him an opportunity to share knowledge with you and impart some of his own personality.

A poorly kept secret is that most everyone you and I know will admit that dads are hard to shop for, but while it’s true that many of them don’t want a gift, it’s because they would much rather have an experience with you.

Another reason why I personally think Father’s Day takes a backseat is because it was invented to complement Mother’s Day. And on top of that when Father’s Day initially took off, it only received attention through the promotion of it’s founder Sonora Smart Dodd. When she left to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1920s, the holiday faded away.

When Dodd returned to her home town of Spoke in the 1930s, she began to promote the holiday again, this time focusing her efforts and raising awareness at a national level, so that it finally stuck in the United States.

Because we never gave fathers a holiday that was uniquely theirs we assumed that they would figure out how the want to celebrate it. The problem with this logic is that both mothers and fathers are wired to give more than receive after they have children, assuming they are healthy. If we want to celebrate our fathers properly we might need to turn inward and focus on them as individuals, rather than as symbols.

But that’s just a theory.

What do you think? Have I finally gone over the edge? Leave some comments below!  Share! Subscribe! Otherwise, I’m out of theories for the week, I think I’ll take a break and wind down for my own fathers Father’s Day celebrations.

Tim!

 

 

 

Books, and Audio, and Video, Oh My! (Public Library)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Back when I was a just a wee one, we would spend a lot of time on Saturday afternoons and sometimes week nights, in a fairly small building, located near a mini-mall.

Over the years I watched that building swap out it’s wooden swinging doors for automatic ones, the introduction of scanners to prevent theft, switching from rolodexes, to Apple 2’s, then finally Dell computers. Even an eventual re-brand of bright colours everywhere and a functioning website that offered pickup became normal for this place.

I loved spending time there, and I think probably spent more time reading snippets of books, magazines, and movie summaries, then I did actually focusing on one topic.

Come to think of it, I’ve always had that “curiosity” attitude about books. I couldn’t just read any old book for 10’s of hours. I was very particular about what I committed to, but that was my personal journey through the experience of reading and eventual maturity of my adult tastes.

I may have mentioned this once or twice before, but my parents didn’t have a bunch of money laying around when we were growing up, so the library was an incredibly inexpensive way for me to be entertained and grow into knowledge.

But now that we have the internet, kids don’t have to use the library to pursue their interests do they?

Like everything in life, it depends.

Because of this fast development of digital communication, it seems to be quite common for social services like public libraries to face heavy scrutinization and threat of budget cuts in today’s world of lean politics and business. At least that’s the impression I often get from people whenever I bring it up. But as is often the case, public perception and personal assumption aren’t that close to reality.

It appears to be more realistic that the city is doing all sorts of things to keep it’s populous invested in learning and participating in self-improvement.

This is a very good thing, like this quote from blogger Kathy Dempsey states.

Libraries are portals to all of the world’s knowledge. And librarians make sure that knowledge continues to be recorded and saved for the future, even as information-storage devices and formats change.

– Kathy Dempsey, Libraries Are Essential

There was a time when larger retail services and public services could be very particular about what they participated in, but with this information shift, brick and mortar services need to be more diversified and inclusive than previously. That means more outreach programs AKA assistive services for those who don’t know where to start, are new to the community, are young or are elderly.

That also means providing online solutions too. In the case of the library, we can now temporarily download ebooks and audio books, and participate in seminars online. The website is online 24-7, so planning your next visit becomes even easier, you can place items on hold and then quickly drop-in to grab your books or whatever you want to borrow.

And because the library keeps archives of books, music, film, and other learning resources, the likelihood of them having something I want to see on my Watch List or Back Catalogue is quite high.

As I’ve mentioned previously in the current Wisdom Wednesday series on self-improvement – Attitude Is Everything. It is so important to participate in library culture, no matter where you are in life or what your personal goals are, the public library is an excellent way to entertain and engage your mind.

Even if you don’t like what you find your first time out, the brilliance of it all is that you haven’t spent money, and you have a wealth of titles available to look into as an alternative. And librarians are so knowledgeable of ways you can focus your efforts, they can look up material by subject, recommend authors, even tell you about local events the library is hosting which might benefit your journey.

I recently rewatched Night at the Museum, because it was in my list of blu-rays I had acquired but not opened, and there was this quote in it about the museum being a place “where history comes to life,” and while that is true the library is even greater, because it’s a place where ideas come to life. As cheesy as that sounds, dear readers.

And the theories are done for the week, my friends. Have a lovely weekend. Please comment! Please subscribe! Please contact me if you want to participate in the future!

Tim!