August Blog Post

As Americans, we are accustomed and entitled to a concept known as “speech”, but what we fail to recognize is that more often than not, we abuse this concept. We are under the impression that talking and speaking out is the solution to any and all problems, and we speak out to a point where our speech becomes excessive and greedy. We fail to put any emphasis on the importance of listening and knowing when silence can mean more than speech.  In an article written by, Ann Russo, titled Between Speech and Silence: Reflections on Accountability, Russo talks about many points, ideas and concepts pertaining to taking advantage of our ability to speak. One of the concepts she discusses is the idea of active listening, this concept really stood out to me due to a few different reasons. The most important reason being that in our culture and society we put so much emphasis on speaking your thoughts and being heard, but we fail and neglect the importance of listening.

Active listening is all about engaging with the speaker and really taking the word “listening” more as an action, it means that you are being attentive to what someone is saying and understanding the feelings and view of that speaker. Active listening can open so many more doors in conversation, it can also bring about change and modification in this world and in today's society I feel that we could use a little bit of modification as well as change. Ann Russo talks about how this type of listening disrupts automatic entitlement, which when I read this, really intrigued me. As humans we do possess this automatic entitlement to speech, we love to let everyone know our every thought and not even think about how our use of speech can affect the people around us. With active listening this sense of entitlement is put in a whole new light that can really show us that listening is more often times than not, more important than actually speaking.  

In today’s political society, I feel as if active listening has never been needed more. When talking to someone with different political views or thoughts as you, active listening can be almost impossible with us humans. We are so caught up in the meaning of our own words and the opportunities that we get to speak our thoughts that we completely and most times, entirely, forget to sit back and actively listen to the people speaking around us. Although these people speaking around us may not have the same values and beliefs as we do, it is very important to understand the feelings and views of those other people. New views and beliefs stem from active listening, if no one ever listened actively, we would not have differing beliefs to provide us with different opinions and lens’s to look at life through.

This life is about experiencing new things, good and bad, but how do we expect to experience new things and have different outlooks on life when we are too caught up in our own voice to listen to someone else’s? Someone else’s voice could be your beliefs of tomorrow but we would never know this if we did not actively listen.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137002372_3