Oh, how life would be so much easier if everyone would just listen. Listening is one of the most valuable yet undervalued skills – we have already covered how it reduces strife and stops arguments from turning into fights, but many times we fail to realize that it has a valuable place in the arsenal that helps us win arguments.
The primary advantage granted by genuinely listening is that it will help you to understand the arguments your opponent brings to the table. As we have already seen, knowing your opponent’s arguments in advance will help you preemptively craft counter-arguments of your own, but your mind is vastly different from your opponent’s.
For starters, your opponent may know more facts than you have found out – they may have consulted different sources or have sources you have no access to. If you fail to listen you might miss these completely and provide an incomplete counter-argument.
It’s also likely that your opponent has processed and interpreted the facts in a very different way than you have. In the majority of cases, in fact, the dissonance between the two of you will lie in how you perceive the issue, and not just in the raw facts. Listening will help you to understand how your opponent thinks so that you can point out any errors in it, and you can also use it to extrapolate and predict how your opponent will interpret other facts and other issues altogether.
Listening is different from hearing – it is not enough to simply have your ears unblocked. You have to engage with what your opponent is saying with your mind. Still, the most obvious point is not to have your hands over your ears singing “lalalalala!” while your opponent is speaking. Just as rude and immature as that is talking over your opponent.
Allow them to make their point in full and do t interrupt. Also try to focus all of your attention to what they are saying. Don’t start thinking of how you will reply while they are still talking, by doing that you will be distracted and won’t gain full comprehension of what they are saying. As for when you should think of your reply, the next tip has that covered.
