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The single most important thing you can do if you want to be well-liked by others is to listen. Good listeners are almost universally admired and appreciated. Just by paying attention to what others are saying you let them know that you respect them, and that you are interested in them personally. Sounds simple, but if you concentrate on listening to others you will find yourself in the minority!

Most people have one favorite subject: themselves. People love to talk about themselves. Listen and you will hear them contort every topic of conversation until, somehow, the spotlight is pointed back at them. Sometimes the linguistic acrobatics people employ in order to make themselves the center of conversation are phenomenal! Once I was part of a conversation in which someone was talking about a horrible accident in which a tower of speakers toppled over at a concert and badly cut a woman’s head. You could see this one person struggling to figure out how they could wrest the conversation away from the person telling the story and back to themselves. Finally he blurted out: “I have a scar on my head!”

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Sometimes you just have to shake your head. Listening is hard work! Especially when you are listening to the same stories over and over again. People who don’t listen to others often don’t expect others to listen to them – so they tell the same stories again and again; as if you are some kind of idiot who can’t remember a thing anyone tells you!

Listening is hard work. Let me tell you. I tend to be a listener – not because I want to make friends, but just because. I like to hear people’s stories. But I don’t like to hear the same stories a thousand times! Sometimes I think to myself: “why do you bother listening? Why do you feel like you need friends?” Friends drive you crazy. They babble on and on about nothing. Some people are like those wind-up dolls; you pull a string on their chest and they talk and talk and talk – but they just keep saying the same things! Have their brains stopped growing? It seems like they must have stopped growing.

I don’t know, sometimes I think I’d like to join a monastery; one in which everyone takes a vow of silence – or maybe they chant once in awhile. But no conversing. All this conversating is making me crazy. I am thought of as a listener so nobody has any qualms about talking to me until their faces turn blue and my ears are about to fall off. I grit my teeth and have high-blood pressure now.

Listening has made my life difficult.