सुनने की कला: पांच बिंदु

5 ways to listen better (My): 

विश्व प्रसिद्ध पुस्तक 'अति महत्वपूर्ण व्यक्तियों की सात आदते' के लेखक स्टीफन कोवे कहते हैं कि किसी को समझाने से पहले खुद उसे समझना या उसे सुनना  बहुत जरूरी होता है। "पहले समझो फिर समझाओ" । इसलिए जब मैंने टेड टॉक पर जूलियस ट्रेझर की  7 मिनट की स्पीच सुनें तो मुझे लगा यह इसका सारांश लिखना और बार-बार दोहराना बहुत जरूरी है। इसके कुछ तथ्य बहुत ही आवश्यक है।

एक बात शुरू में ही समझ लेनी चाहिए।  पिछले 200 सालों में अत्यधिक मशीनीकरण और इंडस्ट्रीलाइजेशन के कारण से मनुष्य ने आसपास की आवाजों को सुनने की बजाय उनसे बचना शुरू किया है। और सुनने की कला धीरे-धीरे विलुप्त होती जा रही है। इस लिए सुनने की कला पर जोर देना जरूरी है।

दूसरा यह कि बातचीत में 60 परसेंट समय हम ज्यादातर सुनने में लगाते हैं। हमें स्कूल व कॉलेज  में लिखना और पढ़ना तो सिखाया जाता है और उस पर जोर भी रहता है परंतु हमारा सुनने और बोलने की कला का अभ्यास कम कराया जाता है।  यह सुनना हमें शारीरिक रूप से, मानसिक रूप से, बौद्धिक रूप से और व्यावहारिक रूप से प्रभावित करता है।इसलिए टेड टॉक पर यह स्पीच अत्यंत महत्वपूर्ण है, कैसा लगा और दो-तीन जगह से निकालकर मैंने इसकी यह संक्षिप्त रूप बनाया है। 

 उसने पांच रास्ते बताए हैं किस प्रकार अपने सुनने की कला को हम पढ़ा सकते हैं।

 1. पहला है शांति यानी ध्यान का अभ्यास करना। इसे हम ध्यान या मेडिटेशन भी कह सकते हैं।

2.  दूसरा है मिक्सर यानी अलग अलग दुनिया सुनने का अभ्यास करना। जैसे संगीतकार यकायक आते समय तबला हारमोनियम सब प्रकार के म्यूजिक अभी हिसाब मन में रखता है और उनकी अलग-अलग चैनल्स को भी देखता है उसी प्रकार से हमको भी अलग-अलग आवासों को तबला ढोलक मृदंग हारमोनियम आदि अलग अलग से सुनने का अभ्यास होना चाहिए।

3. तीसरा  सेवरिंग सेवरिंग अर्थात जो भी सांसारिक या आसपास शोर है उनको अच्छी तरह रस लेकर समझना। यानी पास में  अगर कोई मिक्सी जल रही है तो उसकी आवाज को भी रस लेकर के 1,2,3, 1,2,3 के हिसाब से सुनना। समझना कि यह भी एक 3 ताल की तरह ताल है। संगीतकार कहेगा कि ये दादरा ताल है। धा धिंना ना, धा तिन्न ना । लग जा गले फिर ये हंसी रात हो न, शायद इस जमीं पे मुलाकात हो न हो।

4. और चौथा है पोजिशनिंग हम अपना मानसिक रवैया तय करें कि हमने कैसे सुनना है। अपने मन के फ़िल्टर को भी समझे जो क्षेत्र, कल्चर, पढ़ाई आदि के कारण हमारी आंखों पर रंगीन चश्मा चढ़ा रहता है। चोर की बात को हम सोच समझ कर सकते हैं परंतु अपने बच्चे की बात उसकी शिकायतों को एंपैथी, समानुभूति के स्तर पर सुनते हैं ।

5 .  पांचवा वह संस्कृत का शब्द बोलता है RASA . यह 4 शब्दों से बना है। 

A. R आर से रिसीविंग यानी आने वाले का अभिवादन करना। उसके महत्व को समझना।

ब.  A से अप्रिशिएट बना है यानी वह भी बीच में हां, बिल्कुल, बहुत अच्छा  आदि शब्दों से प्रोत्साहित करते रहना।

C.  तीसरा एस यानी समरी और जाने के जो वो बोलता है उसके मुख्य बिंदु सोचते रहना चाहिए . 

D.  चौथा आ यानी आस्क यानी प्रश्न पूछना। और कुछ नहीं तो इतना भी कह सकते हैं कि कुछ बात तो समझ में आई है थोड़ा और विस्तार से बताइए पूर्णिया अगर हम कोई अच्छा पसंद करते हैं तो उससे भी हम अच्छी तरह से समझ सकते हैं।

यह इस प्रकार ये चार तथा RASA के चार बिंदु कुल 8 बिंदु भी हम कह सकते हैं। जो आज के प्रसिद्ध लेखक साउंड एक्सपर्ट ने कहे हैं। अचानक मेरा ध्यान किसी ने संस्कृत के एक सुभाषित पर दिलाया जिसमें बुद्धि के आठ गुण बताए: शुश्रूषा श्रवणं चैव ग्रहणं धारणं तथा ।

उहापोहोर्थ विज्ञानं तत्वज्ञानं च धीगुणा: ॥

श्रवण करने की इच्छा, प्रात्यक्ष में श्रवण करना, ग्रहण करना, स्मरण में रखना, तर्र्र्कवितर्क, सिद्धान्त निश्चय, अर्थज्ञान तथा तत्वज्ञान ये बुद्धी के आठ अंग है. 

Willing to listen, to actually listen, to understand what we listen, to be able to remember what we have listened, to be able to deduce some conclusions and put forth arguments, to be able to formalise and conclusively put forth the thought, knowledge of the around and Philosophy - these are the eight facets of 'buddhi'.

Julian Treasure, the well known TED speaker talks about 5 ways to listen better in this brilliant video from TEDGlobal 2011. He warns us about losing our listening since we have so many distractions around us which kills conscious listening. Conscious listening, he says, leads to understanding.

The video brings forth many interesting ideas about listening which you should watch for yourself. Here are the five exercises he suggests to improve listening:

1. Silence: Silence of 3 minutes a day helps to reset our ears to quiet so that we can listen well.

2. The Mixer: Even in a noisy environment, try to listen to as many individual channels as you can hear and differentiate.

3. Savouring:  (enjoy in or rekening) This is about enjoying the most mundane sounds. For instance, the tumble dryer of a washing machine. We can enjoy any sound as long as we listen.

4. Listening positions: This is the most important one. Moving your listening position to what’s appropriate –  active/passive or critical/sympathetic. This helps become conscious of barriers/filters to listening and play around with them. 

Adjust your listening positions.

Treasure says this exercise is by far the most effective.

In the same way you imagined your mind as a sound mixer, practice jumping among each of the sound channels around you. If you're listening to a song, try listening only to the drums before listening only to the bass line, for example.

Similarly, practice jumping among different perspectives. Try listening to a speech from a critical perspective, rapidly processing the validity of statements and their meaning, and then try listening from an empathetic perspective, focusing more on the emotion of the words and how the speaker is delivering them.

5. RASA: It’s a Sanskrit word for juice or essence and the acronym stands for Receive, Appreciate, Summary, Ask. It summarises the process of active listening.

Important Points: 

1. And what Julian argues is that listening is the most undervalued sense we have. But our ability to listen, to really listen, it's slipping away. 

1. listening is the most generous gift you can give to another human being. And many people have never had that experience.We are losing our listening. We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. We retain just 25 percent of what we hear. 

2.  over the last 200 years, (since perhaps industrial revolution) we are suppressing sound because of the...Noise. I mean, there's just so much noise pollution now. And we've just got into the habit of suppressing our sense of hearing. So a big part of my mission in life is to get people listening consciously.

3. Julian's idea is that sound affects your life in a bunch of ways you never even think about. But the flipside of that idea is that becoming aware of sound and really listening, it can actually make our lives a little better. For instance, a couple years ago, the city of Lancaster, in California, was trying to figure out how to keep petty criminals from doing things like stealing purses and harassing shoppers on the main drag. And city officials tried all kinds of crime-prevention techniques, but no luck. So they called Julian, and he installed...

Hundreds of all-weather, Bose loudspeakers in the main street called the Boulevards. Those speakers played this soundscape for five hours a day. And according to the sheriff of Lancaster, Calif., is that crime fell 15 percent after that soundscape...

3. BIRD CHIRPING EFFECTS: Just because we've evolved to it over 250,000 years, it's the sound of security because when the birds are singing, generally things are OK.

 If they suddenly stop, you need to be worrying.

4. In Europe, where Julian does most of his work something like 8 million people are having their sleep seriously disturbed by traffic noise at night.

5.  I'm shocked every day. I see people standing on the cheap station as this screech is happening at a 110, 120 decibels, and they're just standing there.

 And once you get to work - well, researchers have actually tested people in these noisy, open-plan office environment.  And they found that productivity dropped by two-thirds...Sixty-six percent drop in productivity in open-plan office types...

The bosses, of course, are all in hermetically sealed offices, so they're not even aware that this a problem.

But there's a lot of research now showing that noise, and the lack of quiet working space, is one of the biggest issues for all office workers.

 It creates stress hormones, increases your risk of heart attack. It increases your risk of stroke. And there's a whole range of other issues - sexual dysfunction, bowel dysfunction, depression, psychological disorders - which are associated with living in noisy situations day in and day out.

6.  listening takes brainpower. There are studies that show that the human brain can only understand 1.6 conversations at a time, which is enough for one person, and a little bit of your inner monologue. That's the amount of auditory bandwidth we have. And if you're in an office where you can overhear one person talking right next to you, they're taking up one of your 1.6. We don't have any earlids. And unless you put headphones on, that person's conversation is inevitably going to be decoded in your brain because we're programmed to decode conversation.

7.  Men tend to listen in, what I call, a reductive way, which is to say for a point, for a solution. You know, we like to have a problem and solve it. Bang. Thank you very much. On to the next thing.

 Women tend, on the other hand, to listen in more of an expansive way. It's not about a point. It's not about a solution. It's just about going with the flow and being with the person, and listening and enjoying the journey with them. So you get this mismatch where she comes home and says: I've had a terrible day, darling. It's been absolutely awful. This happened, that happened. And he says: Have a bath, you'll be fine. So I think the two listenings are quite different. And when we become conscious of our filters, then we can start to play with them and change our listening position. And that is a very, very powerful thing to do.

8. Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively, and behaviorally all the time. The sound around us is affecting us even though we’re not conscious of it.”

9.  I started talking about listening because it occurred to me that the noise around us is not all just made by organizations. Organizations aren’t things, they are composed of people and it’s all of us not listening, which is the issue with the noise that’s being made, the lack of design sound around us. The fact that most of the sound around us is just accidental. It’s like the exhaust gas of what’s going on. Speaking and listening affect one another. If you want to be heard, then you better learn to listen as well. It’s very difficult to be a powerful and inspiring speaker if you aren’t good at listening, if you want to understand the people you’re talking to.

10. Seek first to understand then to be understood,” or something like that?

There is and there’s also the age-old quote which comes from originally a Greek philosopher, which is about the fact we’ve got two ears and one mouth. That’s the correct waiting. Listening is such a forgotten skill, it’s so important for our outcomes in life. Never has the world needed listening as it does right now. You have to look around you, at the politics of hatred and polarization to see the degree to which we’re not listening to each other. 

Anybody who cares about inspiring people, forming a team, getting people to work with you, getting your point across, make a difference in the world, listening is a great access to all of those things. The better you listen, the better you can speak, communicate, and get your point across. 

10. There’s not a vertebrate on this planet that doesn’t have ears. There are plenty that don’t have eyes, but hearing is our primary warning sense because you can hear in a sphere. I can hear behind me. I’m not very good at seeing behind me – I don’t know about you. So, if a twig snaps behind you in a forest, you will spin around. It’s a reflex. 

11. 

that’s not far off. 93% of our time is spent indoors. We only spend 7% of our time outdoors, and of the other 93%, 6 is in the car and 87 is in buildings. So, it’s really important. How we design buildings has a massive influence on how we live our lives and what we get out of our lives. And there’s a great deal of unconsciousness. Now, I was talking about architects. In the US they train for five years, roughly. Ask them how much time they spent on sound. It can be, if you’re very lucky, a couple of months. Maybe they selected to do a course on acoustics, but in most cases out of five years you’ll get the answer that it’s a day or maybe a week. In five years.