Five educated, successful professional women are car-pooling to a seminar. It's a two hour drive. The din inside the vehicle is reminiscent of an orchestra tuning up. Several women are talking at once -- each with an idea to express concerning the issue under discussion. When any is determined to make a point, she cranks up her volume, trumping competing ideas with decibel power.

Is any of these women listening? Can any repeat back or summarize the ideas of the other women in the car? Probably not. And if not, what's the point? Competition? Catharsis? Communication it's not -- without listening there is no communication.

Listening Is a Master Skill
Listening is rarely taught in schools because educators (along with almost everyone else) assume listening is tantamount to breathing -- automatic. But effective listening is a skill. Like any other skill, competency in listening is achieved through learning and practice. The scarcity of good listeners is self-perpetuating; if you didn't have good listeners to learn from and (especially) models to emulate, you probably didn't master this "master" skill. Instead, you learned whatever passed for listening in your environment: distracted half-attention, constant interruptions, multi-layered, high-volume, talk-fest free-for-alls with little listening at all.

Barriers to Listening
Listening takes time or, more accurately, you have to take time to listen. A life programmed with back-to-back commitments offers little leeway for listening. Similarly, a mind constantly buzzing with plans, dreams, schemes and anxieties is difficult to clear. Good listening requires the temporary suspension of all unrelated thoughts -- a blank canvas. In order to become an effective listener, you have to learn to manage what goes on in your own mind. Technology, for all its glorious gifts, has erected new barriers to listening. Face-to-face meetings and telephone conversations (priceless listening opportunities) are being replaced by email and the sterile anonymity of electronic meeting rooms. Meanwhile television continues to capture countless hours that might otherwise be available for conversation, dialogue, and listening.

Other barriers to listening include:

• worry, fear, anger, grief and depression

• individual bias and prejudice

• semantics and language differences

• noise and verbal "clutter"

• preoccupation, boredom and shrinking attention spans

Listening Out Loud
A good listener is not just a silent receptacle, passively receiving the thoughts and feelings of others. To be an effective listener, you must respond with verbal and nonverbal cues which let the speaker know -- actually prove -- that you are listening and understanding. These responses are called feedback.

Verbal feedback works best when delivered in the form of brief statements, rather than questions. (Your questions usually get answered if you wait.) Statements allow you to paraphrase and reflect what you've heard, which affirms the speaker's success at communicating and encourages the speaker to elaborate further or delve more deeply into the topic. Meaningful exchanges are built on feedback.

In order to accurately feed back a person's thoughts and feelings, you have to be consciously, actively engaged in the process of listening. Hearing a statement, you create a mental model, vicariously experiencing what the speaker is describing, feeling the speaker's feelings through the filters of your own humanity and experience.

Ten Steps to Effective Listening

1. Face the speaker and maintain eye contact.

2. Be attentive yet 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 of something that has been said (avoiding questions that disrupt the speaker's train of thought).

8. Try to feel what the speaker is feeling.

9. Give the speaker regular feedback, e.g., summarize, reflect feelings, or simply say "uh huh."

10. Pay attention to what isn't said -- to feelings, facial expressions, gestures, posture, and other nonverbal cues.

Listening is a precious gift -- the gift of time. It helps build relationships, solve problems, ensure understanding, resolve conflicts, and improve accuracy. At work, effective listening means fewer errors and less wasted time. At home, it helps develop resourceful, self-reliant kids who can solve their own problems. Listening builds friendships and careers. It saves money and marriages.

More Listening Tips

• Mentally screen out distractions, like background activity and noise. In addition, try not to focus on the speaker's accent or speech mannerisms to the point where they become distractions. Finally, don't be distracted by your own thoughts, feelings, or biases.

• When listening for long stretches, focus on (and remember) key words and issues.

• When dealing with difficult people, spend more time listening than speaking.

• When in doubt about whether to listen or speak, keep listening.