"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply." - Stephen R. Covey

This quote is what has made me an effective communicator, a better friend, and a better employee.

My mother is dazzlingly sociable. She is extroverted, down to earth, and incredibly friendly. As a youngin' I would watch her at parties where she seemed to know and care about everyone there. However, she wasn't flitting from group to group. No, unless she was hostess, my mom spent a great deal of time conversing with one person at a time.

This didn't seem like typical socialite behavior. Where was the small talk? I soon discovered that my mom bypassed small talk entirely. She was asking these people, sometimes strangers, about their lives. Travel adventures and mishaps, jobs gone wrong, stories about their children, worries about their own job as parents, what books inspired them, and what they loved about their childhood. She learned everything about them and they nothing about her. She asked enthralling questions when necessary and then listened, just listened, to the lives of the party guests. This, I thought, this is how you socialize.

She wasn't interviewing people per say, just giving them someone to hear themout, not to comment, or rebuttal with her own better story, but just to listen, and appreciate the events of their life. This I believe is the best gift one can give. When I asked how to avoid awkward conversation, I was told, "People love talking about themselves." To put it this way, sharing seems a selfish thing. However, I see sharing memories as a preservation of life. You share a memory with someone in the hopes that they will help remember it and keep it alive for you. Or in the case of hardship, there is someone there, not to give advice but rather just to listen, and feel what you feel.

I work in a nursing home in the dementia and Alzheimers ward. Among the residents, there are many who like to proclaim their thoughts and feelings to the world at any moment. To most, their mutterings are just babel, and they are. But if one can sort through the words, there is always something there.

For example, one woman I work with likes to yell, in monotone, day and night. She is so loud other residents complain about her constantly. As we work, she spews a constant stream of nonsense out into the hall. At first, I would play along with her babel. "Then we went to the river and got pizza with the family who were green," she would say. And I would ask, "how did the pizza get down by the river?" Though this kept her calm, and conversing with me, I wasn't actually attune to what she was saying. One day, while I was feeding her peas I asked her if she would like some more and she replied, "Yes, green." That's when I realized that she understood every word I was saying to her, she just didn't know how to reply. That night I talked to her about gardening, and what my brothers did for work. For the first time, she just listened. No yelling, just nodding her head and replying "yep." She talked all the time because she was lonely. She had no one to talk with so she made up both sides of the conversation, recounting jumbled memories with no other way to communicate her feelings. I began noticing what she was actually trying to tell me. Picking out the words of importance and treating her as though we were having a conversation between friends.

The minute we write people off as incomprehensible,boring, pompous, or unfamiliar their words loose meaning to us and we stop trying to understand them. But everyone has a glorious story in there somewhere, and in the end, all we really need, is someone to listen.