The Forums › Forums › Tools, Techniques & Treatments › conversations › Re: conversations
You would think that listening or paying attention to one thing would be easy, right? But it’s actually one of the most complex tasks for the brain because it means shutting out the thousands of irrelevant and extraneous bits of information that are streaming into your brian from your five senses.
So we are not good at filtering out the noise. Which is why we can be creative, we combine things in interesting ways.
But often, as you say, it’s frustrating.
In the documentary Kate Kelly, (co-author of You Mean I’m Not Stupid, Lazy or Crazy) said that the first time she took medication she went to dinner and her son noticed, “You didn’t bite the waiter’s head off.” And she realized that for the first time she could hear his voice clearly despite all the background noise in the restaurant. For ADHD people the sound often get’s mushed up. Hard to distinguish stuff.
This may seem silly, but listening is actually a skill you can develop. Just like memory skills. The more you practice, the better you’ll get.
Just practice repeating what they say in short chunks. Repeat back the gist of what they say. Every time they make a new point, repeat what you’ve heard, and try not to add anything or interpret it or clarify what you think they meant. You know who is a master of this? Oprah.
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