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Knowing your listeners

Last Updated 02 August 2015, 05:35 IST

In today’s stress-fraught modern days, often we are swamped by this sudden impulse to share some of our secret feelings/emotions with some soul around, so as to soothe our severely ruffled mind.

The secret matter may be linked with some inscrutable ire against an irritating colleague, a relative, neighbour, etc.

We do know these feelings are for transitory moments that may not linger longer. But to derive those moments of instant relief, we indiscreetly and indiscriminately would have spilled all our suppressed indignation before wrong persons.

Now, before delving on the matter of impulsive thought-sharing, it is good to know various types of listeners around us. (Of course, besides minuscule percentage of our genuine trustworthy listeners).

The first type are those who are callous, clinical, caught in their own self-centered world.
 If you try verbalizing your emotions before these hard-boiled folks, you will see that though their visual faculties are affixed on you, their aural faculties wouldn’t be attuned to your soppy saga.
Which means, though their eyes are transfixed on you, their mind would have zoned out, traipsing in the various terrains of their own world.

The second type of listeners are those endowed with quite caring and compassionate heart. But the catch here is that they have their own multitudinous tasks and responsibilities to be wrapped up with, and hence are harried by hundreds of their own personal problems.

Since they themselves would be always caught in web of mental stress/tensions, gnawing at their mind persistently, they would be apathetically hearing you, in dribs and drabs.

The third type are those who keenly listen, with ears flapping, to every syllable spewed by you, as though it is some entertainment, akin to a riveting telly serial. To them, listening to others’ discomfiture, acts as a balm to their own bored mind, battered by its own boundless problems.
Call it sadism; they get cheap thrills by listening to others’ woes, which makes them forget their own worries for a while. In short, what is soul-shattering to others is sensational to them.

Finally, you have those dangerous lot of listeners, who are veritable masala-vendors.
These folks are eternally on their slander mission, indulging in smear campaigns; maligning and post-morteming people’s image at their back.

They can easily bring in rifts in relations by misconstruing, morphing, magnifying and misrepresenting things said by you, since they are shorn of moral scruples.

So, your reckless act of revealing your matters before these persons can have serious ramifications, creating irrevocable damages in your other relations.
Naturally, few moments of cathartic effect you experience by spilling matters gets fully negated, turning counter-productive.

Hence, before sharing, it is always prudent to think plenty of times, to prevent yourself from plunging later into more perilous predicaments.

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(Published 02 August 2015, 05:35 IST)

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