Good listening makes genuine contact possible.

So how does one improve one's listening, and what are the common challenges? Here are a few ideas:

The How:

1. To the extent you honor your own feelings and thoughts, you will tend to honor others' feelings and thoughts. So, practice kind and respectful self-awareness.

2. Listening involves resonating (and moving) with feelings, desires, and attitudes, the same way we resonate (and move) with music. Practice listening in this way.

3. Improving our listening often requires, at an action level, that we refrain from responding impulsively to another's words, instead paying attention to our breathing, so we can hear things more deeply.

Two Common Challenges:

1. Sometimes we impulsively try to quickly fix someone's pain - often because the pain makes us nervous. Our fixes in this case tend to be shoddy. We become better listeners as we learn to experience our own pain, when it arises, with kindness.

2. Sometimes we impulsively defend ourselves when someone expresses upset toward us, because we feel attacked. But upset per se is not an attack, and our defenses tend to be ineffective. We become better listeners as we learn to accept our imperfection, and allow others their thoughts and feelings.

If good listening is one side of genuine contact, playful and honest self-expression is the other.

Combine the two and things get really interesting.