We are social animals, and communication is the bedrock of all our relationships - with others, with ourself, with ideas, with food, with the world around us, with absolutely everything…

Our ability to learn is inversely proportional to our mental stress and emotional suffering in life.

The more skilled you are in learning, the less stressed you are and the less you suffer. 

Both because you can prevent problems in the first place, and will be skilled at solving them when they do crop up.

This creates more space for positive energy flow, and opens you up to more and more experiencing of contentment, fulfillment, happiness, joy, fun, inner peace, and freedom. Oh, and LOVE.

Our ability to learn is directly proportional to our ability to communicate: which means engaging in the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. The more we do of each, the more skilled we can become: ‘practice makes perfect’!

It should be noted that school systems worldwide, with only a tiny number of notable exceptions, actively suppress our learning and communication skills during our 12 years and roughly 14,000 hours of classroom time as children.

It’s why there is so much emotional suffering, mental stress and conflict everywhere in our human family.

It’s never too late to learn, practise and master the learning and communication skills. As ever, the starting point is becoming aware that we are not very skilled in something. And that might not be so obvious when it comes to using our native language! But, if they don’t help us master these core life skills during our schooling, we can hardly blame ourselves.

Yet, once we are aware, now we have a choice for action or inaction.

I give you one example of improving our learning and communicating as, hopefully, a trigger for you to think of many more tasks you can set for yourself. In this case we’ll focus on the listening skill, but you can do similar with reading texts. (A quick question, though: How often do you watch a video or read a blog post of an educational nature more than once?!)

Here’s Your Listening Activity in Discrete Tasks

Next time you choose a video to watch on YouTube, or any other channel, pause and do the following activity. It might be best to find a video of 5–15 minutes or so.

(You can use my choice of video if you like by clicking here, but do read the Activity Instructions first.)

1. Pre-Listening Task: Look at the headline, and ask yourself what you know about the topic or issue before watching the video. Or, decide on two or three things you’d like to hear while listening to it, and jot them down in note form.

2. Listening One Task: Play the video and listen out for what you did in the pre-listening task. At the end of the video, recall in your mind what you heard and learned about while watching it.

3. Listening Two Task: Now play the video again and make notes as you listen to it. At the end, reflect upon whether you learned more from watching the same video twice, and by doing these tasks.

I call this interactive listening and reading, because you have to do proactive work in accessing meaning and understanding. It also gets us to slow down, and pay more attention to one thing, thereby deepening our learning experience of and from it.

I hope you enjoy the activity! Do let me know your experience in the comments below.