Listen with your heart to communicate better – Nnabuife

MANAGING Director and Chief Executive Officer of Anambra Newspapers and Printing Corporation, Publisher of National Light Newspaper, Ka O Di Taa and SportsLightXTRA; and the Guest Speaker at the 56th World Communication Day held at St. Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral, Awka, Chuka Nnabuife has urged both the Christian community and the general public to learn to listen with their hearts in order to ensure better communication.

  Speaking while delivering a lecture titled, ‘Listen With Your Heart To Communicate Better’ at the occasion, Sir Nnabuife stressed that listening is cardinal and valuable in communication but fast becoming extinct which explained why there is a lot of information in our contemporary society with very scant communication, adding that most of the world’s current crises in homes, communities and countries can be traced to ineffective communication due to obvious flaws in the act of listening.

  “We all have ears but many times even those with perfect hearing are unable to hear another person…… In fact, there is an interior deafness worse than the physical one. Indeed, listening concerns the whole person, not just the sense of hearing.

The true seat of listening is the heart””It appears that we are finding it more difficult to pay sufficient attention to one another. Until we are able to practically connect the roles of the heart and the ear in our communications, we may not achieve effective communication and our world would continue to wallow in avoidable crisis.

“Nnabuife further stated that  good listening requires much more than nature which is indeed a consciously developed smart ability with skillsets that aid the understanding of information being conveyed from outside or by others in churches and other faith-based organisations,  while poor listening causes challenges of cohesion and harmony which brought the idea to His Holiness, Pope Francis to choose ‘Listening with the Ears of the Heart as thrust of this year’s World Communication Day.

  “By listening with the heart, this discourse means paying keen attention with the view of hearing and seeing the expressed, the implied and the circumstances around the message. It is also a call to go about the mission with the love of God not just emotions and intuition.”

  He also highlighted some of the experts reason among the major causes of ineffective communication such as channel noise and environment or culture of the communication just as ‘actions speak louder than words’ which are the things that influenced what a person understand when listened to a message, adding that everything about channel noise and impact of environment on a message is about good or bad listening or active and inactive listening.

   Furthermore, Nnabuife said that listening is a very crucial factor in the communication process hence it directly affects the passage and assimilation of message, noting that active listening takes in the words as well as the actions in the message which leads to the quality of results in understanding, affects sharing and comprehension of the messenger’s meaning.