The odds are very good that the last person to whom you spoke barely heard anything you said. Don't take it personally - most people just don't listen.
Even the people who never listen know this is true. Most of us know it's bad to be distracted, zoned out and oblivious... but many of us do it anyway.
Likewise, most of us know it's bad to be so stuck in our own biases and beliefs that we block out half of what other people say... because we label their thoughts as "wrong" even before they stop talking.
But we are surrounded by noise. We don't call it noise. We call it by many names: texts, emails, tweets, updates, voicemail, ads, memos, reports, sales pitches, junk mail, TV, Netflix, ITunes...
To protect our sanity, we tune out 99.9% of the world. We even tune out our own feelings. But once we start doing this, we make the mistake of tuning out important stuff, like what the people that matter to us really need us to understand.
