From hearing to listening

(Workshop Meetings Jan 19th & 20th. Glossary) Let's start by reading this poem called 'Please, listen'.
Although some people actually think that hearing and listening are two words to define just one and the same concept, the truth is that there is a long stretch to go from hearing to listening, a distance that we should all start covering at some time in our life if we really want to improve our relationship with the people around us. For a brief definition of both terms click here.

I found this slideshow with plenty of information about listening. Funny, did you notice that in both places they use exactly the same definitions for hearing and listening? I wonder who copied who? 

Have you ever thought that you might be just hearing instead of listening most of the time? How good is your listening?
If you want to go deeply in the subject: The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers put a lot of emphasis on active and -later in his life- receptive listening as a powerful strategy to use in therapy. Here is the text of a conference he gave on communication in 1964. 
Eugene Glendin, who developed the therapeutic process called 'Focusing', maintained that there are only two reasons to interrupt the person who speaks: to express that you are understanding what he/she is saying or to ask for a clarification of something that you did not understand.