Quiet. I like quiet. I don’t require the television on or music playing during the day in my office or home. In fact, I often try to arrive at my office before my colleagues so that I can think through the day, review course materials, and write quick notes to students and friends before the busy activity of the hallway begins. I’m typically fascinated when I observe people who have the ability to tune out the world around them because I am not blessed with that ability. In fact, I can relate better to the meme that says, “That moment you turn down the radio so you can see better,” when hunting for a street address! For real, if someone in the car is talking, my hand finds the Volume Knob and lowers it–the radio is playing or there is conversation in the car, but not both.
Mentioning the issue of my sensitive hearing in the post Be Still, recently I was reminded of not only my issue with ticking clocks and timers, but of the time when something just sounded off while driving my Explorer to work, so I lowered the Volume Knob on the music to listen more carefully. Come to find out, there was a nail in one of my tires, and yes, my friends, I heard the difference. Don’t even get me started on the rattle I heard years ago that took about five trips to the dealership and a recording on my phone to discover, of all things, a bracket was loose from the exhaust pipe.
Perhaps you think I might need to seek professional help for my issues with noises only I can hear; however, I am writing this post to discuss the timely need for us to control the Volume Knobs in our lives as outlined by Clay Scroggins in his book How to Lead in a World of Distraction. And because my students are more vulnerable to this assault of noise as a normal aspect of their lives, I’m truly concerned! Scroggins shares, “Your distractions are pulling you away from other things, important things, things and people you love and goals you want to achieve. Your distractions are keeping you from gaining momentum in your life. They are keeping you from gaining traction in your life.” For me, these distractions could be preventing myself, and others, from experiencing a flourishing life.
The advice Scroggins offers is extremely helpful regardless of what Season of Life we happen to be journeying through; however, I imagine younger generations will find the obstacles to A Listening Life more challenging because they have spent less time learning how to deal with the quiet of their inner life. “When you don’t want to deal with what’s inside you, you’ll turn up the volume knob so the noise around you is louder and louder… We need to find space and quiet to learn how to listen—to hear what’s being said inside us, where there is pain, where there are fears, where there are dreams and hopes that we’ve never said out loud.”
Taking the scientific method approach, Scroggins encourages us to “Observe. Hypothesize. Change a variable. Test. Repeat…picture your fingers on that volume knob. Think of what you do when life is crazy and the distractions are overwhelming you. What does it look like for you when you turn up that noise? Or think of it this way: What is masking the voice inside your head? What is silencing your inner voice?” What I see in Scroggins advice is about developing a Habit of Awareness, when we take control of the Volume Knob of our lives, we embrace self-leadership. “Self-leadership demands that you know more about yourself than anyone else. You need a PhD in you, and in order to become well versed in the ins and outs of yourself, you need to observe and understand the distractions and noises in your life. You need to learn to employ the scientific method.”
In closing, I request that in the comments below that you might consider sharing a time when you’ve embraced controlling the Volume Knob in your life and have followed Scroggins suggestion, “To examine your life, you must learn to name your noise, experiment with turning down the volume, and then listen to what’s left in the quiet that follows.” What did you learn from that scientific experiment?
Reference:
Flourishing @ Life 
Since there is nothing more important in life than knowing God, can we ever do better than HIS own advice? “Be still and know…”
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I’m the kind of person that always has some noise on in the background. Whether it’s a tv show, a podcast, or a playlist, my room is never dead silent. This post was a kind of sign to me that I really need to take notice of the distractions that are pulling me away from the things that are really important to me. Sometimes life gets so busy and noisy, and my autopilot never seems to reach for that volume knob.
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