Discussion #2 on four phases of listening

I believe the first phase, which is sensing, is the one I found to be most difficult. It happened about a month ago when I was meeting an old friend from Canada. We have not met since about ten years ago, so it was nice to meet her again. My Canadian friend and I used to talk about anything like sports, cars, and movies. Since we have not talked for a long period, it was quite difficult to develop a solid conversation. My friend was majoring in business, so she talked about the current economic situation in Canada the whole time. Unfortunately, I don’t know too much about business at all. During the whole time, I was just nodding or saying “oh” after each of her statements. I thought it was kind of boring to listen to her talk about business. I did not really pay attention, and thought about something else. It was bad to be tuning her out, so I decided to give short agreement responses. When she was talking about sports and cars, I would give her selective attention. Those topics were my interests as well, which saved the conversation.
This situation could have been overcome if I would listen more attentively to her. It does not matter if I did not know too much about it. The best thing would to ask questions to her about things I was not able to grasp. This might show her that I am actually listening, and am interested in learning about the state of Canada’s economics. By sensing the message, it will make the conversation flow more smoothly.