You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy
Juan Carlos Zambrano
Gerente de Finanzas @ Tecnofarma Bolivia | Coaching ontologico
Introduction
When was the last time you listened to someone? Really listened, without thinking about what you wanted to say next, glancing down at your phone, or jumping in to offer your opinion? And when was the last time someone really listened to you? Was so attentive to what you were saying and whose response was so spot-on that you felt truly understood?
In modern life, we are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people. Instead, we are engaged in a dialogue of the deaf, often talking over one another at cocktail parties, work meetings, and even family dinners; groomed as we are to lead the conversation rather than follow it. Online and in person, it’s all about defining yourself, shaping the narrative, and staying on message. Value is placed on what you project, not what you absorb
And yet, listening is arguably more valuable than speaking. Wars have been fought, fortunes lost, and friendships wrecked for lack of listening. Calvin Coolidge famously said, No man ever listened himself out of a job.1 It is only by listening that we engage, understand, connect, empathize, and develop as human beings. It is fundamental to any successful relationship—personal, professional, and political. Indeed, the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus said, Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears,2 that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak
Reading this book, you’ll discover—as I did—that listening goes beyond just hearing what people say. It’s also paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they are saying it, in what context, and how what they say resonates within you. It’s not about simply holding your peace while someone else holds forth. Quite the opposite. A lot of listening has to do with how you respond—the degree to which you elicit clear expression of another person’s thoughts and, in the process, crystallize your own. Done well and with deliberation, listening can transform your understanding of the people and the world around you, which inevitably enriches and elevates your experience and existence. It is how you develop wisdom and form meaningful relationships
Listening is something you do or don’t do every day. While you might take listening for granted, how well you listen, to whom, and under what circumstances determines your life’s course—for good or ill. And, more broadly, our collective listening, or the lack thereof, profoundly affects us politically, societally, and culturally. We are, each of us, the sum of what we attend to in life. The soothing voice of a mother, the whisper of a lover, the guidance of a mentor, the admonishment of a supervisor, the rallying of a leader, the taunts of a rival are what form and shape us. And to listen poorly, selectively, or not at all is to limit your understanding of the world and deprive yourself of becoming the best you can be
1 The Lost Art of Listening
Modern life is making such moments increasingly rare. People used to listen to one another while sitting on front porches and around campfires, but now we are too busy, or too distracted, to explore the depths of one another’s thoughts and feelings
Instead of front porches, today’s homes more likely have front-facing garages that swallow up residents’ cars at the end of a hectic day. Or people live compartmentalized in apartments and condominiums, ignoring one another in the elevator. Stroll through most residential neighborhoods these days and it’s unlikely anyone will lean over the fence and wave you over for a word. The only sign of life is the blue glow of a computer or television screen in an upstairs window
Whereas in the past, we caught up with friends and family individually and in person, now we are more likely to text, tweet, or post on social media. Today, you can simultaneously ping tens, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people, and yet, how often do you have the time or inclination to delve into a deep, extended, in-person conversation with any one of them?
In social situations, we pass around a phone to look at pictures instead of describing what we’ve seen or experienced. Rather than finding shared humor in conversation, we show one another internet memes and YouTube videos. And if there is a difference of opinion, Google is the arbiter. If someone tells a story that takes longer than thirty seconds, heads bow, not in contemplation but to read texts, check sports scores, or see what’s trending online. The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.
People get lonely for lack of listening. Psychology and sociology researchers have begun warning of an epidemic of loneliness in the United States
It’s not just in the United States. Loneliness is a worldwide phenomenon. The World Health Organization reports that in the last forty-five years,10 suicide rates are up 60 percent globally
Loneliness does not discriminate.14 The latest research indicates no major differences between men and women or between races when it comes to feeling disconnected
To combat loneliness, people are told to Get out there! Join a club, take up a sport, volunteer, invite people to dinner, get involved at church. In other words, get off Facebook and meet face-to-face. But as mentioned previously, people often feel lonely in the presence of others. How do you connect with people once you’re out there and face-to-face? You listen to them. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Truly listening to someone is a skill many seem to have forgotten or perhaps never learned in the first place
Bad listeners are not necessarily bad people. You likely have a dear friend, family member, or maybe a romantic partner who is a terrible listener. Perhaps you, yourself, are not the best listener. And you could be forgiven since, in many ways, you’ve been conditioned not to listen
And certainly the virtues of listening are not reinforced by the media or in popular culture. News and Sunday talk shows are more often shouting matches or exercises in gotcha than respectful forums for exploring disparate views. Late-night talk shows are more about monologues and gags than listening to what guests have to say and encouraging elaboration to get beyond the trite and superficial. And on the morning and daytime shows, the interviews are typically so managed and choreographed by publicists and public relations consultants that host and guest are essentially speaking prepared lines rather than having an authentic exchange
The dramatic portrayal of conversation on television and in the movies is likewise more often speechifying and monologues than the easy and expanding back-and-forth that listening allows
To research this book, I interviewed people of all ages, races, and social strata, experts and nonexperts, about listening. Among the questions I asked was: Who listens to you? Almost without exception, what followed was a pause. Hesitation. The lucky ones could come up with one or two people, usually a spouse or maybe a parent, best friend, or sibling. But many said, if they were honest, they didn’t feel like they had anyone who truly listened to them, even those who were married or claimed a vast network of friends and colleagues. Others said they talked to therapists, life coaches, hairdressers, and even astrologers—that is,31 they paid to be listened to. A few said they went to their pastor or rabbi, but only in a crisis
It was extraordinary how many people told me they considered it burdensome to ask family or friends to listen to them—not just about their problems but about anything more meaningful than the usual social niceties or jokey banter
When asked if they, themselves, were good listeners, many people I interviewed freely admitted that they were not. The executive director of a performing arts organization in Los Angeles told me, If I really listened to the people in my life, I’d have to face the fact that I detest most of them. And she was, by far, not the only person who felt that way. Others said they were too busy to listen or just couldn’t be bothered. Text or email was more efficient, they said, because they could pay only as much attention as they felt the message deserved, and they could ignore the message or delete the message if it was uninteresting or awkward. Face-to-face conversations were too fraught. Someone might tell them more than they wanted to know, or they might not know how to respond. Digital communication was more controllable
None of us are good listeners all the time. It’s human nature to get distracted by what’s going on in your own head. Listening takes effort. Like reading, you might choose to go over some things carefully while skimming others, depending on the situation. But the ability to listen carefully, like the ability to read carefully, degrades if you don’t do it often enough. If you start listening to everyone as you would scan headlines on a celebrity gossip website, you won’t discover the poetry and wisdom that is within people. And you withhold the gift that the people who love you, or could love you, most desire
2. That Syncing Feeling
The Neuroscience of Listening
If you’re like most people, you get aggravated when people don’t listen to you, and worse when they condescend to listen to you. But what does it mean to really listen to someone? Interestingly, people can more readily describe what makes someone a bad listener than what makes someone a good listener.3 The sad truth is people have more experience with what makes them feel ignored or misunderstood than what makes them feel gratifyingly heard. Among the most frequently cited bad listening behaviors are
If you do these things, stop. But that alone is not going to make you a good listener. It will just make it less obvious that you’re a bad listener. Listening is more of a mind-set than a checklist of dos and don’ts. It’s a very particular skill that develops over time by interacting with all kinds of people—without agenda or having aides there to jump in if the conversation goes anywhere unexpected or untoward. For sure, listeners take on more risk by making themselves available when they don’t know what they will hear, but the greater risk is remaining aloof and oblivious to the people and the world around you
It’s a fair question to ask why, in this technological era, you should bother cultivating your listening skills. Electronic communication is arguably more efficient and allows you to communicate when you want and how you want with vastly larger numbers of people. And it’s true that many speakers don’t get to the point quickly. People may bore you with self-aggrandizing stories or give you way too much detail about their colonoscopies. And sometimes, they say things that are hurtful or disturbing
But listening, more than any other activity, plugs you into life. Listening helps you understand yourself as much as those speaking to you. It’s why from the time we are babies, we are more alert to the human voice and exquisitely tuned to its nuances,4 harmonies, and discordances. Indeed, you begin to listen before you are even born. Fetuses respond to sound at just sixteen weeks’ gestation and,5 during the last trimester of pregnancy, can clearly distinguish between language and other sounds.6 An unborn child can be soothed by a friendly voice and startled by an angry outburst.7 Hearing is also one of the last senses you lose before you die. Hunger and thirst are the first to go, then speech, followed by vision. Dying patients retain their senses of touch and hearing until the very end.8
But it’s important to emphasize that hearing is not the same as listening, but rather its forerunner. Hearing is passive. Listening is active. The best listeners focus their attention and recruit other senses to the effort. Their brains work hard to process all that incoming information and find meaning, which opens the door to creativity, empathy, insight, and knowledge. Understanding is the goal of listening, and it takes effort
Consider the synchrony that developed between psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.13 Their work on judgment and decision-making represents some of the most influential scholarship in behavioral economics and is the basis of Kahneman’s bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The pair were very different personalities—Tversky was impulsive and brazen while Kahneman was more reticent and considered. But they clicked through many hours of conversation—arguing, laughing, and occasional shouting—leading to many eureka moments neither could have accomplished alone.
Our desire to have our brains sync, or to connect, with another person is basic and starts at birth. We are all waiting for it. It’s how we find friends, create partnerships, advance ideas, and fall in love. But if that yearning is not satisfied, particularly when we’re very young, it can profoundly affect our well-being. No psychological concept emphasizes this more than attachment theory.16 It’s the idea that our ability to listen and connect with people as adults is shaped by how well our parents listened and connected with us as children
By the end of our first year, we have imprinted on our baby brains a template of how we think relationships work, based on how attuned our parents or primary caregivers were to our needs. In other words, your ability to form attachments, or your attachment style, is determined by the degree to which your caregivers’ brain waves synced with yours. Attentive and responsive caregivers set you up to have a secure attachment style, which is characterized by an ability to listen empathetically and thus, form functional, meaningful, and mutually supportive relationships
On the other hand, children whose parents were not dependably attentive typically grow up to be adults with an insecure anxious attachment style, which means they tend to worry and obsess about relationships. They do not listen well because they are so concerned about losing people’s attention and affection. This preoccupation can lead them to be overly dramatic, boastful, or clingy. They might also pester potential friends, colleagues, clients, or romantic interests instead of allowing people their space
An insecure avoidant attachment style comes from growing up with caregivers who were mostly inattentive—or perhaps overly attentive, to the point of smothering. People raised this way are often bad listeners because they tend to shut down or leave relationships whenever things get too close. They resist listening because they don’t want to be disappointed or overwhelmed
Finally, people who have an insecure disorganized attachment style display both anxious and avoidant behaviors in an illogical and erratic manner. This is often the result of growing up with a caregiver who was threatening or abusive. It’s really hard to listen if you have a disorganized attachment style because intimacy can feel scary or frightening. Of course, not everyone fits neatly into one of these categories. Most people land somewhere along a continuum from secure to insecure. And, if more on the insecure side, you’re on a continuum from anxious to avoidant
But history doesn’t have to be destiny when it comes to attachment styles. People can change how they are in relationships when they learn to listen and be emotionally responsive to others. And just as important, they must allow people to listen and be emotionally responsive to them—that is, they must form secure attachments. More often, though, people spend their lives seeking or creating circumstances that reproduce what they knew in childhood. They selectively listen to people who sound like who they heard first and, thus, rein-force old neural pathways. They are trying to sync in a way that feels familiar—like following old ruts in a dirt road
Our culture makes it hard for people to listen even in the best of circumstances
Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or showing how it should be done (Here, let me show you. Don’t be shy. That’s awesome! Smile for Daddy.). Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing. The lack of being known and accepted in this way leads to feelings of inadequacy and emptiness. What makes us feel most lonely and isolated in life is less often the result of a devastating traumatic event than the accumulation of occasions when nothing happened but something profitably could have.18 It’s the missed opportunity to connect when you weren’t listening or someone wasn’t really listening to you
We are defined by our attachments in life, each relationship shaping how we are in the world and with one another. And these attachments come from listening to others, starting with our caregivers’ coos to soothe our distress, continuing into adulthood, work, marriage, and everyday life. Talking without listening is like touching without being touched.19 More encompassing than touch, our entire self vibrates with the sounds that are the expressed thoughts and feelings of another. The human voice enters and moves us physically as well as emotionally. It’s this resonance that allows us to understand and also to love. Evolution gave us eyelids so we can close our eyes but no corresponding structure to close off our ears. It suggests listening is essential to our survival
3 Listening to Your Curiosity
What We Can Learn from Toddlers
Much of what we think we know about listening comes from research on how students comprehend material taught in classrooms, which bears little resemblance to the listening we do in our everyday lives. Worse, scholars can’t seem to agree on a definition of listening
And yet, there’s lots of pat advice out there about how to be a better listener. Most of it comes from business consultants and executive coaches who toss around the same ideas but use different (sometimes hilarious) terms and catchphrases like, shared sonic worlds and co-contextualizing. The advice typically boils down to showing that you are paying attention by making eye contact, nodding, and throwing in a mmm-hmm here and there. They instruct you not to interrupt, and when the speaker finishes, you are supposed to repeat or paraphrase back what the person said and then allow them to confirm or set you straight. Only at this point should you launch into what you want to say
The premise is this: listen in a prescribed way to get what you want (i.e., get a date, make the sale, negotiate the best terms, or climb the corporate ladder). Listening may indeed and probably will help you accomplish your goals, but if that’s your only motivation for listening, then you are just making a show of it. People will pick up on your inauthenticity. You don’t need to act like you are paying attention if you are, in fact, paying attention
Listening requires, more than anything, curiosity. McManus is almost compulsively curious. We all were at one point. When you were a little kid, everything was new, so you were curious about everything and everybody. Little kids will ask a million questions, sometimes embarrassingly personal questions, trying to figure you out. And they listen carefully to what you say, often repeating back what you least want them to—like an indiscreet comment or expletive you let slip.
Everyone is born a scientist, said physicist Eric Betzig. It’s just unfortunate that with a lot of people, it gets beat out of them.
Studies show that children and adults who are securely attached tend to be more curious and open to new information than people who are not.4 It’s another tenet of attachment theory that if you have someone in your life who listens to you and who you feel connected to, then the safer you feel stepping out in the world and interacting with others. You know you will be okay if you hear something or find out things that upset you because you have someone, somewhere, you can confide in and who will relieve your distress. It’s called having a secure base, and it’s a bulwark against loneliness
Think about a time when you were trying to tell a story to someone who was obviously uninterested; maybe they were sighing or their eyes were roaming around the room. What happened? Your pacing faltered, you left out details, or maybe you started babbling irrelevant information or overshared in an effort to regain their attention. Eventually, you probably trailed off while the other person smiled blandly or nodded absently. You also probably walked away from the encounter with a distinct dislike for that person
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote, You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.9 To listen is to be interested, and the result is more interesting conversations. The goal is to leave the exchange having learned something. You already know about you. You don’t know about the person with whom you are speaking or what you can learn from that person’s experience
Thinking you already know how a conversation will go down kills curiosity and subverts listening,12 as does anxiety about the interaction. It’s why every day, strangers completely ignore one another in crowded public spaces like trains, buses, elevators, and waiting rooms
Human beings detest uncertainty in general, and in social situations in particular. It’s a survival mechanism residing in our primitive brains that whispers, Keep doing what you’ve been doing because it hasn’t killed you yet. It’s why at parties you might gravitate toward someone annoying whom you know, rather than introducing yourself to a stranger. McDonald’s and Starbucks are testaments to how much humans crave sameness. Their success relies largely on the fact that you can go into any location, anywhere in the world, and get an identical Big Mac or Frappuccino.
But paradoxically, it’s uncertainty that makes us feel most alive. Think of events that shake you out of your rote existence: maybe attending a family wedding, making a big presentation, or going somewhere you’ve never been. It’s on those occasions that time seems to slow down a little and you feel more fully engaged. The same holds true if the experience is risky, like mountain climbing or parasailing. Your senses are sharper. You notice more. Thanks to the release of a feel-good chemical in the brain called dopamine,14 you get a greater surge of pleasure from chance encounters with people than planned meetings. Good news, financial rewards, and gifts are more enjoyable if they are surprises. It’s why the most popular television shows and movies are the ones with unexpected plot twists and astonishing endings.
And nothing is more surprising than what comes out of people’s mouths, even people you think you know well. Indeed, you’ve likely sometimes been surprised by things that came out of your own mouth. People are fascinating because they are so unpredictable. The only certainty you achieve by not listening to people is that you will be bored and you will be boring because you won’t learn anything new.
4 I Know What You’re Going to Say
Assumptions as Earplugs
It’s as if once you feel a connection with someone, you assume it will always be so. The sum of daily interactions and activities continually shapes us and adds nuance to our understanding of the world so that no one is the same as yesterday nor will today’s self be identical to tomorrow’s. Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs change. So it doesn’t matter how long you have known or how well you think you know people; if you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them.
Relying on the past to understand someone in the present is doomed to failure. The French writer André Maurois wrote,3 A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short. How long would you want to stay with someone who insisted on treating you as if you were the same person you were the day you two met? This is true not just in romantic relationships but in all relationships. Even toddlers object to being treated like the infants they were just months earlier. Offer a two-year-old a helping hand with something they’ve already learned how to do and you’ll likely get an exasperated, I do it! Listening is how we stay connected to one another as the pages turn in our lives
One of the most widely cited researchers on the topic of human relations is British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. He told me a primary way we maintain friendships is through everyday talk. That means asking, How are you? and actually listening to the answer. Dunbar is known for Dunbar’s Number,4 which is the cognitive limit to the number of people you can realistically manage in a social network. He pegs it at around 150. This is the number of people you are capable of knowing well enough to comfortably join for a drink if you bumped into any one of them at a bar. You don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to maintain meaningful connections with more people than that
Think of how you, yourself, might tell different people different things. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the type of relationship you have with them or degree of closeness. You might have once told a stranger something you hadn’t told anyone else. What you tell, and how much you tell, depends on how you perceive the listener at that moment. And if someone is listening superficially, listening to find fault, or only listening to jump in with an opinion, then you’re unlikely to make any kind of meaningful disclosure and vice versa
Listening to people who are not close to us brings a different set of biases, but they, too, are rooted in false assumptions. Most notably,8 confirmation bias and expectancy bias,9 which are caused by our craving for order and consistency. To make sense of a large and complex world, we unconsciously create file folders in our heads into which we drop people, usually before they even start talking. The categories can be broad stereotypes influenced by our culture or more individualistic based on experience.10 They can be helpful and accurate in some instances. But if we’re not careful, our rush to categorize and classify can diminish our understanding and distort reality. It’s the Yeah, yeah, I got it syndrome that makes us jump to conclusions about people before we know who they really are.
What happens is we meet someone who fits into one of our mental rubrics—maybe it has to do with gender, race, sexual preference, religion, profession, or appearance—and we immediately think we know them or at least certain aspects of them. Say I told you I’m a native Texan. Did that change how you think of me? Probably. Depending on your mental picture of a Texan, it might have raised or lowered me in your esteem. Same goes if you learn I’m covered with tattoos
Most people think other people are influenced by stereotypes but are oblivious to how often they, themselves, make knee-jerk assumptions. Research shows we all harbor prejudices because of our unconscious drive to categorize and the inherent difficulty of imagining realities we have not experienced ourselves.11 None of us is woke, or fully awake, to the realities of people who are unlike us. At the same time, none of us can claim to share the same mind-set or values as people who we think are like us. When people say things such as, Speaking as a white man, or Speaking as a woman of color, that’s impossible. One can only speak for one’s self
There is an inverse relationship between signaling and listening
Of course, social media is custom-made for signaling.16 Showing that you follow certain individuals or organizations or retweeting or liking messages or images signals values and cool factor.17 Who needs to listen to people when you can just Google them? A Facebook page, Instagram feed, or LinkedIn profile, the thinking goes, tells you all you need to know. And yet, this is precisely why people may be reluctant to give their surnames upon meeting someone new,18 fearing that person will do the digital equivalent of going through their dresser drawers instead of getting to know them more organically
5 The Tone-Deaf Response
Why People Would Rather Talk to Their Dog
Research by Graham Bodie, a professor of integrated marketing communication at the University of Mississippi, shows that people are more likely to feel understood if a listener responds not by nodding, parroting, or paraphrasing but by giving descriptive and evaluative information.1 Contrary to the idea that effective listening is some sort of passive exercise, Bodie’s work reveals it requires interpretation and interplay. Your dog can listen to you. Siri or Alexa can listen to you. But ultimately, talking to your dog, Siri, or Alexa will prove unsatisfying because they won’t respond in a thoughtful, feeling way, which is the measure of a good listener
People want the sense you get why they are telling you the story, what it means to them, not so much that you know the details of the story, Bodie told me. Trouble is, he and his colleagues have consistently found that most people are really bad at this. Their data suggests that listeners’ responses are emotionally attuned to what speakers are saying less than 5 percent of the time, making your dog look pretty good by comparison
Good listeners help speakers figure that out by asking questions and encouraging elaboration. You know you’ve succeeded as a listener when, after you respond, the other person says something like Yes, exactly! or You totally get it!
Carl Rogers, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, called this active listening. Perhaps because active listening sounds so appealingly dynamic, the term has been widely adopted in the business world but without much understanding of its meaning
Rogers described himself while active listening this way: I hear the words,2 the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. For him, active listening was more about being in a receptive mode than outward mannerisms. The idea is to go beyond just the facts, ma’am, which is usually only a fraction of what’s being conveyed. In conversation, people rarely tell you something unless it means something to them. It comes to mind and out of their mouths because it has valence, begging for a reaction. And it’s in understanding the intent and meaning beneath the words that you relate to that person
The world is easier to navigate if you remember that people are governed by emotions, acting more often out of jealousy, pride, shame, desire, fear, or vanity than dispassionate logic. We act and react because we feel something. To discount this and listen superficially—or not at all—is to operate at a serious disadvantage. If people seem simple and devoid of feeling, that only means you don’t know them well enough
You miss out on opportunities (and can look like an idiot) when you don’t take a breath and listen. Talking about yourself doesn’t add anything to your knowledge base. Again, you already know about you. When you leave a conversation, ask yourself, What did I just learn about that person? What was most concerning to that person today? How did that person feel about what we were talking about? If you can’t answer those questions, you probably need to work on your listening. If you go into every situation thinking you already know everything, it limits your ability to grow, learn, connect, and evolve, Noesner said. I think a good listener is someone who is open to hearing someone else’s experiences and ideas and acknowledges their point of view.
While being open and curious about someone else is a state of mind, the ability to acknowledge someone’s point of view with a sensitive response that encourages trust and elaboration is a developed skill. Noesner is a good listener because he’s a practiced listener. It takes awareness, focus, and experience to unearth and understand what is really being communicated. Good listeners are not born that way, they become that way.
6 Talking Like a Tortoise,1 Thinking Like a Hare
The Speech-Thought Differential
Have you ever been talking to someone and got so distracted by your own thoughts that it was like you put the other person on mute? The other person’s lips were moving, and yet you heard nothing until a stray word or a phrase like sex, stock tip, or borrow your car snapped you back to attention—Wait, what?
Your brief exit from the conversation was caused by the speech-thought differential,2 which refers to the fact that we can think a lot faster than someone can talk. The average person talks at around 120–150 words per minute, which takes up a tiny fraction of our mental bandwidth powered by some eighty-six billion brain cells.3 So we wander in our excess cognitive capacity, thinking about a multitude of other things, which keeps us from focusing on the speaker’s narrative.
The idea that higher intelligence makes you better able to avoid these mental side trips is false. In fact, smart people are often worse listeners because they come up with more alternative things to think about and are more likely to assume that they already know what the person is going to say. People with higher IQs also tend to be more neurotic and self-conscious,4 which means worry and anxiety are more likely to hijack their attention
Introverts, because they are quieter, are often thought to be better listeners. But this, too, is false. Listening can be particularly challenging for introverts because they have so much busyness going on in their own heads that it’s hard to make room for additional input.5 Because they tend to be sensitive, they may also reach saturation sooner. Listening can feel like an onslaught, making it difficult to continue listening, particularly when the speech-thought differential gives their minds occasion to drift
According to Nichols, to be a good listener means using your available bandwidth not to take mental side trips but rather to double down on your efforts to understand and intuit what someone is saying. He said listening well is a matter of continually asking yourself if people’s messages are valid and what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you
Perhaps the greatest barrier to keeping our minds on track and following someone’s narrative is the nagging concern about what we’re going to say when it’s our turn. It’s easier to dispatch more mundane thoughts (what you need to pick up at the grocery store), but it’s much harder to stop mentally preparing your rejoinder. Whether it’s a crucial or casual conversation in your professional or personal life, everyone fears fumbling for words or, worse, saying the wrong thing.
The irony is that by remaining defensive and not listening fully, you actually increase your chances of responding inappropriately or insensitively. The more you think about the right thing to say, the more you miss, and the more likely it is that you’ll say the wrong thing when it’s your turn. Just as Nichols’s debate students were more persuasive when they listened, a better response will come to you when you have taken in all that the other person has to say. Then, pause if you need to after the other person concludes to think about what you want to say. While we fear silences almost as much as saying the wrong thing (more about that later), a pause following someone’s comments can actually work to your advantage, as it’s a sign of attentiveness
The upshot is that worrying about what to say next works against you. Your responses will be better, your connections will be stronger, and you’ll be more at ease if you free up your mind to listen. It also makes conversations that much more interesting because you are able to take in more information. Not only are you listening to the words, but you’re also using your leftover brainpower to notice the speaker’s body language and inflection as well as to consider the context and motivation.
7 Listening to Opposing Views
Why It Feels Like Being Chased by a Bear
Neuroscientists at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles recruited subjects with staunch political positions and,1 using an fMRI scanner, looked at their brain activity when their beliefs were challenged. Parts of their brains lit up as if they were being chased by a bear. And when we are in this fight, flight, or freeze mode, it’s incredibly hard to listen. (So tell me, Mr. Bear, why are you chasing me?)
Student protestors in recent years have said listening to opposing views and opinions made them feel unsafe.2 According to a nationwide survey of college and university students conducted by the Brookings Institution,3 more than half, 51 percent, thought it was acceptable to shout down a speaker with whom they disagreed and almost a fifth, 19 percent, supported using violence to prevent a speaker from delivering an address
The truth is, we only become secure in our convictions by allowing them to be challenged. Confident people don’t get riled by opinions different from their own, nor do they spew bile online by way of refutation. Secure people don’t decide others are irredeemably stupid or malicious without knowing who they are as individuals. People are so much more than their labels and political positions. And effective opposition only comes from having a complete understanding of another person’s point of view and how they came to develop it. How did they land where they landed? And how did you land where you landed? Listening is the only way to have an informed response. Moreover, listening begets listening. Someone who has been listened to is far more likely to listen to you
Disagreements and sharp differences of opinion are inevitable in life whether they are over political ideology, ethical issues, business dealings, or personal matters. When engaged in any kind of dispute, the father of listening studies, Ralph Nichols, advised listening for evidence that you might be wrong rather than listening to poke holes in the other person’s argument, much less plugging your ears or cutting someone out of your life entirely. It requires a certain generosity of spirit, but if you remain open to the possibility that you might be wrong, or at least not entirely right, you’ll get far more out of the conversation
This approach is backed up by science. Engaging higher-order thinking is what tamps down activity in your amygdala,14 one of two almond-shaped structures in the primitive part of the brain that primes us to react (racing pulse, tense muscles, and dilated pupils) when we perceive a threat. The amygdala is what makes you instinctively jump when you see a snake or reflexively duck out of the way if someone hurls something at you. But it’s also what propels people into a blind rage when someone cuts them off in traffic or makes someone tweet a bit of vitriol so out of proportion, it defies reason
Research shows there is an inverse relationship between amygdala activity and activity in areas of the brain involved in careful listening.15 If one of these brain regions is hot, the other is not. Amygdala activation clouds judgment, rendering us unthinking and irrational. When trial lawyers put clients through grueling mock cross-examinations, they are essentially training their clients’ amygdalae to tone it down, so during the actual trial they won’t get provoked into giving flustered or antagonistic answers that would harm their cases
In the psychological literature, negative capability is known as cognitive complexity,22 which research shows is positively related to self-compassion and negatively related to dogmatism. Because they are able to listen without anxiety and are open to hearing all sides, people who are more cognitively complex are better able to store, retrieve, organize, and generate information, which gives them greater facility for making associations and coming up with new ideas. It also enables them to make better judgments and sounder decisions
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs famously hired people who weren’t afraid to push back on his ideas as hard as he pushed, often brutishly, on theirs. There was even an award given out every year by Apple employees to whomever did the best job standing up to him.24 Jobs knew about it and loved it. It’s as if he was looking for people who would force him to listen when his nature was to run roughshod over them. In one instance, an employee reportedly argued with Jobs but eventually backed down, exhausted by the fight but still convinced Jobs’s logic was flawed. When it turned out the employee was right, Jobs berated him.25 It was your job to convince me I was wrong, Jobs said. And you failed!
To listen does not mean, or even imply, that you agree with someone. It simply means you accept the legitimacy of the other person’s point of view and that you might have something to learn from it. It also means that you embrace the possibility that there might be multiple truths and understanding them all might lead to a larger truth. Good listeners know understanding is not binary. It’s not that you have it or you don’t. Your understanding can always be improved
8 Focusing on What’s Important
Listening in the Age of Big Data
Qualitative research consultants are who businesses, government agencies, and political candidates hire to listen for them. When they want to know what people think about their products, platforms, logos, or ad campaigns, they call a qual. The gold standard for conducting qualitative research has for decades been to conduct a series of focus groups, but at the QRCA conference, it was clear the trend now is toward quicker and cheaper approaches that depend more on technology than inviting people to sit around a table and share their views
In no time, focus groups came to determine the look, shape, and content of many of the products on store shelves. They still have an enormous influence on product development, how services are delivered, and what television shows and movies we get to watch. Political candidates use focus groups to decide what issues to champion and how to part their hair.
Today, though, decisions are increasingly made based on big data. The trend has been away from qualitative research methodologies like focus groups and toward more quantitative approaches, such as online analytics, social media monitoring, and telecom tracking. This is in part because of the explosion of available online and consumer data from both public and private sources. But it’s also because focus groups are expensive, typically costing $5,000– $9,000 per group. Moreover, it’s getting harder to recruit so-called virgin focus group participants. Focus groups have become so ubiquitous that there are individuals who have made a side hustle out of giving their opinions, getting paid $50–$100 for two hours of opining (plus free granola bars and peanut M&Ms).
A screening process is supposed to prevent anyone from serving on more than one focus group within a six-month period. But people lie.5 If they ask you something off-the-wall, like ‘Have you purchased a treadmill in the past year?,’ say yes; they wouldn’t ask if that weren’t [sic] the answer they wanted, wrote one veteran focus group participant in an online how-to. His record was four focus groups in one week
Swiffers sprang in part from a focus group of so-called super cleaners, women for whom a clean house was not only next to Godliness but also a measure of being a good wife and mother. As Naomi encouraged these women to talk about their lives and cleaning rituals, one participant mentioned she felt guilty when she used paper towels instead of cloth rags that she could wash and reuse. Guilty? Naomi wanted to know more about that. The woman explained that to make herself feel less wasteful, she saved lightly used paper towels—the ones she used to dry her hands, pat down lettuce, or wipe up water splashed on the counter—and at the end of the day, she threw the damp towels on the floor and used her foot to mop up any accumulated grime. The other women in the focus group chimed in that they did the same thing. And that led to a paper towel on a stick, Naomi said, aka the Swiffer.
Listening is the opposite of algorithmic approaches. Algorithms aspire to make guesses that will be as accurate as possible, Salganik said. They don’t aspire to understand. Moreover, he said, many quantitative analysts don’t even want to know what the data is. All they want is a spreadsheet of numbers with data populating, say, the first 100 columns, so they can come up with a formula for what goes in column 101. It’s irrelevant to them what or who the data represents or the real-life problems the data might help solve. Based on his experience, Salganik said, that kind of blind approach generally doesn’t work out very well: I think the more you understand about what you’re doing, the better the statistical model you will build, and if you actually really, deeply understand the people represented by the data, it will probably work even better. In other words, even in the era of abundant data, we need to listen to get to understanding.
For Naomi, the hardest thing about listening is resisting the urge to insert her point of view instead of just taking in what people have to say. That’s an advantage of purely quantitative approaches—when you know nothing but the numbers, your ego and beliefs are less likely to influence the results. But when you’re face-to-face with someone, this can happen directly by straight-up voicing your opinion, or indirectly by asking questions in a leading way
Information is only as useful as how it’s collected and interpreted. Algorithms are only as good as the scope and reliability of the data sets to which they are applied. So, too, the findings of a qualitative researcher are only as good as that individual’s neutrality, perceptiveness, and skill at eliciting anecdote and emotion—in other words, how well the qualitative researcher listens. At best, a quant can give you broad brushstrokes while a good qual can provide finer detail. Both approaches are valid and when used in concert can be extremely revealing. But when it comes to human interactions and divining individuals’ unique motivations, proclivities, and potentials, listening is, so far, the best and most accurate tool.
9 Improvisational Listening
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Work
Back in 2012, Google commissioned a study to find out what made a great team.1 Most of Google’s projects are carried out by teams, and the company wanted to understand why some groups got along and got things done while others developed animosities and petty resentments that led to infighting, back-biting, and passive-aggressive dysfunction. What was the special alchemy of personalities, process, and protocol that made people work well together?
A task force (code-named Project Aristotle) comprised of statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, and engineers examined 180 of Google’s employee teams. They scrutinized team members’ personality traits, backgrounds, hobbies, and daily habits and found no predictive patterns of a group’s success or failure. How teams were structured, how they measured their progress, and how often they met were also all over the map.
After three years of collecting data, the researchers finally reached some conclusions about what made for cohesive and effective teams. What they found was that the most productive teams were the ones where members spoke in roughly the same proportion,2 known as equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking. The best teams also had higher average social sensitivity, which means they were good at intuiting one another’s feelings based on things like tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues
In other words, Google found out that successful teams listened to one another. Members took turns, heard one another out, and paid attention to nonverbal cues to pick up on un-spoken thoughts and feelings. This led to responses that were more considerate and on point. It also created an atmosphere of so-called psychological safety, where people were more likely to share information and ideas without fear of being talked over or dismissed
But recognizing the importance of listening and getting employees to actually do it are two very different things
Shared humor is a form of connectedness born out of listening. It’s a collaborative dynamic that involves the exploration and elaboration of ideas and feelings. The same improvisational interplay is required for any cooperative endeavor, which is why listening is so crucial in the modern workplace. Those who preempt, dominate, or otherwise curb the conversation are unlikely to succeed in their careers, much less have fulfilling personal relationships. Intimacy, innovative thinking, teamwork, and humor all come to those who free themselves from the need to control the narrative and have the patience and confidence to follow the story wherever it leads.
10 Conversational Sensitivity
What Terry Gross, LBJ, and Con Men Have in Common
People who have conversational sensitivity not only pay attention to spoken words, they also have a knack for picking up hidden meanings and nuances in tone. They are good at recognizing power differentials and are quick to distinguish affectation from genuine affection. They remember more of what people say and tend to enjoy, or at least be interested in, the conversation. Conversational sensitivity is also thought to be a precursor to empathy, which requires you to summon emotions felt and learned in previous interactions and apply them to subsequent situations.
Not surprisingly, conversational sensitivity is related to cognitive complexity,3 which, as discussed earlier, means you are open to a range of experiences and can cope with contradictory views. You can’t be good at detecting intricate cues in conversation if you haven’t listened to a lot of people. It is said that intuition, often called the sixth sense,4 is nothing more than recognition. The more people you listen to, the more aspects of humanity you will recognize, and the better your gut instinct will be. It’s a practiced skill that depends on exposure to a wide range of opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions
Conversations in English, in particular, can get messy because of the complexity and expansiveness of the language. Linguists and lexicographers estimate that English has about a million words and is expanding all the time.6 The literary critic Cyril Connolly wrote that the English language is like a broad river being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.7 But the writer Walt Whitman more charitably described English as the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.8 Either way, English is one of the easiest languages to misunderstand even if you’re a native speaker
Things get even more complicated when you try to communicate with someone who grew up speaking a different language from yours. Then you get into linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,12 which holds that a person’s native language influences how they see or experience the world
But what most gets in the way of understanding is your emotions and personal sensitivities. Given that you interpret things according to your background and psychology, knowing yourself and your vulnerabilities is an important aspect of being a good listener
Research indicates that people who have a higher degree of self-awareness,14 and a related concept known as self-monitoring,15 are better listeners in part because they know the sorts of things that lead them to jump to the wrong conclusions and thus are less likely to do so. Cultivating self-awareness is a matter of paying attention to your emotions while in conversation and recognizing when your fears and sensitivities—or perhaps your desires and dreams—hijack your ability to listen well
Psychoanalysts have to go through their own analyses so their personal issues don’t get in the way of understanding the problems and feelings of those who seek their help
So you could say, good listeners are better at both deceiving and detecting deceit. If you think back to the times in your life when you were fooled, if you’re honest, there were likely things you missed or chose to miss. The too-urgent tone. The facts that didn’t quite add up. The hostility or exasperation in the person’s voice when you asked questions. The facial expression that didn’t quite match what the person was saying. The slight discomfort in the pit of your stomach that you couldn’t quite put your finger on
Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us,24 or even remotely like us. Because we only really know ourselves, it’s a natural tendency to have a solipsistic view of the world. We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own. But, of course, they have different backstories and baggage
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Intellectually, we know this, but nonetheless it’s always a rude awakening when someone thinks or behaves in ways that are beyond our expectations or imaginations. Misunderstandings, then, can be seen as an opportunity. They are an inspiration, or perhaps an aggravation, to listen more closely and inquire more deeply. In the words of Miles Davis,25 If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.
11 Listening to Yourself
The Voluble Inner Voice
We all have voices in our heads. In fact, we talk to ourselves constantly about things mundane and potentially profound. We have moral arguments and absurdist debates. We assign blame and make rationalizations. We analyze past events and rehearse future ones. The voices in our heads can be encouraging or defeating, caring or criticizing, complimentary or demeaning. Psychologist Charles Fernyhough at Durham University in the UK knows this better than most. He studies inner dialogue.
His interest sprang from his doctoral thesis, which looked at how children talk out loud to themselves to work through problems and regulate their emotions. We continue talking to ourselves when we grow up, we just learn to do it in our heads—though it still occasionally slips out of our mouths.1 Who hasn’t found themselves wondering aloud where they put their keys or audibly cursing at something they heard on the news? I have a constant inner dialogue that spills out into external speech, Fernyhough told me. His wife has gotten used to it, but he gets funny looks when it happens on the bus. Inner speech and talking to yourself is something we all do, he said. It’s a give-and-take. We are talking and listening inside our heads.
Indeed, we engage the same parts of our brains when we talk to ourselves as we do when we talk to another person.2 These are the brain regions involved with so-called theory of mind, or social cognition, which allow us to empathize and read other people’s intentions, desires, and emotions
Listening to others, then, determines the tone and quality of our inner dialogues. Our previous interactions teach us how to question, answer, and comment so we can do the same with ourselves when we need to solve problems, manage ethical dilemmas, and think creatively
This kind of private or inner speech is associated with higher performance on cognitive tasks by children as well as adults.4 The research suggests that the more people you listen to in the course of your life, the more sides to an issue you can argue in your head and the more solutions you can imagine. Inner dialogue fosters and supports cognitive complexity, that valuable ability to tolerate a range of views, make associations, and come up with new ideas
More sophisticated private speech has been found to be associated with having more involved parents and higher socioeconomic status.5 Private speech development is hindered in children who have grown up in circumstances where their listening opportunities were limited
This is significant because how you talk to yourself affects how you hear other people
We all have guilt and wrestle with ourselves, Steele told me, but an inner voice that says, Are you sure you want to do that? Why don’t you put yourself in their shoes? and Yeah, that was hurtful, but maybe they didn’t intend to hurt you, is a very different voice from the one that says, They are all out to get me and I’m no good. The latter voice is the one that makes you react in ways that are not to your benefit.
People’s inner voices have tremendous influence in part because they’re actually perceived as louder
The trouble is, really tuning in to one’s self is something people go to great lengths to avoid. This was borne out in eleven experiments involving more than seven hundred people conducted by psychologists at the University of Virginia. The majority of subjects did not enjoy spending just six to fifteen minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think. In one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering shocks rather than be alone with their thoughts
This suggests a lot of people have inner voices that sound like my friend’s tormenter, Spanky. Even if your inner voice is friendlier, the dialogues you have with yourself often have to do with what’s weighing on you—things like relationship problems, professional disappointments, health concerns, and the like. Human beings are by nature problem solvers, so in quiet moments, this is where our minds go. Our fixation on what needs to be fixed is why some people can’t abide downtime and always have to have something to do so they won’t think about what’s wrong. However, trying to suppress your inner voice only gives it more power. It gets louder and more insistent, which makes some people get even busier and overscheduled to drown it out. It never works, though. Your inner voice is always there and, if it can’t get your attention during the day, it will roust you at 4:00 a.m. Hello! Remember me?
Cognitive behavioral therapy is all about learning how to talk to yourself differently. An unhelpful inner voice that sounds like a belittling parent or negative friend is replaced by a voice that sounds more like your therapist, suggesting kinder or more open ways of thinking, which in turn has proven effective at fostering a greater sense of well-being. Listening to a wide variety of people, too, is helpful. Many voices bring many perspectives. Questioning people and considering their responses is how you get better at doing the same when you have dialogues with yourself. As difficult as a problem may be, having a dialogue with yourself is ultimately the only way to solve it, or at least come to terms with it
12 Supporting, Not Shifting, the Conversation
Good listeners are all about the support response, which is critical to providing the kind of acknowledgment and evaluative feedback discussed in chapter 5 as well as avoiding the types of misunderstandings identified in chapter 10
Fill-in-the-blank questions are useful in this respect. You and Roger got in a fight because …? That way, it’s like you’re handing off a baton, allowing the speaker to go in whatever direction the person wants. Try to avoid asking about incidental details that knock people off their train of thought and feeling state: Were you and Roger arguing at the coffee shop on Fifty-fifth Street or Sixty-seventh Street? Where they were, what time, what they ordered—none of it matters as much as what happened and how it felt.
This is not just Becker’s opinion. Research indicates both women and men view women as more open and empathetic listeners.6 Some evidence suggests women focus more on relational and personal information whereas men are more attentive to fact-based information.7 As a result, women are more likely to gain people’s trust and be privy to more self-disclosure, which makes their conversations more interesting and, thus, reinforces their willingness to listen
But there’s considerable disagreement over whether this is nature or nurture.8 Some blame cultural influences that teach boys to man up and not be interested in or affected by the emotions of others, while others argue that the greater social sensitivity of women, even infant girls,9 cannot be entirely attributed to societal or parental influence. Some have even argued that autism, characterized by difficulty picking up emotional cues in verbal and nonverbal communication, is a severe form of the male brain
According to researchers at Université de Lausanne in Switzerland, sounds that convey negative emotions are perceived as significantly louder than those that are more neutral or positive in tone,11 even when they have the same amplitude. Similarly, researchers at the University of Minnesota and University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that employees were five times more upset by negative interactions at work as they were made happy by positive interactions.12 This dove-tails with the findings of marriage and family researcher John Gottman at the University of Washington in Seattle whose decades of observational studies indicate good interactions must outnumber negative ones by at least five to one for a relationship to succeed.13 It explains the instinct to shut out others rather than risk the disproportionate intensity of feeling hurt
In the book There Is No Good Card for This: What To Do and Say When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love, authors Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell indirectly identified another kind of shift response that arises from just this kind of avoidant behavior.14 Derber characterized the shift response as a narcissistic attempt to redirect the conversation back to one’s self. But the shift response Crowe and McDowell described occurs when people, uncomfortable with others’ emotions, respond by trying to solve or explain away problems rather than listening and letting the upset or aggrieved feel what they feel and, through dialogue, find their own solutions. The authors advise squelching the impulses to:
Being aware of someone’s troubles does not mean you need to fix them. People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board. Moreover, you shut people down when you start telling them what they should do or how they should feel. No matter how good your intentions or how sage you think your advice, people reflexively resist and resent directives, even if gently delivered. You may be able to help someone fix a leaky faucet, edit a résumé, or find a good accountant, but you can’t help someone salvage a ruined career, repair a broken marriage, or emerge from the depths of despair. Your answer to someone else’s deepest difficulties merely reflects what you would do if you were that person, which you are not
The best you can do is listen. Try to understand what the person is facing and appreciate how it feels. This in itself can lead to solutions. The listening approach to problem solving underlies the Quaker practice of forming clearness committees.15 It started in the 1900s as a way for church elders to determine the compatibility of couples who wished to marry. But over the years, clearness committees have expanded their man-date to consider whatever concerns a member of their community might have—whether it’s about a relationship, career, or matters of faith
Upon receiving a request, a clearness committee of about a half dozen members convenes to listen to the so-called focus person lay out the problem. Then the committee members ask what they call faithful questions. It’s essentially a full-court support response. There is no wise counsel or sharing of similar personal experiences, nor is the questioning meant to guide or influence the person’s thinking. Rather, the clearness committee’s questioning is intended to help the focus person go deeper so an answer might emerge; so clearness can arise from within
It’s hard to ask open and honest questions because most people ask questions that are really recommendations or judgments in disguise. For example, Have you thought of seeing a therapist? and Why don’t you divorce him? are not open and honest questions. Open and honest questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting. It deprives us of all the things we love to do, Palmer said. But open and honest questioning is essential for basic understanding. It allows people to tell their stories, express their realities, and find the resources within themselves to figure out how they feel about a problem and decide on next steps.
The solutions to problems are often already within people, and just by listening, you help them access how best to handle things, now and also in the future. Researchers at Vanderbilt University discovered that when mothers just listened,16 providing no assistance or critique, while their children explained the solutions to pattern recognition problems, it markedly improved the children’s later problem-solving ability—more so than if the children had explained the solution to themselves or repeated the solution over and over in their heads. Previous research has shown that adults provided with an attentive listener gave more detailed solutions with more alternative ideas and better justifications than solutions generated in isolation
Think of when your child comes home from school—you might ask a string of rapid-fire questions: How was school? Have you eaten? Do you have homework? What did you get on your French test? Did you bring home your lunch-box? Similarly, when greeting your spouse, you might ask, How was work? Did you finish your proposal? Do you want to have the Murrays over for dinner on Friday? Do you have dry cleaning? It sounds super friendly, caring, and curious, but Metzger said, It is actually you running down a checklist to determine where things stand and what needs to happen next. It’s not a real conversation, and it’s not listening.
Not that practical questions shouldn’t be asked. Of course they should. It’s just when those are the only kinds of questions you ask, the relationship suffers. Open, honest, and exploratory questioning and the genuine curiosity and careful listening it presupposes can not only bring about greater clarity of what’s on someone’s mind but is also the very basis of intimacy. The question can be as simple as: What did you learn today? Another good one is: What was the best part and what was the worst part of your day?
The more you know about and understand where someone is coming from, the closer you feel to them whether they are loved ones or strangers. Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, conducted an experiment in which he paired students, who didn’t know each other, and had them ask each other thirty-six expansive questions like:
After this reciprocal listening exercise, the paired strangers reported intense feelings of closeness,19 much more so than subjects paired for the same amount of time to solve a problem or accomplish a task
Good listeners are good questioners. Inquiry reinforces listening and vice versa because you have to listen to ask an appropriate and relevant question, and then, as a consequence of posing the question, you are invested in listening to the answer. Moreover, asking genuinely curious and openhearted questions makes for more meaningful and revelatory conversations—not to mention prevents misunderstandings. This, in turn, makes narratives more interesting, engaging, and even sympathetic, which is the basis for forming sincere and secure relationships
You can’t have meaningful exchanges with people, much less establish relationships, if you aren’t willing to listen to people’s stories, whether it’s where they come from, what their dreams are, what led them to do the work they do, or how they came to fear polka dots. What is love but listening to and wanting to be a part of another person’s evolving story? It’s true of all relationships—romantic and platonic. And listening to a stranger is possibly one of the kindest, most generous things you can do.
People who make an effort to listen—and respond in ways that support rather than shift the conversation—end up collecting stories the way other people might collect stamps, shells, or coins. The result is they tend to have something interesting to contribute to almost any discussion. The best raconteurs and most interesting conversationalists I have ever met are the most agile questioners and attentive listeners
The stories we collect in life define us and are the scaf-folding of our realities. Families, friends, and coworkers have stories that bind them together. Rivals and enemies have narratives that keep them apart.23 All around us are people’s legends and anecdotes, myths and stark realities, deprecations and aggrandizements. Listening helps us sort fact from fiction and deepens our understanding of the complex situations and personalities we encounter in life. It’s how we gain entrée, gather intelligence, and make connections, regardless of the social circles in which we find ourselves
13 Hammers, Anvils, and Stirrups
Turning Sound Waves into Brain Waves
Certainly, there are animals that have better hearing than humans. A dog, for example, could hear its puppy yelp from a much greater distance than my dad could hear me, his grown daughter. Elephants’ hearing is so sensitive they can hear approaching clouds.1 But humans are particularly adept at discriminating between and categorizing sounds, and—perhaps most important—we imbue what we hear with meaning
There’s been extensive research over the years on where in the brain we make sense of auditory information
Processing what someone says, it turns out, is one of the most intricate and involved things we ask our brains to do.
What we do know is that each side of your brain has an auditory cortex, conveniently located near your ears. If it is injured or removed, you will have no awareness of sound, although you might have some reflexive reaction to it
But it’s not only words our brains are processing when we listen to people. It’s also pitch, loudness, and tone as well as the flow of tone, called prosody. In fact, human beings can reliably interpret the emotional aspect of a message even when the words are completely obscured. Think of the various ways a person can say, Sure. There’s the peppy, higher-pitched Sure! said when someone is eager to help with a request. There’s the tentative and lower-pitched Suuuure that stretches out for a couple of beats when someone is somewhat ambivalent or reluctant to help with the request. And then there’s the clipped, level-pitched Sure that precedes a but when someone is probably going to argue about how to help with the request, or is not going to help at all
Researchers are just now discovering that specialized clusters of neurons in the brain are responsible for detecting those slight changes in pitch and tone.4 The more practiced a listener you are, the better these neurons get at perceiving the kinds of sonic variations that carry the emotional content, and much of the meaning, of what people say
There’s also evidence that you use different parts of your brain depending on how you interpret what you hear
We should probably back up at this point to talk about the actual mechanics of hearing, which is the necessary precursor to listening. We’ve talked about how auditory information is processed once inside the brain, but it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate how it gets in there. Let’s pause to consider the miracles that are our ears, the openings on either side of our heads that help us not only hear but also maintain our physical balance. You could say our ears help us get our bearings both physically and emotionally
The earliest vertebrates had inner ears,15 which were the beginnings of the vestibular—or balance—system. People who have had vertigo know all too well the importance of a functioning vestibular system. It senses the body’s acceleration and orientation in space and sends signals to the musculoskeletal system to keep us upright. Our slithering forebears’ primitive vestibular systems not only sensed which way was up but could also vibrate in response to pressure,16 first underwater and then in the open air. This was the beginning of hearing because what are sound waves but compressions of air? A Bach sonata, a garbage truck backing up, a mosquito’s whine—they’re all just air particles being scrunched together at regular intervals, kind of like an invisible inchworm moving up-down, up-down through space
When sound waves reach our ears, the air compressions are funneled down the stiff, fleshy outside part of the ear known as the pinna, increasing the relative acoustic pressure by up to twenty decibels by the time it reaches our ear canal.17 The nerve endings in there are incredibly dense
The other end of the ear canal, about an inch inside your head, the sound waves strike the tympanic membrane—your beautiful, pearlescent little eardrum—which vibrates neighboring bones with wonderfully descriptive names like the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup
Protruding from each hair cell is a bundle of bristles,20 called stereocilia, with each strand only as wide as the smallest wavelength of visible light. When sound waves nudge these filaments back and forth, it tickles nerve endings to set all sorts of cognitive and emotional processes in motion. So in the midst of all that ruckus at the airport, tiny hair cells tens of microns long registering infinitesimally small changes were how my dad recognized and responded to my voice.
Most hearing loss comes from damage to those hair cells caused by loud noises.21 Viewed through an electron microscope, healthy stereocilia look like soldiers, standing at attention in precise formation. But when exposed to sounds as loud as an ambulance siren, they look like they’ve suffered an enemy attack, bent and flopped over
Your hair cells might recover if the noise wasn’t too loud and didn’t last too long. A typical conversation occurs at sixty decibels and doesn’t cause damage, but listen to music through earbuds at high volume, which is around one hundred decibels, and you’ll have permanent damage after just fifteen minutes. Lower the volume to a more moderate eighty-eight decibels and you’ll have damage in four hours. A jackhammer or jet engine can cause damage in less than thirty seconds.
The lesson in all this is that many people may be poor listeners because they truly can’t hear well and their brains are working in strange ways to make up for it. While some mishearings can be humorous, hearing loss, in the long run, leads to a litany of poor emotional and social outcomes,31 including, but not limited to:
These symptoms are not so much the result of hearing loss per se but the resulting inability to connect with people. So it’s enormously important to protect your hearing by keeping volume on sound systems in a safe range (no more than 60 percent of maximum volume) and wearing earplugs when in noisy environments.32 It’s also a good idea to get your ears checked if you suspect your listening problems have a physiological component. Earwax buildup all by itself can cause hearing loss.33 You’d be surprised how a good ear cleaning once or twice a year by an otolaryngologist can improve your hearing
While our ears are obviously essential to hearing, it’s worth noting that listening is as much a visual as aural enterprise.34 It’s probably not by accident that Wernicke’s area, where speech is processed in the brain, is located at the juncture of the visual and auditory cortices.35 During perfectly audible conversations, lipreading is responsible for as much as 20 percent of your comprehension.36 Moreover, it’s widely thought that at least 55 percent of the emotional content of a spoken message is,37 in fact, transmitted nonverbally. So, even if you’ve had your ears checked and your hearing is perfect, if you are looking at your phone or out the window while someone is talking to you, you’re not getting the whole story.
There are universal facial expressions people make when feeling authentic emotion. Among the most obvious are the furrowed brow, pursed lips, and raised chin of wounded pride and the soft wrinkling around the eyes and open, upturned mouth of genuine delight
People tend to be pretty good at telling when someone is putting on a fake face as well as reading people’s real emotions, provided they have experience. People who were raised by, say, emotionally flat parents or parents who were depressed or angry all the time tend to have trouble reading the full range of facial expressions.41 Studies have shown this is also true for people who spend too much time looking at screens
But the effects are reversible if one seizes opportunities to listen and engage with a wide variety of people. For example, in one study of children at a device-free outdoor camp,43 researchers found that after just five days without phones or tablets and interacting with their peers, the kids were able to accurately read facial expressions and identify the emotions of people in photographs and videotaped scenes significantly better than controls who had not attended the camp and continued using their devices.
The face not only changes its expression in response to emotion, it also changes color. Not just beet red with embarrassment and ghostly white from shock but more subtle shades corresponding to a range of emotions
While the technology used to digitally transmit the human voice between mobile phones is complicated, it’s nothing compared to the complexity of how human beings perceive speech, process it, and ultimately derive meaning. Science still hasn’t figured it all out. But what is known is listening is intricate and multisensory. We also know the mechanics of listening—the structures within our ears—are fragile and should be protected. And finally, and most reassuringly, we know that our listening ability, measured by the accuracy of our understanding, is improvable with motivation and practice
14 Addicted to Distraction
While our smartphones may not allow us to have a decent conversation (Can you hear me now? How about now?), they seem to offer us just about everything else—social media, games, news, maps, recipes, videos, music, movies, podcasts, shopping, and pornography, if you’re so inclined. In the end, none of it is as emotionally satisfying or as essential to our well-being as connecting with a live human being. And yet, like any addict, we keep tapping, scrolling, and swiping as if pulling a lever on a slot machine, hoping to eventually hit the jackpot.
This compulsion, driven by a fear of missing out, prevents sustained attention, making listening—or any task requiring thought—difficult. It’s hard to concentrate on what’s happening in the real world when you’re preoccupied with what could be happening in the virtual one
Research conducted by Microsoft found that since the year 2000,5 the average attention span dropped from twelve to eight seconds. For context, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds, according to the report. While journalists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have since quibbled with how one measures attention (of a human or a goldfish) and whether it’s really a declining ability or simply more divided,6 advertisers and media companies are living with the reality that it’s harder than ever to capture people’s attention
Comedy skits performed onstage at Second City in Chicago have gone from fifteen minutes to five minutes. Acutely aware of their audiences’ diminished attention spans, directors told me they have to keep the action moving at a rapid clip as well as provide more active (moving, flashing, rotating) lighting. There is no thought of letting a joke slowly build to a big payoff. Directors and performers said people would be checking their phones before actors could arrive at the punch line.
Websites, mobile apps, video games, and social media platforms are designed to grab and keep your attention.10 Companies like Facebook, Google, and Epic Games (the creator of the popular third-person-shooter video game Fortnite) comingle computer science, neuroscience, and psychology to develop strategies to hook you, often by playing on your social anxieties, vanity, and greed
Our human brains are not equipped to manage the onslaught
As machines have increasingly competed for our attention over the past century, the average amount of time people have devoted to listening to one another during their waking hours has gone down almost by half, from 42 percent to 24 percent.12 And now even the time spent listening to recorded speech is going down, as speed-listening has become the new speed-reading. People listen to audiobooks at twice the original speed, often while doing something else like exercising or driving. Apps like Overcast allow people to listen to podcasts in double or triple time; a practice called podfasting. And the audiobook retailer and producer Audible has a Take Me to the Good Parts, feature that lets listeners jump to the steamy sections of romance titles in the company’s collection
Though live and in-person stories can be infinitely more interesting, they take a degree of patience that can be hard for people accustomed to speeding up or sexing up audio content on their smartphones. Research suggests that after people listen regularly to faster-paced speech, they have great difficulty maintaining their attention when addressed by someone who is talking normally—sort of like the feeling you get when you come off an expressway and have to go through a school zone.14 Moreover, you lose your ability to perceive and appreciate nuance in conversation because things like tonal shifts, subtle sighs, foreign accents, and even voices made raspy by whiskey and cigarettes all but disappear when heard in double time
Conversational partners become just another device to toggle between. People periodically check their phones rather than fully attending to whoever is talking, which only makes it more likely they’ll have slow and soul-sucking conversations
Several studies of caregiver-child interactions in public spaces like playgrounds and fast-food restaurants found that the vast majority of caregivers ignored their children in favor of their phones.16 Pediatric experts say such behavior impairs children’s development, which depends on being attended to by their parents. As mentioned earlier, we tend to listen as we were listened to as children, which suggests the so-called screen generation now coming of age may have greater difficulty connecting with others
But it’s not just mobile devices and the associated online distraction that are getting in the way of listening. It’s also the modern aural environments we have created for ourselves
A group of Harvard researchers in 2010 collaborated on a pilot program they called the Family Dinner Project, formed to encourage device-free and listening-focused family meals. The impetus was a number of studies over the past fifteen years that showed families eating together and sharing stories led to lower rates of substance abuse,23 teen pregnancy, and depression while improving kids’ vocabularies, grade point averages, resilience, and self-esteem.
15 What Words Conceal and Silences Reveal
Regardless, when we talk about culturally determined tolerances for silence, the differences are usually only on the order of seconds, if not fractions of seconds. People universally don’t like so-called loss of conversational flow. If the silence goes on too long, longer than what the norm is in that culture, it makes people uneasy, particularly if they are talking to someone who is not a close friend. Intimacy and trust with a conversational partner make it less likely you will feel the need to rev up the chitchat when the conversation slows. Research shows that being able to comfortably sit in silence is actually a sign of a secure relationship.8 Higher-status people also aren’t as likely to get agitated by gaps in conversation,9 presumably because they are more secure in their position
In Western cultures, people tend to interpret silences longer than about half a second as disapproval,10 sanction, or ostracism, so they rush to say something to try to raise their standing. A silence of just four seconds is enough for people to change or nuance their expressed opinion,11 taking the quiet to mean their views are out of line. Former tech executive turned author and career coach Kim Scott has written about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s propensity for silence:12 A friend warned me that Tim tended to allow long silences and that I shouldn’t let it unnerve me or feel the need to fill them. Despite this warning, in our first interview I reacted to a long period of silence by anxiously talking nonstop, and in the process inadvertently told him far more about a mistake I’d made than I had intended.
Certainly there are times when silences mean disapproval—think of the cricket silence after someone tells an inappropriate or off-color joke. But there’s a big difference between being silent with and being silent to, just like there’s a big difference between laughing with and laughing at. It’s more often the case in normal conversation that gaps are because the other person is just thinking or taking a breath before continuing. People pause while figuring out what, or how much, to tell you, or perhaps they need a moment to manage their emotions. Composer Gustav Mahler said, What’s best in music is not to be found in the notes.14 It’s often in the spaces between the notes; when the strands of sound attenuate and disappear. So, too, in conversation, it’s important to pay attention to what words conceal and silences reveal
To be a good listener is to accept pauses and silences because filling them too soon, much less preemptively, prevents the speaker from communicating what they are perhaps struggling to say. It quashes elaboration and prevents real issues from coming to the surface. Just wait. Give the other person a chance to pick up where they left off. As a journalist, it took me too long to realize that I didn’t have to say anything to keep the conversation going. Some of the most interesting and valuable bits of information have come not from my questioning but from keeping my mouth shut. You get so much more out of interactions when you allow people the time and space to gather their thoughts
The Quakers have something called waiting worship where congregants assemble and sit in silence so they are open and available to divine insight. But even Quakers can be uncomfortable with silence
16 The Morality of Listening
Why Gossip Is Good for You
While gossip often has a negative connotation, it actually has a positive social function. There’s a reason why as much as two-thirds of adult conversation is gossip,1 defined as at least two people talking about someone who is absent. Men gossip as much as women,2 and children are adept gossipers by age five.3 We all do it (although not with as much flair as my great-great-aunt) because gossip allows us to judge who is trustworthy,4 who we want to emulate, how much we can get away with, and who are likely allies or adversaries. In this way, listening to gossip contributes to our development as ethical, moral members of society.
We are socialized by the gossip we hear from our families, friends, colleagues, teachers, and religious leaders
Of course, you are also likely to reform if you are the subject of gossip
This is the case even when the gossip is not always entirely true
According to Dunbar, to understand the origins of gossip, we need look no further than the grooming behavior of apes.11 It’s thought early humans—like apes—bonded socially by grooming one another. Mutual stroking and nitpicking fostered goodwill so that later on, the two might share bananas or come to each other’s defense. But as humans grew more intelligent and the complexity of our activities and the size of our communities grew, language—and, more specifically, gossip—replaced grooming as a way to establish and maintain alliances, although we still pet and stroke those closest to us.
The advantage of gossip over grooming, Dunbar said, is that it is a more efficient mechanism for our social bonding and social learning. Grooming is very much a one-on-one activity that can take quite some time (depending on how tangled or louse-infested your partner is), whereas face-to-face conversations are quicker and can accommodate up to four individuals (one speaker and three listeners).12 Any larger and people tend to break off into smaller groups. You’ve probably seen this in action at large parties where guests naturally form various conversational pods of two to four people
This perhaps explains why social media is so seductive. The speed with which gossip can be accessed online, and the sheer quantity, is more than you could ever muster or manage in face-to-face interactions. It creates this imperative to keep checking to make sure you are still in the loop. But, of course, you can never keep up with it all, and with so many narratives and interpretations, the quality and value of the information plummets.
University of Chicago sociologist Peter Michael Blau originated social exchange theory in the 1960s,14 which applied economics to social interactions, including the information we disclose to one another. Blau was a student of Robert Merton, the father of focus groups, and he maintained that listening to people’s stories was essentially a privilege that had to be earned. People start with minor transactions where the information isn’t so sensitive; therefore, it wouldn’t be a big deal if word got out. But as both partners prove their trustworthiness by their attentiveness, sensitivity, and discretion, their relationship deepens, which leads them to engage in more significant transactions (i.e., disclosing more tightly held information).
Listening, then, is not only how we learn to be virtuous members of society, it is in itself a virtue that makes us worthy of the most valuable information. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas believed human interactions are the foundation of personal ethics and that listening, and the understanding and empathy it engenders, gives our lives meaning and direction. Levinas, who was Jewish and was a prisoner of war during WWII, stressed the importance of experiencing the other.15 By this, he meant engaging with other people face-to-face and learning how all our stories are different and yet the same in terms of underlying emotions. Listening to the other is what reminds us of our common human vulnerability and fragility, and it imposes the ethical imperative, or duty, to do no harm.
Integrity and character are not things you are born with; they develop day by day through the choices you make, and that very much includes to whom and how well you choose to listen. Ethical behavior requires that you take into account how your words and actions affect others, and you can’t get a sense of that without listening. In a purely practical and evolutionary context, we survived as a species by cooperating as we foraged for food and hunted big game. Early humans had to listen and collaborate or die. Norms of behavior and rules of civility emerged from those early joint activities, which later informed our ideas of morality
Our modern selves talk more and listen less despite the fact that understanding and responsiveness to one another’s stories, ideas, and concerns have defined all our achievements from hunting woolly mammoths to putting a man on the moon. Not listening to one another diminishes what we can achieve and in that way, too, can be seen as a moral failing. We not only fail one another as individuals, we also fail to thrive as a society
People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say. It seems giving people a piece of your mind isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
Regret came up repeatedly when I interviewed people for this book. So many of them expressed profound regret that they didn’t listen at a critical point in their lives
Moreover, research shows that you regret most the things you could have done differently but can’t go back and do over.20 Not listening is ripe for regret because once you let the opportunity slip away,21 you can never re-create the moment and often don’t realize what you missed until it’s too late.
17 When to Stop Listening
According to the British language philosopher and theorist Paul Grice, human beings, without realizing it, have certain expectations in conversation that,3 when violated (as happened with the unfunny laughter expert), make us less inclined to listen. It stems from the fact that communication is fundamentally a cooperative endeavor, so if we perceive our partners aren’t keeping up their ends of the bargain, we are going to feel cheated and want out of the deal. Grice summarized our conversational expectations in four maxims:
Some scholars have argued for the inclusion of politeness and fairness in turn taking,4 but Grice’s four maxims are widely recognized as what most people expect in civilized society, even if they aren’t aware of it. It explains why it’s so difficult to talk to people suffering from dementia or psychosis. No longer tethered to reality and social norms, they may spout fantastic, disorderly, ambiguous, vague, and/or disconnected ideas. It’s also why calling tech support is so incredibly aggravating.5 The scripted responses often have no logical link to what you said, provide too little or too much information and are often untrue—It’s your equipment, not ours.
Listening is not just something you should do when someone else is talking; it’s also what you should do while you are talking
Conversation, at its best, is a continual listening feedback loop that shapes what people say and how they say it. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ’Tis the good reader that makes the good book.6 Likewise,’tis the good listener who makes the good conversation. When both parties in a conversation are focused and engaged, it’s like a fantastic dance where the two of you are listening intently to each other regardless of who is speaking. Not only are your brain waves in sync—as Uri Hasson and his colleagues discovered—but research shows you also start to physically and tonally align. You mirror each other’s speaking style,7 body posture, gazes, and gestures
Conversing with someone who doesn’t listen well—who doesn’t follow what you are saying or take into account how you feel about what you are hearing—is like dancing with someone who is keeping to a different rhythm or has no rhythm. It’s awkward. And watch out for your toes. The person may have valuable things to say, but it takes much more energy and self-discipline to listen and find out what it is
As great as it is to find someone, a romantic partner or just a good friend, who is easy to talk to and gets you just as you get them, don’t expect that the two of you will be able to sustain that degree of connection all the time. Careful listening is draining, regardless of your personality, aptitude, or motivation. You can’t do it continuously. Indeed, air traffic controllers are limited to one-and-a-half-hour to two-hour shifts before they must take a break. Newer controllers can manage even less time because they haven’t built up enough stamina. Controllers not only have to listen for information like pilots’ requests and read backs of instructions, they also have to listen for any trace of unease or confusion in pilots’ voices to assess when things could be getting dicey in the cockpit
Not listening because you don’t agree with someone, you are self-absorbed, or you think you already know what someone will say makes you a bad listener. But not listening because you don’t have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at that moment makes you human. At that point, it’s probably best to exit the conversation and circle back later. If you half listen to someone or listen as if you are skimming through a book, the other person will pick up on it. Even small children know when . Take, for example, my friends’ toddler who has repeatedly thrown his parents’ cell phones in the toilet—no other objects, just the cell phones. He knows precisely what keeps Mom and Dad from listening to him.
The problem is that we tend to give up too soon. Few people, if any, are effortlessly eloquent and often need time to build up enough trust in you, and maybe also in themselves, to talk freely. Whether you are listening to your boss, colleagues, friends, loved ones, or strangers, it takes a while for people to get it out. They may beat around the bush or hide behind humor. They may say too much or too little. And they can even say things they don’t mean. A good listener takes the time and makes the effort to help people find their voice, and in so doing, intimacy and understanding are earned. Listeners, through the gift or by dint of sustained attention, receive in return other people’s confidences. And besides, wouldn’t you want people to hang in there with you while you figured out or worked up to what you wanted or needed to say?
Sometimes it takes more than one conversation to hear someone
Not listening to someone can be hurtful even when you don’t mean to be, and it can be cruel if used as a weapon. It’s why ghosting, where someone cuts off all communication with another person without warning or explanation, is so incredibly painful. A study published in Journal of Research in Personality found that compared to other breakup strategies,12 ghosting (technically, the avoidance/withdrawal strategy) was the most wounding and provoked the most anger and resentment from those on the receiving end. Those who were given the benefit of an explanation and the opportunity to have their say were less angry and aggrieved.
One of the most common reasons people withdraw is in response to criticism. But it’s important to remember sometimes the things we least want to hear can be the most beneficial
Conclusion
Anyone who has shared something personal and received a thoughtless or uncomprehending response knows how it makes your soul want to crawl back in its hiding place. Whether someone is confessing a misdeed, proposing an idea, sharing a dream, revealing an anxiety, or recalling a significant event—that person is giving up a piece of him or herself. And if you don’t handle it with care, the person will start to edit future conversations with you, knowing, I can’t be real with this person.
When you engage with someone, your behavior does two things: 1) it helps or hinders your understanding, and 2) strengthens or weakens the relationship. Listening is your best bet on both counts. As discussed throughout this book, it’s possible, with awareness and patience, to develop your skill as a listener and do it extremely well. But there will still be times when you lose your focus or tolerance, or both.
Listening heightens your awareness. It makes you feel. As you become more attuned to the thoughts and emotions of others, you become more alive to the world and it becomes more alive to you. Life otherwise can become a muted existence, with days spent cocooned in unquestioned beliefs and fixed concepts, where, even though the world and the people in it are always changing, nothing is ventured beyond the borders of what you already know or accept as true. It feels safe, but it’s really just stifling
But listening is no easy task. Our magnificent brains race along faster than others can speak, making us easily distracted. We overestimate what we already know and, mired in our arrogance, remain unaware of all we misunderstand. We also fear that if we listen too carefully, we might discover that our thinking is flawed or that another person’s emotions might be too much to bear. And so we retreat into our own heads, talk over one another, or reach for our phones
Technology does not so much interfere with listening as make it seem unnecessary. Our devices indulge our fear of intimacy by fooling us into thinking that we are socially connected even when we are achingly alone. We avoid the messiness and imperfections of others, retreating into the relative safety of our devices, swiping and deleting with abandon. The result is a loss of richness and nuance in our social interactions, and we suffer from a creeping sense of dissatisfaction.
While listening is the epitome of graciousness, it is not a courtesy you owe everyone. That isn’t possible. It’s to your benefit to listen to as many different people, with as much curiosity as you can muster, but you ultimately get to decide when and where to draw the line. To be a good listener does not mean you must suffer fools gladly, or indefinitely, but rather helps you more easily identify fools and makes you wise to their foolishness. And perhaps most important, listening keeps you from being the fool yourself
Listening is often regarded as talking’s meek counterpart, but it is actually the more powerful position in communication. You learn when you listen. It’s how you divine truth and detect deception. And though listening requires that you let people have their say, it doesn’t mean you remain forever silent. In fact, how one responds is the measure of a good listener and, arguably, the measure of a good person.
In our fast-paced and frenetic culture, listening is seen as a drag. Conversations unfold slowly and may need to be revisited. Listening takes effort. Understanding and intimacy must be earned. While people often say, I can’t talk right now, what they really mean is I can’t listen right now. And for many, it seems they never get around to it. This, despite what we all want most in life—to understand and be understood—only happens when we slow down and take the time to listen
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1yGreat share... "Asking genuinely curious, open-hearted questions makes conversations more meaningful and insightful, not to mention avoiding misunderstandings."