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Key insights from
You're Not Listening: What You're
Missing and Why It Matters
By
Kate Murphy
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What you’ll learn
Besides “I love you,” the phrases “Let me finish” and
“You’re not listening to me” are among the most common in close
relationships. But what are we overlooking when we are so determined to get
a word in edgewise? Journalist Kate Murphy knows a thing or two about
listening well. Every time she interviews someone for a story, she asks
questions and then carefully attends to the response. She has witnessed
what an open, attentive presence unlocks for others, as interviewees share
far more than they intended to. It is a surprising and gratifying
experience for both parties, and often these unexpected meanderings into
unchartered conversational territory have inspired Murphy’s best
storytelling. These experiences as a professional listener sent Murphy on a
quest to understand what good listening is and the perks it brings. You’re
Not Listening is an ode to better relationships, deeper understanding,
and the reclamation of a vanishing art form.
Read on for key insights from You're Not Listening.
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1. We are so
conditioned to make sure our voices are heard that we have lost touch with
the art of listening well.
In the 1920s, a group of famed writers and actors regularly
gathered for a roundtable chat at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. These
were some of the sharpest wits of their day and they would joust and jest
with such elegance that newspapers would record and print the lively
exchanges. Their banter enthralled the nation and the legacy continues to
shape our conception of humor.
What most people did not know, however, was that many of the
regulars at the Algonquin were profoundly lonely and depressed. One writer
attempted suicide three times. Another critic hated himself so intensely
that just before dying of cardiac arrest, he revealed, “I never had
anything to say.” Part of the problem was that no one in these discussions
really listened. They waited patiently for a slight lull in the banter and
injected their bit. They were listening for pauses, not to hear what others
were saying. One depressed member later confessed that “there was no truth
in anything they said.” A century later, this mindset of having a one-liner
ready hasn’t really gone anywhere. Neither has our struggle to truly
listen.
Signs of our struggles to listen are deeply embedded in our
culture:
-Debate teams teach people to listen in order to rebut—not
to reconsider their own position. We are as anxious to avoid being
persuaded as we are to persuade others. -Culture emphasizes charisma,
controlling the narrative, and guiding a conversation. “Be assertive and
let your voice be heard,” is the common messaging. Delivering a TED Talk is
much more of the cultural ideal than sitting in the audience and taking it
in.
-Social media allows you to curate what you listen to and
get rid of whatever you don’t want to hear.
-And then there’s the conditioning you might have heard from
coaches and parents who were upset or intense when they insisted you “need
to listen up.” For those who grew up associating listening with rules,
castigation, and critique, listening can carry unpleasant associations.
-Politics is another domain in which genuine listening is an
uncommon phenomenon. “Crosstalk” is one of the most pervasive words in
congressional transcripts. It’s what stenographers write when everyone is
talking and they don’t know what to type.
-TV and popular culture don’t exactly model good listening
for us, either. Cable news is short on thoughtful, evenhanded discussions,
and long on shouting matches with pundits trying to get the last word.
-Many of us would plead guilty to indulging daydreams of
landing those show-stopping “mic drop” moments. Listening at its best
promotes good conversation, but we often listen in a way that truncates it.
The cultural pattern of not listening well is pervasive. If
you’re not a good listener, you might find some solace in the fact that you
are in good company. It’s a lost art, but it’s an art that can be regained.
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2. Listening
connects us to life itself better than any other human endeavor.
We all know what it’s like to be in conversation with
someone and realize the other person is not engaged with us at all. They
may even be making great eye contact, nodding sympathetically, and giving
the occasional token “hmmm.” But we can tell when the lights are dim behind
the listeners’ eyes. We know intuitively when someone is just following
social protocol. It comes across as condescending and insincere.
We're much better at identifying traits of bad listeners
than good ones. We readily identify the absent-minded perfunctory
responses, the nervous energy, looking around the room, the glancing at the
phone, interrupting, or responding with vagaries. We’re all guilty of this from
time to time, but being a better listener involves more than dropping bad
habits.
Truly listening happens when we allow ourselves “to be moved
physically, chemically, emotionally, and intellectually” by what someone is
speaking to us. It is a skill that takes practice to become proficient at;
it takes exposing yourself to a wide variety of people and dropping any
ulterior motives and scaffolding that you’re tempted to use to guide the
conversation in a certain direction, or at least to keep it in familiar
territory. Dropping those supports is risky because we open ourselves to
uncertainty and unchartered waters. We might hear things we don’t want to
hear. But in the final analysis, we miss out on more when we stand back
from people for fear of being hurt.
The benefits of listening are more than little perks. It
would not be an exaggeration to say that listening may connect us to life
better than anything else we do. The benefits are baked into our neurology.
Even in the womb, babies can distinguish noise from human voices just a few
months into pregnancy. What is more, the baby can distinguish angry voices
from gentle, soothing voices. When someone is at death’s door, touch and
hearing are the senses that stay with them till the very end.
At a biological level, listening links people. The sounds
literally resonate in the bodies of both people. Brain scans reveal that
true, active listening results in a process called “coupling,” in which the
listener’s brain waves begin to mirror the speaker’s. It gives new meaning
to the phrases “like-minded” and “getting on the same wavelength.” The more
time you spend listening to each other, the more your minds will sync.
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3. Assumptions are
earplugs.
According to a leading authority on group couples therapy,
you are more likely to listen closely to a stranger than to someone who is
close to you. What’s that about? The short answer is that it is hard for
people in long-term relationships to stay curious about one another. It
takes effort and intentionality, and without it, people drift toward the
presumption that they have figured the other person out. They don’t listen.
They might start speaking for the other person or making decisions on
behalf of the other person.
The assumption that we have someone close to us “figured
out” is known as the “closeness-communication bias.” The bias was on full
display in a revealing study in which people were no better at guessing the
intent behind their spouse’s ambiguous phrasing than those of complete
strangers. No matter how long you have known someone, you effectively cut
yourself off from that person when you forget you are dealing with someone
separate from you, someone who knows things you do not and has thoughts of
which you are unaware.
There is a strange irony that the people we are closest to
are the ones we pay the least attention to. Familiarity can lull us into
presuming that we know all about someone, but our assumptions about who
they have been in the past can keep us from rediscovering them in the
present. It can keep our listening superficial, with us presuming that
we’ve heard it all before and know what to expect from the other.
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4. Good listeners
resist the urge to follow mental rabbit trails mid-conversation.
High IQ and introversion are associated with good listening,
but these qualities can be more a hindrance than a help to staying attuned
to and tracking what someone else is saying. Introverts tend to be more
sensitive and more quickly “topped off” as far as social interaction. High
intelligence can get in the way of quality listening because thought moves
much faster than words. People with agile, active minds can spin off in
numerous directions while the speaker is on the second sentence of her
story. Good listeners, however, resist the urge to take mental vacations
mid-conversation. They dig deep to stay present.
This seems easy enough, but most people struggle mightily to
stay present and really listen to what someone is saying without mentally
checking out. A study of thousands of students and working professionals
uncovered the widespread incapacity to retain what someone had said in
brief exchanges. Even when the listeners believed they had listened
carefully and thought they recalled everything, most couldn’t remember half
of the conversation immediately after, and the majority could
recall only a quarter of the conversation a few months later.
Listening is its own kind of meditation, but instead of
focusing on the breath and returning to the breath whenever you’re
distracted, you focus on the speaker and return to the speaker every time
you take a mini mental vacation.
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5. Your brain
processes sharp disagreement the same way it does being chased by wild
animals.
If you don’t think someone has anything to teach you, your
negotiation is over before it starts. To listen well and to learn, you have
to ask questions of the other person out of genuine curiosity—not to set
yourself up to win a game of “gotcha.” For Gillian Todd’s Harvard Law
School students, this is a tough mindset to adopt. If you’ve been accepted
into Harvard Law, you’ve probably advanced by dominating in debates, by
proving that you are incisive and persuasive.
Students have clearly expressed their fear that listening to
the views of others will make them less secure in their own beliefs. What
would happen if genuinely trying to understand someone’s point of view
changed their own? Would they lose themselves and their most cherished
values in the process?
Everyday life gives us clues that this is not a struggle
exclusive to Harvard law students. People tune in to cable news and outlets
proclaiming viewpoints that echo their own. People lash out or shut down
when a relative brings up politics during the Thanksgiving meal.
Why is it that we seem to perceive a different view as life
threatening?
The reason it feels like our lives are in danger is because
that is exactly how the brain processes it. UCLA’s Brain and Creativity
Institute ran fMRI scans on subjects with intractable political views and
discovered that when the subjects’ opinions were challenged, the same
portions of the brain light up as when someone is being chased by a bear.
When you suddenly feel your only options are to fight, flee, or freeze, you
probably won’t be able to attend well to what someone is telling you. This
also helps us make sense of why students have said that speakers with
differing opinions have made them feel “unsafe” or why 51 percent of
students polled believe it’s acceptable to shout a speaker into silence and
nearly a fifth condoned the use of violence to silence someone. They are
opting for the “fight” option to escape a scenario that their brains are
interpreting as “dangerous.”
At points in US history, it has been common for politicians
of different parties to call one another friends. Former Democratic Speaker
of the House Tip O'Neill and President Reagan, for example, would begin the
day as fierce political rivals and end the day reuniting as friends. They
were capable of letting their guards down and having drinks together. Just
a few decades later, that seems unfathomable in our inhospitable political
climate. When John McCain, a champion of bipartisanship, was at death’s
door in 2018, his exhortation to members of the House and Senate was to
return to the practice of bipartisan authorship of bills.
It’s not just anger that we feel in the face of opposition,
but fear. A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly half of
Republicans feared Democrats and slightly more than half of Democrats
feared Republicans. Nonprofits and think tanks aimed at promoting and
facilitating civility between factions have noticed significant upticks in
requests to mediate disputes since 2016.
Sharp disagreement fires up the same part of the primal
brain that says, “You’re not part of the tribe anymore, you are cast out
and cut off.” It makes sense that with stakes so high, fear and anger would
not be far away. It’s vital to learn the skill of internal deescalation
when a view you disagree with makes you panicky. You might be tempted to
lash out or shut down, to label someone crazy or stupid. Check your inner
posture and honestly ask yourself whether your disposition is humble,
tranquil, and open to something new, or whether you feel agitated and
closed off. When you feel like there’s a bear chasing you even though
you’re just talking to people at a party, ask a question about how they
arrived at their beliefs—not to set yourself up for a delicious rebuttal,
but to understand their world better. After all, we stop listening to other’s
views when we are insecure about our own. People settled in who they are
don’t get rattled by contrary opinions, they don’t dismiss people who hold
different views as idiots without first discovering who they are, and they
certainly don’t pillory them online.
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6. Good listeners
support what speakers are expressing instead of shifting the focus.
There are a few ways you can respond to someone initiating a
topic of conversation. There are support responses and shift responses.
Support responses are conversational inputs that the listener offers to
amplify what the speaker is expressing. Shift responses cut the
conversation short by changing the topic and the point of focus from
speaker to listener. So if someone tells you excitedly that she just got a
new puppy, you could say, “I’ve never owned a dog” (shift response) or you
could say, “Oh, what kind?” or “How are you liking having a dog around?”
(support response).
According to a sociologist at Boston College, conversational
narcissism is brimming with shift responses that subtly (or not-so-subtly)
bring attention from the speaker to the listener. The purpose of a response
is not to redirect attention from what someone has said but to illuminate
the subject someone has brought up and discover more of what they think
about it. The goal of listening is to see and understand the speaker—not to
change or sway them.
The goal of support responses is keeping the emotional
spirit of someone’s comment alive. Asking too many questions about the
details can derail the emotional momentum that allows you to sync and stay
connected. If you heard that two friends got in a fight at a restaurant,
you ask them what happened and how they felt and are feeling now. These are
the questions friends want you to ask them. What the feuding friends
ordered or what they were wearing that day is much less important.
Leading questions in which we already presume the answer to
whatever we are asking also get in the way of supporting the speaker. Be
aware of the temptation to add “Wouldn’t you agree?” or “Don’t you think?”
or “But isn’t it true that…” Phrases like these will keep you from
supporting the speaker and from learning from them.
Support responses also avoid questions that are long-winded
and subtly self-aggrandizing. If you are tempted to begin questions with
references to the influential people you know, accomplishments you’re
especially proud of, or how well traveled you are, start over.
If you want to support someone speaking to you, don’t tell
them, “I know exactly how you feel,” try to understand the root of
someone’s problem, and don’t dredge up an upbeat banality or tell someone,
“That’s nothing compared to this one time when…” These techniques are all
shift responses because they derail emotional momentum.
But maybe that is exactly what we want to do sometimes. It
is hard to hold space for the speaker—especially when the speaker is going
deep. The impulse to rely on shift responses may have less to do with a
narcissistic bent and more to do with feeling uncomfortable with strong
emotions. We can all relate to feeling like it would be easier or more
socially expedient to change the subject or “fix” someone’s strong emotions
with a platitude or distraction, rather than sitting with someone in
distress. As much as we act rational and composed, there’s plenty of
emotion swirling beneath our social posturing. This could be why some
people feel uneasy about gaining a reputation as a good listener. If you
support a speaker well and listen attentively, he or she might take it as
an invitation to gush, and no one enjoys feeling like they’re drowning in
an emotional deluge. That is one reason shifting from the speaker instead
of supporting the speaker can be a tempting option.
But here again, we miss out when we don’t listen. The risk
of being overwhelmed is smaller than the risk of missing out on the
connection listening can bring. If we are worried about being overwhelmed
by someone in the process, it might just be a matter of learning healthy
boundaries.
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Endnotes
Neutral news is
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