How to become a better listener
Failing to listen and to be heard is a scourge of modern life. In this extract author Kate Murphy explains how to listen properly and why it matters
LEAD the conversation, stand out from the crowd, be heard. It’s the golden rule for anyone who wants to get ahead in life so at work, home, on social media and at parties we all talk over each other. But we aren’t listening – and nobody is listening to us.
The result? It’s making us lonelier, more isolated and less tolerant than ever before. In short, we aren’t doing ourselves or anyone else any favours. In this extract from a fascinating new book, You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters, American writer Kate Murphy explains why it’s vital you stop talking and start listening.
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’re encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully to other people.
Instead, we’re engaged in a dialogue of the deaf, often talking over one another at cocktail parties, work meetings and even family dinners. But in the process we miss so much.
Real listening isn’t about sitting passively and allowing someone else to ramble on. Quite the opposite. It’s an active process – it’s not only hearing what people say but also paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they’re saying it and how what they say resonates within you.
So it’s actually often much harder to do than speaking – but get it right and it will transform your understanding of the people and the world around you, your experience and existence.
THE LOST ART OF LISTENING Interestingly, people can more readily describe what makes someone a bad listener than what makes someone a good listener.
The sad truth is we have more experience with what makes us feel ignored or misunderstood than what makes us feel gratifyingly heard. Among the most frequently cited bad behaviours are: Interrupting. Responding vaguely or illogically to what was just said.
Looking at a phone, watch or at anything else other than the speaker. Fidgeting (tapping on the table, frequently shifting position, clicking a pen, and so on).
If you do these things, stop. But that alone isn’t 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 mindset than a checklist of do’s and don’ts. It’s a particular skill that develops over time.
KEEP IT REAL There’s a lot of pat advice out there from business consultants and executive coaches about how to be a better listener. It typically boils down to showing that you’re paying attention by making eye contact, nodding and throwing in a “mmmhmm” here and there.
They instruct you not to interrupt, and when the speaker finishes, you’re 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 (a date, a sale or advance in your career). Listening may indeed and probably will help you accomplish your goals, but if that’s your only motivation for listening, then you’re just making a show of it. People will pick up on your inauthenticity. You don’t need to act like you’re paying attention if you are, in fact, paying attention.
EVERYONE HAS A STORY TO TELL 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. Researchers at the University of Utah in the US found that when talking to inattentive listeners, speakers remembered less information and were less articulate in the information they conveyed. Conversely, they found that attentive listeners elicited more information, relevant detail and elaboration from speakers, even when the listeners didn’t ask any questions. So if you’re barely listening to someone because you think that person is boring or not worth your time, you’ll actually make it so. In How To Win Friends and Influence People, self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie wrote, “You can make more friends in two months by being interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” To listen is to be interested, and the result is more interesting conversations. The goal is to leave the exchange having learnt something.
You already know about you. You don’t know about the person with whom you’re speaking or what you can learn from that person’s experience.
DON’T MAKE ASSUMPTIONS Thinking you already know how a conversation will go down kills curiosity and subverts listening. You miss out on opportunities (and can look like an idiot) when you don’t take a breath and listen.
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.
To listen is to be interested, and the result is more interesting conversations
AVOID ASKING TOO MANY QUESTIONS Interrogation doesn’t work with terrorists, so why would it work when you meet someone? Peppering people with appraising and personal questions such as, “What do you do for a living?” or “What part of town do you live in?” or “Are you married?” is interrogating. You’re not trying to get to know them. You’re sizing them up.
It makes people reflexively defensive and will likely shift the conversation into a superficial and less-than-illuminating résumé recitation or self-promoting elevator pitch.
Listening for things you have in common and gradually building rapport is the way to engage with anyone.
MIND THE GAP 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 such as “sex” or “borrow your car” snapped you back to attention – “Wait, what?”
Your brief exit from the conversation was caused by the speech-thought differential, which refers to the fact that we can think a lot faster than someone can talk. The average person talks at around 120 to 150 words a minute, which takes up a tiny fraction of our mental bandwidth powered by some 86 billion brain cells. 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.
But perhaps the greatest barrier to keeping our minds on track is the nagging concern about what we’re going to say when it’s our turn. 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.
Rather pause if you need to after the other person concludes and take a few moments to think about what you want to say. While we fear silences almost as much as saying the wrong thing, pausing can actually work to your advantage, as it’s a sign of attentiveness.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s okay to say, “I don’t know what to say,” when you don’t. You can also say, “I’d like to think about that,” which conveys that you respect what the other person said by taking time to think about it, while at the same time honouring that part of you that’s uncertain and needs time to process.
CHOOSE YOUR WORDS WISELY Imagine a friend tells you he just lost his job. It’s okay, he adds, because he never really liked his boss and the commute was killer – just today it took him an hour and a half to drive to the office. But then suddenly he chokes up when he says he doesn’t know how he’s going to tell his family he lost his job. And anyway, he says, clearing his throat, he has this big fishing holiday planned and now he’ll probably have to cancel. Of course, it depends on how well you know the guy and the circumstances, but, generally, responses such as “I’m sorry you lost your job” or “You’ll find another job soon” come off as trite and dismissive. And saying, “You think that’s bad? When I got laid off . . .” makes it all about you. But a good listener, noticing when the guy’s voice caught, might say something more along the lines of, “So now you have to break the news to your family? That’s rough. How do you think they’re going to react?” 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. “People want the sense you get why they’re telling you the story, what it means to them, not so much that you know the details of the story,” Bodie says.
Trouble is, he’s 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% of the time.
So it’s not that your friend lost his job that’s significant but how it’s impacting him emotionally. Sleuthing that out is the art of listening, particularly when people tend to bombard you with a lot of unimportant information (the commute, the fishing trip and so on).
Think of yourself as a detective and ask, “Why is this person telling me this?”
Understand that speakers sometimes might not know the answer themselves. Good listeners help them 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!”
The more you think about the right thing to say, the more you miss