You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

by Kate Murphy

“whole self” made her feel vulnerable. “I think it’s an issue of trusting that you can be imperfect in the conversation,” she said. “Listening is a matter of you deciding you don’t need to worry what to say next,” which then allows “someone else’s opinions and ideas to get past your border defenses.”

according to the tenets of self-psychology, committing a faux pas creates an opportunity to fix it, which strengthens your tie to the other person.

Good listeners, rather than getting mired in their own thoughts, insecurities, and superficial judgments, pick up on the subtext of what people say as well as subtle nonverbal details

“Your internal stance should be one of curiosity,” Todd instructs her students. Which means they must ask questions out of curiosity as opposed to questioning to prove a point, set a trap, change someone’s mind, or to make the other person look foolish.

“They worry that if they really pay attention or really understand the other side’s point of view, they will lose sight of what matters to them.”

At the moment you feel you are going to react with hostility toward those who disagree with you, take a breath and ask them a question, not to expose flawed logic but to truly expand your understanding of where they are coming from.

Research shows there is an inverse relationship between amygdala activity and activity in areas of the brain involved in careful listening. If one of these brain regions is hot, the other is not.

in the not-too-distant past, our amygdalae helped us fight or flee from existential threats like lions, tigers, and bears; but today, our biggest worries tend to be social rejection, isolation, and ostracism.

Good listeners have negative capability. They are able to cope with contradictory ideas and gray areas. Good listeners know there is usually more to the story than first appears and are not so eager for tidy reasoning and immediate answers, which is perhaps the opposite to being narrow-minded.

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.

“Why?” tends to make people defensive—like they have to justify themselves.

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.”

listener’s demeanor. By that, I mean she’s exceptionally calm and has an expression that transmits interest and acceptance. Her eyes don’t dart, her fingers don’t fidget, and her body seems always relaxed and open.

“Instead of thinking, ‘This person is a jerk and out for themselves,’ I think, ‘Oh, man, this person is really struggling to be seen.’”

Controlling the narrative and grabbing for attention make for one-sided conversations and kill collaboration. Rather than advancing your agenda, it really just holds you back. The joy and benefit of human interactions come from a reciprocal focusing on one another’s words and actions, and being ready and willing to respond and expand on every contribution.

“Dating is a ritual of getting to know another person well enough to laugh.”

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.

Lack of emotional resonance, of course, is what makes normal conversations dull and boring.

These are things anyone who wants to be a better listener can emulate. Demonstrate interest either by learning about people beforehand or being inquisitive in the moment. Try to find what excites them. It doesn’t matter if it’s their bottle cap collection; if they are passionate about it, it will be interesting. And also respect boundaries by backing off if you suspect you’ve stumbled into a touchy area. Gently change the subject and be gracious in not knowing. Intimacy can’t be forced.

“Words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.”

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.

“To observe and to record in memory thousands of little signs and to remain aware of their delicate effects.”

But it must be said that lying is often a cooperative act. There’s the liar and the person who hears what they want to hear. People say, “Oh, I’d never fall for that,” not realizing how seriously their listening is impaired when they so want to believe somebody loves them or will make them rich or will cure what ails them.

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.

This is significant because how you talk to yourself affects how you hear other people. For example, someone who has a critical inner voice will hear someone else’s words very differently than someone whose inner voice tends to blame others.

Some theorists argue that reading is a form of inner speech. Research indicates that we sound out words in our heads as we read. If a word takes you longer to say, it will take you longer to read. Another study showed that when subjects heard recordings of two people, one who spoke rapidly and another who spoke very slowly, and then were asked to read excerpts of works supposedly written by the slow or fast talker, the subjects read at a pace consistent with the speech rate of whoever they thought the writer was.

Who does your inner voice remind you of? What does it tell you? Does your inner voice sound different in different situations? Is it friendly? Is it critical? These are all important things to ask yourself because your inner voice influences how you ponder things, interpret situations, make moral judgments, and solve problems. This, in turn, influences how you are in the world; whether you see the best or worst in people and whether you see the best or worst in yourself.

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.

More common was the shift response, which directs attention away from the speaker and toward the respondent. Less common, and Disraeli’s forte, was the support response, which encourages elaboration from the speaker to help the respondent gain greater understanding. Here are some hypothetical examples:

For him, the worst questions are the ones that are never asked.

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: suggest you know how someone feels identify the cause of the problem tell someone what to do about the problem minimize their concerns bring perspective to a situation with forced positivity and platitudes admire the person’s strength

“When people tell you how you feel or what you should do, I think most of us know that it makes us defensive,

It’s hard to ask open and honest questions because most people ask questions that are really recommendations or judgments in disguise.

Grilling them about what happened is interrogating. Telling them they shouldn’t feel how they feel is minimizing. And changing the subject is just maddening.

If you jump in to fix, advise, correct, or distract, you are communicating that the other person doesn’t have the ability to handle the situation:

By questioning and listening carefully to the answers, the other person might in return begin to ask you questions so they can benefit from your experience. And that’s okay, too. In this way, you have earned the right to reflect on your own approaches to problems and offer counsel or consolation. And it also ensures the stories and sentiments you share are truly relevant and helpful.

“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’...

Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why? What would constitute a “perfect” day for you? When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else? If you were able to live to the age of ninety and retain either the mind or body of a thirty-year-old for the last sixty years of your life, which would you want? After this reciprocal listening exercise, the paired strangers reported intense feelings of closeness, much more so than subjects paired for the same amount of time to solve a problem or accomplish a task.

“The 36 Questions That Lead to Love,

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.

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.

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.

Ronald Sharp, who, with Eudora Welty, coedited The Norton Book of Friendship,

Sharp echoed others who were close to her, recalling how she always made time for him and expressed genuine interest in what he had to say. “She never rushed you or tried to finish your thoughts,” Sharp said. “She invited you to tell your story, and, more importantly, she actually let you tell your story.”

when you hear people’s stories, you tend to want to do right by them.”

Research shows that being able to comfortably sit in silence is actually a sign of a secure relationship.

In Western cultures, people tend to interpret silences longer than about half a second as disapproval, 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, taking the quiet to mean their views are out of line.