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

by Kate Murphy

Wars have been fought, fortunes lost, and friendships wrecked for lack of listening.

Epictetus said, “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”

the soundtracks to the movies that are their walled-off lives.

The result is a creeping sense of isolation and emptiness, which leads people to swipe, tap, and click all the more.

To really listen is to be moved physically, chemically, emotionally, and intellectually by another person’s narrative.

A lot of listening has to do with how you respond—

We are, each of us, the sum of what we attend to in life.

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.

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 The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.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. Experts are calling it a public health crisis, as feeling isolated and disconnected increases the risk of premature death as much as obesity and alcoholism combined. The negative health impact is worse than smoking fourteen cigarettes per day.

“I’m surrounded by so many people every day but I feel strangely disconnected from them,” one person wrote. Lonely people have no one with whom to share their thoughts and feelings, and, equally important, they have no one who shares thoughts and feelings with them.

Connectedness is necessarily a two-way street, each partner in the conversation listening and latching on to what the other said.

So begets the familiar scene of twenty-first-century life—at cafés, restaurants, coffeehouses, and family dinner tables, rather than talking to one another, people look at their phones. Or if they are talking to one another, the phone is on the table as if a part of the place setting, taken up at intervals as casually as a knife or fork, implicitly signaling that the present company is not sufficiently engaging.

In a culture infused with existential angst and aggressive personal marketing, to be silent is to fall behind. To listen is to miss an opportunity to advance your brand and make your mark.

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.

Interrupting Responding vaguely or illogically to what was just said Looking at a phone, watch, around the room, or otherwise away from the speaker Fidgeting (tapping on the table, frequently shifting position, clicking a pen, etc.) 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.

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.

Of course, they were all brilliant on their own, but it took a kind of mind meld to achieve what they did. This congruence happens to varying degrees between any two people who “click,” whether friends, lovers, business associates, or even between stand-up comedians and their audiences. When you listen and really “get” what another person is saying, your brain waves and those of the speaker are literally in sync.

But if considered in conjunction with Hasson’s findings, it also suggests who we listen to shapes how we think and react.

The more you listen to someone, such as a close friend or a family member, and the more that person listens to you, the more likely you two will be of like minds.

Our desire to have our brains sync, or to connect, with another person is basic and starts at birth.

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.

It’s subtle, but profound. And it’s what listening is all about. Everybody has something going on in their heads, whether it’s your child, your romantic partner, your coworker, a client, or whoever. To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing.

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. It’s the missed opportunity to connect when you weren’t listening or someone wasn’t really listening to you.

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.

McManus told me the CIA doesn’t so much train agents to be good listeners as recruit good listeners to be agents.

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.

You don’t need to act like you are paying attention if you are, in fact, paying attention.

Listening requires, more than anything, curiosity.

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.

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned as a journalist is that everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.

So if you’re barely listening to someone because you think that person is boring or not worth your time, you will actually make it so.

“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.”

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.

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.

By being genuinely curious, courteous, and attentive, the study’s participants discovered how correspondingly gracious—and ultimately, interesting—their fellow commuters could be.

I was there to find out why people so often feel unheard and misunderstood by their partners. Coche’s answer was pretty simple: people in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Not necessarily in an unkind way; they just become convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.

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.

In some cases, the subjects actively avoided telling the people in their innermost circle because they feared unkindness, judgment, blowback, or drama.

But if we’re not careful, our rush to categorize and classify can diminish our understanding and distort reality.

A white man, a woman of color, an evangelical, an atheist, a homeless person, a billionaire, a straight person, a gay person, a boomer, a millennial—each has a singular experience that separates them from everyone else who shares that label. Making assumptions of uniformity or solidarity based on age, gender, skin color, economic status, religious background, political party, or sexual preference reduces and diminishes us all.

There is an inverse relationship between signaling and listening.

it’s important to remember that what you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference.

people are more likely to feel understood if a listener responds not by nodding, parroting, or paraphrasing but by giving descriptive and evaluative information.

When someone says something to you, it’s as if they are tossing you a ball. Not listening or half listening is like keeping your arms pinned to your sides or looking away so the ball sails right past or bounces clumsily off you.

J. Pierpont Morgan said, “A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.”

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?

“I think a good listener is someone who is open to hearing someone else’s experiences and ideas and acknowledges their point of view.”