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

by Kate Murphy

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.

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

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.

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.

“Some people are much better at listening than others, but it can be refined, it can be augmented, and can be turned into an art form,”

speech-thought differential, which refers to the fact that we can think a lot faster than someone

make yourself aware of and acknowledge distractions, then return to focus. But instead of focusing on your breathing or an image, you return your attention to the speaker.

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.

listening for evidence that you might be wrong rather than listening to poke holes in the other

linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a person’s native language influences how they see or experience the world.

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.

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. You’ll flinch at a clap of thunder, but you won’t know why. Critical to the comprehension of speech is Wernicke’s area, located in the brain’s left hemisphere. It’s named for the German neurologist Carl Wernicke, who, in 1874, published his discovery that stroke patients with lesions in that area could still hear and speak but were unable to comprehend what was said to them.