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

by Kate Murphy

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

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.

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.

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.

having listened well and often to someone in the past makes it easier to get back on the same wavelength when you get out of sync, perhaps due to physical separation or following a time of emotional distance caused by an argument.

“Speaking as a white man,” or “Speaking as a woman of color,” that’s impossible. One can only speak for one’s self.

as is increasingly the case, we judge people by their identification with an ideological faction such as alt-right, liberal, conservative, democratic socialist, evangelical, environmentalist, feminist, and so on.

In our increasingly disconnected society, people have gotten notably more conspicuous and vocal about their affiliations—particularly their political and ideological affiliations—in an effort to quickly establish loyalties and rapport.

When someone says something to you, it’s as if they are tossing you a ball.

The world is easier to navigate if you remember that people are governed by emotions, acting more often out of jealousy, pride, shame, desire, fear, or vanity than dispassionate logic.

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

Talking about yourself doesn’t add anything to your knowledge base.

In fact, smart people are often worse listeners because they come up with more alternative things to think about and are more likely to assume that they already know what the person is going to say.

listening as similar to meditation. You make yourself aware of and acknowledge

instead of focusing on your breathing or an image, you return your attention to the speaker.

We often miss what people are saying—including their names—because we are distracted sizing them up, thinking about how we are coming across and what we are going to say. Not so when you meet a dog, which is why you can more easily remember a dog’s name than its owner’s.

Secure people don’t decide others are irredeemably stupid or malicious without knowing who they are as individuals.