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

by Kate Murphy

A surgeon in Chicago said, “The more you’re a role model, the more you lead, the less permission you have to unload or talk about your concerns.”

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.

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.

When you listen and really “get” what another person is saying, your brain waves and those of the speaker are literally in sync.

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.

children whose parents were not dependably attentive typically grow up to be adults with an insecure anxious attachment style, which means they tend to worry and obsess about relationships. They do not listen well because they are so concerned about losing people’s attention and affection.

Given they expect criticism or insult, they’ve developed a resistance to listening, either by tuning out or talking over people, without realizing it—

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.

“Everyone is born a scientist,” said physicist Eric Betzig. “It’s just unfortunate that with a lot of people, it gets beat out of them.”

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.

As wonderful as intimacy and familiarity are, they make us complacent, leading us to overestimate our ability to read those closest to us.

Research shows we all harbor prejudices because of our unconscious drive to categorize and the inherent difficulty of imagining realities we have not experienced ourselves. None of us is “woke,” or fully awake, to the realities of people who are unlike us.

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.

You are the detective, always asking, “Why is this person telling me this?” understanding that speakers sometimes may not know the answer themselves. Good listeners help speakers figure that out by asking questions and encouraging elaboration.

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.

People with higher IQs also tend to be more neurotic and self-conscious, which means worry and anxiety are more likely to hijack their attention.

Listening can be particularly challenging for introverts because they have so much busyness going on in their own heads that it’s hard to make room for additional input. Because they tend to be sensitive, they may also reach saturation sooner. Listening can feel like an onslaught, making it difficult to continue listening, particularly when the speech-thought differential gives their minds occasion to drift.

it’s helpful to think of listening as similar to meditation. You 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.

She tells them that if they believe the other person has nothing to offer, is not worth their time, or is the enemy or inferior or dull, then no matter how much they nod, paraphrase, or look someone in the eye, it will come off as false, and their negotiations will be unsuccessful.

We almost can’t help ourselves because when our deeply held beliefs or positions are challenged, if there’s even a whiff that we might be wrong, it feels like an existential threat.

“We might not like the compromises regular order requires, but we can and must live with them if we are to find real and lasting solutions,” McCain wrote in an editorial that appeared in The Washington Post.

Trump represents a transformation in the body politic: people on the right and the left can create their own realities online and drive their own unchallenged narratives—maligning, blocking, or deleting content and commentary they don’t like.

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.

The truth is, we only become secure in our convictions by allowing them to be challenged.

effective opposition only comes from having a complete understanding of another person’s point of view and how they came to develop it.

if you remain open to the possibility that you might be wrong, or at least not entirely right, you’ll get far more out of the conversation.

people with an overactive amygdala are more apt to suffer from anxiety and depression,

In the moment, the primitive brain interprets a difference of opinion as being abandoned by the tribe, alone and unprotected, so outrage and fear take over.

“I’m beginning to think my need to show what I can do is keeping me from finding out what other people can do and what we can do together.”

Intimacy, innovative thinking, teamwork, and humor all come to those who free themselves from the need to control the narrative and have the patience and confidence to follow the story wherever it leads.

Katherine Hampsten, associate professor of communication studies at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, has a good analogy for what happens when we listen. She says it’s like a game of catch with a lump of clay. Each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back. Things like education, race, gender, age, relationship with the other person, frame of mind, connotations of words, and distractions all influence how the clay is shaped. Add more people to the game of catch and the complexity and range of meanings increases.

But what most gets in the way of understanding is your emotions and personal sensitivities. Given that you interpret things according to your background and psychology—and you can’t convene a team of producers to collaboratively dissect conversations like they do on Fresh Air—knowing yourself and your vulnerabilities is an important aspect of being a good listener.

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.

For all the times we have that moment of “Oooh! Now I get it,” there are many more misunderstandings we fail to catch. We are oblivious to all the hurt feelings, missed opportunities, and botched jobs. All because we couldn’t be bothered to make sure we understood.

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.

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. It’s all your fault versus It’s all their fault. In other words, our inner dialogue influences and distorts what other people say and thus how we behave in relationships.

Human beings, as much as we try to contain it or pretend otherwise, are brimming with emotion. It can sometimes feel like too much to take on someone else’s inner chaos when we can barely cope with our own.

decades of observational studies indicate good interactions must outnumber negative ones by at least five to one for a relationship to succeed.

Research suggests that after people listen regularly to faster-paced speech, they have great difficulty maintaining their attention when addressed by someone who is talking normally—sort of like the feeling you get when you come off an expressway and have to go through a school zone.

But there’s a big difference between being “silent with” and being “silent to,” just like there’s a big difference between “laughing with” and “laughing at.”

Composer Gustav Mahler said, “What’s best in music is not to be found in the notes.” It’s often in the spaces between the notes; when the strands of sound attenuate and disappear. So, too, in conversation, it’s important to pay attention to what words conceal and silences reveal.

Somehow lost in our self-promoting culture is the fact that you can’t talk your way into a relationship.

Listening to the “other” is what reminds us of our common human vulnerability and fragility, and it imposes the ethical imperative, or duty, to do no harm.

Whether viewed as an evolutionary survival tactic, basic moral virtue, or what we owe the ones we love, listening is what unifies us as human beings.

“We can readily accept the fact that we can be wrong,” the Polish-born social psychologist Robert Zajonc wrote, “but we are never wrong about what we like or dislike.”

While not listening is justified and a matter of practicality in some circumstances, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a form of rejection.

While listening is the epitome of graciousness, it is not a courtesy you owe everyone. That isn’t possible. It’s to your benefit to listen to as many different people, with as much curiosity as you can muster, but you ultimately get to decide when and where to draw the line.

While people often say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.” And for many, it seems they never get around to it. This, despite what we all want most in life—to understand and be understood—only happens when we slow down and take the time to listen.