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

by Kate Murphy

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.

Relying on the past to understand someone in the present is doomed to failure.

the number of people you can realistically manage in a social network. He pegs it at around 150. This is the number of people you are capable of knowing well enough to comfortably join for a drink if you bumped into any one of them at a bar. You don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to maintain meaningful connections with more people than that.

people—say, a spouse and best friend—with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection, and concern. Friendships at this level require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends who you see less often and thus, your ties are more tenuous.

exception might be friends with whom you feel like you can pick up right where you left off even though you haven’t talked to them for ages. According to Dunbar, these are usually friendships forged through extensive and deep listening at some point in your life, usually during an emotionally wrought time, like during college or early adulthood, or maybe during a personal crisis like an illness or divorce.

And if someone is listening superficially, listening to find fault, or only listening to jump in with an opinion, then you’re unlikely to make any kind of meaningful disclosure and vice versa.

slightly more than half the time, people confided their most pressing and worrisome concerns to people with whom they had weaker ties,

“Not that we shouldn’t always try to communicate and to give each other the gift of listening, for that is love, even if we aren’t always able to understand.”

social signaling theory and social identity theory,

what you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference.

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.

These affiliations provide a sense of belonging and also the kind of guiding principles once provided by organized religions, which have correspondingly been losing adherents. Moreover,

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

good listener, by picking up on tonal and nonverbal cues and asking a clarifying question or two, can respond more sensitively and specifically,

striking commonality among mass murderers is a profound alienation from society.

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,

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?

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.

“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.”

pause following someone’s comments can actually work to your advantage, as it’s a sign of attentiveness.

listening going on.” It’s also worth pointing out that it’s okay to say, “I don’t know what to say,” when you don’t. You can also say, “I’d like to think about that,” which conveys that you honor what the other person said by taking time to think about it, while, at the same time, honoring that part of you that is uncertain and needs time to process.

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.

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.

looked at their brain activity when their beliefs were challenged. Parts of their brains lit up as if they were being chased by a bear. And when we are in this fight, flight, or freeze mode, it’s incredibly hard to listen.

Confident people don’t get riled by opinions different from their own, nor do they spew bile online by way of refutation.

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

People are so much more than their labels and pol...

And effective opposition only comes from having a complete understanding of another person’s point of view and how they came to develop it. How did they land where they landed? And how did you land where you lande...

advised listening for evidence that you might be wrong rather than listening to poke holes in the other person’s argument,

our biggest worries tend to be social rejection, isolation, and ostracism.

corporate pilot told me he will not fly with copilots who are supporters of Far Left politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Shows they have poor judgment and lack basic analytical skills,” he said.

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

Steve Jobs famously hired people who weren’t afraid to push back on his ideas as hard as he pushed, often brutishly, on theirs. There was even an award given out every year by Apple employees to whomever did the best job standing up to him.

manager’s most important role is to “give the quiet ones a voice.”

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 also means that you embrace the possibility that there might be multiple truths and understanding them all might lead to a larger truth.

So, General Mills, which owned the Betty Crocker brand, reformulated its mixes, leaving out eggs to give homemakers more of a role in the baking process. Having to crack some eggs as well as add water made it feel like more of an honest effort.

“Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.” A quiet, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand.

not once did I see her cross her legs or arms. When she was with someone, she never gave the slightest indication she was on a schedule or there was somewhere else she’d rather be.

My most vivid image of Naomi is her sitting with her elbows bent in front of her on the table, cheeks resting in her hands, eyes wide, listening like a rapt teenager. “The real secret to listening I’ve learned is that it’s not about me,” Naomi said at one point. “I’m holding my cup out in front of me. I want them to fill my cup and not pour anything in their cup.”

What they found was that the most productive teams were the ones where members spoke in roughly the same proportion, known as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.”

so-called psychological safety, where people were more likely to share information and ideas without fear of being talked over or dismissed.

Nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations with higher levels of social interaction, whereas positions that require predominantly analytical and mathematical reasoning—that can be turned into an algorithm—have been disappearing.

To be successful at improvisational comedy and also the improvisation that is your real life, listening is critical. 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.

People who fear intimacy tend to use divisive, put-down, or mean humor, which discourages listening by making people defensive.

Those who preempt, dominate, or otherwise curb the conversation are unlikely to succeed in their careers, much less have fulfilling personal relationships.

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.

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.

Not surprisingly, conversational sensitivity is related to cognitive complexity, which, as discussed earlier, means you are open to a range of experiences and can cope with contradictory views.

work. When people feel known and appreciated, they are more willing to share.