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

by Kate Murphy

“She never rushed you or tried to finish your thoughts,” Sharp said. “She invited you to tell your story, and, more importantly, she actually let you tell your story.”

“It takes not a big group, not yelling and screaming, but ‘Let’s sit down and listen to each other and invite someone home for dinner.’”

“I’ve learned to be quiet,” he told me after we delivered the couple to the cashier. “I guarantee you if I’d said something while we were sitting there, they would have just bought the bureau or nothing at all.” Hopf doesn’t quite

Hopf is more sedate, purposely shepherding customers to relatively quiet corners of the store and just letting them talk—or not talk—on occasions when they are mulling or just plain muddled.

He doesn’t interrupt, wheedle, cajole, correct, or interject. When customers go off on tangents, he just listens, gathering intelligence.

What’s most striking about Hopf is his unusually high tolerance for silence, remaining totally unperturbed when customers like the Hortons go mum. It’s a rare quality, particularly in Western cultures, where people get extremely uncomfortable when there are gaps in conversation. We call it dead

Japanese businesspeople tolerate silences that last nearly twice as long as those Americans can withstand, 8.2 seconds versus 4.6 seconds.

Intimacy and trust with a conversational partner make it less likely you will feel the need to rev up the chitchat when the conversation slows. Research shows that being able to comfortably sit in silence is actually

Higher-status people also aren’t as likely to get agitated by gaps in conversation, presumably because they are more secure in their position.

To be a good listener is to accept pauses and silences because filling them too soon, much less preemptively, prevents the speaker from communicating what they are perhaps struggling to say.

You get so much more out of interactions when you allow people the time and space to gather their thoughts.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and, in fact, most of the world’s religions from Bahá’í to Zen Buddhism incorporate some form of meditative or contemplative silence where the faithful try to listen to some higher order or, at least, to their best selves.

Trappist monks believe silence opens the mind to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. There is a teaching in the Talmud that says, “A word is...

a full day seems daunting, try staying silent during a single conversation. Don’t say anything unless asked a question.

talk to one another as talk at one another,

you can never keep up with it all, and with so many narratives and interpretations, the quality and value of the information plummets.

University of Chicago sociologist Peter Michael Blau originated social exchange theory in the 1960s,

Robert Merton, the father of focus groups,

Listening, then, is not only how we learn to be virtuous members of society, it is in itself a virtue that makes us worthy of the most valuable information.

Levinas, who was Jewish and was a prisoner of war during WWII, stressed the importance of experiencing the “other.” By this, he meant engaging with other people face-to-face and learning how all our stories are different and yet the same in terms of underlying emotions. Listening to the “other” is what reminds us of our common human vulnerability

Integrity and character are not things you are born with; they develop day by day through the choices you make,

and that very much includes to whom and how well you choose to listen.

Ethical behavior requires that you take into account how your words and actions affect others, and you can’t get a sense of that without listening. In a ...

constant self-promotion and image cultivation comes at a cost. We lose touch with others and ultimately our sense of belonging and connection, which was all we really wanted in the first place.

when people feel the urgency to always sell themselves, they tend to exaggerate, which lowers the level of discourse and fosters cynicism.

When asked his IQ score, the physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking said, “I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

that those who bragged the most were usually the least accomplished.

Something to keep in mind when you’re tempted to promote yourself instead of finding out what’s great about whomever is in front of you.

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more ...

seems giving people a piece of your mind isn’t all it’s...

a sense of urgency to tell people how you feel, it’s n...

you do need to listen enough to know when the other person is ready to hear what you have to say. Not everything needs to be said as you are feeling it.

fact, sometimes it’s better to wait until you aren’t feeling it quite so strongly.

social regrets, which have to do with relationships, tend to be more intense than nonsocial regrets, such as where you went to school or an investment you made.

the most intense regret comes from neglecting those we love.

Relationships most often fail due to neglect, and one of the principle kinds of neglect is not being attentive.

Maxim of Quality—we expect the truth. Maxim of Quantity—we expect to get information we don’t already know and not so much that we feel overwhelmed. Maxim of Relation—we expect relevance and logical flow. Maxim of Manner—we expect the speaker to be reasonably brief, orderly, and unambiguous.

And when we detect total bullshit in a conversation or someone throws out a non sequitur or drones on in mind-numbing detail about something we don’t care about—we tend to get annoyed, and we check out.

The best communicators, whether addressing a crowd or a single individual, are people who have listened, and listened well, in the past and continue to listen in the moment. They are able to engage, entertain, and inspire because they first try to get a sense of their audience and then choose their material and style of delivery accordingly.

Listening is not just something you should do when someone else is talking; it’s also what you should do while you are talking. Is the other person indicating any real interest in hearing more about your kid’s oboe recital?

Better to listen to how people feel than try to convince them to feel differently.

air traffic controllers are limited to one-and-a-half-hour to two-hour shifts before they must take a break. Newer controllers can manage even less time because they haven’t built up enough stamina.

Controllers not only have to listen for information like pilots’ requests and read backs of instructions, they also have to listen for any trace of unease or confusion in pilots’ voices to assess when things could be getting dicey in the cockpit.

Part of being a good listener is knowing your limits and setting boundaries.

Not listening because you don’t agree with someone, you are self-absorbed, or you think you already know what someone will say makes you a bad listener.

But not listening because you don’t have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at t...

These are people who, whenever you listen to them, you feel depressed, diminished, or distressed. You can’t listen someone out of being abusive or cruel.

good listener takes the time and makes the effort to help people find their voice, and in so doing, intimacy and understanding are earned.

not to recommend obsessive rumination or picking apart conversations, which psychiatrist Zerbe said usually has more to do with insecurity than honest reflection. You know you’re doing this when you are spinning your wheels going over and over how you feel about something someone said instead of considering the feelings that drove the other person to say it.

“You slow down and translate a big confusing world, almost like a prayer.”