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

by Kate Murphy

To really listen is to be moved physically, chemically, emotionally, and intellectually by another person’s narrative.

In social situations, we pass around a phone to look at pictures instead of describing what we’ve seen or experienced.

ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.

Or if they are talking to one another, the phone is on the table as if a part of the place setting, taken up at intervals as casually as a knife or fork, implicitly signaling that the present company is not sufficiently engaging.

Among the most frequently cited bad listening behaviors are: Interrupting Responding vaguely or illogically to what was just said Looking at a phone, watch, around the room, or otherwise away from the speaker Fidgeting (tapping on the table, frequently shifting position, clicking a pen, etc.)

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.

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.

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing.

McManus told me the CIA doesn’t so much train agents to be good listeners as recruit good listeners to be agents.

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.

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.

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

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.

In the documentary Bowling for Columbine,

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.

According to Nichols, to be a good listener means using your available bandwidth not to take mental side trips but rather to double down on your efforts to understand and intuit what someone is saying. He said listening well is a matter of continually asking yourself if people’s messages are valid and what their motivations

are for telling you whatever they are telling you.

known as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” The best teams also had higher “average social sensitivity,”

Shared humor is a form of connectedness born out of listening. It’s a collaborative dynamic that involves the exploration and elaboration of ideas and feelings.

Psychologists call it conversational sensitivity.

People who have conversational sensitivity not only pay attention to spoken words, they also have a knack for picking up hidden meanings and nuances in tone.

The Voices Within, Fernyhough

Crowe and McDowell described occurs when people, uncomfortable with others’ emotions, respond by trying to solve or explain away problems rather than listening and letting the upset or aggrieved feel what they feel and, through dialogue, find their own solutions.

Being aware of someone’s troubles does not mean you need to fix them.

Moreover, you shut people down when you start telling them what they should do or how they should feel. No matter how good your intentions or how sage you think your advice, people reflexively resist and resent directives, even if gently delivered.

Our language comprehension is generally better and faster when heard in the right ear versus the left. It has to do with the lateralization of the brain so that what one hears in the right ear is routed first to the left side of the brain, where Wernicke’s area is located.

The opposite may be true for left-handed people whose brain wiring may be reversed.