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

by Kate Murphy

When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.”

support response.

Good listeners are all about the support response, which is critical to providing the kind of acknowledgment and evaluative feedback discussed in chapter 5 as well as avoiding the types of misunderstandings identified in chapter 10.

The goal is to understand the speaker’s point of view, not to sway it.

“Don’t you think…?” “Isn’t it true…?” “Wouldn’t you agree…?” And good questions definitely don’t end with “right?”

What made you decide to become a sociologist?” Becker’s face contorted as if he’d just smelled something dreadful. “You’re assuming it was a decision,” he said. “Better to ask, ‘How did it happen that you became a sociologist?’”

“I’m not sure I’m a better listener than anyone else, but if I hear something I don’t understand, I ask about it,”

Some evidence suggests women focus more on relational and personal information whereas men are more attentive to fact-based information. As a result, women are more likely to gain people’s trust and be privy to more self-disclosure, which makes their conversations more interesting and, thus, reinforces their willingness to listen.

good interactions must outnumber negative ones by at least five to one for a relationship to succeed.

The authors advise squelching the impulses to: suggest you know how someone feels identify the cause of the problem tell someone what to do about the problem minimize their concerns bring perspective to a situation with forced positivity and platitudes

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

People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board.

You may be able to help someone fix a leaky faucet, edit a résumé, or find a good accountant, but you can’t help someone salvage a ruined career, repair a broken marriage, or emerge from the depths of despair.

The best you can do is listen. Try to understand what the person is facing and appreciate how it feels.

When people tell you how you feel or what you should do, I think most of us know that it makes us defensive,”

Center for Courage & Renewal,

But open and honest questioning is essential for basic understanding. It allows people to tell their stories, express their realities, and find the resources within themselves to figure out how they feel about a problem and decide on next steps.

Look at it as an invitation to have a conversation, not as something to be fixed or get upset about.

Again, the solutions to problems are often already within people, and just by listening, you help them access how best to handle things, now and also in the future.

Whether it’s your child, romantic partner, friend, colleague, or employee who comes to you with a personal problem, if you ask open and honest questions and listen attentively to the answers, it communicates, “I’m interested in hearing more from you,” and “Your feelings are valid.” If you jump in to fix, advise, correct, or distract, you are communicating that the other person doesn’t have the ability to handle the situation: “You’re not going to get this without me.” And you’re also telling them, “There’s no room for honest emotion in our relationship.”

Think of when your child comes home from school—you might ask a string of rapid-fire questions: “How was school?” “Have you eaten?” “Do you have homework?” “What did you get on your French test?” “Did you bring home your lunchbox?” Similarly, when greeting your spouse, you might ask, “How was work?” “Did you finish your proposal?” “Do you want to have the Murrays over for dinner on Friday?” “Do you have dry cleaning?” It sounds super friendly, caring, and curious, but Metzger said, “It is actually you running down a checklist to determine where things stand and what needs to happen next. It’s not a real conversation, and it’s not listening.”

The question can be as simple as: “What did you learn today?” Another good one is: “What was the best part and what was the worst part of your day?”

What is love but listening to and wanting to be a part of another person’s evolving story?

“People are always telling you who they are.”

“You can always hear your puppies,

Wernicke’s area,

mondegreen.

Researchers have measured the rate at which people’s facial muscles contract to form expressions and found that they occur in conjunction with, and at the same frequency as, spoken or signed words in a sentence. It’s called the grammaticalization of facial expressions.

If you have to listen to someone remotely, phone is better than text or email because as much as 38 percent

of someone’s feelings and attitudes are conveyed by tone of voice.

There was a time when, during idle or anxious moments, people reached for a cigarette. They lit up while fretting over a problem, drinking a cup of coffee, waiting on a friend, driving a car, mingling at a party, and unwinding after sex. Now, in those same situations, people just as reflexively reach for their phones.

A study by a British advertising buyer found that, on average, when people are at home, they switch between devices (phone, tablet, or laptop) twenty-one times per hour, all while the television is on in the background.

The quality of your attention doesn’t matter. Indeed, the more divided your attention, the more persuadable you are. The more likely you are to click Buy Now.

As machines have increasingly competed for our attention over the past century, the average amount of time people have devoted to listening to one another during their waking hours has gone down almost by half, from 42 percent to 24 percent.

There shouldn’t be background noise, much less the intruding ping of a mobile device. It seems obvious, but how often do we actually do it?

The impetus was a number of studies over the past fifteen years that showed families eating together and sharing stories led to lower rates of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and depression while improving kids’ vocabularies, grade point averages, resilience, and self-esteem.

People in Japan, by contrast, allow longer gaps in conversation. Studies have shown that Japanese businesspeople tolerate silences that last nearly twice as long as those Americans can withstand, 8.2 seconds versus 4.6 seconds. Doctor-patient interactions in Japan contain more silences than in America, 30 percent versus 8 percent. In America, we say, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” while in Japan, “The silent man is the best to listen to.”

There’s a similar comfort with silence in Nordic countries, most notably Finland. Like the Japanese, Finns place greater value on listening, modesty, and privacy than Americans and many Western Europeans. There’s some truth in the joke about two Finnish men on their way to work and one says, “It is here that I lost my knife,” and on the way home that evening, the other man says, “Your knife, did you say?” It’s considered impolite and overbearing in Finland to be too quick to jump in when someone finishes a thought, much less to interrupt. Silences are not only okay there, they are basic decorum. But researchers have also suggested that people in quieter cultures may have greater fear of losing face or being humiliated, which makes them more reluctant to speak.

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.

“If you can bear to do it for just twenty-four hours, you will learn to be a better listener,” she said. “You will learn the unimportance of your words and the importance of other people’s words.”

“They are trying to fill the void of a relationship that has not started yet—or isn’t very deep—with noise.” She added, “It’s the people who are comfortable in their own skins that are okay with quiet.”

Silence is what allows people in. There’s a generosity in silence but also a definite advantage. People who are comfortable with silence elicit more information and don’t say too much out of discomfort. Resisting the urge to jump in makes it more likely you will leave conversations with additional insight and greater understanding.

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.

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say.

You are putting your ego ahead of the other person’s vulnerability.

Not everything needs to be said as you are feeling it. In fact, sometimes it’s better to wait until you aren’t feeling it quite so strongly.

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.

but we are never wrong about what we like or dislike.”

These are people who, whenever you listen to them, you feel depressed, diminished, or distressed.