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

by Kate Murphy

But it must be said that lying is often a cooperative act. There’s the liar and the person who hears what they want to hear.

This was one of the many profound thoughts in the book. The person lied to is often complicit with the liar because it’s something they want to believe.

So you could say, good listeners are better at both deceiving and detecting deceit. If you think back to the times in your life when you were fooled, if you’re honest, there were likely things you missed or chose to miss.

We often miss lies, as well as truths, because when someone says something that doesn’t make sense, most of the time, we don’t stop the conversation and say, “Wait. Back up. I don’t understand.”

Our desire to not look stupid is what ensures our stupidity.

Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us, or even remotely like us. Because we only really know ourselves, it’s a natural tendency to have a solipsistic view of the world. We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own.

This is one of the reasons I find behavioral assessments so valuable: they clearly mark out ways I am motivated and behave differently than others.

Listening to others, then, determines the tone and quality of our inner dialogues.

Listening makes me better at talking to myself.

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.

This is also why people who have limited interactions with other people but seek out online reinforcement of their views can’t understand how their opinion could possibly not be correct.

our inner dialogue influences and distorts what other people say and thus how we behave in relationships.

When asked about his daily writing routine, Ray Bradbury responded that his morning ritual was to lie in bed and listen to the voices in his head. “I call it my morning theater,” he said. “My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement, I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.”

I love this.

Who does your inner voice remind you of? What does it tell you? Does your inner voice sound different in different situations? Is it friendly? Is it critical? These are all important things to ask yourself because your inner voice influences how you ponder things, interpret situations, make moral judgments, and solve problems. This, in turn, influences how you are in the world; whether you see the best or worst in people and whether you see the best or worst in yourself.

I was at the ResGen Men’s Summit in Sioux Falls yesterday and the last speaker takes about the importance of quieting the noise long enough to listen.

“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.”

two kinds of responses. More common was the shift response, which directs attention away from the speaker and toward the respondent. Less common, and Disraeli’s forte, was the support response, which encourages elaboration from the speaker to help the respondent gain greater understanding.

Shift responses are usually self-referential statements while support responses are more often other-directed questions. But they have to be truly curious questions meant to elicit more information and not subtly impose your own opinion—open-ended questions like “What was your reaction?” not “Didn’t that piss you off?” The goal is to understand the speaker’s point of view, not to sway it.

When you listen for this kind of response, it’s amazing how frequent it is.

And good questions definitely don’t end with “right?”

Right!

researchers at the University of Minnesota and University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that employees were five times more upset by negative interactions at work as they were made happy by positive interactions.

That’s depressing.

Good listeners are good questioners. Inquiry reinforces listening and vice versa because you have to listen to ask an appropriate and relevant question, and then, as a consequence of posing the question, you are invested in listening to the answer.

Listening helps us sort fact from fiction and deepens our understanding of the complex situations and personalities we encounter in life. It’s how we gain entrée, gather intelligence, and make connections, regardless of the social circles in which we find ourselves.

But it’s not only words our brains are processing when we listen to people. It’s also pitch, loudness, and tone as well as the flow of tone, called prosody. In fact, human beings can reliably interpret the emotional aspect of a message even when the words are completely obscured.

it’s widely thought that at least 55 percent of the emotional content of a spoken message is, in fact, transmitted nonverbally.

I see SO many variations on this statistic that I hardly know what to believe anymore.

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. This means that during many conversations, you get just 7 percent of the meaning from the actual words, which could be typed.

Email is for confirmation. Not communication.

Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, and Lewis Carroll all attributed their genius to long periods of uninterrupted musing. Could you put away your phone for an hour? A half hour? Five minutes?

While you may think you can tune out these kinds of things, research consistently shows that you cannot. The ability to multitask is a delusion. Each input degrades your attention. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman memorably wrote, “The often used phrase ‘pay attention’ is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”

I was stunned. Hopf, who has been selling furniture for thirty years, was not. “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.”

The hardest thing in sales is to be quiet. And the most effective.

In America, we say, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” while in Japan, “The silent man is the best to listen to.”

in conversation, it’s important to pay attention to what words conceal and silences reveal.

As a journalist, it took me too long to realize that I didn’t have to say anything to keep the conversation going. Some of the most interesting and valuable bits of information have come not from my questioning but from keeping my mouth shut. You get so much more out of interactions when you allow people the time and space to gather their thoughts.

There’s a reason why as much as two-thirds of adult conversation is gossip, defined as at least two people talking about someone who is absent.

Regret came up repeatedly when I interviewed people for this book. So many of them expressed profound regret that they didn’t listen at a critical point in their lives.

Grice summarized our conversational expectations in four maxims: 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.

Four conversational maxims that, if followed, can’t help but make you a great conversationalist.

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? Did the other person wince when you started talking about politics? Was that a sigh of relief you heard when you said, “To make a long story short…”? If you’re not good at reading other people’s reactions as you speak, then just ask them. Check in. “Have I lost you?” “Did I overstep?” “What do you think?” “Are you still with me?” “Had enough?” “Am I boring you?” “Make sense?” “Too much?”

As bad as people are at listening when I am talking, I find they are even worse at listening when they are talking. This was one of the best points in the book.

You can’t argue your way into affection, but truly listening is the surest way to form a bond.

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 that moment makes you human.

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

Journaling is a form of reflective listening for Anthony Doerr, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book All the Light We Cannot See. Now forty-seven, he has kept a diary since he was sixteen. “It’s really a way to train yourself to look and listen,” he told me. “You slow down and translate a big confusing world, almost like a prayer.”

I wish I were more consistent at journaling.

one of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

💯💯💯

When you don’t interrupt or talk over people, you don’t keep them from finishing their sentences and thoughts. They sometimes say things that they didn’t expect and maybe didn’t even know themselves.

listening is a rewarding endeavor. Hearing how other people deal with struggles helps you figure out how to deal with your own problems, either by adopting their coping strategies or doing the opposite when you observe it’s not working out for them. Listening helps you see we are all dealing with similar issues—

By listening, you acknowledge and embrace the world that is going on outside your head, which helps you sort out what’s going on inside your head.

“I’ve begun to think there is a crisis of listening in our world,” Father Gómez said. “There are a lot of people who want to talk but very few who want to listen, and we are seeing people suffer from it.

When you engage with someone, your behavior does two things: 1) it helps or hinders your understanding, and 2) strengthens or weakens the relationship. Listening is your best bet on both counts.

Technology does not so much interfere with listening as make it seem unnecessary. Our devices indulge our fear of intimacy by fooling us into thinking that we are socially connected even when we are achingly alone. We avoid the messiness and imperfections of others, retreating into the relative safety of our devices, swiping and deleting with abandon.

Guilty ✋

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. To be a good listener does not mean you must suffer fools gladly, or indefinitely, but rather helps you more easily identify fools and makes you wise to their foolishness. And perhaps most important, listening keeps you from being the fool yourself.