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.

The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.

Studies indicate the greater the screen time, the greater the unhappiness. Eighth graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of clinical depression by 27 percent and are 56 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than their peers who spend less time on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram.

The 1 percent rule, or 90-9-1 rule, of internet culture holds that 90 percent of users of a given online platform (social media, blogs, wikis, news sites, etc.) just observe and do not participate, 9 percent comment or contribute sparingly, and a scant 1 percent create most of the content. While the number of users contributing may vary somewhat by platform, or perhaps when something in the news particularly stirs passions, the truth remains that the silent are the vast majority.

Moreover, the most active users of social media and commenters on websites tend to be a very particular—and not representative—personality type who a) believe the world is entitled to their opinion and b) have time to routinely express it.

In a culture infused with existential angst and aggressive personal marketing, to be silent is to fall behind. To listen is to miss an opportunity to advance your brand and make your mark.

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.

More often, though, people spend their lives seeking or creating circumstances that reproduce what they knew in childhood. They selectively listen to people who sound like who they heard first and, thus, reinforce old neural pathways. They are trying to sync in a way that feels familiar—like following old ruts in a dirt road.

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.

“Everyone is born a scientist,” said physicist Eric Betzig. “It’s just unfortunate that with a lot of people, it gets beat out of them.” He told me this in 2014 after learning he had won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in the development of a super high-resolution microscope that allows visualization of such minute biological processes as the transfer of DNA between cells. “I’ve been lucky to be able to maintain that kid-like curiosity and enthusiasm for experimenting and learning,” he said.

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.

A white man, a woman of color, an evangelical, an atheist, a homeless person, a billionaire, a straight person, a gay person, a boomer, a millennial—each has a singular experience that separates them from everyone else who shares that label. Making assumptions of uniformity or solidarity based on age, gender, skin color, economic status, religious background, political party, or sexual preference reduces and diminishes us all.

There is an inverse relationship between signaling and listening. Say you see someone wearing a VEGANS MAKE BETTER LOVERS T-shirt or driving a truck with an NRA bumper sticker. You may feel that’s all you need to know about either person. It’s also fair to say that they may be so invested in those identities that it does tell you a lot. But it’s important to remember that what you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference. There’s more than you can imagine below the surface.

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.

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, you already know about you. 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?

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.

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. It also means that you embrace the possibility that there might be multiple truths and understanding them all might lead to a larger truth. Good listeners know understanding is not binary. It’s not that you have it or you don’t. Your understanding can always be improved.

Nor did Naomi simply ask why they shopped late at night because, she told me, “Why?” tends to make people defensive—like they have to justify themselves. Instead, Naomi turned her question into an invitation: “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. “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois—me, Ben, and Jerry,” she said. Insights like that are why people hire Naomi.

He explained to me that, broadly speaking, the difficulty with looking for answers in data sets is you become like a drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost. Ask the drunk why he’s looking for his keys under the lamppost, and the drunk says, “Because that’s where the light is.” Data sets shed light only on what’s in the data set.

“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.”

“You tend to not listen very well when it’s your boss’s idea you’re asking people about,” she said. “You ask questions in a way, and hear answers in a way, and write your reports in a way that will make your boss happy.”

This is significant because how you talk to yourself affects how you hear other people. For example, someone who has a critical inner voice will hear someone else’s words very differently than someone whose inner voice tends to blame others. It’s all your fault versus It’s all their fault. In other words, our inner dialogue influences and distorts what other people say and thus how we behave in relationships.

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. According

For him, the worst questions are the ones that are never asked.

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 admire the person’s strength

Experts in web analytics say the majority of internet users give articles online about fifteen seconds before deciding to stay or go, and if a website takes more than three seconds to load, people get utterly exasperated and move on. 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. So if you’re still reading this book so many pages in, I’m ecstatic.

Somehow lost in our self-promoting culture is the fact that you can’t talk your way into a relationship. Garrulousness fills the silence but erects a kind of word wall that separates you from others. 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. And if you’re Gallery Furniture’s Greg Hopf, you’ll outsell everyone else on the floor.

But the larger point here is sometimes you need to make the call to stop listening. While you can learn something from everyone, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to everyone until they run out of breath.

Listening is not just something you should do when someone else is talking; it’s also what you should do while you are talking.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”