You're Not Listening Quotes

“Toning down the inner alarm, or the “No, you’re stupid!” impulse that leads to ideological entrenchment is possible, as Gillien Todd tells her students, when you remind yourself to take a calm, open, and curious stance rather than an angry, aggravated, or alarmed stance. It’s far more useful to listen to find out how other people arrived at their conclusions and what you can learn from them—whether it changes or shores up your own thinking. At the moment you feel you are going to react with hostility toward those who disagree with you, take a breath and ask them a question, not to expose flawed logic but to truly expand your understanding of where they are coming from.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Harvard sociologist Mario Luis Small found that slightly more than half the time, people confided their most pressing and worrisome concerns to people with whom they had weaker ties, even people they encountered by chance, rather than to those they had previously said were closest to them—like a spouse, family member, or dear friend. In some cases, the subjects actively avoided telling the people in their innermost circle because they feared unkindness, judgment, blowback, or drama. It raises questions of why we choose the listeners we do.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Steele gave the example of another mother in the Group Attachment-Based Intervention program who said she couldn’t stand her baby’s crying. A well-meaning person might have explained that humans are designed to react negatively to babies crying so we’ll be moved to take care of them. Or maybe commiserated with the mother by saying, “Oh yeah, the sound of a baby crying can get to me, too.” But those responses would have earned you a low score on the listening scale used by the New School’s graduate students. The highest score, in fact, went to a clinician who didn’t tell the mother anything. She paused and asked, “What is it about the crying that bothers you?”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“By listening first rather than jumping in prematurely to explain or reassure in a way that missed the point, the clinician was able to get on the mother’s wavelength so they could connect on a deeper level. And having experienced being experienced, the mother will hopefully be able to extend a similar gift to her child. It’s a model for how we could all listen better.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“la generación Z, la primera criada con pantallas, tienen más probabilidades de sentirse solos”
― Kate Murphy, No me estás escuchando: Qué te estas perdiendo y por qué es importante

“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.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“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.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“using social media data to learn about human behavior is like learning about human behavior by watching people in a casino.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“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.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“The only certainty you achieve by not listening to people is that you will be bored and you will be boring because you won’t learn anything new.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Kamprad’s approach demonstrates not only good business sense but also a genuine curiosity about other people’s thoughts and feelings. It’s an eagerness to understand someone else’s worldview and an expectation that you will be surprised by what you hear and will learn from the experience. Put another way, it’s a lack of presumption that you already know what someone will say, much less that you know better.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Listening requires, more than anything, curiosity.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“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.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“The contemporary French intellectual Pascal Bruckner argues in The Temptation of Innocence that modern individualism may be taking us backward. He observes that when one’s duty is foremost to one’s self, there is no sense of social obligation and “guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.” In our self-reliant society, we believe we are responsible for our own happiness and prosperity. “Everyone must sell himself as a person, in order to be accepted,” Bruckner writes. But this 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.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” To listen is to be interested, and the result is more interesting conversations. The goal is to leave the exchange having learned something. You already know about you. You don’t know about the person with whom you are speaking or what you can learn from that person’s experience.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“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. Of”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“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? If you can’t answer those questions, you probably need to work on your listening.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Talking about yourself doesn’t add anything to your knowledge base.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“The French writer André Maurois wrote, “A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Circle of Security alone has trained more than thirty thousand facilitators in twenty-two countries.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“The value of information is inversely related to its availability and its triviality.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“silence is a “pocket of possibility,”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Attentive and responsive caregivers set you up to have a secure attachment style, which is characterized by an ability to listen empathetically and thus, form functional, meaningful, and mutually supportive relationships. On the other hand, children whose parents were not dependably attentive typically grow up to be adults with an insecure anxious attachment style, which means they tend to worry and obsess about relationships.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Many of the great collaborations in history were between people who fully understood and internalized what the other was saying. The fathers of flight, Orville and Wilbur Wright; WWII leaders Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; James Watson and Francis Crick, who codiscovered the structure of DNA; and John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles were all partners known for spending uninterrupted hours in conversation before they made their marks on history. Of course, they were all brilliant on their own, but it took a kind of mind meld to achieve what they did. This congruence happens to varying degrees between any two people who “click,” whether friends, lovers, business associates, or even between stand-up comedians and their audiences. When you listen and really “get” what another person is saying, your brain waves and those of the speaker are literally in sync.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“To research this book, I interviewed people of all ages, races, and social strata, experts and nonexperts, about listening. Among the questions I asked was: “Who listens to you?” Almost without exception, what followed was a pause. Hesitation. The lucky ones could come up with one or two people, usually a spouse or maybe a parent, best friend, or sibling. But many said, if they were honest, they didn’t feel like they had anyone who truly listened to them, even those who were married or claimed a vast network of friends and colleagues. Others said they talked to therapists, life coaches, hairdressers, and even astrologers—that is, they paid to be listened to. A few said they went to their pastor or rabbi, but only in a crisis.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“And to listen poorly, selectively, or not at all is to limit your understanding of the world and deprive yourself of becoming the best you can be.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Listening is something you do or don’t do every day. While you might take listening for granted, how well you listen, to whom, and under what circumstances determines your life’s course—for good or ill.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“And in Japan, there’s been a proliferation of companies such as Family Romance that hire out actors to pretend to be lonely people’s friends, family members, or romantic partners. There’s nothing sexual in the arrangements; customers are paying only for attention. For example, a mother might rent a son to visit her when she’s estranged from her real son. A bachelor might rent a wife who will ask how his day went when he arrives home from work.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters