When you reflect on what someone said, the person’s thoughts and feelings take up residence in you. It’s an extension of the idea of listening as a form of hospitality. You are inviting someone into your consciousness. and the conversations you care about are the ones you carry with you in memory.
To me, communication is key to a good relationship. I don’t mind disagreement, but avoiding difficult conversations bothers me because it leaves little chance to resolve problems, reconcile differences, or repair mistakes.
I understand that talking to strangers can make even introverts happier, and that anyone can be interesting and teach us something. Yet I’m often impatient with certain behaviors, and my natural tendency is not to engage with strangers. Reconciling these instincts becomes harder as we get older, become more set in our preferences, and settle into our routines. At minimum, I want to become a better listener to the people I care about.
Excerpts:
The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.
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The executive director of a performing arts organization in Los Angeles told me, “If I really listened to the people in my life, I’d have to face the fact that I detest most of them.”
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Others said they were too busy to listen or just couldn’t be bothered.
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Listening takes effort. Like reading, you might choose to go over some things carefully while skimming others, depending on the situation. But the ability to listen carefully, like the ability to read carefully, degrades if you don’t do it often enough.
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Among the most frequently cited bad listening behaviors are:
- Interrputing
- Responding vaguely or illogically to what was just said
- Looking at a phone, watch, around 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.
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Our brains not only sync up the moment someone tells us something, the resulting understanding and connection influences how we process subsequent information. 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.
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To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.
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It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention.
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Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing.
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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.
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…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.
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Put another way, having listened well and often to someone in the past makes it easier to get back on the same wavelength when you get out of sync, perhaps due to physical separation or following a time of emotional distance caused by an argument.
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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.
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J. Pierpont Morgan said, “A man always has two reasons for what he does–a good one, and the real one.” Listening helps you understand people’s mind-sets and motivations, which is essential in building cooperative and productive relationships as well as knowing which relationships you’re better off avoiding.
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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. “If you go into every situation thinking you already know everything, it limits your ability to grow, learn, connect, and evolve,” Noesner said. “I think a good listener is someone who is open to hearing someone else’s experiences and ideas and acknowledges their point of view.”
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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.
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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.
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According to Derber, shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism, which quashes any chance of connection. Shift response 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…
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
- minimise their concerns
- bring perspective to a situation with forced positivity and platitudes
- admire the person’s strength
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.
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Kids, like all of us, just want to be heard. Try instead, “Have you always felt this way?” or “What would quitting mean?” Look at it as an invitation to have a conversation, not as something to be fixed or get upset about.
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Regret is the second-most common emotional state, after love, she said, and the two feelings are intertwined since the most intense regret comes from neglecting those we love. Relationships most often fail due to neglect, and one of the principle kinds of neglect is not being attentive.
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I, myself, am an inveterate quote collector–I jot down any interesting, funny, or thought-provoking thing I hear, or overhear, during the course of the day. I have several notebooks as well as files on my computer filled with pithy and profound quotes from friends, family, colleagues, strangers, and of course, people I have interviewed. When you start paying attention, you’d be surprised how many things you will find worth recording. And reading back over your quote collection, you start to pick up interesting themes that are as revealing about yourself as the people you are quoting.
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Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of the treatise On Friendship, once told me, “The best friendships are those where you are able to immediately pick up the conversation where you left off because the person’s words have remained with you.” Indeed, one of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: “I’ve been thinking about what you said.” Likewise, friends are people who can connect what you are saying in the moment to things you’ve said in the past to help you work through problems or clarify your thinking or, in some cases, just make you laugh at the association.
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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. The result is a loss of richness and nuance in our social interactions, and we suffer from a creeping sense of dissatisfaction.
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Listening takes effort. Understanding and intimacy must be earned.
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