Read The Lost Art of Listening Online
Authors: Michael P. Nichols
___ 16. Think of listening as instinctive, rather than as a skill that requires
making an effort?
___ 17. Make an active effort to get other people to say what they think
and feel about things?
___ 18. Pretend to be listening when you’re not?
___ 19. Respect what other people have to say?
___ 20. Feel that listening to other people complain is annoying?
___ 21. Make effective use of questions to invite people to say what’s on
their minds?
___ 22. Make distracting comments when other people are talking?
___ 23. Think other people consider you to be a good listener?
___ 24. Tell people you know how they feel?
___ 25. Don’t lose your cool when somebody gets angry at you?
How Communication Breaks Down
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Scoring
For the odd- numbered questions, give yourself four points for each ques-
tion you answered “Almost always”; three points for “Often”; two points
for “Sometimes”; and one point for “Almost never.” For the even- numbered
questions, the scoring is reversed: four points for “Almost never”; three
for “Sometimes”; two for “Often”; and one for “Almost always.” Total the
number of points.
85–96 Excellent
73–84 Above average
61–72 Average
49–60 Below average
25–48 Poor
1.
If you got a high score on this questionnaire, congratulations. Read on
to reinforce what you’re already doing and perhaps get some additional
ideas for improvement. If you scored less well, pick out one bad habit
at a time and practice letting others finish talking, and then let them
know what you think they’re saying before you say what’s on your mind.
Just this will go a long way.
2.
During the next few days, pick out a couple of relationships that are
important to you and try to identify two or three things that get in the
way of your listening. Common interferences include: being preoccu-
pied, trying to do two things at once, having negative thoughts about
the speaker (“He’s always complaining”), not being interested in the
topic, wanting to say something about yourself, wanting to give advice,
wanting to share something similar, being judgmental.
Once you identify two or three of your own bad listening habits,
practice eliminating one of those impediments for a week, but only in
conversations that you decide are important to you.
Part Two
…
The Real Reasons People
Don’t Listen
THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN
The Heart of Listening
4
…
“When Is It
My
Turn?”
The Heart of Listening:
The Struggle to Suspend Our Own Needs
Forty years ago I took my first course in how to be a good listener. I was in
graduate school, and the course was called Elementary Clinical Methods.
We learned about making eye contact and asking open-ended questions
and how to parry personal inquiries with the therapist’s famous evasion,
“Why do you ask?” We practiced on each other, and I learned a lot of
interesting things about my classmates. Then we went to the state hospital
to practice on patients, and I learned that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this
work.
It was the first time I’d ever been in a mental hospital, and I approached
it with fascination and horror. Maybe I expected to see an axe murderer or
perhaps a scene out of
The Snake Pit.
In those days before the widespread
use of tranquilizers, some of the back wards
were
snake pits. But in the ward
for new admissions, where they sent us, the patients were mostly just very
unhappy people.
My first real patient was a young mother who’d become depressed
after coming home from the hospital with her second baby. She looked
disheveled and lonely, and I felt sorry for her. I asked her why she’d come
to the hospital and why she felt so hopeless and where she grew up and
things like that. She answered my questions, but the interview never really
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THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN
went anywhere. Every time I’d ask another question, she’d respond, but
only briefly, and then wait for me to say something. Since I didn’t have
anything to say, it was an awkward wait.
It was my first interview, and I was very disappointed that it didn’t go
well. Eventually I learned not to ask so many questions and, if people didn’t
seem to have much to say, to comment on that, inviting them to explain
their reticence rather than trying to fight it with questions. But the real prob-
lem in that first interview didn’t have to do with technique. I wasn’t really
interested in that woman; I was more interested in being a therapist.
This troubling experience illustrates the most vital and difficult
requirement for listening. Genuine listening demands taking an interest
in the speaker and what he or she has to say.
Taking an interest
can easily be sentimentalized by equating it with sin-
cerity or caring. Sincerity and caring are certainly fine characteristics, but
listening isn’t a matter of character, nor is it something that nice people do
automatically. To take an interest in someone else, we must suspend the
interests of the self.
Listening is the art by which we use empathy to reach
across the space between us. Passive attention doesn’t work.
Not only is listening an active process; it often takes a deliberate effort
to suspend our own needs and reactions—as Roxanne’s mother so bravely
demonstrated by holding her own feelings in check long enough to listen
to her daughter’s fierce resentment. To listen well, you must hold back
what you have to say and control the urge to interrupt or argue.
Kiana was enjoying going to the gym more now that she’d found a
workout partner. Marilyn knew a lot about exercise and stretching and
always seemed to have interesting things to say. Theirs was a nice, easy
friendship, but so far it didn’t extend beyond the gym.
One rainy morning, Marilyn came late and said that her basement
had leaked and she had had to make an appointment with a handyman.
Kiana was just about to say that she, too, had problems with leaks, but she
held back her urge to talk about her own concerns to make sure Marilyn
had finished.
The Heart of Listening
75
Marilyn went from talking about her leaky basement to talking about
problems she was having with her kids. Kiana really appreciated Marilyn’s
opening up to her and felt that their friendship had moved to a more inti-
mate level. After their workout, Marilyn asked if Kiana and her husband
would like to get together for dinner. Kiana hadn’t really needed to talk
about the leaks in her ceiling, and now she was glad she hadn’t.
James was talking to Harry after work about starting to feel burned
out. He was working long hours, losing interest in the job, and getting too
little opportunity to meet new people. Harry knew exactly what James was
talking about, but he suppressed the impulse to say so and continued to
listen. After complaining for a while, James shifted to thinking out loud
about what he could do to make life more interesting. “What I need,” he
said, “is something that turns me on. It doesn’t have to be work. It could be
getting reinvested in a hobby.” By listening instead of interrupting to say
“me too,” Harry felt that he’d allowed James to think about doing some-
thing more than just complaining—and James’s saying that he needed to
rediscover something that turned him on made him realize that the same
thing was missing in his life.
The act of listening requires a submersion of the self and immersion in
the other. This isn’t always easy. We may be interested but too concerned
with instructing or reforming the other person to be truly open to his point
of view. Parents have trouble hearing their children as long as they can’t
suspend the urge to set them straight. Even therapists, presumably exem-
plars of understanding, are often too busy trying to change people to really
listen to them. (Unfortunately, most people aren’t eager to be changed
by someone who doesn’t understand them.) That failures of understand-
ing occur in psychotherapy, just as everywhere else, is a fact often missed
as long as therapists remain too wrapped up in their own theories to give
themselves over to sustained immersion in the other person.
Although therapists may be less likely than the average person to
interrupt, some are so anxious to be perceived as sympathetic that they
offer sentimentality instead of compassion. “Oh yes,” they say with their
eyes, “I understand how you feel.” Sympathetic or not, condescending
kindness from a patronizing person isn’t the same thing as listening. The
superficially sensitive therapist doesn’t have to listen because he already
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THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN
knows what he wants to say:
“Oh yes, I understand.”
Listening is a strenu-
ous but silent activity.
There’s a big difference between showing interest
and really taking an interest.
Suspending the self does not of course mean
losing
the self—though
that seems to be precisely what some people are afraid of. Otherwise, why
do they insist on relentlessly repeating their own arguments, when a sim-
ple acknowledgment of what the other person says would be the first step
toward mutual understanding? It’s as though saying “I understand what
you’re trying to say” meant “You’re right and I’m wrong.” Or that to give
someone who’s angry at you a fair hearing and then say “I see why you’re
upset with me” meant “I surrender.” Ironically, when the fear of never
getting your turn is so strong that you don’t hear the other person out, it
becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy.
Martina was trying to explain to Zach that when she gets upset about
something she just needs to talk about it without him giving her the third
degree. “I never get the feeling that you’re willing to just listen to me when
I get upset,” she said.
“Yes, but,” Zach said, “if I don’t understand what’s bothering you, how
can I help?”
“I don’t necessarily need you to analyze the situation,” Martina said.
“Sometimes I just need you to listen to me.”
“I’m happy to listen to you,” Zach said, “but if I don’t understand why
you’re upset, I don’t really know what the problem is.”
Can you see that both Martina and Zach are doing a good job of
expressing their feelings? And that neither one is doing a very good job of
listening?
I’ll have some practical suggestions for breaking this pattern in
Chapter 7, but first it’s important to understand more about the difficulty
involved in the simple art of listening.
Genuine listening involves a suspension of self. You don’t always
notice this because it’s reflexive and taken for granted, and because in
most conversations we take turns. But you might catch yourself rehearsing
The Heart of Listening
77
what you’re going to say next when the other person is talking. Simply
holding your tongue while someone speaks isn’t the same thing as listen-
ing. To really listen you have to suspend your own agenda, forget about
what you want to say, and concentrate on being a receptive vehicle for the
other person.
The listener’s responsiveness is experienced subjectively by the
speaker as—at least temporarily—vital to a sense of being understood, of
being taken seriously. Listeners feel that pressure.
The Burden of Listening
Listening puts a burden on the listener. We feel the weight of the other
person’s need to be heard. Attention must be paid.
But, you might object, isn’t empathy a natural expression of the self?
Isn’t listening something we automatically extend to each other as part
of being human? Yes and no. Empathy is an active form of engagement.
At times we’re interested in what the other person is saying, and listen-
ing is effortless. But there inevitably comes a moment when we cease to
be engrossed. We lose interest or feel the urge to interrupt. It is at this
moment that listening takes self- control.
Genuine listening means suspending memory, desire,
and judgment—and, for a few moments at least, existing
for the other person.
Suppressing the urge to talk can be harder than it sounds. After all,
you have things on your mind too. To listen well, you may have to restrain
yourself from disagreeing or giving advice or sharing your own experience.
Temporarily, at least, listening is a one-sided relationship.
In everyday conversations, you may not notice that burden. But you
can feel the pressure to be attentive whenever another person needs to
talk for more than a few minutes. Even if you care about the person and
are interested in what she has to say, you’re caught. You need to be silent.
You need to be selfless.