The Lost Art of Listening (13 page)

___ 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
69

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

73

74
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

76
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.