I heard this quote recently on a virology podcast I listen to, and it has really stuck with me. It’s taken from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Listening well takes practice, commitment, and a kind of meta-awareness of ourselves and thought processes as we hear another person talking. The default mode of communication is to simply reply, or to formulate answers and “I” statements right back. In the last two decades or so we are collectively losing the ability to listen to one another, our abilities increasingly fractured by addictive cell phones, calcified tribalism fanned by the media and our politics, and a simple sense of exhaustion from modern life.
Are you tired?
Do you feel like anyone has really listened to you lately?
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
I find myself doing this with patients as they tell their stories. I need to listen longer. Listen better. Being listened to is therapeutic. When I do this, the patient usually tells me the answers, the diagnosis, the plan. I just need to bend it here and there, clean it up and polish it.
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
I find my patients sometimes doing this back to me as I try to counsel and collaborate with them. You can see the verbal wheels spinning as answers, reactions, or rationalizations will occasionally cut me off mid-sentence.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of, or judgmental about. But practicing the art of listening well with our friends, spouses, family, and loved ones is paramount. And we can broaden that to patients, doctors, clients, neighbors, and on down the line.
An obscure and overlooked article was written about this 5 year ago. I found it by just searching for the above quote. It only received 20 likes on Medium.com, so I’d like to rediscover it here because I think it deserves further consideration. The author reviews some practical guidelines to help us reflect upon and improve our listening habits to become even better at understanding others. That mutually feels good.
☑️ Make a conscious effort to listen to first understand; not to reply, correct, or criticize. Otherwise we are already formulating a response that takes away from our ability to pay attention, learn new ideas, or challenge our own preconceived notions. The other person knows it.
☑️ Pay full attention. What a gift it can be to put down our phones, make old fashioned eye contact, and start rebuilding the shattered neural pathways that we once had which allow us to pay real attention to someone as they tell us a story.
☑️ Listen for facts, but also needs and feelings. While we are paying actual attention to someone, our multifaceted brains still have the bandwidth to pick up on nonverbal communication, motivations, and emotional cues. I wrote a post about this entitled do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged? It’s not my original idea, but it’s golden.
☑️ Practice being silent. Resist the urge to fill any seemingly uncomfortable silence with words. A little silence can encourage a person to keep talking, to open up even more, to trust the conversation. We can nod slowly and knowingly at key times that a statuary silence might feel disconcerting.
☑️ Keep an open mind. Try to hear the person out, and give their opinions and stories our full measure of patience instead of summary judgement and dismissal. (Unless said ideas are abhorrent, as many these days are. See below.)
☑️ Watch body language. “Listening” is not just an acoustic phenomenon if we define it more broadly as what we do to understand someone else. More than half of all communication is non-verbal.
☑️ Ask relevant, clarifying questions. This really lets someone know we are trying to understand, and it can be a little epiphany for ourselves - it’s actually much more pleasurable to dive deeper with someone than to just keep hitting volley after volley back and forth. Terry Gross, the famed host of WHYY Philadelphia’s Fresh Air program that NPR syndicates nationally, is a master at this. I met her in the local supermarket down the street a while back. I just thought that was cool and worth sharing. Not much of a story, so no need to ask me clarifying questions about this brush with celebrity.
☑️ Monitor our own emotions. Being mindful of our quickening heart rate, tightening muscles, or reflexive emotions can help prevent reactions like saying something mean or harsh that we will later regret. Mindfulness is the foundation of responding, not reacting.
☑️ Don’t interrupt. This is tough but may be the most important one. Interrupting can make someone else feel disrespected, insecure, rejected, or angry. (I will say that some folks can go on and on, and actually have trouble stopping, so at a reasonable time I think it’s ok to judiciously help them out with an “interjection.” ;)
☑️ Listen with compassion and kindness. Human beings have dignity, and when we approach conversation positively, affirmatively, and with a warm heart it builds connection. Connections are good for mental and physical health, and are the strands of the social web that keep us from the despair of loneliness. And if we want to sincerely channel Jesus, I think this quote is powerful from the King James Bible:
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
Wow.
☑️ While doing all the above, have limits. It’s ok to change the subject, or end the conversation if it is abusive, disrespectful, or just too at odds with our personal beliefs. Maybe we let passions cool and come back to the contentious subject later, avoiding a showdown in the moment that leaves both people feeling insulted, hostile, and irreconcilably angry.
And finally, I’ll add a 12th guideline to make an even dozen, and flip the table back to ourselves as speakers:
☑️ We can try to speak more deliberately, more slowly, more engagingly - like we deserve the other person’s attention and understanding. How often do we find ourselves blurting out stories quickly before the listener looks away at their iPhone or replies before we have finished a thought. It’s not totally their fault, it’s just habit and default mode. But by speaking quickly and nervously and in anticipation of that interruption or loss of attention from our interlocutor, we can almost trigger it ourselves. Try speaking like you deserve to be understood, just as you return the same graceful favor.
I don’t think this post needs to be much longer. I thank you for listening, and please let me know if you try this out. How did listening to understand someone else go?
I’m going to give these 12 guidelines a more conscious try in the office today starting at 9 AM. I may be running even later than usual… or maybe I’ll paradoxically be more effective, and more on time.
Try, try again.
Going to keep this article. Has a lot of good suggestions to become a better listener especially not interrupting someone when they are talking. Although when someone is rambling, I do interrupt.
I grew up in a large extended family. My father was one of 9 children who were always looking for attention. Then came the grandchildren (me) surrounded by too many people interrupting each other to be heard at family gatherings. As an introvert and child, being outside playing was a blessing. The family is smaller now with cousins and their kids (my dad's last sibling is still alive at 96), so gatherings aren't as intense as when I was a young child. We cousins seemed to have mellowed and there is less interruptions.
Excellent post. I am an introvert but would not necessarily call myself quiet. I am just one of those people born with a natural inclination to listen, and listen, and listen… whether in my own interactions or those I observe around me. I “lock in” and I have always been fascinated by the human story. Eventually, after listening and thinking, I respond. There are some disadvantages to this (I’m not always the greatest self advocate and I’ve had to learn to set boundaries), but because I listen so much and by nature, I am keenly aware of how little I in turn am listened to and how the people I’m speaking to or observing have often already formulated their response before I (or the speaker) have even made it through the first sentence or two!
What I’ve come to believe - Listening with intention to understand is a skill. I work in human services in an education role and explicitly teach this skill. We should teach this not only in the early grades but through higher education. For years, I think my field assumed that people would “pick up on this” as it was modeled in life, but I disagree. It is a skill we need to teach to all learners, not only neurodivergent ones.