The Beauty and Craft of Listening
Except for that one time the essays I wrote in high school were discussions of some sort. Choose a topic, look at both sides of the coin, and make a decision. Sometimes we picked a side and defended this point of view. At other times we looked at a particularly delightful (or dreadful) book and discussed that. Eventually, we got good at shining the light on random opinions our teacher came up with. But one time was different.
One time, our teacher asked us to do something extraordinary when going to bed. Instead of trying to fall asleep, we were to open the window a bit and spend 15 minutes listening to the sounds of the night.
It didn’t matter what we heard or didn’t hear. There was no wrong answer. All we were supposed to do was to listen and to write down what we heard — in a nice way, of course.
Different people heard different things, depending on whether they lived inside the city, or in the suburbs. It was curious, the multitude of sounds that existed in a supposedly quiet night. But what never left me was the sense of wonder my classmate finished his essay with:
How come I never heard those sounds before? They were there, but I didn’t listen.
What he realized back then is that listening does something. Like when you walk down the street lost in thoughts and you don’t hear someone calling your name.
Listening is acknowledging.
You keep walking, seemingly ignoring the person, and sometimes they take it that way. Because when you listen, you acknowledge that something exists.
The tree falling in the wood, did it happen? Maybe not unless you listen.
Feedback, and Thank You
A soft skills course. We met the announcement with eye-rolling and sarcasm, hiding our ignorance. The university had told us that we needed to attend this course for our Master’s degree in computer science but we wanted to be engineers, right, so who needed soft skills? Wasn’t that for the social sciences or something? So we attended with a healthy amount of skepticism — and were blown out of the water.
Two coaches, the serious type, taught us about a variety of topics, one of which was accepting feedback. After hearing a person out who is trying to help us, possibly clarifying ambiguities, we had three tasks:
- Say thank you.
- Consider their observations and suggestions with some distance.
- Take a step to change something.
For those coaches, it was essential to do nothing but to say “thank you”. No explanations, justifications, or rebuttals. Just a thank you.
Because “thank you” completes the listening; it is nothing else than an acknowledgment.
What “thank you” says is: I appreciate your intention to help. I value your opinion. But more fundamentally: I heard you. Because often what hides behind feedback is not a demand for change but a desire to be heard.
Are you listening?
Acknowledging is what the question “Are you listening?” is all about. Not acknowledging as in “yes, dear”. But acknowledging the whole package, their happiness, their worries, their dreams, their fears, all the glorious pink and muddy gray that make up the person in front of us.
A rock can’t listen, because it lacks humanity. To really listen, you need a shred of empathy for the one talking.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm expressed this idea beautifully in his essay collection aptly titled “The Art of Listening”. When explaining his therapeutic approach he says, slightly abbreviated:
There is nothing human which is alien to us. Everything is in me. I am a little child, I am a grown up, I am a murderer, and I am a saint. I am narcissistic, and I am destructive. There is nothing in the patient which I do not have in me. And only inasmuch as I can muster within myself those experiences which the patient is telling me about, only if they arouse and echo within myself can I know what the patient is talking about.
Listening is a fundamentally human experience, and it can be a journey into your own self.
But the purpose is not just to learn about yourself, it’s about finding common ground, it’s to realize that they and their experiences are human same as you.
Ideally, the other person has the same realization by listening to you, but even if they don’t: listening is not a one-way street.
Primal Sounds
Those two coaches also had something to say about listening as an activity. Specifically, they were discussing the sounds we make when we do listen.
An agreeable “mmh” helps the speaker continue, a questioning “eh …” signals disagreement and prompts an explanation — without us ever having to actually speak a word.
Those “primal sounds” as they called them signal interest, they indicate that we listen, that we try to understand.
My initial reaction was: that feels manipulative to make those sounds on purpose! But then I realized that what they wanted to convey was simpler:
Active listening is a skill. It can be learnt.
And they were asking: Anyone can listen. But can you listen well?
Learning to Listen Well
Half the challenge of listening is to actually be there with the other person. That’s easier said than done: Our phones are an endless source of distractions. If you want to actually listen to someone, get that thing out of the way.
The next hurdle to being there is you: what’s on your mind, your daily worries, what you have to do right after you’re finished talking. You’ve to set that aside for a minute.
Then, with that half out of the way, and you actually being able to receive anything, it’s about attitude, which is well summarized in this tidbit:
Try to understand before being understood.
Like everyone else, I’ve lots of ideas and opinions about almost everything. But to really listen, I’ve to shut up. As the Dalai Lama put it:
When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.
Look at it in terms of time: if you spend more time talking than being quiet, you can’t be doing much listening. Sounds simple, is simple — but simple doesn’t mean easy.
At some point, you will have learned something new. You think you understand something or someone better. Don’t assume. Make sure.
When you strongly disagree with an opinion (not an observation), don’t blast out what you know to be true. Ask instead.
Questions are the listener’s friend.
Questions also allow you to direct the conversation to healthier, more interesting, or simply different topics.
Another technique to make sure you are actually right about what you understood is mirroring. When you mirror something you heard, you bounce it back in your own words. If the other person feels misunderstood, you did not listen well. If they nod and continue, you got it. That goes for customer feedback, for your neighbor’s love story, for your uncle’s Laos memories.
With that, you’ll already come far. To learn to listen, you’ve to know about a few techniques, there is lots of practice, and it all starts with a choice, a commitment. Come to think of it, that applies to pretty much any other skill: learning to bake, picking up a new language, making your TikTok videos go viral.
Why should we invest that much?
People We Love
Listening matters for two reasons and the first is about the people we love. Those people don’t want money or things or even our time. The daughter at the school play, the friend scoring a major deal, the husband bringing home the cushion in the exact color she loves, the son building a castle … they want to be seen and heard. They want to be acknowledged.
Undivided attention in the moments that matter most to them, really listening when someone tells us something that matters to them, that creates memories and bonds that endure. The stuff we live for.
How come we consciously decide to learn how to surf and how to take videos of kittens and recognizing trees by their leaves — but when it comes to really listening to the people we love we go for what comes naturally?
Get What We Want
The second reason to learn this skill is that it helps us get what we want.
Mostly, to get what we want, we need to give others what they want. Give people a product they love, and charge them for it. Coach someone to negotiate a higher salary, and they’re happy to pay you, help you.
How do you figure out what they want? Observing, trying, listening.
Why Now
In a way, 2020 has been more silent than the entire decade before it. The pandemic has slowed things down a bit. Airplanes grounded, people working from home, busyness removed from our lives.
In other ways, 2020 has been screaming at us. With statistics and infection numbers, with facts and rumors.
But it’s also been begging us to pause, to reconsider our priorities, to be kinder in big and small ways.
Maybe it’s time we learned to listen.