You’re not listening. Maybe you don’t care enough to try? You’re distracted? Or any number of other internal or external issues might be at play. Want to do better? by Kate Murphy (2020) can help.
Noted therapist Lori Gottlieb has called this “an essential book for our times,” while the publisher introduces it as “always illuminating and often humorous.”
As Murphy stated in an interview posted on the book’s Amazon page, “What I found is that rather than being a checklist of dos and don’ts, listening is more a state of mind. It’s about getting yourself in a receptive mode and also developing an awareness of the kinds of things that hijack your attention, cloud your perception, and make you zone out during a conversation. And, just as importantly, listening has to do with how well you respond—the degree to which you are able to encourage and elicit the clear expression of someone else’s thoughts. It’s both an art and a skill.”
Selected Quotes from You’re Not Listening
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.
To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. 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.
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.
Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing. The lack of being known and accepted in this way leads to feelings of inadequacy and emptiness. What makes us feel most lonely and isolated in life is less often the result of a devastating traumatic event than the accumulation of occasions when nothing happened but something profitably could have. It’s the missed opportunity to connect when you weren’t listening or someone wasn’t really listening to you.
Anyone who has shared something personal and received a thoughtless or uncomprehending response knows how it makes your soul want to crawl back in its hiding place. Whether someone is confessing a misdeed, proposing an idea, sharing a dream, revealing an anxiety, or recalling a significant event—that person is giving up a piece of him or herself. And if you don’t handle it with care, the person will start to edit future conversations with you, knowing, ‘I can’t be real with this person.’
