How To Be A Good Listener

Many of us probably have a nagging feeling that we don’t listen enough to other people.
Here we’re not going to make the guilt worse by telling you that listening is a good thing,
worthy but in fact rather dull. We’re going to show you that listening to others is first
and foremost an interesting thing to do, something that could be as pleasurable for you as it
is for your speaking companion.
We commonly locate pleasure in conversation as follows:
Talking about myself is fun and hearing you, talking about you, is boring.
And as a result we try to minimize how much we are listening
– and maximise how much we are talking – because that’s how it feels like we’ll have the
most interesting lives. But is this analysis of pleasure really accurate? Of course there
is a basic pleasure to be had in, as we put it, ‘hearing the sound of our own voice’.
But we can also venture that this isn’t the real pleasure of talking about ourselves.
The real pleasure of talking about ourselves lies in understanding ourselves, becoming
clearer about who we are, what we feel, what we want and what we might do next. The pleasure
of talking about ourselves lies in self-clarification, not merely in hearing our voices. Generally
we tend to believe that Self-Clarification will only be possible if we ourselves actually do the
talking. But something far more interesting and redemptive is in truth the case: we can sometimes end
up best understanding bits of ourselves by listening to the stories of other people.
This might sound like a merely convenient – and sentimental – thing to say. But
it is soberly true and the proof lies in an area we know very well: literature. Novels
are stories of other people that we don’t mind hearing; because they are also, at their
best, stories that teach us about ourselves. We’re prepared to spend hours hearing other
people – like Tolstoy or Proust or Virginia Woolf – talking about their ideas and adventures.
And remarkably, we don’t mind not getting a single word of our own into the arena because
we’re actively understanding bits of ourselves by listening to their stories. This is what
Marcel Proust had to say on this, he wrote: ‘Every reader of a novel is in effect the reader
of his own life, whose shape he is better able to appreciate thanks to the spectacles
which the novelist has offered him.’ We might well reply that this is all very well,
but that the average person we have to listen to is a lot less interesting than Marcel Proust.
So no wonder we want to listen to the novelist and not the average person. But the people
we have around us are a lot more interesting than we think – if only we knew how to listen
to them and edit them properly. The reason why so-called great writers are interesting
to listen to (even when they talk about themselves) is that they have mastered the trick of teasing
out from their experiences what is Universally Relevant from what is Locally Specific. So-called
‘great writers’ might be telling us a story about their aunt’s childhood or a
trip to the woods, but in the way they tell us these things, they will be adept at teasing
out the Universal Dimension – so that their stories end up being not just local anecdotes
with no echoes in the minds of others, but Universal Stories that simultaneously narrate
pages in the Universal book of Humankind: they end up being their stories and our own.
In truth, we are all living out stories in the Universal Book of Humankind. But we’re
apt to describe this life so badly, to get so bogged down in local details and unnecessary
digressions, that we bore our audiences, giving Listening to someone very negative associations.
We haven’t got the wrong sort of life; we have the wrong techniques for narrating that
life. And by narrating badly, we help to create an enduring suspicion of the act of having
to listen to someone else speak. Here is some of what goes wrong when we try to narrate
our lives: Firstly we keep latching onto factual details: we go on about times, places, external
movements – not realising that things become interesting only when people say what they
feel about what happened, not merely what happened. Secondly we often get overwhelmed by an
emotion we experienced and insist upon it rather than attempting to explain it. So we
say, again and again, ‘it was so beautiful’ or ‘it was the scariest thing in the whole world’
but without accurately unpacking the feeling and thereby being able to make it live in
someone else’s mind. Thirdly just when we promise to get a bit interesting with our narration,
we take fright. We get scared of our own emotions, which can threaten to trigger feelings of
unbearable sadness, confusion and excitement. We take flight into superficiality. Fourthly, another problem,
we don’t stick with one story. There is so much in our minds, we keep opening up new
subplots. We're not focusing. When the Good Listener encounters these unfortunate ways of talking, they don’t
panic; they try to act like good editors. Being a good listener is like being a good editor
in a publishing house. Consider the relationship between the American writer Raymond Carver,
and his NY editor Gordon Lish. Lish heavily edited Carver – or, as we might put it,
listened to him in a hugely creative and transformative way; a way that can teach us about the art
of listening in ordinary life as well. – Lish hugely boosted Carver’s confidence; he made
him feel the world was listening and that it was worth properly unpacking his experiences.
He did the editorial equivalent of what in conversation we can call looking closely into
someone’s eyes with tenderness and sympathy. – He stopped Carver from descending into
local tedium. He took Carver’s experiences in rural America and gave them a universal
dimension, ensuring that Carver is now famous in Korea to Germany as well. – Lastly he stopped
Carver digressing; he kept him focused on a central theme in each story he wrote. What
we need to do as listeners is a version of what Lish did for Carver. In listening, we
can also shape, tease out, cut out, emphasise – in the name of getting the latent really
good story to emerge from our companion’s mind. So when listening, stop your companion
digressing; say things like, ‘So a minute ago you were saying that….’ Bring them
back to the last coherent and emotionally ‘alive’ part of the story. Draw them away
from numb surface details to deeper emotional realities. Ask: ‘what did that feel like
for you…?’ Allow for the unusual and the weird. Use signs that suggest an open mind.
Maybe someone is about to say that they felt attracted to their sister or stole money from
a company. Don’t do anything that might close off a vulnerable confession. ‘Say
go on…’ You’re not a judge, you’re a friend. The Good Listener knows that one
of the best ways to understand an issue in one’s own life is to hear it discussed through
the life of someone else – and furthermore, they have the editing skills to make sure
they can find themselves in the words of others. That way, listening will no longer a chore.
It’s about the most interesting thing we can ever do with somebody else.
We believe in making the world a more emotionally intelligent place.
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As well as other merchandise that re-enforces some of the themes illustrated in our videos.
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How To Be A Good Listener

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