How to Listen

Years ago, I was talking with my friend Mac, when I noticed that he didn’t seem to be paying attention.

“Are you listening to me?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “Why?”

“Well, usually when two people are talking, they take turns, with one person talking as the other person listens. Then, when the first person is done talking, the other one responds.”

Mac seemed confused by this.

“When other people are talking to me, I just count silently in my head until they stop, and then I say what I wanted to say.”

I looked at him incredulously, and he was able to maintain a straight face for long enough to make me question his sanity, after which we both laughed.

Later, when I had moved across the country, he sent me a letter that began,

Dear Dan,

1 2 3 4 5 6…

It went on like that for more than a page. I admired his commitment to the joke, and I still find it funny today.

Most people aren’t taught to listen

Although I remember repeatedly being told to listen when I was a kid, primarily by my parents and teachers, all that really meant to me was that I had to be quiet and look at the person who was talking. Even so, I was frequently in trouble for not listening.

Our earliest exposure to it involves listening as a passive process. We remain quiet and still, looking at the other person, and presumably we’ll just soak up the information being shared.[1]

Later, we learn to take notes in class as we listen, which is a less passive process, insofar as we have to translate what we hear into text, and we have to decide what’s important enough to write down. There’s some intellectual activity involved in that, but it doesn’t require much engagement with the information being presented or much critical thinking.

Probably the only real training we get in listening per se is when we learn about debating. In that process, though, we learn about a very specific kind of listening, in which we listen primarily with the intent to rebut whatever our opponent says. We’re not listening to understand what they say, only to argue against them and prove them wrong. Often, we’re not listening so much as just waiting for our turn to say what we’ve already decided to say next.

Unfortunately, that type of listening becomes the standard for most of us, and it isn’t until we’re much older that we realize debating skills aren’t much use in ordinary life. Listening to rebut the other person isn’t effective with our bosses, much less our spouses, and we’re likely to find ourselves ill prepared to communicate effectively as adults.

Listening to understand

I was a sophomore in college before I figured out that the main purpose of listening was to understand what the other person was saying. I had this epiphany after a class in which the professor had explained T.S. Eliot’s belief that every new work of art, every new idea, and every contribution to our understanding and our culture alters all that which came before: “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted…”[2]

After that, I sought to learn by listening and actively incorporating new information into my existing understanding. From that point forward, I was no longer a passive listener, or a passive reader, but instead was actively engaged in a dialogue with the other in a way that expanded my knowledge.

But it was only when I started my psychotherapy training that I really learned to listen as a truly interactive process. Therapy is inevitably based in communication and the first step towards becoming an effective therapist was, for me, learning to listen.

Engaged listening

The first psychotherapy course at my graduate school was named “Verbal and Nonverbal Communication,” and it was exactly what it sounds like. Everyone knows that the actual words we speak are only part of the message we’re sending; for purely factual information, they may be the majority of the meaning conveyed, but they’re only a fraction of the total when we’re expressing feelings. Nonverbal communication encompasses a wide range of elements, including voice tone and body language, which can be as obvious as gestures, facial expressions, and eye contact, or as subtle as changes in breathing, eye movements, and micro-expressions (very brief facial expressions that occur when an involuntary emotional response occurs but is immediately overridden consciously). The entire quarter was spent exploring different types and levels of communication, especially when there were inconsistencies in the messages being conveyed between the verbal and nonverbal channels.

In therapy, listening requires a level of attention that I cannot possibly sustain in my personal life, which has frequently annoyed people close to me. I’ve been asked more than once, “How can you be a therapist when you never notice anything?” Meanwhile, in sessions, I notice when someone’s eyes dilate, even if they’re sitting across the room from me.

A less intense and difficult kind of listening, and the one I teach couples in therapy, is reflective listening. This is listening to fully engage with and understand the other person, as opposed to listening just enough to get to your turn to respond.

In reflective listening, the person who is listening focuses their attention on the person who’s talking, paying attention to both their words and the nonverbal cues. While listening, they demonstrate engagement by maintaining eye contact (insofar as that’s culturally appropriate[3]), nodding, and vocalizing understanding using interjections like “uh-huh.”

The listener avoids interrupting, unless they truly don’t understand something that was said, and they wait until the person speaking reaches a natural pause. At that point, the person listening responds by paraphrasing what they heard and asking if they got the message. That involves saying something like, “If I understood you correctly… [paraphrase of what they heard]… Is that right?” If the speaker responds negatively, meaning the other person didn’t understand what was being said, they may explain aspects of their message they don’t believe were accurately received, repeat their message using different words, or ask clarifying questions to better understand what wasn’t clearly communicated.

Once the message has been received and the speaker has confirmed the listener's accurate understanding, the conversation may take one of several paths:

• The speaker may continue on to complete their thoughts and express what they want the other to hear,
• The listener may ask follow-up questions to better understand the speaker’s position,
• Or they may switch roles, with the listener becoming the speaker in a new round of communication as the other person takes the listening role.

Throughout, the focus is on being sure each person understands what the other is trying to say, and no one moves on until they’re both clear there’s an understanding. If there’s a disruption in the process – if something interrupts the conversation or if one of the participants becomes upset (angry, overwhelmed, triggered, etc.) – the conversation is stopped with an agreement to return to it when the disruption has passed and both people are ready to resume.

This process is usually slow at first, and it’s not necessary for every discussion, but it gets easier with practice and can help people overcome longstanding misunderstandings and conflicts.

Of course, both parties need to remain calm and respectful throughout the process, and it can be especially important to maintain an attitude of curiosity, especially when it might otherwise be easy to become defensive.

And, as we get better at this, it becomes easier to expand our focus to the nonverbal elements of the dialogue, identifying possible feelings the other isn’t expressing verbally and asking them directly to confirm what’s been unstated. That can allow a greater sense of empathy and understanding, and the development of new perspectives that may help us past impasses.

A note for managers

Although I learned to listen as a therapist, those skills have also been essential in my non-therapy work, both as a colleague and as a manager. Particularly when meeting with team members to discuss problems or to initiate a disciplinary process, I try to begin difficult work conversations by making sure I understand what the other person is thinking or feeling, giving them an opportunity to explain their perspective and their position.

Obviously, that doesn’t mean taking on a therapist role or trying to address psychological issues we may think we perceive, but it’s always a good idea to understand where the other person is coming from, especially when there’s a disagreement or a problem.

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I don’t want to sound like I’m a great listener in every area of my life – I’m not – but listening is a skill we can practice and improve. Being an effective and engaged listener can make a significant difference in virtually every area of our lives, both at work and at home.

Do you get what I’m saying?

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For more information, visit https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-it-together/202006/active-listening-skills . Or if you’d rather listen to something on this topic, go to https://youtu.be/7wUCyjiyXdg?si=ItcgovWJSEpDai9i .

If you or someone you know needs help, call 988 for any mental health or substance use crisis.

You can also call 1-800-273-8255 for the?National Suicide Prevention Lifeline ?or?text HOME to 741-741 for support from the?Crisis Text Line . The?National Helpline for alcohol and drug abuse ?is at 1-800-662-4357. All three are free and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year.

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This piece is not intended as medical or legal advice. Always speak with your medical provider before initiating a diet or exercise regimen or if you have medical questions. If you have legal questions, consult with an attorney.

This article represents my own opinions as a non-physician and does not reflect the opinions or positions of my employer.

[1] My colleague, Alyssa Lien , pointed out to me that we also learn to listen as kids by eavesdropping and gossiping. It’s a fascinating topic, but I’ve honestly never studied it and haven’t got much to say about it. I’ve heard that Paul Harris’ book, Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others (2015), includes a review of the research on this (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674503830 ).

[2] Eliot, T.S. (1919) Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Egoist, vol.6, no. 4 (Sept. 1919) and vol. 6, no. 5 (Dec. 1919). Accessed at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent on August 1, 2024. I literally had not read that piece since around 1979, but I found it just as interesting as I did back then. It’s astonishing to me now how great an impact that one piece, and the professor’s comments on it, has had on my thinking and my life.

[3] Eye contact during conversations is highly culture specific; for example, I was trained to not interpret a lack of eye contact while listening as meaningful unless I was sure the person’s community aligned with the dominant cultural expectation around that. For instance, it’s common in many African American and Black communities for people to make eye contact while speaking but not while listening (c.f., Elliott, C. E. (2010). Cross-Cultural Communication Styles, pre-publication master’s thesis. Retrieved August 8, 2024, from https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/lpsc_wksp_2007/resources/elliott.pdf ). A more detailed analysis of cross-cultural listening is available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7195164/ (Smith-Keiling BL, Sharma A, Fagbodun SM, Chahal HK, Singleton K, Gopalakrishnan H, Paleologos KE, Brantley J, Nguyen V, Mathew M, van de Ligt AJ. Starting the Conversation: Initial Listening and Identity Approaches to Community Cultural Wellness. J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2020 Apr 10;21(1):21.1.33. doi: 10.1128/jmbe.v21i1.2073. PMID: 32431769; PMCID: PMC7195164).