You're Not Listening

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.

The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.

Take first introductions. We often miss what people are saying—including their names—because we are distracted sizing them up, thinking about how we are coming across and what we are going to say. Not so when you meet a dog, which is why you can more easily remember a dog’s name than its owner’s.

Charles Reagan Wilson, an emeritus professor of history and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi, recalled asking the short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty why the South produced so many great writers. “Honey,” she said, “we didn’t have anything else to do but sit on the porch and talk, and some of us wrote it down.”

The power of qualitative research—the power of listening—is that it explains the numbers and possibly reveals how the numbers come up short. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches may not get you the whole truth, Naomi said, but you will get a “truer truth.”

Research suggests that after people listen regularly to faster-paced speech, they have great difficulty maintaining their attention when addressed by someone who is talking normally—sort of like the feeling you get when you come off an expressway and have to go through a school zone.

“If you can bear to do it for just twenty-four hours, you will learn to be a better listener,” she said. “You will learn the unimportance of your words and the importance of other people’s words.”

Instead, Naomi turned her question into an invitation: “Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.” A quiet, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand. “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois—me, Ben, and Jerry,” she said. Insights like that are why people hire Naomi.

Research shows that being able to comfortably sit in silence is actually a sign of a secure relationship. Higher-status people also aren’t as likely to get agitated by gaps in conversation, presumably because they are more secure in their position.