‘Why do we find it so difficult to listen?’ It was a question asked by an old friend two weeks ago. She wrote it in response to my piece about psychotherapist Gwen Adshead’s book, The Devil We Know.
Of course, listening to someone else can be fascinating – and easy! And here’s why - when people meet our needs in conversations, when they talk about something we’re interested in, when their words answer the questions we have about whatever, or whoever they are talking about. When they don’t ‘drone on’, when they demonstrate some sort of awareness of us as listeners, when they exhibit self-awareness and humour. People are easy to listen to when they recognise that conversation is a two-way process and show at least some interest in us and not only in what they want to talk about.
But those kinds of speakers are few and far between! So what about the others?
At one level, the basic rules of effective (sometimes called ‘active’) listening are fairly simple to learn: be aware of your body language, sit still, give the speaker eye contact, nod or offer a ‘hmm’ at appropriate moments, don’t interrupt.
Sounds easy enough! But as our friend recognised, it is often so difficult – why?
On a physical level there are various barriers to good listening. The listener, we are told, can hear 200-250 words a minute. But the words in the listener’s mind are going at about 1000 words a minute. We think four times faster than someone can speak! So to listen well we must somehow slow down or ignore or clear the noise in our heads and pay attention to what someone else is saying.
And the noise in our heads proceeds on multiple levels! To listen well we must turn our minds away from our own preoccupations, from our worries and aspirations, from our drive to get the next email written, the next job done, the next rung climbed on some ladder of our own choosing. To listen well means deliberately choosing a different kind of focus.
To listen well in a social situation, we must turn our attention perhaps from the room around us where there may be food or drinks to be tasted, or speakers so much more interesting or socially attractive than the one we are with. To listen well, we must stop thinking about our own emotional concerns, our backpain, our hunger or thirst or tiredness. It’s a tall order and perhaps it's amazing we ever hear what anyone else says!
If we can manage to put the mute button on all our internal noise and actually concentrate on what someone else is saying, a whole lot more barriers arise. First – boredom! The talk may be all about the speaker and their life and goals or some other world of ideas in which we are not naturally interested. In some cases they may be telling us what we already know or what we don’t need to know or even what we don’t want to hear. They may be expressing dogmatic opinions with which we mildly or wildly disagree. They may express certainties which make us question our own; or describing experiences which remind us of experiences in our own lives which we don’t want to think about. They may well have priorities that are completely different from ours.
Probably the most difficult place to be a good listener is in the family. After all, we tend to think, we know where this ‘conversation’ is going, we’ve heard it all before, we quickly become bored. We concentrate on creating our responses, our ‘answers’, our ‘fixes’, our understandings of the way the speaker’s mind or behaviour works, especially if they are younger and less experienced in the world than we are. Offering respect and genuine curiosity about what it means to be inside the head of those we love can bring a gentle and gradual end to arguments and damaged relationships.
All of this raises the challenging question, ‘How genuinely interested are we in people different from ourselves?’ Finding the answer means growing in self-awareness. It is the work of a lifetime!
If you really want to examine your own listening skills, try this exercise:
Sit with someone you trust and take five minutes each way to listen to each other without saying a word followed by more time spent reflecting on the process of talking and listening.
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