Believe me, you are not listening!
- self-development
- book
- communication
Introduction
We live in a world where everyone wants to be heard, but few take the time to truly listen. In You Are Not Listening, journalist Kate Murphy reveals how poor listening habits are ruining our relationships, careers, and more complicated things like government or even our sense of self. If you’re serious about mastering communication skills, this book is a game-changer!
Why This Book Matters
Most people assume they are good listeners, but Murphy proves otherwise. Through interviews with experts, scientific research, and real-life examples, she uncovers how modern society has lost the art of listening. The book challenges us to recognise our own improvement points and take action.
How This Book Can Help You Master Communication
If you’re eager to enhance your communication skills and build stronger relationships, You Are Not Listening is an essential read. I truly believe that this book should be part of hight school or university program. It not only explains why listening is crucial but also provides practical techniques to become a better communicator. To involve you into reading, I’d like to share the most insightful pieces from this book.
The next 10 minutes can be the most impactful time of your day, so I insist you don’t skip it! But believe me, you’ll have a 10 times more if you’d decide to read the whole book afterwards!
Insights
”Listening, in theory, could end up wars and conflicts. Listening is a essential skill. Nowadays a rare skill. Without active listening people feel lonely even being with people face-to-face; The way around, listening to people and communicate effectively could lead to deep and unexpected pleasurable(pleasing) conversations.”
”The inability to listen creates a huge communication gap between society. Politicians, media, higher echelons and community.”
“Television journalists and commentators prefer to quote from Twitter and Facebook rather than going out and getting quotes that come from actual people’s mouths. That’s how listening is done in the 21st century by the press, politicians, lobbyists, activists, and business interests”
”In a culture infused with existential angst(a feeling of persistent worry) and aggressive personal marketing, to be silent is seemed to mean to fall behind. But it’s actually not!”
“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!”
“If you’re barely listening to someone because you think that person is boring or not worth your time, you will actually make it so.”
“You already know about you. You don’t know about the person with whom you are speaking or what you can learn from that person’s experience.”
“McDonald’s and Starbucks are testaments to how much humans crave sameness. Their success relies largely on the fact that you can go into any location, anywhere in the world, and get an identical Big Mac or Frappuccino.”
“Peppering people with appraising and personal questions like “What do you do for a living?” or “What part of town do you live in?” or “What school did you go to?” or “Are you married?” is interrogating. You’re not trying to get to know them.”
“Instead, they might have started out by talking about the commute or maybe noticing someone’s Chicago Cubs ball cap, asking if the person ever goes to games—listening and letting the conversation build organically.”
“While you might think you’d be more likely to listen to a loved one than a stranger, in fact, the opposite is often true. It’s a phenomenon psychologist Judith Coche knows all too well.”
“Bishop Flores believes that expecting complete understanding is the root of many troubled relationships……”
“What happens is we meet someone who fits into one of our mental rubrics—maybe it has to do with gender, race, sexual preference, religion, profession, or appearance—and we immediately think we know them or at least certain aspects of them.
It’s a reflexive mental tendency that gives you the illusion of understanding and, hence, lessens your curiosity and motivation to listen.
Without realizing it, you start listening selectively, hearing only what fits your preconceived notions. Or you might even behave in ways that get me to confirm your expectations.”
“Your dog can “listen” to you. Siri or Alexa can “listen” to you. But ultimately, talking to your dog, Siri, or Alexa will prove unsatisfying because they won’t respond in a thoughtful, feeling way, which is the measure of a good listener.”
“The world is easier to navigate if you remember that people are governed by emotions, acting more often out of jealousy, pride, shame, desire, fear, or vanity than dispassionate logic. We act and react because we feel something.”
“If people seem simple and devoid of feeling, that only means you don’t know them well enough.
J. Pierpont Morgan said, “A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.”
“It requires a certain generosity of spirit, but if you remain open to the possibility that you might be wrong, or at least not entirely right, you’ll get far more out of the conversation.”
“One of her greatest talents is asking questions that don’t rob people of their stories.”
“Salganik said: “Algorithms aspire to make guesses that will be as accurate as possible. They don’t aspire to understand.” “
“For Naomi, the hardest thing about listening is resisting the urge to insert her point of view instead of just taking in what people have to say. That’s an advantage of purely quantitative approaches—when you know nothing but the numbers, your ego and beliefs are less likely to influence the results.”
“The real secret to listening I’ve learned is that it’s not about me,” Naomi said at one point. “I’m holding my cup out in front of me. I want them to fill my cup and not pour anything in their cup.”
“Instead of thinking, ‘This person is a jerk and out for themselves,’ I think, ‘Oh, man, this person is really struggling to be seen.’” In her experience, it all boils down to insecurity. “Their concern is they are not enough,” she said. “So they will use whatever tactics they think will work for them.” The most common tactics are showing off, withdrawing into a corner, or sometimes even getting hostile when others don’t think they are funny—“What’s wrong with you? Don’t you get it?”
“To be successful at improvisational comedy and also the improvisation that is your real life, listening is critical. Controlling the narrative and grabbing for attention make for one-sided conversations and kill collaboration.”
“To have an inside joke, to be able to make someone smile even when that person is mad at you, to have license to let down your guard and be silly, requires the investment of listening. You have to listen to them long enough to be able to repeat back something they said and put a funny twist on it and also to know what the lines are that you’d better not cross,”
“Those who preempt, dominate, or otherwise curb the conversation are unlikely to succeed in their careers, much less have fulfilling personal relationships. Intimacy, innovative thinking, teamwork, and humor all come to those who free themselves from the need to control the narrative and have the patience and confidence to follow the story wherever it leads.”
“You can’t be good at detecting intricate cues in conversation if you haven’t listened to a lot of people. It is said that intuition, often called the sixth sense, is nothing more than recognition”
“A good listener has the ability to elicit more than superficial or anxious chatter so people reveal more of who they really are.”
“English is one of the easiest languages to misunderstand even if you’re a native speaker.”
“Cultivating self-awareness is a matter of paying attention to your emotions while in conversation and recognizing when your fears and sensitivities—or perhaps your desires and dreams—hijack your ability to listen well.”
“You can only be as intimate with another person as you are with yourself.”
“The research suggests that the more people you listen to in the course of your life, the more sides to an issue you can argue in your head and the more solutions you can imagine.”
“How you talk to yourself affects how you hear other people. For example, someone who has a critical inner voice will hear someone else’s words very differently than someone whose inner voice tends to blame others. It’s all your fault versus It’s all their fault. In other words, our inner dialogue influences and distorts what other people say and thus how we behave in relationships.”
“Good questions don’t begin with: “Don’t you think…?” “Isn’t it true…?” “Wouldn’t you agree…?” And good questions definitely don’t end with “right?” These are actually camouflaged shift responses and will likely lead others to give incomplete or less-than-honest answers that fit the questioner’s opinions and expectations.”
“I’m not sure I’m a better listener than anyone else, but if I hear something I don’t understand, I ask about it.”
“Researchers at Vanderbilt University discovered that when mothers just listened, providing no assistance or critique, while their children explained the solutions to pattern recognition problems, it markedly improved the children’s later problem-solving ability—more so than if the children had explained the solution to themselves or repeated the solution over and over in their heads.”
“It’s an argument for listening to as many sources as possible to keep your brain as agile as possible.”
“Naomi Henderson, the focus group moderator, told me she’s noticed that when people tilt their heads to the right so their left ear is up, it usually signals that they are tapping into more emotional parts of themselves”
“One of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“To be a good listener is to accept pauses and silences because filling them too soon, much less preemptively, prevents the speaker from communicating what they are perhaps struggling to say.”
“Regret is the second-most common emotional state, after love, she said, and the two feelings are intertwined since the most intense regret comes from neglecting those we love. Relationships most often fail due to neglect,”
“Grice summarized our conversational expectations in four maxims:
Maxim of Quality—we expect the truth. Maxim of Quantity—we expect to get information we don’t already know and not so much that we feel overwhelmed. Maxim of Relation—we expect relevance and logical flow. Maxim of Manner—we expect the speaker to be reasonably brief, orderly, and unambiguous.”
“Or the person could just be a jerk. People rarely are, though. Their self-centered conversational style more often speaks to deep insecurities, anxieties, or blind spots. Sometimes just by listening, they begin to listen, too—not only to you but also to themselves.”
“We can readily accept the fact that we can be wrong,” the Polish-born social psychologist Robert Zajonc wrote, “but we are never wrong about what we like or dislike.” Better to listen to how people feel than try to convince them to feel differently. You can’t argue your way into affection, but truly listening is the surest way to form a bond.”
“When we are too busy to listen, when we look at our phones, jump in too soon with our opinions, or make assumptions, we prevent others’ thoughts and emotions from being genuinely expressed. And we end up hollow or emptier than we would be otherwise”
“But listening is no easy task. Our magnificent brains race along faster than others can speak, making us easily distracted. We overestimate what we already know and, mired in our arrogance, remain unaware of all we misunderstand. We also fear that if we listen too carefully, we might discover that our thinking is flawed or that another person’s emotions might be too much to bear.”
“Careful listening is draining, regardless of your personality, aptitude, or motivation. You can’t do it continuously.”
“Part of being a good listener is knowing your limits and setting boundaries.”
“The power of the listener is that you get to decide how much effort you want to put in and when you’ve had enough.”
“There are also times when you have to admit that, try as you might, you can’t get on someone’s wavelength. It could be that something inside you is preventing you from listening, or it could be that the other person doesn’t want to be heard and is being withholding. Or it could be the person is just toxic. These are people who, whenever you listen to them, you feel depressed, diminished, or distressed. You can’t listen someone out of being abusive or cruel.”
“To be a good listener does not mean you must suffer fools gladly, or indefinitely, but rather helps you more easily identify fools and makes you wise to their foolishness. And perhaps most important, listening keeps you from being the fool yourself.”
“While people often say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.”
…….
That’s it for now. How do you feel?
Take your time, make your self a tea or coffee and stay with your thoughts for some time, what you just read surely worth it!
And when you feel ready, let Kate tell you the whole story and explain why “You’re Not Listening”……