Book Report: You’re Not Listening
What You’re Missing and Why It Matters
Once in a while I come across a book that feels like a gift. As if it was laid in my path with intention - the universe saying “here, this is what you need.” When I began reading You’re Not Listening, it felt kind of like that. Because here is a book that confirms so much that I’ve known to be true about the power and challenge of listening. Not only that, but Kate Murphy has taken the time to find all the science and research to back up these claims I’ve been making for so long based on theory and anecdotal experience.
In a nutshell, Murphy asserts that listening is hard and listening is important. I couldn’t agree more. Based on the science and our lived experience, Murphy writes that “…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. And so we retreat into our own heads, talk over one another, or reach for our phone” (pg 222).
When we approach active listening as a compulsory task, we miss the point. Because “listening is more of a mind-set than a checklist of dos and don’t s” (pg. 22). It’s more effective to approach listening as a meditative practice (pg. 73).
Besides reorienting our approach to listening, good listening takes some advanced cognitive functioning: “Good listeners have negative capability. They are able to cope with contradictory ideas and gray areas. Good listeners know there is usually more to the story than first appears and are not so eager for tidy reasoning and immediate answers, which is perhaps the opposite to being narrow-minded. …In the psychological literature, negative capability is known as cognitive complexity, which research shows is positively related to self-compassion and negatively related to dogmatism. Because they are able to listen without anxiety and are open to hearing all sides, people who are more cognitively complex are better able to store, retrieve, organize, and generate information…” (pg. 87).
This is a longer way of saying something I’ve believed for a long time, which is that the best mediators are those who are comfortable with ambiguity. I didn’t make that idea up, I heard someone else say that, but can’t for the life of me remember the source. (If you know, please let me know!)
There’s so much in this book that supports the practice of mediation based on close active listening and commitment to party self-determination. Here’s an example: “Again, the solutions to problems are often already within people, and just by listening, you help them access how best to handle things, now and also in the future” (pg. 148). Doesn’t that sound exactly like the principle of self-determination?!?! This passage goes on with some science to back up the claim: “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. Previous research has shown that adults provided with an attentive listener gave more detailed solutions with more alternative ideas and better justifications than solutions generated in isolation” (pg. 148).
There is one section of the book that I had more trouble with. Apparently there is quite a bit of research pointing to the positive nature of gossip. Murphy outlines the research and points out the conclusion that gossip has an overall positive impact on social behavior. I have a hard time swallowing this because I have been a victim of malicious gossip and have also witnessed other negative effects of gossip. But I am aware of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, meaning that we have a tendency to filter information and focus only on the facts that reinforce our beliefs. So I’m working on accepting the premise that gossip can be good.
Overall I am so excited about this book and have been recommending it to all of my students. If you are looking for an easy non-fiction read, I would totally recommend checking this one out. And let me know what you think!