How to listen
It often feels like I understand enough to be helpful without knowing all those details. But when I think that, I’m usually wrong: I end up giving bad advice, based on bad assumptions, and the person I’m talking to ends up having to do a bunch of work to argue with me and correct my bad assumptions. That makes the conversation feel disfluent and adversarial instead of collaborative.
Exactly me.
It turns out this is a really common failure mode of helping-conversations, which is what I think generates the old saw at the beginning of this post, that “sometimes people don’t want help, just to be listened to.”
But I think that’s actually too nice to the helper, and uncharitable to the complainer (in that it assumes they weirdly don’t caring about solving their problem). What’s really going on is probably that your advice is bad, because you didn’t really listen, because you weren’t curious enough.
So the right advice isn’t “listen harder and repeat everything back”—you won’t be genuine if you’re just imitating the surface appearance of a good listener. Instead, be humble and get curious! Remind yourself that there’s a ton of detail behind whatever you’re hearing, and try to internalize all of it that you can.
When a friend says, “I’m furious with my husband. He’s never around when I need him,” that one sentence has a huge amount underneath. How often does she need him? What does she need him for? Why isn’t he around? Have they talked about it? If so, what did he say? If not, why not?
Matt Goldenberg:
I think that curiosity is a necessary, but not sufficient generator here. It also requires a deeply internalized felt sense of how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each-other.
If you have a deep curiosity, but not that understanding, you’ll tend to want to ask elaboration questions—Why, what, how? You’ll tend to miss the very basic step of checking to make sure the thing you heard was actually the thing said.
The “reflecting what they said back to them” doesn’t just cargo cult the idea of letting people feel understood, but it importantly mimics the behavior of someone who doesn’t know if they understood at all.
So the right advice isn’t “listen harder and repeat everything back”—you won’t be genuine if you’re just imitating the surface appearance of a good listener. Instead, be humble and get curious! Remind yourself that there’s a ton of detail behind whatever you’re hearing, and try to internalize all of it that you can. Once you’ve done that, your advice will be more likely hit the mark, and you’ll be able to communicate it clearly.
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The central lesson is that there is a core generator of good listening,, and if you can tap into your curiosity about the other person’s perspective, this both automatically makes you take actions that come off as good listening,
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I think that curiosity is a necessary, but not sufficient generator here. It also requires a deeply internalized felt sense of how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each-other.
If you have a deep curiosity, but not that understanding, you’ll tend to want to ask elaboration questions—Why, what, how? You’ll tend to miss the very basic step of checking to make sure the thing you heard was actually the thing said.
The “reflecting what they said back to them” doesn’t just cargo cult the idea of letting people feel understood, but it importantly mimics the behavior of someone who doesn’t know if they understood at all. It’s not just a chance for validation of someone’s feelings and beliefs, but also a chance to correct any misunderstandings of those feelings and beliefs.
www.greaterwrong.com/posts/4K5pJnKBGkqqTbyxx/to-listen-well-get-curious
One of the nicest things anyone’s done in conversation with me is say “hold on, I need a few minutes to think about that,” actually go off and think for several minutes, and then come back to the conversation with an integrated perspective. I felt deeply respected as a mind.
People who don’t appreciate this sort of thing aren’t trying to make themselves understood about something surprising, so I expect that by your values you should care less about making them happy to talk with you, except as a way of getting something else from them.
www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d9CcQ24ukbL8WcMpB/how-to-always-have-interesting-conversations