How to be a good listener: my mission to learn the most important skill of all
I was very suspicious about this assignment. Kate Murphy’s new book, You’re Not Listening, suggests that many of us – absorbed in our own thoughts and dreams, occupying our little digital bubbles – have lost the ability to listen, creating an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The thesis seems inherently plausible – but why me? Are you trying to tell me something about my inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to listen?
As my editor started telling me how I might approach this piece, I began – much to the amusement of our colleagues – interrupting her. OK, maybe I do have a little problem shutting up for a few minutes to listen; a tendency to anticipate what the other person is going to say and reply before they have even had the chance to express it the way they want to. “Bad listeners are not necessarily bad people,” Murphy says in her book, but being unable or unwilling to listen is not an attractive characteristic. It’s time for a spot of re-education. Let’s hope that after a life of lecturing rather than listening, it’s not too late.
Murphy, a journalist based in Texas, is a very good listener. I can tell that even on a long-distance phone link. She engages; treats my questions seriously; studiously compliments me for taking the trouble to read her book; tries to have a proper conversation. She has what is the crucial characteristic of the good listener – curiosity. Her hero is the late oral historian Studs Terkel, who found that everyone had a great story to tell if you could be bothered to talk to them properly and listen to what they had to say.
“Everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions,” says Murphy. “If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.” This makes me think of too many tedious, failed interviews I’ve done, including one with a famous author during which I fell asleep. I’d always argued both parties were to blame – an interview is a two-way street, after all – but it looks like I have to carry the can. I just wasn’t trying hard enough to care.
“I saw a crying need to write this book,” Murphy says. “Everyone is so intent on expressing their own opinion, or they’re so distracted by technology or by their own thoughts, that it’s making us isolated, misinformed and intolerant. I wanted to raise awareness of the value and great joy of listening.” She spent two years analysing academic research on listening and interviewed numerous people who are paid to listen intensely – “spies, priests, psychotherapists, bartenders, hostage negotiators, hairdressers, air-traffic controllers, radio producers, focus group moderators”. The result is a fascinating guide to something we assume we do automatically, yet for the most part do very badly.
Murphy doesn’t claim to be a naturally good listener, but says she is a “practised” one. “Anyone can get good at it,” she argues. “The more people you talk to, the better your gut instinct. You’re able to pick up those little cues.” She says the fact we now spend so much time communicating electronically means we are losing the ability to pick up all those face-to-face cues. Without them, she explains, “you’re not going to get the full context and nuance of the conversation”.
Bad listeners may not be bad people, but Murphy says the effects of bad listening are profound.
“Anyone who has shared something personal and received a thoughtless or uncomprehending response knows how it makes your soul want to crawl back into its hiding place,” she writes. “Whether someone is confessing a misdeed, proposing an idea, sharing a dream, revealing an anxiety or recalling a significant event – that person is giving up a piece of him or herself. And if you don’t handle it with care, the person will start to edit future conversations with you, knowing: ‘I can’t be real with this person.’”
Before I talked to Murphy, I made a point of meeting Gillian Rowe, a psychotherapist based in Tunbridge Wells. I had met Rowe once before – we had a friend in common – and, as what could be called a professional listener, she agreed to discuss her approach to listening. I found our conversation strangely unnerving, and became aware of all my own tics – bursts of rapid-fire opinion, half-finished sentences, a tendency to interrupt, an inability to absorb what Rowe was saying (she practises transactional analysis, which I found really hard to grasp) while formulating my next question. All this contrasted with her measured, fluent, unhurried approach. She calmly let the conversation take its course; I felt I was constantly bending and stretching it, trying to hurry it on to some preordained end.
“To be able to really listen, you have to get rid of your own ego, your own thoughts,” says Rowe. “It’s almost impossible to do, but you’ve got to try to put all that aside.” She says that, when she works with couples, she asks them to listen to each other and then repeat what the other has just said. “That might sound like quite an easy exercise to do,” she says, “but invariably they will put their own twist on it and change it.” Ego-free, agenda-free listening is hard.
I relate my awkwardness to Murphy, contrasting my nerviness with Rowe’s placid thoughtfulness. She immediately recognises the hallmark of the professional listener. “That was something I noticed in all the really excellent listeners I interviewed,” she says. “They all had a very calm demeanour. They were very open, but they weren’t in their own heads. That can be unnerving to someone who is all over the place. It’s more comfortable if the other person isn’t listening because then you’re not responsible for what you’re saying.”
The generally accepted view is that women, having inherently more empathy than men, are better listeners. Murphy, although she admits that’s
what everyone assumes, is reluctant to accept it as a general rule. “It’s a pervasive thought and both men and women think that,” she says. “So you have to wonder if there isn’t something to it. But I’ve met women who are terrible listeners and men who are great listeners, so it really depends on the situation.”
Murphy argues that our growing failure to listen has dire political consequences because we are no longer willing to engage with our opponents’ points of view. In the US, for instance, “senators used to meet in a communal dining room where they talked to each other and were exposed to each other in a way where they could really listen, whether it was about politics or something else. They humanised each other. Now people are intent on being separate and demonising one another. It’s not just that they don’t agree. They think the other person is bad, is an evil person. You can’t start listening if you think the other person is fundamentally an idiot or a bad person.” She says you only grow when you listen to opposing viewpoints – a powerful argument for escaping from our socialmedia echo chamber.
For some, the ability to listen can be a matter of life and death, which is why every day thousands of Samaritans volunteers are on call for desperate people with an urgent need to be heard. I go to Samaritans central office at an old mill in Surrey to meet its senior learning and development officer, Lucia Capobianco, who has also done listening shifts at her local branch for more than 10 years. As with Rowe, I am immediately struck by her calm, unhurried good sense. After an hour in her company, I feel better for having met her.
Capobianco says the key to their work is making the person who has made the call feel in control. “We want them to take control of their decisions, which is why we will get them to talk about options by exploring open questions. The idea of Samaritans is not to make someone dependent on the service; we want to be able to talk to someone, to listen to them, find out what’s going on and help them to move out of that situation.”
She says volunteers are trained to avoid being drawn into a discussion of themselves – something callers sometimes try to do. All the focus will be on the caller, with open questions that gradually get to the heart of whatever is bothering them. They don’t see their role as advisers. They are a sounding board, there to listen and try to understand. “What people want is to tell you what’s going on at that moment,” says Capobianco. “They just want to put it out there. Sometimes, it just needs a small thing like saying to someone: ‘It is really crap, isn’t it? The situation you’re in is really awful; it’s horrible.’ And they feel validated because you’re the first person who has said: ‘It’s OK to feel this way.’”
Capobianco says the organisation teaches its volunteers to be active listeners – a term coined in 1957 by the US psychologists Richard Farson and Carl Rogers. Active listening is a kind of super-engaged form of listening in which the listener concentrates intently on what is being said, asks questions to add detail and summarises what they have been told. New volunteers often consider themselves to be good listeners, but they soon realise the training they are given in active listening makes them far more effective. “There is a point when the active listening kicks in and their family and friends notice they are listening differently,” says Capobianco.
In our everyday lives, we will not usually have to talk people down from desperate situations or offer counselling that lays bare deep-seated psychological issues. But we can learn from the way the pros approach listening. It’s about empathy, asking the right questions, being patient and giving people the time and space to tell their stories in the way they want to, offering odd words of encouragement, but not interrupting the flow and not feeling the need to fill every silence.
“You have to give people breathing space,” says Capobianco. “It takes a lot of courage to ring Samaritans. They may be very upset, they may present quite aggressively to start with, they may blurt everything out, and silence just calms things down, gives them a break. When they’ve got everything out, you can start to talk to them. You acknowledge their anger and say you are sorry this is happening to them, then lower your voice and say: ‘Where would you like to start?’ If someone is agitated and you start trying to come in with questions, you just make them more agitated and the conversation doesn’t work.”
Samaritans publishes a list of listening tips: show you care by making eye contact and putting your phone away; have patience; use open questions and avoid putting your own spin on what you are being told; say it back to show you’ve understood, but don’t try to impose your own instantaneous solution; have the courage to ask someone how they feel and really care about their reply.
Today, the third Monday of this challenging month, a day generally known as “Blue Monday”, Samaritans is launching a campaign, neatly called “Brew Monday”, to encourage family and friends to have a cup of tea together, talk about their lives and problems, and practise their listening skills. The organisation will even be supplying teabags at railway stations and branch events across the country for what it hopes will be a heartening, lonelinessdefying brew.
When we meet, Rowe also brings a set of listening tips, and it coincides with Samaritans’ list at many points. Show empathy – enter into the world of the other person. Concentrate. Ask open questions: “What was it like for you?” “How did you feel?” “Can you tell me more?” Reflect back the speaker’s feelings and paraphrase what they have been saying in clear, simple language. Gently ask for clarification, although, as trust develops, she says you can begin to challenge what they are saying and focus more intensely on the problem they want, sometimes very guardedly, to discuss.
Can journalists hope to listen in the way that the professionals do? I ask Simon Hattenstone, a very skilful Guardian interviewer, who last year, with Daniel Lavelle, wrote a remarkableseries on the deaths of homeless people in the UK that demanded tremendous listening skills when it came to finding out about them from family and friends.
“Liv Ullmann told me I was a really bad listener because I kept interrupting,” Hattenstone recalls. “When I was young, I used to think it was quite a cool technique; that it would make people relax by making them think I didn’t give a shit about what they were saying.” He says that back then he thought silences put people on their guard and made them too aware of what they might be about to reveal. Now, he says, he tries not to fill the silence, preferring to let the subject find their own way through it.
“The most powerful things are often when you let the silence roll,” he explains. That was especially true for the homeless deaths series, where he says it was essential to let the bereaved “have their emotions and let them think their way through” rather than impose his own agenda. A TV interview, he says, is about drama and confrontation; a print interview is about detail and getting proper answers. Like Capobianco, he says you have to “slow people down” when you talk to them because “they always want to speed up”. You have to get as much detail as you can, and clues to a person’s motivation or to the crux of an event will appear in unlikely places.
Hattenstone says there is always a danger of following your interview script so slavishly that you miss the essence of what you are being told. “Someone is answering and you’re already thinking about the next question, which is awful because you’re not listening,” he explains. “Often in the best interviews people will take you to places you completely don’t expect to go, but if you’re rigidly looking at your questions you often miss what people say. It passes you by.”
The real art of listening lies in caring, profoundly caring, about what you are being told and about the person who is telling their story. In her book, Murphy offers an encomium to the people she has interviewed during her career. “Without exception, they have expanded my worldview and increased my understanding,” she says. “Many have touched me deeply. People describe me as the type of person who can talk to anyone, but it’s really that I can listen to anyone.” Curiosity, empathy, a genuine interest in other people. The art of listening is really the art of being human.
You’re Not Listening is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99) on 23 January. To buy a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p for orders over £20, visit guardianbookshop.com or call 0203 176 3837
To be able to really listen, you have to get rid of your own ego, your own thoughts
the short-lived Independent Group for Change. Whittome had been the official candidate for a day when Boris Johnson called the 2019 election.
Whittome is from a politically engaged family: her grandparents belonged to the Communist party of India (which she stresses is different from the Communist party in Britain) and her mother quit the Labour party over the decision to amend clause IV in 1995. “I get a lot of my strength from my mum, but also the networks that we built around us,” says Whittome.
Her mother is a social-care lawyer working in local government; she got her law degree as a mature student and was out of work for five years when Whittome and her brother were young. Originally, Whittome planned to become a lawyer, too – partly due to the feeling that “I have got to provide for my family when my mother can’t” – but she dropped out of university after two years for financial reasons.
That must have been tough, I say. But she insists she loved the jobs she got instead, as a care worker and a hate-crime project worker. “When I first stood for election, I was asked by people – white, middle-class academics: ‘When are you going to get a proper job?’ And I’d say: ‘I’ve got a proper job; I’m a care worker.’ It felt like a real privilege to be let into people’s homes and facilitate their lives. For a lot of people, you’re the only person they see all day.” She snorts at the argument that young people need more real-life experience before becoming MPs, pointing out that age is no guarantee of that: “Jacob Rees-Mogg is in his 50s and he’s never changed a nappy.”
Yet it is undeniably a steep learning curve, moving from anonymous activist with the freedom to say what you like to this merciless public stage. Whittome has already triggered a kerfuffle by tweeting, when Iain Duncan Smith was knighted, that she was “thinking of the millions of people whose loved ones have been killed” by his policies. Does she really believe welfare reform directly claimed millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of lives?
“Millions isn’t necessarily an overestimation,” she says. “There were, in 2017, 130,000 people who died avoidably due to austerity.” But the study I think she is citing, which examined the years 2012 to 2017, was not about welfare policy – it was about higher-than-expected numbers of deaths, which the authors suggested (but could not prove) reflected cuts in health spending. What evidence has she for this serious accusation against the former work and pensions secretary? “Specifically on welfare policies, we don’t know how many people have died as a result of universal credit. We know that people have died due to austerity.” All right, but that is not what she tweeted.
However, Whittome’s convictions are not easily shaken. “The bigger problem is that we are talking about ‘Is it tens of thousands, is it hundreds of thousands?’ – it’s certainly not dozens – and ‘How many people do each of these people know?’, to ascertain exactly how many people are mourning and how many people have died. The fact that we’re having this conversation in the media, rather than actually dealing with the immediate issue, is sad.” To Whittome, all this is splitting hairs, yet she is operating in a world where precision matters.
Of course, Whittome is not the first new MP to walk a tightrope between the formal demands of public life and staying true to his or her roots. (She has swapped numbers with the SNP MP Mhairi Black, who was only 20 when she was elected in 2015; they plan to compare notes over a drink.) But she is clearly anxious not to cut herself off from her community, which is why she promised to take only £35,000 of her £79,468 salary and give the rest to local causes and strike funds. Her sacrifice may not have endeared her to Labour colleagues, who will be bracing themselves to justify taking their full pay. But Whittome says she did not mean to imply that politicians do not deserve the money; she just thinks that firefighters and teaching assistants deserve a rise, too – and she will take hers only when they get theirs. So is this purely a personal decision, or does she think other MPs should follow suit? “It’s a personal decision. I think it’s an important representative principle, because as Labour MPs we are workers’ representatives. I certainly don’t berate MPs for taking the full salary.”
Yet for all her determination to “rise with her class, not above it”, Whittome recognises that in some senses she has already changed. “As much as I was a working-class woman on 12 December, now I’m not,” she says. “I walk the corridors of power and I have huge responsibility to share that [power] with everyone else.”
On election night, Whittome tweeted about wanting to be “a new kind of MP”, inspired by radical women of colour. Those inspirations range from “the Squad” in the US – the hotshot progressive Democrats Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – to the late factory worker Jayaben Desai, who led the 1976 strike at the Grunwick film processing plant in north-west London. She feels particularly connected to Desai, who challenged lazy assumptions about female Indian workers: “People thought that she was a docile, subservient Asian woman and she was anything but.”
Whittome is under no illusions about what she may face in the current political climate. The day after the Brexit referendum, she was called an “effing black bitch” on the street in what is now her constituency. She does not consider the timing a coincidence. “I wasn’t the only person I know who suffered intensified abuse after Brexit,” she says. “I think Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson’s campaigns, which had very clear and overt racist undertones, legitimised the racism that already existed.” There is every chance that the abusive passerby is one of her constituents, while the man she sees as legitimising hate runs the country.
The lesson she takes from Corbyn’s crushing defeat last month is not that the party was too leftwing or too proremain, but that it didn’t make its case early enough, either for a second Brexit referendum or for policies such as free broadband. “The individual policies of the manifesto were popular, but there were just so many of them and we hadn’t built support,” Whittome says. She is passionate about tackling the climate crisis and would rather have seen the promise of 1m new green jobs take centre stage: “I think what should have been a climate election was taken over by a Brexit election.”
Whittome nominated Clive Lewis to replace Corbyn as Labour leader – Lewis dropped out last week after failing to get enough nominations from Labour MPs and MEPs – and Dawn Butler for deputy. It worries her that BAME candidates such as Lewis, Butler and Rosena Allin-Khan had to plead for help getting on the ballot, while Lisa Nandy initially lagged behind the frontrunners; she remembers wanting to back Rushanara Ali for deputy in 2015 and not getting the chance because Ali could not get enough nominations. Why does she think this keeps happening? She says she has faith in her parliamentary colleagues, but adds: “I think we need to interrogate our unconscious biases … we’re lawmakers, and it’s our responsibility to interrogate our privilege and to use the immense power that we have to amplify the voices of people who don’t get heard.”
She is concerned, too, about calls for Labour to win back white, workingclass voters by taking a tougher line on issues such as immigration. “That’s why I wanted Clive on the ballot. I don’t want to be back in a PLP [parliamentary Labour party] meeting in five years’ time, talking about losing and winning back our heartlands, but we are talking now about different heartlands: Brixton, Nottingham, Liverpool.” Her city seat is a traditional Labour stronghold, she points out, but one with many more black voters than the towns where Labour lost. “I want to hear from candidates and activists in those places about what needs to change. But I’m also clear that we can’t just follow the conversation with immigration – we need to lead it, too. We need to make arguments for immigrants that aren’t just about people’s economic value, because the continuation of that is: when they are no longer of any economic value, they’re not welcome here.”
The generational divide on the left between those comfortable with so-called identity politics and those occasionally confounded by it feels very clear talking to Whittome. Her politics is intersectional, deftly navigating the prickly places where race, class and other sources of discrimination collide; she expresses sympathy with the Duchess of Sussex’s battle for acceptance in Britain, but she adds that liberation is not only about women at the top: “Even if all the top business leaders were women of colour, that wouldn’t make one jot of difference while lower-paid women of colour were being paid less than £10 an hour for cleaning on zero-hours contracts.”
Yet this wariness of privilege in any form may not always sit easily with acquiring political power. When a cabbie asked recently if this was her dream job, she hesitated: “I thought: ‘Actually, I don’t think my generation dreams the way that the older generation really did.’ Our dreams are a lot more shortterm: they’re things like moving out of the family home, getting a job – any job, really. These are the struggles that occupy a lot of our thinking. That and the fact that we won’t have a planet to live on if we don’t take drastic action. That’s my experience growing up in Nottingham – that we don’t live in a society where we can afford to dream.” Whittome can dream bigger now, but it may take her a while to get used to that.
What should have been a climate election was taken over by Brexit