On Listening

Last semester, when Harvard inaugurated a new University President, there was a huge ceremony held in his honor in the Yard. Among the several long speeches expressing well wishes and good luck for incoming President Bacow that were given at this event, there was one speech, from Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, that especially stood out to me.

Governor Baker talked about the importance of being a good listener. He shared how, as a child, he and his family would often have long debates around the dinner table on a multitude of topics. His parents encouraged disagreement and diversity of ideas at these family debates, but they had one golden rule: if you talked over someone or were otherwise disrespectful, you had to sit in silence and let everyone else share their ideas first before it would be your turn to speak again. The purpose of this rule, Governor Baker explained, was to teach him and his siblings to value good listening over good speaking.

The speech really resonated with me because good listening is something I personally value a lot, too. When I think about people I feel most comfortable around, I think of individuals who let me talk about what’s on my mind uninterrupted, ask me reflective questions about what I’m saying, and remember what I tell them the next time we talk. These people leave me feeling appreciated after every conversation because they make an effort to demonstrate that they truly care about what I have to say. They’re people I try to emulate, as I work on being a more consistent good listener myself.

Unfortunately, good listeners are not always easy to come by. In his speech, Governor Baker attributed today’s polarized political climate to the presence of too many good talkers, without enough good listeners, in government. Even on a smaller scale, though, we all know people in our daily lives who are bad at listening. People who keep checking their phone while you’re saying something. People who strike up a conversation with you on the way to class, only to interrupt you every five seconds as they go out of their way to say hi to everyone they know who passes by. People with whom you have to speak in eight-word-or-less sentences because you know they’ll zone out or interrupt you by the ninth. We all know these kinds of people and, whether we intend to or not, we all are these kinds of people sometimes, too.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it really means to be a good listener—whether I am a good listener myself and what I can do to improve. I’ve been fortunate in college to have had several experiences that have helped me learn and grow in this respect.

In November, my EMS organization participated in a listening workshop led by one of the peer counseling groups on campus. The purpose of the workshop was to develop habits that would allow us, as healthcare providers, to take a step back and really listen to what our patients are telling us, instead of jumping right in with diagnostics and procedures as EMS providers are wont to do. The workshop began with an interesting activity. We broke up into pairs and one partner, with his eyes closed, had to talk about whatever was on his mind for two minutes, while the other partner, whose eyes remained open, had to listen silently.

The activity highlighted the difference between appearing to listen and truly listening. As the listener, I wanted so many times during the two minutes to chime in with a reaffirming “uh-huh” or an understanding head nod. It was almost as if I needed these tricks to prove that I was really listening to every word. Ironically, though, I think I actually understood what my partner was saying better when I sat silently, perhaps because in the back of my mind I wasn’t constantly planning how I would respond; instead, I was reflecting more deeply on what I was hearing.

At the workshop, I also became more aware of how my responses may impact a person’s perception of whether I was listening or not. It’s easy to respond to a long story by immediately comparing it to one of your own personal experiences. I know I do it all the time when I start a response with, “Yeah I know how you feel! When x happened to me, I…” We usually say this with good intentions, often to try to demonstrate sympathy for the speaker. Unfortunately, it can sometimes have the opposite effect of making the other person feel like you weren’t listening—as if the entire time you were just thinking about your own experience instead of theirs. Sometimes, the speaker may even feel like you think their experience is less important or legitimate than yours, especially if what you share is more dramatic or extreme than their original story.

I think the biggest lesson I took away from the workshop was that active listening is supposed to look passive. It’s okay—and sometimes even better—to silently take in what someone is saying instead of throwing in a perfectly timed “mhhm” at the end of each of their sentences. It’s more helpful sometimes to respond with an open-ended question or even just a “I recognize that this experience was difficult for you” than to try to generate your own example of a time you felt somewhat like the other person does now.

The skills I learned in the workshop were applicable to more than just EMS. I work on my listening skills a lot as a tutor, too. Especially at the beginning of a semester, frazzled students will sometimes begin a tutoring session by trying to explain every problem they have all in the first five minutes of the conference. I used to think it was better to just interrupt the students before they got too far, so that I could introduce a bit more structure to the conference early on, take the problems one-by-one, and avoid wasting time. Eventually, however, I realized, that maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to just let students take those full five minutes to release all their frustrations. The students are often not looking for me to immediately solve all the problems they mention; they just want someone to listen to and empathize with their stress. Now, I try to give students as much time as they need to share whatever they want. I take diligent notes as they talk so I can circle back to the relevant portions later, but I don’t interrupt. Taking this moment to listen often helps build trust with the student and, hopefully, makes them feel a bit more like their concerns are being appreciated.

Listening well is especially difficult, however, when the ideas you hear conflict with your own core beliefs. About a year ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Israel with Harvard Hillel. After the main ten days of the program, one of the Hillel coordinators organized an optional 5 day extension program for students to learn more about modern geopolitics. The first day of the extension started off with a trip to the West Bank to speak with Palestinian activists about their experiences with Israel. As you can imagine, the narratives we heard here were a lot different from the ones most of us grew up hearing in our Jewish communities back home.

An invaluable piece of advice one of the trip directors gave us on our first day was to really try to convince ourselves of the point of view of every presenter we met instead of immediately pushing off their ideas as incorrect because they are different from our own. It’s a lot harder to do than it sounds, but it’s a technique I’ve been trying to work on more ever since the trip. When I do remind myself to take a step back and really understand an idea from someone else’s point of view, I find that it makes difficult conversations go a little more smoothly. This is true for debates in class, disagreements with coworkers, and even interpersonal conflicts with friends.

Being more compassionate and careful listeners is something we can all work on. It’s a natural urge to want to share your opinions with others and have the loudest voice in a room. It’s what we learn to do in school, after all, when we’re graded on how many holes we can poke in an author’s argument or how many times we can participate in an in-class discussion. But true generation of creative and worthwhile ideas comes from first listening to others, then thinking. When we ignore this first step and fail to listen, we miss out on one more opportunity for learning and growth.