Listening Just Isn't Enough

“Am I being heard?”

Valerie Cherish is Lisa Kudrow’s lovably self-centered protagonist on The Comeback. Throughout the show, she demands to be heard, with varying degrees of success.

I think we can all relate to Valerie, even if just a little. When we speak, we want people to listen.

But what Valerie is begging for isn’t simply to be listened to; she wants to be understood. And the distinction matters.

There’s a growing self-help industry promising to help you become a better listener. Most people already think they are good listeners, and yet, most people report that others don’t listen well enough to them. That’s a disconnect worth pondering. Perhaps spending all this time trying to get people to listen hasn’t been time well spent. Sorry, Valerie.

Listening Versus Understanding

Clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Brown University Yael Schonbrun has a new book, Why Don’t You Understand Me?, that explores the deeply ingrained need to be understood. Sure, listening is a part of understanding, but Schonbrun’s book makes it quite clear that it’s just not enough.

First, it’s important to understand (see what I did there?) that it is impossible to fully understand another person. We can never read their minds or experience what consciousness is like for them. This sets up an important obstacle when it comes to understanding one another: On one level, we just can’t.

But it’s not necessarily successful understanding that we’re after. Schonbrun explains that others trying to understand us is what we’re actually after. To make someone feel like you’re trying to understand them means you’re not making assumptions. You’re not assuming their experience is similar to yours. Instead, you’re leading with humility and curiosity. This person is different from me, and I genuinely want to know more about their perspective.

That means asking questions and sincerely wanting to know the answers. It means allowing their point of view to be different from yours.

If I can never get inside your head, the least I can do is let you be the one to explain what’s going on in there.

So How Do We Try to Understand Each Other?

1. Stop Talking. Step one in understanding is to stop talking. You cannot understand someone else if you are filling all the audio space with your noise words.

2. Reflect and Get Curious. Instead of asking questions just to ask and instead of making assumptions, understanding requires us to do some reflection first. Set an intention to try to get to the bottom of what makes the other person tick.

3. Ask Questions. Because you can’t know what’s in their head, you probably have some questions to ask to begin to hear the other person’s version of things. So do that. Ask open-ended questions. Then, ask some more. Still no assumption-making. Still no noise words from you.

4. Listen, but Like, Really Listen. Let the other person’s perspective really hit you. That means you can’t be thinking about what you’re going to ask next or judging them as they're explaining. Dig deep, and listen without an agenda, without assumptions, without judgment, without scripting the rest of the interaction.

Understanding Starts With You

Listening is a part of understanding, but it requires more of us. It requires us to drop our preconceived ideas and let conversations unfold. It requires us to be humble, to be curious, to not have all the answers, to not always land on solutions.

Life is messy. And we end up on an island when we don’t strive for understanding. You see, that’s the real trick with understanding: When we try our best to understand others, we are better understood in turn.

So stop waiting for others to understand you, and start trying to understand others. It just might save you from some Valerie Cherish-esque misunderstandings.

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