4.4 Becoming A Better Listener

The math is simple: you are going to spend more of your life listening than talking. This is certainly true for students: giving speeches and presentations is important, as is contributing to group discussions, but you will probably spend the majority of your time listening to teachers and fellow students. This chapter began with the argument that we could all use some help becoming better at that practice, though, so let’s end by looking at ways to improve your listening skills. I’ll divide the discussion into two domains: the classroom, and conversations with friends and family.

The Classroom: Taking Notes

Some students, I’ve noticed, sit in class without taking any notes — even if the teacher does not post their lecture materials. When I was a student, I was the opposite, taking notes as much as possible, and it’s a habit I’ve maintained. As a result, I have piles of pads with notes on talks I attended or videos I watched, some of which I’ve never gone back and looked at again. Your style may vary. The central question is: what helps you listen best? For some people, listening attentively can be better than worrying about writing things down (just as some people at a concert prefer to take it all in rather than make recordings they’ll never listen to again). If you are a note-taker, what is the best way to do it?

The research is rather surprising. An article in Scientific American by Cindi May, citing research by Pam Meuller and David Oppenheimer, advised students “Don’t take notes with a laptop.” This runs counter to the common perception that taking as many notes as possible is the ideal, and if you can type 100 words per minute, you’re ahead of the game. Mueller and Oppenheimer divided students into two groups: those who took typed notes, and those who used the much slower and less efficient “old school” method of writing notes longhand. The longhand writers, it turns out, learned much more; the students weren’t able to keep up with everything, so they had to be more judicious in what they wrote down. In May’s words,

taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy ‘mental lifting,’ and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing, students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow them to transcribe a lecture word-for-word without devoting much thought to the content.

The students who learned the least were the ones who downloaded the instructor’s slides and just stared at them. Why? Because that required the least mental work. It’s the difference between typing and listening.

This underscores an odd point about learning: learning is, by nature, an inefficient process, and efforts to make it more efficient can produce the opposite effect. In The Matrix, Neo is hooked up to electrodes and a few minutes later proudly announces “I know kung fu!” Outside of sci-fi movies, it doesn’t work that way; the more instantaneous the learning, the less effective it is. Instead, making conscious mental choices and being active are better than any form of downloading.

What are good note-taking practices? Listen for the point before writing something down. Think about whether exact wording matters, and if not, phrase things in whatever shorthand works for you. Use as many abbreviations as you can (as a communication student, I devised abbreviations for “communication,” “language,” “theory” and “relationships”). Finally, decide whether writing down examples help you understand and remember concepts, and if not, don’t bother with them. If you aren’t confident that you understand everything by the time test day is close, do what only a small number of students actually do: ask questions!

Conversations with Friends and Family

The context and purpose may vary: a close friend wants to open up about something that’s weighing heavily on their mind; a parent wants to give you a lesson on filing your taxes; your obnoxious cousin wants to bend your ear about their political views, which differ sharply from yours. In each of these scenarios, specific listening techniques may vary, but the principles remain the same. You can distinguish between types or degrees of listening:

Passive Listening: The most basic technique is extremely simple — keep your mouth shut and just hear what the speaker says. This may leave them wondering if you are absorbing what they’re saying, and whether you agree with it or not. Not giving them any indications of either factor can leave them frustrated, and leave you tempted to not actually listen but just put on a good show. To give the speaker some reassurance that you’re listening, you can use obvious techniques such as nodding your head at the right moments, or giving verbal reassurances such as “Right,” or “Mm-hm.” The problem with both of those techniques, of course, is that they are also used to indicate agreement, and you might not agree at all. This, in turn, might make you want to avoid giving such indications. And it’s difficult to let someone go on about things that you think are objectionable. In other words, while this might seem like the easiest form of listening, that isn’t always the case.

Parroting: To let the speaker know that you are listening, a simple technique is to just repeat back to them what they have said, in their own words. This can be obvious and possibly annoying, but it’s an improvement over passive listening.

Active Listening: This form of listening is characterized by the listener rephrasing the speaker’s comments in their own words. This takes mental work, so it gives the speaker a better sense that you’re thinking about what they’re saying. If you’re not getting it exactly right, this can lead to the “Lego exercise” kind of conversation described in Chapter 1.

Active Listening + Probing: There have been many times in my life when I was listening to someone express an opinion that I thought was ridiculous, but knew that “calling them out” and explaining why they were wrong wouldn’t help much. Funny thing: people don’t like being told they are stupid, and they tend to stop listening when you do that to them. What’s the alternative?

Here’s a habit that I have developed over the years, which at first took a lot of conscious effort but has become more natural, and has paid off in many ways. Instead of saying “Where’d you get that bone-headed opinion?”, I now say “I hear you saying X; tell me more about that.” It requires some humility, but if you actually want to open your mind and hear about views different from your own, I know of no better way. As a bonus, you may make unusual friends.

Of course, none of these techniques prevent you from expressing your own opinions, but timing matters: the most important listening technique of all is to let the other person speak their mind in an uninterrupted turn. Hopefully you’ll get your turn later, but interrupting is the opposite of a good listening technique.