We Talk Too Much, and Few of Us Were Ever Taught to Listen
Friends take turns talking, and no famous book teaches listening.
The School of Life · Being A Good ListenerIn a talk on listening, the speaker starts with a kind explanation. Hearing others well matters enormously, yet, in his account, only a small share of us have learned how, not from bad character but from lack of teaching. He adds that no one has ever really listened to us.
So, the speaker argues, "we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen" and are "hungry to meet others but reluctant to hear them." His summary is, "friendship degenerates into a socialized egoism." My reading is that he means we take turns performing rather than hearing each other.
As his illustration, the speaker turns to the bookshelf. Our culture offers many celebrated guides to speaking, and he names two from the ancient world, Cicero's Orator and Aristotle's Rhetoric. By contrast, he says, "no one has ever written a book called The Listener."
He says listening, like most things, is learned through education. Good listeners also do three things. They egg us on with those two words, go on, ask why something bothered us so much, and remember what we told them before. They urge clarification when we say something vague like "I'm fed up with my job" and help us find what we really mean. And they do not moralize, using small sounds of sympathy to signal that our follies and vulnerability are welcome.
When we are with people who listen well, we feel a powerful pleasure. By noticing what they do, he says, we can learn to magnify that pleasure and offer it to others. He closes by saying listening is "one of the keys to a good society."
Questions people ask
Is it literally true that no one has written about listening?
No, though the speaker has a point about emphasis. There are modern books on listening, from counseling manuals to business titles about active listening, but they are recent and far less famous than the classic guides to rhetoric and public speaking. For most of Western history, learning to persuade got far more prestige than learning to hear.
Why would being heard make someone talk less, not more?
Psychologists describe it as feeling securely attended to. When people sense that someone will stay, prompt them, and remember what they said, they do not need to repeat themselves, exaggerate, or rush to get it all out. Being heard lowers the anxiety that you will be cut off or forgotten.
What is one simple thing I can do to listen better tomorrow?
Say "go on" and mean it. Do not interrupt, do not top the story, and ask one follow-up about a detail the speaker just mentioned, like how a situation has changed over time. That small encouragement tells the other person that you are keeping their history in mind.