We think about what we have to say, how much to say, and how best to say it. We invest so much in talking that we sometimes treat the time when we’re not talking as a rest break.
Instead, active listening, investing ourselves in what others are saying, is the only way we can learn from others and adapt what we have to say to correspond to the other person’s perspective.
Don has been married for forty-seven years. He admits not everyone saw his potential for being a good husband. “My own mother used to wonder how my wife put up with me. If I ever told her about a disagreement we’d had, she would tell me to turn right around and apologize. Every time.”
He continues, “One time, while I wasn’t paying very close attention, my wife told me an interesting story about a neighbor. The next day I repeated the story to her, forgetting that she had been the one who told me.”
Before too long, Don began to understand the importance of communication in their arguments. “We would argue about one person not doing what they agreed to do or forgetting something important, and it became clear that the problem was we weren’t paying enough attention in the first place.”
Don says now, “I realized that listening is a skill, and like any other skill, the less attention you give to it, the more mistakes you make. Only these are mistakes you can’t cover up, because the person who was talking to you knows you made them.”
Good talkers tend not to be good listeners. Indeed, people who think of themselves as good talkers tend to rate themselves as extroverted, while good listeners rate themselves as introverted. Good listeners are 60 percent more likely to try to put themselves in the other person’s place—trying to see things through their perspective.
Pauk 1997