Speak Last

When it comes to personal growth, if that’s something you care about, it’s worth thinking about your blind spots, your biases, and anything else that might be holding you back. I tend to have a lot of conversations with strangers, and lately I’ve been making more of any effort to listen rather than speak. It’s quite a simple yet powerful way to learn about others, and yourself too, in the process. People will reveal a surprising amount if you simply give them space and keep your mouth shut. A few questions here and there to move things along helps, but the questions matter less than giving others time to speak (and you’ll find that people will often fill the gaps themselves).

Practicing listening is probably more important than practicing speaking, at least when it comes to conversational skills and learning to connect with others. Listening is not entirely passive, it still requires a back and forth, particularly to demonstrate to the other party that you’re actually listening. Asking follow-up questions is a good way to demonstrate your engagement and interest, and it gives you an opportunity to get clarification and a deeper understanding. This is often referred to as active listening, and it’s a skill like any other which requires practice.

We’re all egotistical, although some of us pretend not to be. We all feel like the main characters in our own lives (which, arguably, we are), and everyone loves talking about themselves when the opportunity arises. It’s okay to have an ego, it’s quite natural and not something you can easily get rid of. But you can always become more aware of the ego, how it affects your behaviour, and how to keep it in check.

Listening forces us to put our ego aside, at least temporarily, and to focus on someone else. Listening requires humility and patience. A good listener is empathetic, understanding, and non-judgmental. A good listener will ask questions to clarify without making the other person feel stupid or judged, and will show genuine interest in peoples’ stories, experiences, and feelings.

People tend to throw the word “empathy” around a lot, so I’ll try not to lean too hard into it, but we can’t discuss listening without talking about empathy. Empathy helps us connect to others, and we can only empathize by listening and allowing others to express their thoughts and feelings so we can understand them.

It’s also important as a listener to be aware of your own biases and to try to avoid the urge to berate, interrupt, steer, or correct the speaker. It’s not about you, it’s about them. As a listener, you should be a mirror, reflecting back what you hear, and not a window, projecting your own thoughts and feelings onto the speaker.

Everyone has their struggles, their stories, their experiences, and their unique perspectives. You can learn an awful lot more by listening than speaking, and people will probably like you more too.

To be clear, I don’t consider myself a good listener, this is something I continue to work on. I have a tendency to interrupt (bad), offer unsolicited advice (bad), and sometimes I’m not really interested in what the other person is saying (bad). In that way, I suppose this blog post is as much for me as it is for the reader. Something to medidate on, perhaps.