Active Listening
To be a good conversationalist, be a good listener. To be interesting, be interested. Carnegie's chapter on listening is titled "An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist" — the point being that the skill most people think requires wit and knowledge requires something far simpler: the willingness to give someone your full, unhurried attention.
The Paradox of the Good Conversationalist
Carnegie attended a bridge party and was called "most stimulating conversationalist" by a woman he'd spent 45 minutes with. He said almost nothing — he'd asked her about her trip to Africa and then listened. A botanist at a dinner party called him "most interesting conversationalist" after an evening where Carnegie, knowing nothing about botany, had listened intently and with genuine interest.
An interesting conversationalist, in practice, is usually an interested listener.
Harvard president Charles W. Eliot: "There is no mystery about successful business intercourse. Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that." Henry James described Eliot's manner: he sat erect, made no movement except revolving his thumbs, seemed to be hearing with his eyes as well as his ears. At the end of any interview, the person who had talked felt they had had their full say.
The Mechanism: Feeling Heard
The deeper point is not technique — it's that most people are chronically unheard, and a patient listener fills that need dramatically.
Lincoln wrote to an old Springfield friend asking him to come to Washington during the Civil War. Lincoln talked for hours about the advisability of issuing a proclamation freeing slaves — going over every argument, reading letters and newspaper articles. After hours, Lincoln shook hands and sent his friend home without once asking for his opinion. He hadn't needed advice. He'd needed a sympathetic listener to unburden himself to. "He seemed to feel easier after that talk," said the old friend.
Sigmund Freud was described by a man who had met him: "He had qualities I had never seen in any other man. Never had I seen such concentrated attention. His eyes were mild and genial. His voice was low and kind. His gestures were few. But the attention he gave me, his appreciation of what I said, even when I said it badly, was extraordinary. You've no idea what it meant to be listened to like that."
The Reader's Digest noted: "Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience."
Listening as Customer Service and Leadership
The New York Telephone Company's most vicious customer had initiated multiple lawsuits, filed innumerable Public Service Commission complaints, threatened to tear the phone from the wall. One skilled troubleshooter listened for nearly three hours. He listened again on a second visit, and a third, and a fourth. On the fourth visit, the customer paid all his bills in full and voluntarily withdrew his complaints. He had never had a telephone representative treat him that way, and what he had really wanted all along was a feeling of importance — which he'd been getting by kicking and complaining. Once he got it from a genuine listener, his imagined grievances evaporated.
Julian Detmer of the Detmer Woolen Company had an angry retailer travel to Chicago swearing never to buy again. Detmer listened patiently without interrupting, thanked the customer for coming, said the credit department's behavior may have annoyed other good customers too, admitted their clerks had likely made the error, wiped the charge off the books, and invited the man to lunch. The customer placed the largest order he had ever made with them, named his later-born son "Detmer," and remained a customer for twenty-two years.
The Counterfactual
Isaac Marcosson, a journalist who interviewed hundreds of celebrities, observed: "They are so concerned with what they are going to say next that they do not keep their ears open. Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait."
People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves. Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler called them "hopelessly uneducated — not educated, no matter how instructed they may be."
Want to make people shun and despise you? Never listen for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. Interrupt when you have an idea.
What Active Listening Looks Like
- Give exclusive attention — put other thoughts aside
- Encourage the speaker with genuine questions about what they care about most
- Don't interrupt, contradict, or redirect to yourself
- Let an angry person talk themselves out before attempting resolution
- Stay silent long enough that the other person fully unburdens themselves
Connections
- genuine-interest-in-others — genuine interest is the motivation; active listening is what genuine interest looks like in conversation
- empathy — active listening is the behavioral expression of perspective-taking; both require temporarily putting your own agenda aside
- desire-to-feel-important — what a person usually wants from a conversation is to feel heard and important; listening provides this directly
- talk-in-terms-of-interests — listening first reveals what the other person cares about; talking in their terms follows from that knowledge