T he paucity of my listening powers dawned on me as a byproduct

of starting to meditate. This is not to make some claim to faux

enlightenment – simply to say that meditation is the practice of
noticing what you notice, and meditators tend to carry this mindset
beyond the yoga mat, and begin to see their own mind more clearly.
Among a smorgasbord of other patterns and quirks, what I saw was a
self that, too often, didn’t listen.

The younger me enjoyed conversation. But a low, steady egoism

meant that what I really enjoyed was talking. When it was someone
else’s turn to talk, the listening could often feel like a chore. I might
be passively absorbing whatever was being said – but a greater part of
me would be daydreaming, reminiscing, making plans. I had a habit of
interrupting, in the rather masculine belief that, whatever others had to
say, I could say better for them. Sometimes, I would zone out and tune
back in to realise that I’d been asked a question. I had a horrible habit,
I saw, of sitting in silent linguistic craftsmanship, shaping my answer
for when my turn came around – and only half-listening to what I’d
actually be responding to.
The exceptions to this state of affairs, I began to see, were situations
where there existed self-interest. If the subject was me, or material that
might be of benefit to me, my attention would automatically sharpen.
It was very easy to listen to someone explaining what steps I needed to
take to ace a test or make some money. It was easy to listen to juicy
gossip, particularly of the kind that made me feel fortunate or superior.
It was easy to listen to debates on topics where I had a burning desire
to be right. It was easy to listen to attractive women.
Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

On bad days, this attentional autopilot constricted me. On topics of

politics or philosophy, this made me a bore and a bully. People
avoided disagreeing with me on anything, even trivial points, because
they knew it would balloon into annoyance and a failure to listen to
their reasoning. In my personal life, too often, I could forget to support
or lift up those around me. The flipside of not listening is not
questioning – because, when you don’t want to listen, the last thing
you want to do is trigger the exact scenario in which you are most
expected to listen. And so I didn’t ask my friends serious questions
often enough. I liked jokes, and I liked gossip; but I’d forget to ask
them the real stuff. Or I’d ask them things they’d already told me a
week ago. Or forget to ask about their recent job interview or break-
up.

This is where bad listening does the most damage: it signals to the
people around you that you don’t care about them, or you do but only
in a skittish, flickering sort of a way. And so people become wary of
opening up, or asking for advice, or leaning on you in the way that we
lean on those people we truly believe to be big of heart.
All of the above makes for rather a glum picture, I know. I don’t want
to overstate things. I wasn’t a monster. I cared for people and, when I
concentrated, I could show it. I was liked, I made my way in the
world, I apparently possessed what we call charisma. Plenty of the
time, I listened fine. But this may be precisely the point: you can coast
along in life as a bad listener. We tend to forgive it, because it’s
common.

Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening (2020), frames

modern life as particularly antagonistic to good listening:

[W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices,
and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully
and with intent to other people.
Why do we accept bad listening? Because, I think, listening well is
hard, and we all know it. Like all forms of self-improvement, breaking
this carapace requires intention, and ideally guidance.

W hen I discovered Rogers’s writings on listening, it was

confirmation that, in many conversations, I had been getting it all
wrong. When listening well, wrote Rogers and his co-author Richard
Evans Farson in 1957, the listener ‘does not passively absorb the
words which are spoken to him. He actively tries to grasp the facts and
the feelings in what he hears, and he tries, by his listening, to help the
speaker work out his own problems.’ This was exactly the stance I had
only rarely adopted.

Born in 1902 – in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway, three

years earlier – Rogers had a strict religious upbringing. As a young
man, he seemed destined for the ministry. But in 1926, he crossed the
road from Union Theological Seminary to Columbia University, and
committed himself to psychology. (At this time, psychology was a
field so new and so in vogue that, in 1919, during negotiations for the
Treaty of Versailles, Sigmund Freud had secretly advised Woodrow
Wilson’s ambassador in Paris.)