Myth 4:
Good listeners listen well all the time
If we take the advice of the Collins et al. study in Myth 3 to heart, in order to really listen to another we must be paying attention to them 100% of the time. That’s a rather high bar, and one even the best listeners among us won’t be able to reach. The best we can do is to admit when our attention fades and recommit to paying attention. Likewise, we shouldn’t assume people are completely “locked in” when we speak, even if we’ve already identified them as a “good listener.” The best practice is to not judge too harshly. Slipups can happen to all of us.
If we admit our listening mistakes (like when we check our phone mid-conversation) we could start a trend that enables others to take a closer look at how and when they are truly listening. For speakers, give a little grace when someone’s attention has been disrupted. Allow them the benefit of the doubt, and remember that these slipups happen.
What this fourth myth really suggests is that “good listening” is a characteristic of an individual, like a personality trait. It’s as if by learning the specific techniques, we can always engage in high-quality listening. The problem is that high-quality listening is more state-like; that is, what it means to be a good listener changes with the situation.
There’s evidence to back up this situational view of listening. In a study I published with two former graduate students, we found that people choose to listen in ways that match their understanding of the situation; the situation mattered more than their typical listening preferences. In another study, we found that people who reported a higher general tendency to be active and empathic when they listen were also more likely to report they’d listen that way regardless of the situation. Even so, the situation, again, was a more important contributor to how people in that study chose to listen.
There is also evidence that perceptions of listening quality are driven 3.5 times more by the unique combination of speaker-listener than by the trait of the listener. In a piece I wrote with a colleague, we opened our essay like this:
Listening is an acquired art, not an inherited capacity. Artful listening involves an ability to work through obstacles in relationships over time, to give oneself to another consistently rather than unpredictably, and to consider that things could be other than what we had assumed them to be. As such, listening is difficult and contingent, rarely done to the satisfaction of all interlocutors.
No one is able to engage in high-quality listening all the time. There is a distinct possibility that listening to certain types of information like trauma stories can cause secondary trauma and perhaps burnout. So, it might not be healthy to always tune your listening ears to empathy and other-focused attention. More than that, as we will learn in Myth 5, “good listeners” are those who recognize the specific listening needs of specific situations (and people).