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Here is the summary of the book: Many people may be troubled by…
Here is the summary of the book:
Many people may be troubled by several scenarios in their lives. Wives complain that their husbands take for granted what they have done. Husbands complain that their wives nag and take too long to get to the point. Parents complain that their words fall on deaf ears with their children. Children complain that their parents are too busy scolding instead of hearing them out. When we chat with our friends, they appear to be listening, but they betray their lack of interest by glancing around and shifting their weight back and forth. The reason for these problems is that often we don’t actually listen to what others say. As a result, our conflicts with others are getting worse, and so does the quality of our lives. Therefore, it is particularly important to learn how to listen. So, what makes good listening? How can we improve our relationships by listening? Nichols answered these questions in The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships. Although this book is about communication, it does not set out to explain how to speak. Instead, it starts with how to really hear what the other person says and then analyzes obstacles to listening. Finally, it talks about how to “break” these obstacles and help readers solve the problems of “talking but not listening” and the “failure to be understood.” In this book, Nichols recounts many real family problems and sad stories. Then he offers corresponding practical techniques to address these problems. Meanwhile, simple and practical exercises combine theory with practice. Whether for professional consultants or the general public, it is a relevant book that should not be overlooked. Nichols is a US-American writer of classic bestsellers and a professor of psychology. He has practiced psychological counseling and family therapy for over 30 years. When writing this book, he was able to use his own and his patients’ stories to determine “the essence of listening.” Next, we will extract the key points from this book through the following three parts: Part one: Why is listening so important? Part two: What are the obstacles to listening? Part three: How can we become better listeners?
Why is listening so important? | Chapter 2
In modern society, people are under great pressure. The fast-paced lifestyle makes us too busy to listen to one another. However, listening plays a vital role in our lives. This book mentions three meanings of listening. First of all, listening represents our understanding, respect, and attention toward others. In Nichols’ view, being listened to means being recognized, and being heard means being taken seriously. It satisfies our need for self-expression and our need to communicate with others. If others do not respond to us when we talk to them, we feel frustrated and get hurt easily. Each of the following cases gives such an example: A wife comes home from a business trip, eager to tell her husband how it went. He listens, but after a while, something in his eyes betrays that his mind has wandered off. Or a child happily tells his parents that it has won an award, yet they don’t seem as happy as the child had imagined. Or your old friend got married. In the past, he would listen attentively to everything you say, but now he doesn’t seem really interested anymore. Very few people in our lives pay attention to what we say. When others do not respond to us, we feel that we are not understood or taken seriously, and our feelings get hurt. We may seek consolation through the following ways: We turn on the TV even when there is nothing to watch, or escape into the online world and treat ourselves to fictional characters. Such escapism may relieve your stress temporarily, but it does not help you solve the problem. You may feel even emptier and more upset afterward. See? The lack of attention and recognition from others will cause us a certain degree of psychological harm. We all need to be listened to. We yearn to be heard on the basis of understanding and respect. We expect others to show us attention. The second meaning of listening is that it shapes us and connects us to each other. Listening shapes our characters. The child that is listened to and understood by its parents grows up whole and secure. Among scientific findings on the importance of listening, Daniel Stern’s research on infants has the most profound implications. He believes that an infant is never totally undifferentiated from the mother. In other words, the infant has a symbiotic relationship with the mother. For infants, the need for “understanding” is second only to the need for food and shelter. Let’s imagine a scene in which a child excitedly shows its mother a toy. The mother responds in kind, sharing the child’s joy. She nods with a smile and says, “Yes, it’s amusing.” If the mother always listens when interacting with the child, the child feels that its expression is recognized by the mother and thus becomes more confident. As we can see, the listener’s attention and recognition enable us to open up and experience a fuller version of ourselves. So, does listening only mean that there is one person speaking and one person listening? The answer is no. Another aspect of listening is mutuality. It isn’t just the ‘me’ but the ‘us’ that is important in listening. We all yearn for mutuality through listening, eager to get through to each other. For example, a wife who is on business trip calls her husband every night to tell him that the meeting went okay or that it is raining. The husband listens attentively and tells his wife what happened in the home. In fact, there is nothing important. The woman just wants to share the everyday observations, opinions, and complaints. Otherwise, those things would accumulate and burden them in isolation. Listening to each other and sharing each other’s thoughts is a good way to connect us to each other. Based on empathy, listening bridges the space that separates us and maintains good interpersonal relationships. The third meaning of listening is to ensure good communication by improving the way we respond to others. The speaker tends to impose certain distorted expectations on the listener. This dynamic is what psychoanalysis calls “transference.” Transference refers to all the ways in which a person’s experience of a relationship is shaped by subjectivity, including past experiences, expectations, sensitivities, hopes, and fears. For example, a junior high school student who dislikes studying is often blamed by his mother. When he receives psychological counseling, the phenomenon of “transference” occurs. He tends to regard the psychoanalyst as his mother and thinks that they will blame him too. “Countertransference” refers to how the listener’s subjectivity distorts his or her experience of the conversation. For example, suppose a woman expects a man to talk only about himself. In that case, she may keep inquiring about him and not speak about herself. As a result, the man really only talks about himself, thereby confirming her expectations in the sense of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As we can see, communication can be easily disrupted by either the speaker or the listener. So, how do we respond to others to facilitate better communication? The answer is to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. We might as well explain it through a case in the book. A wife told her husband that something her boss said made her worried that she might be in trouble at work. The husband said that he didn’t think so. The wife immediately refuted her husband, saying that he didn’t listen to her. Both of them became infuriated. The wife was angry because her husband didn’t consider her feelings. The husband was angry because he thought he did listen. However, the husband didn’t realize his wife’s troubles. The wife needed to have her feelings acknowledged, not disagreed with. The husband can improve his response by telling his wife that he understands her feelings, thus expressing concern for her troubles and giving some opinions and suggestions afterwards. In this way, the wife could believe that her husband was indeed listening. The communication between the couple would go smoothly. Therefore, as long as we improve the way we respond to others and put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, we can really communicate and exchange ideas with others. Alright, that was it for Part One: Why is listening so important? Listening represents our understanding, respect, and attention toward others. It shapes us and connects us with each other. In the meantime, improving the way we respond to others ensures good communication.
What are the obstacles to listening? | Chapter 3
In Part One, we learned the importance of listening. Next, let’s see what factors keep us from listening. In Nichols’ view, there are three major obstacles to listening. The first obstacle is assumptions. We often speculate about the speaker’s meaning based on our own subjective cognition, making us unable to really understand what the other person is saying. For example, your friend told you that he wanted to go back to school to get his master’s degree, but he doubted his ability to do so. After he told you his worries, you took for granted that he just needed encouragement from others. So you said that this was a great decision and offered a lot of encouraging words. However, what you said made him feel misunderstood. He felt that you didn’t understand his worries, and your encouragement was more like pressure on him. Worse still, when the speaker is still talking, the listener starts to prepare his own opinions. He may be eager to tell the other his own experience, or even talk about his feelings, suggestions, or criticisms with excitement. This is called overreaction. Overreaction is also the embodiment of assumptions. Have you ever experienced such a scenario? When you are telling someone about your own experience, the listener thinks it is a story-sharing conference and immediately starts to tell his own story, completely forgetting that you are the one who wants to share your story. When you complain about your misfortune, the listener thinks that you just need advice, so he immediately gives his own advice and suggestions, without considering that you just want someone to listen to you quietly. To listen well, we have to read the needs of the speaker and respond to the context, instead of interrupting the speaker and roaming in our own thoughts. Therefore, when listening to others, we should set aside our judgment and assumptions, which would be obstacles to listening. Apart from assumptions, transference can also cause communication to break down. Remember what we’ve talked about in the first part? Expectations also make us ignore vital information we should have noticed. For example, a husband found that whenever his wife asked him to do something for her, he felt like she was bossing him around. Why is that? It turned out that when he was a child, his mother often asked him to do chores, but she often criticized him. He developed such an expectation at an early age: when others say they need his help, they just want to control and blame him. This expectation makes him feel disgusted and afraid. He casts his wife in the role of a controlling mother. However, he neglects one point: what his wife truly wants to express is the need for his understanding and care. This example shows us a fact. We usually listen to the one part that represents the overdeveloped parts of our personalities, which is the “part” that keeps us from learning to listen and recognizing the feelings of others and ours. Therefore, we should learn to identify an
How can we become better listeners? | Chapter 4
In the first two parts, we learned about the importance of listening and the obstacles to listening. Let’s talk about the last part of the book: How to be a better listener? First of all, let’s see the listening between intimate partners. Partners should learn to control their emotions and have more understanding and tolerance. There is no lack of understanding and familiarity between intimate partners, but why do we often see couples quarrel? One of the most important reasons is emotional reactivity. If your partner criticizes you angrily, you should try your best to calm down, hear your partner out, and acknowledge your partner’s point of view. Your attentive listening can help soothe your partner’s feelings to some extent. After both sides calm down, you can discuss the solution to the problem together. Don’t refute and disagree with your partner at the beginning, but don’t completely ignore your partner’s anger either. Otherwise, you will only aggravate the contradiction and break down the communication. The way to reduce emotional reactivity is to stay calm and open. Don’t interrupt, contradict, or ignore the subject. In marriage, many people wish to change their partners into what they want. However, they neglect one point: marriage isn’t about resolving differences but about learning to live together with them. For example, a husband likes to watch football after dinner, while his wife likes to keep fit. After listening to each other’s real needs, the couples chose to respect each other’s lifestyle, so that both sides could enjoy the pleasure of marriage. The way to get along with your partner is not to ask your partner to done anything according to your preferences. Couples who learn to listen to each other with understanding and tolerance will find that they don’t need to change each other. Partners often play the role of a pursuer or a distancer. What does that mean? In a love relationship, when one pursues the other, the other inclines to pull farther away. Pursuers want more connection, while distancers feel pressured. So how to change the situation? Suppose you were a pursuer, what would you do? This book proposes three steps: First of all, you have to change yourself. For a period of time, focus less on the other person. Then observe your partner’s reaction and ask your partner to share their feelings with you. Finally, according to your partner’s response, work out a suitable relationship mode for the two of you. The pursuer should try backing off, and the distancer should try initiating contact. To accommodate each other, partners must learn to listen to each other and negotiate the space between them. Sensible partners won’t dwell on subjects about which they disagree. Instead, they will search for alternative ways of connection. Therefore, if partners want to get along well with each other, they must learn to control their emotions and listen to each other with understanding and tolerance. As for the way of listening to chil
Summary & Review | Chapter 5
Well, we have now summarized The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships. Now, let’s review the main contents of this book that tells us how to improve our relationships by listening. Part one: Why is listening so important? Because listening represents our understanding, respect, and attention toward others. It shapes us and connects us to each other. Meanwhile, improving the way we respond to others ensures good communication. Part two: What are obstacles to listening? Assumptions make us unable to listen to what the other person is saying. Expectations caused by transference also make us ignore vital information. Emotional defensiveness disrupts communication. Part three: How can we become better listeners? Partners should learn to control their emotions and listen to each other with understanding and tolerance. As for the way of listening to children, parents need to sustain empathy, respect, and understand their children. When listening to friends, we should listen attentively and show sincerity and caring. In fact, it is not easy to keep the habit of listening in life, which requires hard work and the development of related skills. We should learn to regard relationships as a two-way street. The listening we don’t get is the listening we don’t give. Therefore, we should learn to pay more attention to other people, enough to hear their feelings and consider their point of view. Listening better requires not only being more open to others but also being more aware of yourself. Always pay attention to whether you express yourself in a way that makes listeners anxious and defensive. Good listening allows us to be more open, generous, and connected, to touch other people’s lives, and to feel their dignity and value. Empathy listening promotes growth in the listener, the speaker, and the relationship between them. Just as this book says: Listening isn’t a need we have; it’s a gift we give.
A paper summarizing personal experience with the Nichols’ (2009) text, your developing insights, and how you see this text has begun to influence your interactions with others.
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