Why I’m Hoping to Stay (Purposefully) Unsettled in 2021
The first thing I learned from Kate Murphy’s You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters is how often I get “listening” wrong. Not the action (though I get that wrong often enough!), but the word itself. While I’m a fairly accurate typist (thanks to a literature degree and lots of early work in corporate content), I found, in transcribing quotes and notes, that I almost never type “listening” correctly the first time.
The second thing I learned from reading this book, therefore, was how rarely autocorrect tools will adjust common typos of “listening.” “Litsening” or “listenng” or “listrning”—a no matter the formulation, it sat there, underlined in squiggly red, highlighting how neither I nor any of the magic tools I use every day really know what to do when we get listening wrong.
The book itself was unexpectedly underwhelming on a first read. I underlined and dogeared in a few places, then walked away, feeling unimpressed; but when I came back a week or so later, those quotes and passages had resettled in a way that seemed much, well, louder. Maybe by making her insights more subtle, Murphy is tutoring us in her main lesson: you have to really work at listening. Be comfortable with silence as an essential part of interaction; be patient in finding meaning; and be generous in your expectations—assume every conversation has something to teach you.
Being comfortable with silence is a hard thing when so many of our interactions these days are marred by cell phone delays or connectivity challenges, people’s faces freezing up on Zoom. I’m still trying to work out the mechanics of that (cheers to the future inventor of the cell call equivalent of the “someone’s typing” in a text thread, so we can wait until our conversation partner is truly done speaking before jumping in without feeling we’re being awkwardly quiet).
Patience is also a constant struggle, particularly for high-achievers who have seen their best (or most visible) results come from impatience, those of us who feel keenly the consequences of wasted time, when we have so much we want to make happen in our minutes, hours, months, and years.
But setting (or resetting) expectations is something we’ve probably all gotten better at recently—it’s an idea with great utility in the pandemic era, when nothing is what we anticipated and the small is newly celebrated.
What Murphy suggests is simply to approach conversations expecting that you will learn something. Rather than pushing to charm, to convince, to decipher, or even to learn one thing in particular (the secret password to a career in their company, the one tool to make your business successful), go into conversations hoping to learn one thing that you didn’t expect or choose to learn. Assume that no matter how much you know this person or this type or this interaction, something new will come of it. If you’re open, Murphy says—really open, not just open to the thing you’re looking for—you’ll listen better, and because effective listening opens up the speaker as well as the listener, you’ll have a much better interaction because of it.
So here’s to being unsettled in 2021, at least in conversation. Set your expectation to surprise, and you can count on being rewarded.
