Doing What's Right by Tavis Smiley

Author:Tavis Smiley [Smiley, Tavis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48391-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2000-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Listening (Both to What’s Said and to What’s

Left Unsaid)

Remember the day President Clinton stood before us on national television and said, “I want you to listen to me. I did not have sexual relations with that woman”? The president admonished us to pay attention, and we did. And because we listened, his words ultimately came back to bite him in the rear. Yet too often we don’t listen to what’s being said. Perhaps we instinctively don’t believe it. Someone once told me to believe none of what I hear and half of what I read. In any event, all of us have, at least once, been accused of being “hard of listening.”

What’s the point of listening if you can believe little of what you hear? For one thing, listening teaches you to hear what’s not being said.

No one knows this better than the mothers of the world. Say something to your mother with a certain inflection in your voice, and she’ll know immediately that something’s wrong. If you say, “Nothing,” she’ll challenge you. She heard what you didn’t say. Some people will discuss a problem but won’t claim direct ownership of it. But if you’re an attuned listener, you’ll be able to read between the lines because of what they don’t say. That’s what listening teaches you to do.

Often it is the act of listening that raises ones antenna. You don’t want to blot out what the other person says because it’s too different from what you believe. Listen anyway, even if you think you already know what’s going to be said. You’d be surprised at what you can learn about your opponent’s position.

But you must listen to yourself as well. Some people talk without hearing themselves, only to get caught in a contradiction later. Twice a week, when I do live commentaries on The Tom Joyner Morning Show, I take along a cassette tape and record what I’ve said on air. When I go to the gym to work out, or when I return home, I put that tape in my headset and listen to it. I listen to hear what I said and how I sounded. I also listen because people invariably tell me I said something I did not say.

Listening challenges you to get involved and to respond when you know what you are hearing simply isn’t true. The fastest-growing medium in the country is talk radio. The people on it—many of them expressing extreme points of view—help listeners formulate opinions about legitimate issues that later they go to the polls and vote on, that they put money behind, that they put energy and effort behind. They take those opinions as gospel. The fact is, there’s too much monologue in America and not enough dialogue.

One of the television sitcoms I helped salvage, Living Single, had a funny line about this on one of its episodes. As three of the show’s four women characters sat at the kitchen table watching television talk shows, Synclaire, the goofy one, said,

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