Social Chemistry by Marissa King

Social Chemistry by Marissa King

Author:Marissa King [King, Marissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00


The First Duty Is to Listen

Part of the follow-up question’s magic is that it shows you were listening. We spend close to 44 percent of our time listening. But it is rare for someone to be truly heard.

Being listened to is a gift. As Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, wrote: “The best gift we can offer our beloved is our true presence, our true listening.” The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich similarly remarked, “The first duty of love is to listen.”

Carmelene Siani recalled a transformative conversation with a friend that prompted her to commit to listening more deeply. Carmelene’s friend had been badly scarred during an accident as a child. Her friend revealed why she had decided to refuse further treatment. Each skin graft—she had endured fifteen—brought her back to the trauma of her childhood. Each cut made her feel more alone, as if she were at the “bottom of a deep well. I’d look up and see my mother and my family on the edge of the well peering back down at me,” she told Carmelene. “‘We’re here for you . . . We love you,’” they would repeatedly tell her. “But they never left the rim of the well. Not one of them ever came down into the well with me.” She quietly continued, “I wish they had listened to me . . . I wished they had let me be, exactly as I was; afraid and in pain. I wish they hadn’t told me the pain would go away, that I would feel better some day. I wish they had just let me talk about what it was like for me and even though I was little, to not deny my experience.”

Sometimes people don’t want advice or reassurance.

Listening can literally make pain go away. Multiple clinical trials have found that listening reduces patients’ physical pain. Effective listening improves leadership ability, sales performance, school outcomes, marriage, dealing with adolescents and crying children, and hostage negotiations, among other outcomes. When employees feel like their boss is listening to them, they are less likely to be emotionally exhausted and less likely to quit. When people feel listened to, they are more likely to trust you, like you, and feel motivated.

Yet, listening can be deceptively hard. As clinical psychologist Richard Schuster has written: “Although this requirement appears to be extraordinarily easy to accomplish, in reality it continually slips through our fingers. We all seem to know how to listen, yet many of us (even trained psychotherapists) fail to listen correctly.” Because we have two holes in our head through which sound enters, people think they know how to listen.

And almost everyone thinks they are good at it. A survey conducted by Accenture that included more than 3,600 professionals from thirty countries found that 96 percent of respondents thought they were a good listener. Anyone who has spent a day in an office knows that this isn’t true. Even the respondents themselves admitted to being highly distracted and multitasking.

It’s the



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