By Ryan Smith
When asked how good they are at interpersonal communication, most people think that they’re either good or about average. But in fact, if we could look at the whole of human communication from a psychologist’s perspective, it would soon become obvious that most people are abysmally bad at communicating with others.
In our daily lives, we are easily able to perform complex and evolutionarily unnatural feats like calculus, reading, and interacting with computers. Yet when it comes to something as basic as interacting with other members of our own species, most of us communicate on a very low level, and this leads to loneliness and estrangement in our everyday lives.
Of course communication is just a medium. Being better at communication does not in itself make you more empathic, insightful, or understanding. But becoming better at communication can help you structure the abilities and talents that you do have in such a way as to get more out of them. Good communication skills can bring new nuance to your relationships and it can bring out new interesting aspects of almost anyone’s personality.
Most people yearn to disclose more of themselves and to be closer to others. But most of us have never been listened to, or communicated with, in a way that truly facilitated these qualities. What’s more, we have ourselves learned to listen and communicate from people who typically didn’t understand how to listen and communicate. From early on, the twin levers of shame and embarrassment have taught people to curtail substantial parts of themselves until they are trapped in a place where they are just “going through the motions” of “what one does when being social” and are unable to show anything but a tiny part of themselves.
At the same time, most of us would like to know our intimates better than we do, or we would like to be able to facilitate those deep conversations and Aha! moments that other people look back on and regard as crucial to their lives. So how does one listen like a psychologist?
1. Project Openness, Avoid Judging
The number one mistake people make when they try to listen like a psychologist is that they are unable to listen to others without contributing their own judgment of what they are being told. People are generally concerned with appearing smart and “giving a glowing performance” when they are being confided in, and ironically, this actually hinders their ability to listen.
In everyday communication, judging the content of what other people are telling you is what goes on most of the time. But when you listen like a psychologist you need to be thinking to yourself that your judgments are irrelevant. Instead, think of it like this: The other person has some vague hunch about what she is feeling, but she cannot quite make it out herself. What she needs from you is room to explore her own feelings in order to clarify her own take on the the matter that she is confiding in you. What she needs is help in arriving at her own judgment of the situation, not yours. Even if it doesn’t appear that way.
Therefore, anything that starts with the words:
- “Why don’t you…”
- “You have to…”
- “You need to…”
- “You’ll be all right…”
Is likely to be the inverse of listening like a psychologist.
In everyday communication people tend to think that the more of their points they can get the other person to accept and acknowledge, the more brilliant they are, and the better communicators and problem solvers they are. But when you set out to listen like a psychologist, this is actually completely untrue. The more you crunch and “solve” the other person’s problems according to what you think should be done, the worse of a psychologist you are. When you are truly listening like a psychologist, it is the other person’s experience that counts, not yours. In a situation where the other person is really opening up to you, even a favorable judgment can be patronizing. The other party’s experience can stand on its own and there is nothing you can tell him that can give him the same experience of a breakthrough that simply helping him focus his own thoughts can.
Listening like a psychologist means giving the other person space to explore his own thoughts and feelings. Listening like a psychologist is not persuasion or advice-giving. When a person is opening up and confiding in you, focusing on the problem, rather than the other person’s feelings about the problem, is the fundamental mistake that serves to keep both of you stuck in everyday communication.
2. Avoid Labels and Run-on Criticism
In most intimate relations there is an undercurrent of criticism between the people who are supposedly close to one another. It is like a radio running in the background; a steady current so pervasive that people don’t even notice it. They think it cannot be any different. “That’s what families do,” they will tell others if asked.
When people are close to each other and are a significant part of each others’ lives, the temptation to engage in run-on criticism is often there as an unconscious impulse. It is not that we want to hurt those close to us, but we often engage in run-on criticism as a means of addressing our own fear that the other person will never change and become what we want them to be.
Moreover, most of us have not learned to express what we want without getting on the other person’s case. We have not learned to appreciate the difference between being aggressive (“If you want what’s best for both of us, make me a sandwich”) and assertive (“I’m hungry, but I don’t feel like spending the next 20 minutes in the kitchen. Would you be up for making me a sandwich?”).
Though most of us would deny it, as soon as we become intimate with other people, we tend to depend on them being a certain way, acting a certain way, and doing certain things for us. One way that we try to force our wishes on those close to us (and they try to force their wishes on us) is by continuously criticizing each other. Another way that we try to control others is by assigning labels to those who are close to us. We stick them in a box where it is easy and comfortable for us to relate to them, but which tends to focus on just one side of their personality. Thus we reduce them to a stock character and limit their full range of expression.
When you are listening like a psychologist, you must detach from all ideas about what you wish that the other person should be or do, and you must be careful not to look at the other person through a preconceived box. A good psychologist is open to all the sides of the other person’s personality. By being open and avoiding judgment and criticism of the other person, she will feel free to express the other sides of her personality and feel as if the psychologist truly sees her full personality, where ordinary people see only parts of it.
Assigning stock roles to people is a powerful thing, and in the long run, both the person who labels the other as well as the person being labeled will often find themselves unable to break the spell of the label. Labeling provides both parties with a psychological template for their relation. The benefit of such a template is that it saves energy and effort, but the cost is that we cease to see the other as the full human being that is before us and start see our own image of that person instead.
3. Develop a Palette of Listening Skills
If you look at the curriculum taught in schools, it soon becomes obvious that immense effort is expended on making sure that children understand the basic themes of classic novels and that they know the capitals of various countries by heart. But with something as central to human existence as listening skills, we basically leave our children to fend for themselves, assuming, perhaps, that listening skills cannot be trained. However, almost anyone can become better at listening attentively by developing a basic grasp of listening skills such as the following:
- Being attentive. That means also using eye contact and body language to show that you are really listening. Don’t be checking that Kindle or iPhone. Don’t be looking away. Once you are genuinely attentive, you will probably find that even small, seemingly insignificant and innocuous cues can get the other person to really open up. “Your face is beaming today.”
- Silence. Give the other person space to say what he wants to say and time to add something to what they’ve just said before you rejoin the conversation. If you are sitting on edge, ready to interject just as soon as the other person finishes talking, you are doing it wrong. When first learning this skill it feels weird to purposefully react with silence when you are being spoken to. But if you think of it as giving the other person space to unfold his thoughts and experiences, it quickly becomes less uncomfortable to use silence as a tool for listening well.
- When using silence in this manner, you are in effect being respectful of the other person. You are lifting your conversation out of the everyday rat race where success is measured in speaking time, and replacing that with an open-ended attention to the other that is dedicated wholly to her point of view (and not to yours).
- Paraphrasing. When the other person has spoken, you should repeat the essential content of what they just said back to them in your own words (not your own judgments). By paraphrasing, you are showing the other party that you have been listening and that you have understood the gist of their experience and how they see their situation. Unlike responses such as “I understand,” paraphrasing cannot be faked and so paraphrasing is much more effective in building rapport than other types of acknowledgement. Like being silent on purpose, it may feel a little awkward at first to simply repeat back to the other person what he just said. But if you think of paraphrasing as you demonstrating to the other person that you are actually paying attention, it becomes apparent why paraphrasing is a sign of respect, rather than mockery. At any rate, try it. While you may think that other people will think that you are acting strangely, most people will actually be glad to experience that their message is being recognized.
4. Mirror the Other Person
In everyday communication people are mainly concerned with their own reaction to what is going on around them. They want to be liked and accepted by others, and they feel that they will primarily be evaluated on the basis of their reaction to what the other person says or does. But in fact, if we are able to show that we can recognize the other person’s experience as it if were our own, others are bound to feel much closer to us than if we are only able to say snappy things.
Take an example coined by the author and consultant Robert Bolton. Picture a young mother on a morning where everything goes wrong. The baby cries, the phone rings, and then she burns the toast. If her husband notices this and says, “God, can’t you cook toast?” the woman is likely to feel more stressed and pressured and she may even explode then and there.
But if the husband were instead to say, “Honey, it’s been a rough morning for you. First the baby, then the phone, now the toast,” the young wife is likely to feel much better as well as feeling closer to her husband.
The two reactions showcase the difference between being reactive (reacting to what others say and do on your own terms) and being reflective (mirroring back to the other person what she is going through and what it is like to be her right now). When you are being reflective, you are acknowledging what the other person is going through without judging or criticizing them. Again it is empathizing with other person’s experience of the situation that is completely central here.
Of course there is a time and place for being both reflective and reactive, but when you are listening like a psychologist you should almost always aim to be reflective.
5. Be Mindful of the Presenting Problem
Using the reflective mirroring technique when listening is particularly important when people are vulnerable. When people feel vulnerable and exposed, they are not likely to be forthcoming and to want to spell out how they are really feeling. In such situations, reactive responses only make things worse, whereas reflective responses can make both parties better off.
Take the familiar scene from pop culture where the male part of a couple is going drinking with his buddies for a night out on the town. The female is behaving stiffly and prudely, but if he asks her, “What’s wrong?” she’ll say, “Nothing,” and if he reacts directly to what he thinks she is feeling, he’ll just amplify the antagonism: “Is this about me going drinking with my friends?” – “No, I told you it was nothing. Of course I don’t have a problem with you having fun with your friends.”
In reality, the woman is feeling threatened by the situation (will her boyfriend be messing around with other women and perhaps get into compromising situations?). Perhaps she is also envious (“Why are my friends and I not doing anything tonight?”). But as long as the boyfriend is being reactive, showing his reaction to the bad vibes that he is picking up from her, the girlfriend is not likely to want to admit that anything is wrong. In fact, his failure to empathize with her vulnerability is likely to simply confirm to her that should he find himself in a tempting situation with another woman, he is more likely to act on his own need for erotic variety than to identify with her need for commitment and fidelity. In such a situation, reactive responses only make things worse.
In other words, what the girlfriend presents as the problem is not what actually is the problem. Only by listening empathically and identifying with her needs can the boyfriend get beyond the presenting problem and on to the real problem. Only by listening like a psychologist and applying a combination of the techniques mentioned in this article can he resolve the tense situation to their mutual satisfaction.
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How to Listen like a Psychologist © 2014 Ryan Smith and CelebrityTypes International.
With research by Robert Bolton, Tom Butler Bowdon, Jan Sutton, and William Stewart.