the best moment from a great movie
This week’s professional read was Kate Murphy’s You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters. She spoke at last year’s TLC conference and Jim Knight has gushed about her book so much that I got it from my public library and read it this week while my teachers gave their final exams.
Not surprisingly, Murphy has me thinking about how to listen and how I (don’t) listen.
I can’t shake something she taught me about who we listen to best and worst. As it turns out, we are worse at listening to people we are closest to than we are at listening to strangers. This is because one of the most common ways that we fall short at listening is that we mistakenly decide we know what the person is in the process of saying. Our brains then dedicate their bandwidth to filling in the next words we think the person will say (like a slow dime-store AI) rather than to actually listening to the words. Once we’re done with that part, our brains start reacting/zoning out/composing our responses. That’s a lot of not listening!
This mistake, Murphy says, is actually easier to make with a spouse or child or close friend than it is with anyone else. We believe we know these people well, so while they talk, our brains say “Oh, I know where this person is going with this” and shuts down. Now that I am aware of this problem, I have been paying more attention to my mind while my wife is talking, and yeah, I do tend to be listening to my own voice’s reactions to her words rather than actually listening to her words. Just now, she was telling me about a current knee problem she’s having. She’s off to Target to get a knee brace. Did I listen to my wife? Not effectively. Instead of listening, my brain was focused on planning how I might need to help her in the days to come. Sorry, hon. I’ll work on getting better.
The part of Murphy that I am going to hold onto most, however, is what causes us to say “wow, that person really listened to me!” My guess would have been that people felt like someone was a good listener based on the listener’s physical responses to them. Did they maintain eye contact? Lean forward? Nod and say “mmm-hmm”? As it turns out, these aren’t key factors in having people feel listened to as I would have guessed.
The most important factor in feeling listened to is the notion that the speaker feels understood. A decent shorthand to this is that the listener knows why the speaker is saying this right now–why it matters enough to the speaker to talk about.
I have copied three key questions Murphy gives and have them open on a tab on my work computer. I’ve been looking at them after coaching conversations as a check-in to see how I am doing:
–What did I just learn about this person?
–What was most concerning to this person today?
–How did this person feel about what we were talking about?
If I can answer these questions effectively, I have probably been a good listener, and I have probably made the teacher feel comfortable enough that they can talk to me about what’s really on their minds professionally rather than about what they think I want to hear.
Wrapped up in all of this is the idea of empathy. I have always been interested in the idea of empathy.
I can trace the day I started really foregrounding empathy in my mind. It was August 28, 2001, one of our school’s pre-service days. Several teachers were late to work because of a major traffic issue. A distraught woman sat on the edge of the Ship Canal Bridge in Seattle considering ending her life. Traffic was shut down, and the experts attempted to dissuade the young woman from killing herself.
Traffic backed up for miles—people were hours late to their destinations. Livid commuters turned their ire against the woman sitting on the edge of the bridge. They shouted “Jump, bitch! Jump!” The first responders couldn’t compete with the vitriol. The woman jumped. (Miraculously, she survived.)
As I read about this incident in the newspapers over the next few days, I, like all decent humans, was mortified. How could anyone, seeing someone such a critical crossroads of their life, become a monster? How could someone see a human in pain and decide that their commute mattered more than her life?
It felt like the juniors I was about to teach in the 2001/2002 school year needed some preventative maintenance in how to treat their fellow humans. I didn’t do a lot. I just made a simplistic, text-only poster with the words “Practice Empathy.” It lived on my classroom wall for the next 17 years, and when a book or a life situation called for it, I’d point at it and give a mini-sermon.
In retrospect, I think “empathy” might not have been the word I was looking for. My Google search bar gives this definition for “empathy”: “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” I don’t know that this is what I actually wanted from my students. I think I probably just meant “kindness” or “gentleness” or “beauty.” Did the commuters actually need to understand the demons that drove that woman to the edge of the Ship Canal Bridge? I don’t think that’s necessary, nor possible.
Do we ever actually know how someone feels? I think we tend to overestimate our ability to understand other people. We overplay the “I know how you feel” card. This has results that probably drive us apart more than bring us together.
Here’s an embarrassing story on that theme. It comes from my first couple of years refereeing varsity basketball, about 20 years ago. We were evaluated by referee experts–usually retired refs–who would visit us after our games and gives us observations and tips.
After officiating a game, I was surprised when my crewmates and I were visited by John. John was too young to be retired, and the previous year, he had been one of our top, state-tournament-level officials. I asked him why he wasn’t on the court and was evaluating instead. He said he had put officiating on hold because of an injury. John was a firefighter, and while battling a blaze, a massive backdraft blasted him back-first into a cement wall behind him. Because he had a big metal oxygen tank on, it badly messed up his back. John was, in every sense, a hero who had sacrificed his body for the greater good. His heroism came at real personal cost: it knocked him out of something he loved and was very good at.
What was my response?
“I know how you feel, John.”
(I told you this was an embarrassing story.)
I was thinking about how I had just been forced to take three years away from refereeing myself. I had injured my vocal cords by overdoing it at a Karaoke party. It was scary in its own way, as the things I liked to do most (teach, sing, ref) were all at risk if my voice were permanently damaged. My voice healed after a couple of years of vocal therapy–the bump on the cord vanished–but it was a rough couple of years. So what I thought I was saying was inspirational: “I know what it means to not be able to ref and do what you love, but hang in there and you’ll get back like I did.”
But that attempt at connection feels very wrong. Dense. Arrogant, even. What must that declaration–“I know how you feel”--have sounded like to John? If I am in John’s position, I’m not thinking “what a nice thing to say!” I’m confused at best and angry at worst. How could this dude who overdid it at a Karaoke party say that he’s like me, who nearly died fighting a fire?
This has come up in other areas of my life as well. My college girlfriend (who sometimes reads these…hi there, college girlfriend!) walks with crutches and braces as a result of a childhood accident. She has some crazy stories of dense, well-meaning people telling her how they know what she’s going through when they see her ambling along with crutches or wheeling longer distances in her wheelchair. Stuff like “Hey, I was on crutches/in a wheelchair for two weeks after a skiing accident once, so I totally know how you feel!” (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) The speaker believes they are bonding with someone when in reality they are revealing themselves as not worth the energy of a conversation.
Why do we do this? I do think that these attempts at empathy come from the pattern-seeking nature of our brains. Every brain expert tells us we learn things best by linking them onto things that are already in the cranium. Even if the two things are wildly unalike, finding the similarities makes it easier for us to learn about the new thing. This is probably what I was trying to do with John. Faced with something beyond my ability to understand, my brain tried to “understand” it by improperly saying: “Oh! This is kinda like something I have been through.”
This is obviously better than the cruelty of the cruelty on the Ship Canal Bridge, but that does not mean it rises to the level of a good response. We can do better. What if empathy wasn’t the goal? What if listening was?
Empathy can lead to false understanding. Listening can lead us far closer to actual understanding.
Since reading Murphy’s book, I’ve tried to become more cognizant of my own inner monologue as I listen to people, like with my wife and her knee this morning. I try to shut down anything that enters my mind other than my conversation partner’s words and nonverbals. Murphy likens it to meditating. While meditating, we are supposed to quiet our mind entirely. When thoughts pop up anyway (as they inevitably do), we simply acknowledge the thought and let it go. I’m trying to do that when I listen to people now.
To do this well, I need to fight against the urge to empathize. When I am listening to someone, my mind naturally wants to go to my own experiences to help me to understand. With a teacher, that means I am thinking of past situations like theirs, whether from my own teaching experience or from similar things I’ve coached teachers through. It’s the pattern-making predilection all of our minds have. We are constantly asking “What is this like that I already know?”
The problem is that this process prevents me from doing my job. When I empathize, I am paying attention to the pattern-finding, problem-solving, memory-searching voice in my head rather than to my conversation partner’s voice. Even if I come up with a relevant and cogent example to use with the teacher, my empathizing is at the expense of listening to them.
An image I keep coming back to is the best scene in the wonderful movie Little Miss Sunshine. As the put-the-fun-in-dysfunctional family travels to Olive’s pageant, teenage Dwayne learns that he is colorblind. Right there in the back of the van, he learns that his dream of flying fighter jets is over. He loses his temper in a manner violent enough that the family pulls the van over, and Dwayne runs down the hill by the road to angrily mourn the life he no longer will have.
The adults try to talk to him. They need to get him in the van to get moving again: time’s ticking, and they have a pageant they can’t miss. Dwayne won’t budge.
That’s when little sister Olive does this.
It works perfectly. Why? Because all Dwayne wants is for someone to be there with him. Olive isn’t pretending that she knows what he’s going through the way that adults often do in a misguided way with their teenagers. Empathy doesn’t matter to Dwayne in his moment of crisis. Kindness does. Listening does. Love does.
Murphy has taught me that people typically don’t want to be empathized with, including in a coaching situation. They want to be listened to. My brain doesn’t work fast enough to do both well.
As a result, I am going to keep Murphy’s three questions in front of me and try to be aware of when I am hearing my own voice instead of theirs. Instead of “Practice Empathy,” my new mental poster will say “Practice Listening.”
Am I far off here? Being too hard on empathy? What are your experiences, both in and out of school, with these sorts of things?