The Year I Became a Better Listener Changed Every Relationship I Had

I was 26 in Charlotte when a workplace training on communication produced an observation that I received with mild scepticism and that I could not stop thinking about for weeks afterward. The facilitator asked the group to think about what they were doing when someone else was speaking.

The honest answer, which I provided only internally, was that I was frequently formulating my response before the other person had finished - that the activity of listening was partly a waiting activity in which I was planning what I was about to say.

I was physically present in conversations and cognitively elsewhere for portions of them that I was embarrassed to estimate. The experiment I ran afterward was simple: for one week, I would make a deliberate effort to finish hearing what someone was saying before I began forming a response.

This sounds minimal and was harder than I expected. The impulse to begin composing while listening was so habitual that suspending it required active effort in almost every meaningful conversation. What I noticed, in the conversations where I managed it, was several things simultaneously.

The other person spoke differently when they were not being partially interrupted by my waiting-to-speak energy - more completely, in some cases more honestly. I understood what they were saying more accurately because I had heard the whole of it rather than the part I had caught before my composition began.

My responses, because they were based on the full version of what had been said, were more relevant and more useful. The conversations felt different to the other people too - several people told me, over the following months, that they had found talking to me particularly easy or satisfying without quite knowing why.

I knew why. I had been actually there. The change compounded over the year into something that went beyond a communication technique. It changed the quality of what I understood about the people in my life because I was finally receiving the full signal rather than the portion that fitted between my own transmissions.