Good Listeners
When someone tells me I am a good listener, I notice what I hear underneath the compliment. It is not quite what they think they are saying. What I hear, at least as often as not, is its obverse: I am a good speaker.
The comment arrives as praise for me and functions as praise for them, and the two are not in conflict because the person offering it rarely notices the distinction. They have been speaking for some time. They have found it satisfying. I have not interrupted. The satisfaction and the absence of interruption have combined, in their reading of the situation, into evidence of my attentiveness. It is generous of them to name it. It is also, in a way I find consistently interesting, primarily about them.
Having said it, they continue speaking. Often at some length. I notice this and I notice that I am noticing it, which means some part of my attention has shifted from what they are saying to the meta-question of why they said the thing about listening at all. The observation seems to require no response. I am, as they have just observed, apparently listening, which means I am not speaking, which means I have nothing to add to the observation except to go on not speaking, which is what I was doing before they made it and what I am expected to go on doing afterward. The comment was not an invitation to the conversation. It was a description of the conversation’s current arrangement, offered as a compliment to consolidate that arrangement.
What I am actually doing during this time is worth saying, because it is not always the same thing. I may be listening in the full sense—attending to what is said, tracking the logic of it, following the emotional texture of the account, noticing what is present and what appears to be absent. I may be watching the face rather than listening to the words, because faces carry information that words sometimes contradict or complicate. I may be attending to the body—the slight shift in posture when something important is being said, the stillness that arrives when a man touches something he doesn’t usually touch. Or I may be wondering, with increasing gentleness, whether I might introduce a question. Whether there is a gap in what’s being said that a question could open. Whether the person speaking would notice the question or roll over it with the next thing they were going to say regardless.
Or my mind may have wandered. I want to say this plainly, because the assumption embedded in the compliment is that good listening is a continuous state, maintained without interruption across whatever duration the speaker requires. My experience is that attention has a texture—it is more present at some moments than others, it shifts with what is being said, it flags when the material becomes repetitive or when the speaker has settled into a rhythm that no longer requires a listener in any active sense. People who speak at length about themselves tend not to monitor whether the person across from them is still in the room with the same quality of attention they arrived with. The face turned toward them reads as listening. The face turned toward them is enough.
There is a comparison buried in the compliment that I find at least as interesting as the compliment itself. Compared to whom, exactly, am I a good listener? The observation doesn’t say. It implies a field of alternatives against which I have been measured and found superior. That field is presumably made up of the other people this person speaks to, which tells me something useful about their ordinary experience of conversation—that it involves a great deal of speaking and a shortage of whoever might listen to it. I appear favourably in the comparison not necessarily because of any particular quality I have brought to the situation, but because the bar for what constitutes listening, in their experience, sits somewhere lower than my willingness to stay quiet and keep my face attentive. I don’t say this with contempt. I say it because the comparison, if examined, describes a life in which the experience of being genuinely heard is rare enough that its approximate presence in this conversation seems remarkable.
The same structure applies when someone tells me I am obviously very intelligent. The obviously does the most revealing work in that sentence. It suggests that the intelligence is visible, displayed, available to assess—which means the person assessing it has been watching for evidence of it, and has found the evidence sufficient to declare a verdict. What they are actually describing is a gap between what they expected and what they encountered, or a comparison with whoever they usually speak to. Intelligent compared to whom? To a different set of people, in a different set of conversations, I might not seem intelligent at all. Compared to the room this person usually moves through, I apparently do. This tells me more about the room than about my intelligence.
I have been thinking for years about the distinction between speaking to, speaking with, and speaking at—three different spatial prepositions that describe three entirely different activities, though all three are casually described by the same word, conversation. Speaking to someone is informative. It has a direction—I know something you don’t, or I have something to tell you, or I need to communicate a fact that changes the situation. The information flows one way by design, and the design is appropriate to the purpose.
Speaking with someone is what most people mean by conversation and what far fewer people actually engage in: a mutual exchange in which both directions carry genuine traffic, in which what one person says shapes what the other says next, in which neither person arrived with a complete account and both leave with something they didn’t have before.
Speaking at someone has the grammatical structure of address but the actual structure of a monologue. It nominates a listener in order to have a witness, not in order to engage. The listener’s function is to be present and to appear to receive, not to contribute.
When someone tells me I am a good listener, I find they usually mean one of two things. Either they are saying I am a good audience for information—they have something to communicate and I have received it without disrupting the transmission—or they are saying something that functions, in effect, as a directive. I have noticed this quality, and named it, and the naming consolidates it. You are a good listener means: continue not speaking. The person doing the speaking has noticed that the current arrangement suits them and has marked it. Whether I might have something to contribute does not appear to have reached their attention. The compliment forecloses the very response that a conversation might have invited.
I want to be fair to the impulse behind the compliment, because I think the impulse is genuine even when the effect is the opposite of what genuine looks like. People who say this have usually been speaking in circumstances where speaking is difficult, or where what they have to say feels urgent and underheard, and they are expressing something real about the rarity of feeling attended to. The feeling of being listened to—genuinely, without the listener’s visible impatience or their visible waiting for their own turn—is apparently uncommon enough that when it arrives, it produces something close to gratitude. The gratitude takes the form of naming the quality that created it. I understand this. I find it, at the same time, a useful reminder that the gratitude is for the absence of interference rather than for anything I actively supplied.
What I offer in a conversation is not primarily a technique or a skill or a set of responses calibrated to make the speaker feel heard. What I offer is the absence of the things that make most listeners bad at listening—the comparison with their own experience, the forming interpretation, the advice preparing itself, the story from their own life that the speaker’s story reminded them of and that they can barely wait to introduce. I refrain from these not because I am performing superior attentiveness but because I have, over time, found that what I bring to a conversation is more useful when I bring less of it. This is counterintuitive. It tends to be experienced by the person I’m with as a positive quality in me. I notice they usually don’t think to ask what I am refraining from. That would require attending to me, which is not always what the session is for.
The compliment does tell me something, though. It tells me the person speaking has felt the difference between this and their ordinary experience of being in conversation. They can’t always name what the difference is, so they name what they can see: that I am listening.
The deeper description—that I am not competing, not extracting, not loading the next response while they are still speaking—is not visible to them as such. They experience the result of it without seeing the mechanism. The result is that they felt heard.
The mechanism is what I chose not to do. I find this a reasonable description of much of what I have tried to bring to encounters across the years. A man speaks. I stay in the room. I do not take what he says and run with it somewhere. And at some point, if the silence between us holds, he says something true that he didn’t know he was going to say. That is the thing I was actually listening for. Not everything he said before it—though I was present for that too—but the thing that arrived when he had finally said enough that he could hear himself.
The compliment, when it comes at that point, I receive differently. By then, it means something more like: I arrived somewhere I didn’t expect to arrive, and you were in the room when I got there. That I can accept without the equivocation I’ve been describing. The rest of the time I nod, and wait, and go on not speaking, and wonder what, if I were permitted to, I might say.
You are here: Manly Views