You're Not Listening

If there's one skill I wished I'd learned years ago it's this: listening.

Listening will propel your career, improve your relationships tenfolds (and even spark up your sex life), understand intricacies and complexities that is the world, improve your learning & knowledge, and make the world a safer place.

When I look at the world today (and my own personal life as well), I realise that listening is screaming in demand and scarce in supply. It's one of the reasons we witness wars, climate change, toxic masculinity, racist/caste violence, violence against women, rise of jingoistic politics, and unhappy relationships.

We all want to be heard but we rarely get it. We all want to listen but we rarely offer audience to people (especially loved ones) who need it. Why? We simply do not know how.

Kate Murphy's book is fantastic and distils the essence of listening. Yes, one could refer to a dictionary and be done with it. But there's a lot more nuance than just hearing & understanding. There are so many levers involved in the process it requires us to fully utilise all our faculties at our disposal, it's not easy. We often get overwhelmed and eventually fail to listen – even if we are trying our best, even if we are making a conscious effort to do so.

Remarkably, after reading this book, I've learnt to listen better and noticed that the quality of my life has improved by leaps and bounds.

I highly recommend this book. Let's have some wine and indulge in a conversation, shall we?

Every politician should have to read this book. Every leader should read this book. Frick every human should read this book.

I think my favorite tidbit from this that shows how powerful true active listening can be is the person referenced who said one of the reasons they married their spouse is they always leave a pause after he finishes speaking, showing they're really processing what he said.

I can often struggle with allowing silence in conversations and life in general and this book has really opened my eyes to how powerful that silence caj be.

A good read! Very well researched and written by someone who knows how to make her writing interesting. I appreciated the focus on something that we take for granted, though it got preachy about phones and social media at times. I'm grateful for the reminder to listen, to actually try. It really means a lot. 

A welcome addition to the canon. Much more readable than Supercommunicators and less dated than Nonviolent Communication. Well organized and referenced. Written with compassion, sensitivity, and humor.

This is probably going to become my first-choice recommendation for people waking up to the importance of listening. Even though it was published in 2019, it's well tuned to the problems of 2025: loneliness, attachment theory, cell phones, identity politics, and the importance of silence (both ambient noise and not speaking). I lurrrrved the opening of the last chapter, When to Stop Listening: a pompous blowhard professor mansplains humor to her. I'm quite sure that person is by now aware of this book and his presence in it, and I wonder: is he cringing in shame now, striving to become a better person? Or is he digging his heels in defensively? Because that's really the root of the problem: those who most need this book are the least likely to read it.

She has a Recommended Reading list at the end, books she considers masterpieces of the art of listening, and War and Peace is first on it—a choice that delights me, because I thought the same thing when I read it. Unfortunately, Middlemarch, a book I found insufferable, is also on that list. I will have to grit my teeth and give it another try.