what makes you interesting?
If you’ve read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, you might recall his poignant assertion, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” (1)
What is the best way to go about cultivating and conveying interest in others? Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters, claims the key is listening. In her words, “to listen is to be interested and, the result is more interesting conversations.” (2)
Listening is a hard concept to pin down, precisely because it seems so obviously self-explanatory. But not all listening is created equal and so define it, we must. If there’s a universal experience people have in common, it’s having interacted with someone who is a bad listener. Maybe they respond noncommittally or are preoccupied or don’t ask any follow up questions. Perhaps they don’t let you get a word in edgewise or can’t be bothered to signal with body language that they are picking up what you’re putting down. The conversation is one-sided and unfulfilling.
Murphy gives a few commonly accepted definitions of what it means to listen but settles on this profound one: “Listening is about the experience of being experienced.” Go ahead and read that again. Listening is about the experience of feeling experienced by another and making them feel the same. It’s an intimate, intentional act of connection.
A facilitator of interesting conversation is someone who will be remembered as easy and enjoyable to be around. They ask questions, seemingly from a place of genuine curiosity, and are as excited to hear our answer as we are to give it. Time passes undetected, and we leave the exchange feeling invigorated at having been understood and heard.
Leading with curiosity means avoiding two things, unequivocally: stereotyping and assuming we know what someone is going to say. “Thinking you already know how a conversation will go down kills curiosity and subverts listening.” (3) Stereotyping someone is essentially doing the same thing. Placing people in predetermined, sensical boxes makes us feel we already know how they will behave and thus, we don’t try look for evidence to the contrary.
The ability to listen well is what separates good advisors from just okay ones. RFN Partner Sean Hutchinson often teaches and presents about how neuroscience – in effect, dopamine – is the magical ingredient for having better conversations and doing better discovery with clients and Kate Murphy would agree.
She tells us listening is best done when we’re giving it our undivided attention and especially when we’re uncomfortable or trying something outside of our normal routines. She likens this kind of active listening to mountain climbing or parasailing… experiences that seem to slow down time and enliven our senses.
“Thanks to a release of a feel-good chemical in the brain called dopamine, you get a greater surge of pleasure from chance encounters with people than planned meetings. Good news, financial rewards, and gifts are more enjoyable if they are surprises… And nothing is more surprising than what comes out of people’s mouths, even people you think you know well.” (4) To go deeper into the power of dopamine and discovery, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of Sean’s series, The Neuroscience of Effective Conversations.
Advisors commonly get caught up in following rigid meeting plans and searching for just enough information to offer up a solution. They can get so preoccupied with jumping to conclusions, they forget to sit back and discover the minutiae of what their clients could tell them if they were given the space and encouragement to do so. In this context, we see Murphy’s book as a rallying cry to rediscover our curiosity but also, our patience.
There’s a critical need for advisors who refrain from interjecting with solutions before the problems are even communicated. “To be a good listener is to accept pauses and silences because filling them too soon, much less pre-emptively, prevents the speaker from communicating what they are perhaps struggling to say. It quashes elaboration and prevents real issues from coming to the surface.” (5)
In the past, we’ve discussed how important next level listening is to achieve greater understanding. We’ve also explored ways advisors can experiment with different listening techniques to improve their and their clients’ comprehension and retention of important information. As proponents of active listening and meaningful engagement, we’re pleased to add Kate Murphy’s book, You’re Not Listening, to our roster of advisor resources. We highly recommend you give it a read and reap the benefits that come with better collaboration, communication and connection.
1, 2, 3 Murphy (41)
4 Murphy (43)
5 Murphy (188-189)