by Kate Murphy
Because people like to appear knowledgeable, they like to ask questions that suggest they already know the answer. Or they frame questions in ways that prompt the answers they want. Good questions don’t begin with: “Don’t you think…?” “Isn’t it true…?” “Wouldn’t you agree…?” And good questions definitely don’t end with “right?” These are actually camouflaged shift responses and will likely lead others to give incomplete or less-than-honest answers that fit the questioner’s opinions and expectations.
Also deadly are long questions that contain a lot of qualifying or self-promoting information: “I have a background in landscape architecture and am an admirer of Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park and is an underrecognized genius in my opinion, and I travel extensively and I’m struck by the enduring vibrancy and popularity of the great parks like New York’s Central Park and St. James’s Park in London and the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, so I’m wondering if you agree that we need to have more grand ambitions when we think about green spaces?” This was an actual question someone stood up and asked at a sustainable development forum. Don’t be that person.
Beware, too, of questions that contain hidden assumptions. Another noted sociologist, Howard Becker, reprimanded me once for asking him just such a question. We were sitting in his sunny study overlooking San Francisco’s famously steep and switchbacked Lombard Street when I asked him, “What made you decide to become a sociologist?” Becker’s face contorted as if he’d just smelled something dreadful. “You’re assuming it was a decision,” he said. “Better to ask, ‘How did it happen that you became a sociologist?’”
Becker, who spent much of his long career at Northwestern University, is known for embedding himself for months, if not years, within various subcultures and then writing about them like an insider. His subjects have included jazz musicians, pot smokers, artists, actors, and medical students, among others. “I’m not sure I’m a better listener than anyone else, but if I hear something I don’t understand, I ask about it,” he told me. For him, the worst questions are the ones that are never asked.
Ninety-one and feisty, Becker doesn’t understand why people are so reluctant to ask questions. Having traveled widely and lived in four countries as a lecturer and researcher, Becker said reticence seems to be a global, and globally unproductive, tendency. He now divides his time between homes in San Francisco and Paris,* and he said the shuffle between cultures and languages keeps him from getting complacent about what he knows. “So much is taken for granted in ordinary discourse, particularly if it’s in your native language,” he said. “Things go by you and you don’t know exactly what was meant, but you let it go because you think it’s not important, don’t need to know it, or feel embarrassed.”
Or people are anxious about the answer. Asking open-ended questions means the conversation can go anywhere, particularly into emotional territory. To listen openly takes a certain amount of adventurousness and even some courage because you don’t know where you may end up. “A lot of people aren’t comfortable with it,” Becker said. “Quite a few men are not very good at it. That’s why instead of doing fieldwork, [male sociologists] tend to get into demography, the statistical study of populations, so they don’t have to develop intimate knowledge of people.”
This is not just Becker’s opinion. Research indicates both women and men view women as more open and empathetic listeners. Some evidence suggests women focus more on relational and personal information whereas men are more attentive to fact-based information. As a result, women are more likely to gain people’s trust and be privy to more self-disclosure, which makes their conversations more interesting and, thus, reinforces their willingness to listen.
But there’s considerable disagreement over whether this is nature or nurture. Some blame cultural influences that teach boys to man up and not be interested in or affected by the emotions of others, while others argue that the greater social sensitivity of women, even infant girls, cannot be entirely attributed to societal or parental influence. Some have even argued that autism, characterized by difficulty picking up emotional cues in verbal and nonverbal communication, is a severe form of the male brain.
In all the interviews I did for this book, the idea that women were better listeners than men was a recurring theme. A real estate investor in Houston told me, “I don’t interview tenants. I send one of my female employees because they are much better at reading people than I am. I don’t listen the way they do.” Likewise, a venture capitalist in San Francisco said that when sizing up founders of start-ups, he always defers to a female partner at his firm. “She is off-the-charts unbelievable at being able to read people. Founders barely start speaking and she understands their motivations and whether they are good or bad. It’s incredible. I’ve asked her to explain it to me, and she can’t really. She’s like my mom. She just knows. Maybe it’s a female thing.”
But to say all women are better listeners than men is like saying all men are taller than women. I’ve interviewed and known personally many women who were horrible listeners and many men who were exceptional listeners. It has much more to do with background, life experience, and even the situation. Some people might be great listeners but only when listening to certain people or in certain circumstances.
Everyone, though, to a greater or lesser extent, has some anxiety about, or some discomfort with, the strong feelings that can tumble out of people when they find a willing listener. Humans beings, as much as we try to contain it or pretend otherwise, are brimming with emotion. It can sometimes feel like too much to take on someone else’s inner chaos when we can barely cope with our own.
According to researchers at Université de Lausanne in Switzerland, sounds that convey negative emotions are perceived as significantly louder than those that are more neutral or positive in tone, even when they have the same amplitude. Similarly, researchers at the University of Minnesota and University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that employees were five times more upset by negative interactions at work as they were made happy by positive interactions. This dovetails with the findings of marriage and family researcher John Gottman at the University of Washington in Seattle whose decades of observational studies indicate good interactions must outnumber negative ones by at least five to one for a relationship to succeed. It explains the instinct to shut out others rather than risk the disproportionate intensity of feeling hurt.
In the book There Is No Good Card for This: What To Do and Say When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love, authors Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell indirectly identified another kind of shift response that arises from just this kind of avoidant behavior. Derber characterized the shift response as a narcissistic attempt to redirect the conversation back to one’s self. But the shift response Crowe and McDowell described occurs when people, uncomfortable with others’ emotions, respond by trying to solve or explain away problems rather than listening and letting the upset or aggrieved feel what they feel and, through dialogue, find their own solutions. The authors advise squelching the impulses to:
suggest you know how someone feels
identify the cause of the problem
tell someone what to do about the problem
minimize their concerns
bring perspective to a situation with forced positivity and platitudes
admire the person’s strength
Being aware of someone’s troubles does not mean you need to fix them. People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board. Moreover, you shut people down when you start telling them what they should do or how they should feel. No matter how good your intentions or how sage you think your advice, people reflexively resist and resent directives, even if gently delivered. You may be able to help someone fix a leaky faucet, edit a résumé, or find a good accountant, but you can’t help someone salvage a ruined career, repair a broken marriage, or emerge from the depths of despair. Your answer to someone else’s deep
est difficulties merely reflects what you would do if you were that person, which you are not.
The best you can do is listen. Try to understand what the person is facing and appreciate how it feels. This in itself can lead to solutions. The listening approach to problem solving underlies the Quaker practice of forming “clearness committees.” It started in the 1900s as a way for church elders to determine the compatibility of couples who wished to marry. But over the years, clearness committees have expanded their mandate to consider whatever concerns a member of their community might have—whether it’s about a relationship, career, or matters of faith.
Upon receiving a request, a clearness committee of about a half dozen members convenes to listen to the so-called focus person lay out the problem. Then the committee members ask what they call “faithful” questions. It’s essentially a full-court support response. There is no wise counsel or sharing of similar personal experiences, nor is the questioning meant to guide or influence the person’s thinking. Rather, the clearness committee’s questioning is intended to help the focus person go deeper so an answer might emerge; so clearness can arise from within.
Quaker educator and author Parker Palmer told me about his experience with a clearness committee in the 1970s when he was trying to decide whether to accept an offer to become president of a large educational institution. At first, the questions were about the position and what he hoped to accomplish. Then someone asked what seemed like a simple question: “Parker, what would you like about being president?” He listed the things he wouldn’t like—the politics, raising money, not being able to teach. When asked again, “But what would you like?” he again talked about aspects he wouldn’t like. “Well, I wouldn’t like to give up my summer vacations.” The committee members persisted, “But, Parker, what would you like about it?”
Finally, appalled by what he realized was the truth, he said, “I guess what I’d really like most is getting my picture in the paper with the word president under it.” There was an uncomfortable quiet. Finally, another questioner broke the silence. “Parker, can you think of an easier way to get your picture in the paper?” Palmer laughed recalling it. “I knew right then that taking the job would be a totally bogus career move,” he said. So he went home, talked it over with his wife, and called the institution and withdrew his name. “I look back with enormous gratitude for an experience of being deeply listened to, but more than that, having this rare opportunity to listen to myself,” he said. “It saved me from making an enormous mistake.”
Had someone on the committee said to him, “You know, Parker, I don’t think you’re really interested in that job,” the outcome likely would have been different. “When people tell you how you feel or what you should do, I think most of us know that it makes us defensive,” Palmer told me. “We start defending the indefensible. ‘That’s arrogant. You don’t know me. Of course I’m interested. This is a great opportunity.’ We start to talk ourselves into something. It totally changes the dynamic.”
His experience being the focus of a clearness committee and serving as a questioner on dozens of other clearness committees moved Palmer to develop a curriculum to teach the process to people outside the Quaker community. It is now taught at retreats sponsored by the Center for Courage & Renewal, a Seattle-based nonprofit Palmer founded twenty-five years ago to support people in the helping professions, such as doctors, teachers, and social workers. The idea is not so much to teach people how to hold formal clearness committees but rather to teach them the listening techniques involved so they are more effective in their jobs and more attuned to people in their personal lives.
More than two hundred thousand people have attended the retreats, and it turns out the most difficult part of the curriculum is learning how to ask “faithful” questions, which, in keeping with the secular nature of the retreats, are referred to as “open and honest” questions. A neurosurgeon from Seattle who participated in one of the retreats told me, “You don’t realize how the questions you ask can reduce your interactions to sterile transactions. In your professional and also your personal life, everything gets so binary—this or that—so you don’t hear people’s stories and you lose sight of what’s important.”
It’s hard to ask open and honest questions because most people ask questions that are really recommendations or judgments in disguise. For example, “Have you thought of seeing a therapist?” and “Why don’t you divorce him?” are not open and honest questions. Open and honest questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting. “It deprives us of all the things we love to do,” Palmer said. But open and honest questioning is essential for basic understanding. It allows people to tell their stories, express their realities, and find the resources within themselves to figure out how they feel about a problem and decide on next steps.
* * *
Say your son or daughter jumps into the car after soccer practice and says, “I hate it. I’m never going back. I quit.” This always strikes a nerve with parents who are likely to respond with: “You can’t quit. Where’s your team spirit?” or “Oh my God, what happened? I’m going to call the coach!” or “Are you hungry? Let’s go eat. You’ll feel better.” None of that is listening. Grilling them about what happened is interrogating. Telling them they shouldn’t feel how they feel is minimizing. And changing the subject is just maddening. Kids, like all of us, just want to be heard. Try instead, “Have you always felt this way?” or “What would quitting mean?” Look at it as an invitation to have a conversation, not as something to be fixed or get upset about.
Again, the solutions to problems are often already within people, and just by listening, you help them access how best to handle things, now and also in the future. Researchers at Vanderbilt University discovered that when mothers just listened, providing no assistance or critique, while their children explained the solutions to pattern recognition problems, it markedly improved the children’s later problem-solving ability—more so than if the children had explained the solution to themselves or repeated the solution over and over in their heads. Previous research has shown that adults provided with an attentive listener gave more detailed solutions with more alternative ideas and better justifications than solutions generated in isolation.
Whether it’s your child, romantic partner, friend, colleague, or employee who comes to you with a personal problem, if you ask open and honest questions and listen attentively to the answers, it communicates, “I’m interested in hearing more from you,” and “Your feelings are valid.” If you jump in to fix, advise, correct, or distract, you are communicating that the other person doesn’t have the ability to handle the situation: “You’re not going to get this without me.” And you’re also telling them, “There’s no room for honest emotion in our relationship.” By questioning and listening carefully to the answers, the other person might in return begin to ask you questions so they can benefit from your experience. And that’s okay, too. In this way, you have earned the right to reflect on your own approaches to problems and offer counsel or consolation. And it also ensures the stories and sentiments you share are truly relevant and helpful.
Julie Metzger, an infectiously enthusiastic registered nurse in Seattle, specializes in encouraging parents and adolescents to listen to one another. For nearly thirty years, her nonprofit, Great Conversations, has offered classes and presentations in the Pacific Northwest to help teens, preteens, and their parents talk about sex and “other growing-up stuff.” Despite the often blush-worthy subject matter, her classes are packed. It’s partly due to Metzger’s sense of humor (she’s been known to give talks with sanitary pads comically stuck to her sweater) but also her ability to nail family dynamics, particularly the tendency to ask questions that are based more on logistics than on trying to connect with one another.
Think of when your child comes home from school—you might ask a string of rapid-fire questions: “How was school?” “Have you eaten?” “Do you have homework?”
“What did you get on your French test?” “Did you bring home your lunchbox?” Similarly, when greeting your spouse, you might ask, “How was work?” “Did you finish your proposal?” “Do you want to have the Murrays over for dinner on Friday?” “Do you have dry cleaning?” It sounds super friendly, caring, and curious, but Metzger said, “It is actually you running down a checklist to determine where things stand and what needs to happen next. It’s not a real conversation, and it’s not listening.”
Not that practical questions shouldn’t be asked. Of course they should. It’s just when those are the only kinds of questions you ask, the relationship suffers. Open, honest, and exploratory questioning and the genuine curiosity and careful listening it presupposes can not only bring about greater clarity of what’s on someone’s mind but is also the very basis of intimacy. The question can be as simple as: “What did you learn today?” Another good one is: “What was the best part and what was the worst part of your day?”
The more you know about and understand where someone is coming from, the closer you feel to them whether they are loved ones or strangers. Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, conducted an experiment in which he paired students, who didn’t know each other, and had them ask each other thirty-six expansive questions like:
Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?