You’re Not Listening - by Kate Murphy

ISBN: 9781250297198
Date read: 2026-02-25
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Being a great listener when people speak. Deep insights about understanding, connection, helping people express themselves, overcoming assumptions, the ethics of gossip, and more. Specific techniques for the support response, encouraging elaboration, and keeping it balanced. You can’t be ethical without being a good listener. When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.”

my notes

Toastmasters can perfect your public speaking, but there’s no comparable training of listening.

Listening goes beyond just hearing what people say.
It’s also paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they are saying it.

Listening has to do with how you respond - the degree to which you elicit clear expression of another person’s thoughts.

Lonely people have no one with whom to share their thoughts and feelings.
They have no one who shares thoughts and feelings with them.

Listening plugs you into life.
Our desire to have our brains sync, or to connect, with another person is basic and starts at birth.
We are all “waiting for it.”
It’s how we find friends, create partnerships, advance ideas, and fall in love.

Our ability to listen and connect with people as adults is shaped by how well our parents listened and connected with us as children.
Insecure anxious attachment style people are concerned about losing people’s attention and affection.
Can lead them to be overly dramatic, boastful, or clingy.

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

If you have someone in your life who listens to you and who you feel connected to, then the safer you feel.
Stepping out in the world and interacting with others:
You know you will be okay if you hear something or find out things that upset you because you have someone, somewhere, you can confide in and who will relieve your distress.
It’s called having a secure base, and it’s a bulwark against loneliness.

Everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions.
If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.

Uncertainty makes us feel most alive.
Events that shake you out of your rote existence: you feel more fully engaged.
Your senses are sharper.
You notice more.
You get a greater surge of pleasure from chance encounters with people than planned meetings.

Listening for things you have in common and gradually building rapport is the way to engage with anyone.

Interrogation doesn’t work.
Peppering people with appraising and personal questions like “What do you do for a living?” or “What part of town do you live in?” or “What school did you go to?” or “Are you married?” is interrogating.
It makes people reflexively defensive and will likely shift the conversation into the superficial.
Prying is the quickest way to lose someone’s confidence.

Assumptions are earplugs.
People in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other.
Convinced they know each other better than they do.
They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.
Close friends also overestimated how well they grasped each other’s meaning.
The understanding, ‘What I know is different from what you know,’ is essential for effective communication to occur.
Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs change.
If you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them.
Relying on the past to understand someone in the present is doomed to failure.
How long would you want to stay with someone who insisted on treating you as if you were the same person you were the day you two met?

A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.

People confided their most pressing and worrisome concerns to people with whom they had weaker ties, even people they encountered by chance, rather than to those they had previously said were closest to them.
They avoid telling the people in their innermost circle because they fear unkindness, judgment, blowback, or drama.

We can never really know another person’s mind.

We unconsciously create file folders in our heads into which we drop people, usually before they even start talking.
That makes us jump to conclusions about people before we know who they really are.
Our unconscious drive to categorize and the inherent difficulty of imagining realities we have not experienced ourselves.
Everyone has a singular experience that separates them from everyone else who shares that label.
What you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference.
There’s more than you can imagine below the surface.

When people feel insecure or isolated, they tend to overdramatize and espouse more extreme views to get attention.

In dating situations, people may be reluctant to give their surnames upon meeting someone new, fearing that person will do the digital equivalent of going through their dresser drawers instead of getting to know them more organically.
Divulging your last name is now seen as a significant turning point in the relationship.
The delay reflects a yearning to be known more deeply and individually first; to not be judged by posts, tweets, and other signals.

People want the sense you get why they are telling you the story, what it means to them, not so much that you know the details of the story.
You are the detective, always asking, “Why is this person telling me this?” understanding that speakers sometimes may not know the answer themselves.
Good listeners help speakers figure that out by asking questions and encouraging elaboration.
People rarely tell you something unless it means something to them.
It comes to mind and out of their mouths because it begging for a reaction.
A man always has two reasons for what he does - a good one, and the real one.

When someone else talks, we take mental side trips.
We get too absorbed in our musings, diverting our attention just a little too long, only to return to the conversation somewhat behind.
Smart people are often worse listeners because they come up with more alternative things to think about and are more likely to assume that they already know what the person is going to say.
The use, or misuse, of this spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person can concentrate on the spoken word.
To be a good listener means using your available bandwidth to double down on your efforts to understand and intuit what someone is saying.
Continually ask yourself what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you.
You don’t need to worry what to say next.

Getting to know another person well enough to laugh.
To have an inside joke, to be able to make someone smile even when that person is mad at you, to have license to let down your guard and be silly, requires the investment of listening.
You have to listen to them long enough to be able to repeat back something they said and put a funny twist on it and also to know what the lines are that you’d better not cross.
Think who can make you burst out laughing, it’s usually your closest confidants.
That’s because you feel free enough to let loose with them but also because the things that are the funniest to us are often the most personal.

We listen like a game of catch with a lump of clay.
Each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back.

Remember more of what people say:
Precursor to empathy, which requires you to summon emotions felt and learned in previous interactions and apply them to subsequent situations.

Conversational sensitivity: picking up hidden meanings and nuances in tone.
You can’t be good at detecting intricate cues in conversation if you haven’t listened to a lot of people.
Intuition is nothing more than recognition.
The more people you listen to, the more aspects of humanity you will recognize, and the better your gut instinct will be.
It’s a practiced skill that depends on exposure to a wide range of opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.

When people feel known and appreciated, they are more willing to share.

We often miss lies, as well as truths, because when someone says something that doesn’t make sense, we don’t stop the conversation and say, “Wait. Back up. I don’t understand.”
People shrug and move on because it doesn’t seem worth the trouble or they think they can guess what the other person meant.
Assume everything is relevant.
If something doesn’t quite make sense to you, pay attention.
“I’m not a better listener, but if I hear something I don’t understand, I ask about it.”

Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us.
We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own.
Misunderstandings are an opportunity.
They are an inspiration, and invitation to listen more closely and inquire more deeply.

Miles Davis: “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”

The self generates conversations with itself by taking the perspective of another.
An example is an athlete who might internalize the voice of a coach.
Listening to others determines the tone and quality of our inner dialogues.
The more people you listen to in the course of your life, the more sides to an issue you can argue in your head and the more solutions you can imagine.

Ray Bradbury responded that his morning ritual was to lie in bed and listen to the voices in his head.
“I call it my morning theater. My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement, I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.”

Our inner voices are influenced by the voices we regularly hear in the media.
This is important because your inner voice influences how you ponder things, interpret situations, make moral judgments, and solve problems.
Whether you see the best or worst in people or yourself.
Your inner voice: if it can’t get your attention during the day, it will roust you at 4:00 a.m.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is all about learning how to talk to yourself differently.
An unhelpful inner voice is replaced by kinder or more open one.

By recording and transcribing more than a hundred informal dinner conversations, he identified two kinds of responses.
More common was the shift response, which directs attention away from the speaker and toward the respondent.
Less common was the support response, which encourages elaboration from the speaker.
Shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism.
Shift responses are usually self-referential.

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. Better to ask, ‘How did it happen that you became a sociologist?’”

He now divides his time between homes in San Francisco and Paris.
The shuffle between cultures and languages keeps him from getting complacent about what he knows.

Negative emotions are louder.
We’re five times more upset by negative interactions than made happy by positive interactions.

Squelch the impulses to:
* suggest you know how someone feels
* identify the cause of the problem
* tell someone what to do about the problem
People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board.
You shut people down when you start telling them what they should do or how they should feel.
No matter how good your intentions.
When people tell you how you feel or what you should do, it makes you defensive.
We start defending the indefensible.

Open and honest questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting.
Open questions allow 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.

Good listeners are good questioners, because you have to listen to ask an appropriate and relevant question.

Many journalists prefer telephone to in-person interviews so they don’t get biased or distracted by the other person’s appearance or nonverbal tics.
It’s the same idea behind the confessional booth in the Roman Catholic Church.
It makes people less self-conscious and encourage a more open and honest exchange.

Japan saying: “The silent man is the best to listen to.”

Gossip is defined as at least two people talking about someone who is absent.
Gossip allows us to judge who is trustworthy, who we want to emulate, how much we can get away with, and who are likely allies or adversaries.
Listening to gossip contributes to our development as ethical, moral members of society.
We are socialized by the gossip we hear from our families, friends, colleagues, teachers, and religious leaders.
The Jesus parables and Buddha stories are recorded gossip.
The more shocked or upset you are by gossip, the more likely it is that you’ll learn a lesson from it.
Of course, you are also likely to reform if you are the subject of gossip.
Organizations that allow their members to gossip will be more cooperative and deter selfishness better than those that don’t.

Social dynamics change rapidly and are incredibly complicated.
Trying to understand this complexity is extremely challenging.
That’s why we’re so interested in listening to and examining lots and lots of examples to try to understand how the game is played.

Listening it is in itself a virtue that makes us worthy of the most valuable information.
Integrity and character develop by choices.
This includes to whom and how well you choose to listen.

Ethical behavior requires that you take into account how your words and actions affect others.
You can’t get a sense of that without listening.

Individualism: when no sense of social obligation, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order.
He gained freedom, but he has lost security, belonging and connection.

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say.

You need to listen enough to know when the other person is ready to hear what you have to say.

Not everything needs to be said as you are feeling it.
In fact, sometimes it’s better to wait until you aren’t feeling it quite so strongly.

Relationships most often fail due to neglect - not being attentive.

Communication is fundamentally a cooperative endeavor, so if we perceive our partners aren’t keeping up their ends of the bargain, we are going to feel cheated.

Conversational expectations:
* truth
* get information we don’t already know
* … but not so much that we feel overwhelmed
* relevance and logical flow
* Manners - we expect the speaker to be reasonably brief, orderly, and unambiguous
* politeness and fairness in turn taking

Careful listening is draining.
Air traffic controllers are limited to two-hour shifts.

Few people are effortlessly eloquent.
They often need time to build up enough trust in you, and maybe also in themselves, to talk freely.
A good listener takes the time and makes the effort to help people find their voice.
Intimacy and understanding are earned.

The best friendships are those where you are able to immediately pick up the conversation where you left off because the person’s words have remained with you.
One of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is:
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

Friends can connect what you are saying in the moment to things you’ve said in the past to help you work through problems, clarify your thinking or just make you laugh at the association.

People sometimes say things that they are embarrassed by what they said.
They may apologize for saying too much or might later act distant or coolly toward you, resentful that you know what you know.
When you start drawing from other people’s accounts, they are going to get upset, even if you believed the information was not embarrassing or sensitive.
Better to be a reliable confidant.
Otherwise, people will think twice about telling you anything of significance.

Think about the people in your life who you have a hard time listening to and ask yourself why.

When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.”
Many never get around to it.