6 Listening

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Erno Daniel looks for “stealth germs.” As a physician and author of Stealth Germs in Your Body (2008), he’s on the lookout for conditions caused by bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that can go undiagnosed and untreated until they manifest themselves as something serious later. Although his clinical medical experience helps him diagnose hidden, chronic, or low-grade infections, he can’t run hundreds of tests on every patient. He can, however, listen to them.

Unfortunately, not all physicians listen effectively. One study found that, on average, doctors interrupt patients only eighteen seconds after they begin to speak (Appleby, 1996). They try to jump to a diagnosis, relying on familiar technical knowledge, and fail to hear the patient’s whole story. Financial pressures in the health care industry often limit the amount of time doctors can spend with their patients. Consequently, many don’t gather the full details of conditions afflicting patients, which may be more relevant than the first symptom patients disclose.

But Daniel asks patients to tell him when their symptoms started; he asks them where they’ve traveled, what they’ve eaten, when the symptoms became more acute, and what else is going on in their lives. Early in his career he used this strategy to discover that an infectious organism in the water of a small community was causing many people to have ulcerlike symptoms. At the time, it was thought that all these symptoms were due to stress, but Daniel’s listening skills led him to find the treatable infectious cause.

On elementary school report cards, “Listens well” and “Follows directions” are high praise for young children (Edwards & Edwards, 2009). But somewhere in the years that follow, we stop thinking about listening as a crucial skill. “I listen well” probably isn’t a line on your résumé, like being able to speak German or knowing the ins and outs of JavaScript. Yet professors, employers, and medical professionals often define effective listening as a crucial skill. In fact, listening pioneer Ralph Nichols claimed that listening helps us achieve our most basic human need: to understand and be understood (Beall, 2006; Floyd, 2006; Nichols, 2006; Purdy, 2006; Wolvin, 2006).

In this chapter, we examine the nature of listening—how we hear, process, come to understand, and then respond to others’ communication. We learn why listening is so important and why we so often fail to listen effectively. And we describe tools and techniques you can use every day to become a more effective and competent listener.