Jorge: If you can't pay the sort of respectful attention to people when you are interacting with them, you're just not going to be able to develop the kind of relationship that is going to make it possible for you to collaborate effectively.

Narrator: You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry: Jorge, it is excellent to see you.

Jorge: It's good to see you too. Harry, you were telling me before we started recording that you've been a bit under the weather and that your voice is maybe not gonna hold out. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to make it.

Harry: It might cause me to be more deliberate. A little bit slower and maybe a little gravelly. So hopefully it'll benefit everybody.

Jorge: I was gonna say, that might result in benefits for our listeners.

Harry: Exactly. But interestingly, part of that is I think I caught a touch of something and it's on the heels of having what I would characterize as a really grueling week last week, but grueling in the most positive way. And somewhere, I don't know if it was an interview or a podcast, I wish I could remember. I think it was about movie making. So it was probably a director, producer, or writer said it never gets easier and the work gets more challenging and more rewarding. And the arc of our career is filled with pushing the edges of our ability and our work, but it doesn't get easier. Here I am trying to share a reading on a topic that I think is super important and hopefully this will land.

Jorge: Let's jump right into it.

Harry: Okay. “Listening is a courtesy and more fundamentally a sign of respect. It's impossible to convince someone that you respect them by telling them so. It must be demonstrated, and listening is the simplest way to do that. But listening is no easy task. Our magnificent brains race along faster than others can speak, making us easily distracted. We overestimate what we already know and, mired in our arrogance, remain unaware of all we misunderstand. We also fear that if we listen too carefully, we might discover that our thinking is flawed or that another person's emotions might be too much to bear.

“And so we retreat into our own heads, talk over one another, or reach for our phones. Technology does not so much interfere with our listening as make it seem unnecessary. Our devices indulge our fear of intimacy by fooling us into thinking that we are socially connected even when we are achingly alone. We avoid the messiness and imperfections of others, retreating into the relative safety of our devices, swiping and deleting with abandon. The result is a loss of richness and nuance in our social interactions, and we suffer from a creeping sense of dissatisfaction. Not listening reduces the level of discourse. We experience and evaluate our words differently when said aloud to an attentive listener versus when they’re in our heads or tapped out in 140 characters.

“A listener has a reactive effect on the speaker. As a result, careful listening elevates the conversation because speakers become more responsible and aware of what they are saying. While listening is the epitome of graciousness, it's not a courtesy you owe everyone. That isn't possible. It's to your benefit to listen to as many different people with as much curiosity as you can muster, but you ultimately get to decide when and where to draw the line. To be a good listener does not mean you must suffer fools gladly or indefinitely, but rather helps you more easily identify fools and makes you wise to their foolishness, and perhaps most importantly, listening keeps you from being the fool yourself.

“Listening is often regarded as talking's meek counterpart, but it's actually the more powerful position in communication. You learn when you listen. It's how you divine truth and detect deception. And though listening requires that you let people have their say, it does not mean you forever remain silent. In fact, how one responds is the measure of a good listener and arguably the measure of a good person. In our fast-paced and frenetic culture, listening is seen as a drag. Conversations unfold slowly and may need to be revisited. Listening takes effort; understanding and intimacy must be earned. While people often say, “I can't talk right now,” what they really mean is, “I can't listen right now.” And for many, it seems they never get around to it. This, despite what we all want most in life— to understand and to be understood—only happens when we slow down and take the time to listen.”

Jorge: Wow. That's really lovely. There's so much there. I was taking notes, and we can get into that because I pay attention through taking notes. I was trying to actively listen, Harry. Before we unpack it, what book is this? Who is it by?

Harry: Yeah. This is a book called You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy.

Jorge: Nice. The ideas here are not counterintuitive, right? This is something that we've heard in the past, that we need to listen more carefully. And the fact that we have technologies now that hinder that or can make it more difficult or can give us an excuse to retreat into our own little space. As you were reading, I was thinking of something that happened to me just this morning, and it was mediated through technology where it caused me to not listen with care to a conversation that I initiated and to which I should have been paying attention. And I'll give you the setup, and I'll try not to belabor this.

Harry: Okay.

Jorge: I exercise; I try to go on a walk or a run every morning, and I usually just take my Apple Watch with me, wearing AirPods. And the app that I use to listen to podcasts on the Apple Watch has this quirk, and it's a quirk with the latest release, where if I pause—if I take out one of the pods from my ear—when I put it back in, it will have lost its place.

Harry: Oh my gosh!

Jorge: So it's really annoying, right? I try not to stop the audio, and this is a fabulous app. I'm not gonna name it 'cause I don't want to dis it, right? It's a fabulous app, and I think it's a bug in their latest release, right? But what that means is that for the last, I would say, couple of weeks, I've been very careful to not stop the audio because it's going to be a problem for me. And I frankly. And I felt bad precisely because I do agree with what you said: that listening with care is a sign of respect, and I felt like I did not give my wife or the situation we were in the proper respect. Anyway, just wanted to share that because it's an example of this, I think.

Harry: Yeah, and I think a couple of things struck me about the article. One was really that it placed the emphasis on listening respectfully versus listening carefully. And it really made the point that listening is an act of respect, and reflecting on my own experiences with my family, my partner, and the people I work with, it's so easy to be caught up in the habit of wanting to respond, just being compelled almost to respond, to keep the if their style—if they get frustrated with interruptions—dial it back. If they happen to have a very New York style, it's very engaged and people talk over each other, then okay, maybe that's fine. But what is it that is going to communicate respect to that person rather than what is gonna communicate care was the central idea to me.

The second thing was that, and you put your finger on this, our devices create what I think the article calls out as a false sense of intimacy. And that false sense of intimacy is, unfortunately, leading us to believe that we're showing up respectfully and leading us to believe that we're getting our needs met from a connection point of view, but in fact, it's hollow and collapses under weight. And so I think there are two core ideas here. One is that listening is a function of not just listening with care, but listening to connect and to do so with respect. And the second thing is to really pay significantly more attention to the caustic effects of our devices, not only when we're alone, but what it means to think that we're connecting with people when we're together.

Jorge: I am wanting to unpack that second one because devices can be an obstacle to giving the conversation the proper respect—[00:13:00] as in the example that I cited, the AirPods were literally pumping audio into my ears when I was trying to listen to what my wife was saying, right? So in that case, it's literally adding noise to the channel. But technology can also be a means for communication to happen. I think that I'm paying attention to you right now. We are meeting over Zoom, right? I'm looking at you on my laptop screen, and I feel like we're connecting, right?

Harry: I feel that.

Jorge: I have an iPad here where I'm taking notes. And I would argue that the iPad is helping me pay better attention to this conversation and to be more respectful. So I don't think that technology is necessarily bad per se; it might have something to do with whether the technology is serving as the medium through which the conversation is happening and how we're using it—whether we're using it as a distraction, or we're using it actually as a means to help us be more present.

Harry: Yeah. Yeah, and I think your story was so spot on because, man, it's one thing to show up in a conversation and have your own voices in your head consuming the bandwidth and making it difficult to really be attentive to what's going on. It's another thing altogether to have technology pumping audio into your head, consuming all the bandwidth, with you there, hopefully conveying the respect and the intent behind that that you would have. Part of the reason that this reading jumped out at me was I've just been reflecting on our conversation, and I noticed that you are really an extraordinary listener, and you respond in a way that I think not only conveys respect, and it's not just what you're saying, but how you're saying it. But it also—you could look at it from a meta level—because I think it conveys respect to whoever might be listening in on our conversation. And I thought, “Wow, I have something to learn from Jorge, because I would like to be more like that.” 'Cause I find my brain running way ahead of my ability to manage a queue of things that I think are key in a conversation.

Jorge: I appreciate that, Harry. Thank you for saying that. I do think that I've gotten better. I wasn't always like that. Getting better at listening is a result of two things in my life. One was running The Informed Life podcast, and these two things are complimentary. They're related. One was running the podcast, and that was an interview-based show, so the whole point was me asking someone else questions and trying to grok their world. In working on that project, I read up on interviewers and listened to interviews with interviewers. I remember hearing one with Terry Gross where she was talking about how she interviews people. And practicing, right? I remember like practicing at this.

But the other thing is a conversation that I had when I was working on my book, Duly Noted, which is a book about note-taking. And this wasn't a conversation; it was an exchange on Twitter, but I've had gives the monkey mind something to do, and it forces me to get my half of the conversation out of the room.

And it's not like I'm taking notes verbatim, right? That's not the point. And this is actually an advantage to taking notes longhand; I can't write fast enough to capture notes verbatim, nor would I want to because what it does is the slower speed makes it so that I am listening for the main ideas. I just want to capture the main ideas. This is starting to get a little meta, but earlier you said something that struck me as a big idea. You said that listening respectfully is not the same thing as listening carefully. And I didn't capture the whole thing that you said, but I did write down “listening respectfully” and then I have the not equal sign. I wrote the little not equal sign and then I wrote on the other side of it, I wrote “listening carefully.” So it's just that listening respectfully does not equal listening carefully. And that's enough for me to remember what it was that you said, but I had to really be paying attention for me to get that distinction. Anyway, note-taking longhand has helped me a lot. I used to tell people, when I was doing the interviews for The Informed Life, I used to say it before we started recording: if you see me looking down, it's not that I'm not listening to you; it's the opposite. I'm actually taking notes, and it helps me.

Harry: And to that point exactly, there's a reason that I go nowhere without a Space Pen, without three-by-five cards in my pocket. And the reason is that especially in a wide-ranging conversation with somebody I don't particularly know very well, or in a particularly emotional conversation with somebody I know very well, taking those kinds of notes really helps me pay acute attention to what's going on and what's being said and allows me not to try to manage the queue of thoughts that I'm having and the arguments that I'm trying to make and how I'm gonna be right.

And there were two other thoughts, and one was especially for talking with people and listening to people in social situations, and you've probably heard this before, the challenge is to be the most interested person in the room and not the most interesting or entertaining person in the room. And that really makes it easy to hang your hat on what is the engagement model to show up? If you're there with curiosity and you're there listening and you're there respectfully, you're more likely to give the impression that you're showing up there as a full-blown participant in that conversation.

And the other thing that does in concert with note-taking, I think, is it puts you in a stronger position to draw from the most generous possible response, right? Because it's very easy to inadvertently just say what you think, rather than considering what you heard and considering what the most generous response would be, which hopefully is gonna lead you down a path of having a respectful connection with somebody.

Jorge: This distinction between being the most interested versus the most interesting person in the room is so key. I think the first time I came across that idea is, I wanna say it's in Dale Carnegie's book, what is that called?

Harry: Hmm. How to Make Friends and Influence People?

Jorge: How to Make Friends and Influence People, which is—talk about a title that is person? And that's a major pivot. I think that if you can make that switch—and I'm talking about it as though I do it well—I don't do it well, right? That's something that I need to keep reminding myself.

Harry: I think all of us can do a better job of showing up and really engaging people with curiosity and generosity and respect. We're in a time when this is needed more desperately than probably it ever has been.

Jorge: There's this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre that “hell is other people,” right? And I think that so many of us have this conception of, “Oh my gosh, am I gonna get involved in some kind of situation here?” I'm picturing myself going to a cocktail party or something like that. It's like, do I really wanna engage in conversation? I don't know. I have enough stuff to deal with. And that's an attitude that we can bring to such an experience. Another attitude is that every individual, every human life, is unique and really interesting. I think that people are really interesting, Harry. And if you talk with people for a little bit and you find what it is that really lights up their world, you can very quickly find that they're very interesting.

Harry: Oh yeah.

Jorge: But you have to be genuinely interested, to your point earlier, right? Like that requires bringing curiosity to the table. We're talking about this, and this is making me very reflective, but I'm wondering, as we've said in previous episodes, at what point do we slap the snow chains on this puppy, right? Because the ultimate point here is, at least for our conversations here, to help people gain traction. And I think we're burying the lead here in that if you can't pay the sort of respectful attention to people when you are interacting with them, you're just not going to be able to develop the kind of relationship that is going to make it possible for you to collaborate effectively.

Harry: One hundred percent. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Because ultimately, this does boil down to being able to engage to collaborate effectively to create the kind of world that we wanna live in, and less of the kind of world that we may have.

And I think we have to start with ourselves. And I think this goes back to a theme we've been talking about. You have to start with self. And if you remember, when you hear yourself say, “I can't talk right now” and run the auto translator, “I can't listen right now.” That should be a call to step back and pay attention that, “Okay, maybe right now is not the right time, but I would like to listen to you, and I would like to delve into this, as difficult or challenging as it might turn out to be, but now is not the time and place. Can we set up some time to do this?”

Jorge: It's so funny that it should come back to this because we started the conversation today by saying that your voice is a little shot. Maybe you literally have a harder time talking. But it's easier to tell when you have a hard time talking than it is to tell when you have a hard time listening. And maybe the takeaway here is to be more self-aware, perhaps. Have the clarity to know that your body sometimes is just not receptive. And again, it's something I've had to learn for myself. Sometimes, one of my kids will need something. They'll come in through the... they'll barge into my little office here, and I'll have to say, “Sorry, not right now. I can't right now,” because I know that my mind is not in a place where I'm going to have the level of respect, frankly, that the conversation requires. So it comes back to self-awareness.

Harry: I think that's right. I think bringing it to the heart of self-awareness is, I think, that's where this gets traction.

Jorge: Right, sir. Thank you for bringing this topic to our conversation. Now I'm thinking back: have I done a good job listening to what Harry was saying? I don't know. Gets very meta.

Harry: Yeah, I feel seen, I feel respected, and I feel like we had a good conversation.

Jorge: I feel that way too. Harry, thank you for making the time as always.

Harry: Yeah. Thank you, Jorge. I'll talk to you soon.

Narrator: Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com, and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's Podcasts app. Thanks.