Recently, I realized why people keep giving this weird-seeming advice. Good listeners do often reflect words back—but not because they read it in a book somewhere. Rather, it’s cargo cult advice: it teaches you to imitate the surface appearance of good listening, but misses what’s actually important, the thing that’s generating that surface appearance.
The generator is curiosity.
I think that curiosity is a necessary, but not sufficient generator here. It also requires a deeply internalized felt sense of how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each-other.
If you have a deep curiosity, but not that understanding, you’ll tend to want to ask elaboration questions—Why, what, how? You’ll tend to miss the very basic step of checking to make sure the thing you heard was actually the thing said.
The “reflecting what they said back to them” doesn’t just cargo cult the idea of letting people feel understood, but it importantly mimics the behavior of someone who doesn’t know if they understood at all. It’s not just a chance for validation of someone’s feelings and beliefs, but also a chance to correct any misunderstandings of those feelings and beliefs.
I think this sense is what statements like:
Are you feeling hurt because you would have liked me to agree to do what you requested?
is trying to train. After 30 or so times of getting a response like “No! I’m feeling confused because I thought we already agreed to this 3 weeks ago,” you start to get a visceral feel for how wrong your understanding can be.
This always used to seem silly to me. If I complain at my partner and she “just listens,” I’ve accomplished nothing except maybe made her empathetically sad. When I complain at people, I want results, not to grouse into the void!
I think this section really gets into how deep this misunderstanding can go. It could be that you’ve 100% understood the content of what they said, but if you misunderstood the intent, you might give understanding when they wanted advice, or advice when they wanted understanding. You not only have to clarify WHAT they said, but why!
And it goes even deeper! I may understand the content of their problem, and I may even understand that their intent is to give advice, but I misunderstand the frame from which they’re coming. If they’re coming from a frame of personal responsibility, but they’re coming from a frame of systems and incentives, you could give advice that totally misses the mark even though it’s great advice.
It often feels like I understand enough to be helpful without knowing all those details. But when I think that, I’m usually wrong: I end up giving bad advice, based on bad assumptions, and the person I’m talking to ends up having to do a bunch of work to argue with me and correct my bad assumptions. That makes the conversation feel disfluent and adversarial instead of collaborative.
So after rereading the second half of the post, it seems like I’m basically just repeating your post back to you in different words.
Which seems totally appropriate.
Does what I said match your understanding?
I finally got chatGPT to say ” Skydragon”