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You’re Not Listening, Here’s Why by Kate Murphy — Notes

You’re Not Listening. Here’s Why. – The New York Times

There’s an unconscious tendency to tune out people you feel close to because you think you already know what they are going to say.

…something incredibly ironic about interpersonal communication: The closer we feel toward someone, the less likely we are to listen carefully to them. It’s called the closeness-communication bias and, over time, it can strain, and even end, relationships.

Social science researchers have repeatedly demonstrated the closeness-communication bias in experimental setups where they paired subjects first with friends or spouses and then with strangers. In each scenario, the researchers asked subjects to interpret what their partners were saying. While the subjects predicted they would more accurately understand, and be understood by, those with whom they had close relationships, they often understood them no better than strangers, and often worse.

Harvard sociologist Mario Luis Small found that slightly more than half the time, 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 — like a spouse, family member or dear friend.

::But what is love if not a willingness to listen to and be a part of another person’s evolving story? A lack of listening is a primary contributor to feelings of loneliness.::

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Listening During a Pandemic by Kate Murphy — Notes

Listening During a Pandemic – The New York Times

The trouble is that listening is a skill few diligently practice even in the best of times, and it can really fall by the wayside during periods of uncertainty, hardship and stress.

People aren’t devices where you can just press “play” and they will share their innermost thoughts and feelings with you. Intimacy is earned through patience, sensitivity and meeting people where they are.

It was about how he was experiencing life.” These days, she said she looks forward to her daily “quarantine call” with her dad, who now lives in Florida.
It wasn’t transactional. It was about how he was experiencing life.” These days, she said she looks forward to her daily “quarantine call” with her dad, who now lives in Florida.

…employing a tactic known as “third things.” The term was coined by the Quaker educator and author Parker Palmer and refers to things external to the two people talking, which can serve as springboards for connection.

Start out by talking about something the other person likes, or maybe doesn’t like, and finding out why that is. It could be music, art, books, films, food, favorite childhood toys or even other people. The point is to explore one another’s affinities, attitudes, beliefs and opinions — but never argue about them. As the Polish-born social psychologist Robert Zajonc wrote, “::We are never wrong about what we like or dislike.”::

Careful listening requires focus and effort. You can only keep at it for only so long. So it’s important to be alert to the other person’s, and your own, willingness to continue. If you’re unsure, just ask: “Had enough?” or “Shall we pick this up later?”

Perhaps as illuminating as the use of third things is listening to how people respond to expansive hypotheticals such as “If you could time travel, where would you go?” or “If you could live to be 100 and you could retain either the brain or body of a 25-year-old, which would you chose?” Such imaginative flights can be a welcome escape when feeling stifled and hemmed in at home. People’s answers and their reasoning may surprise you, even when they are people you think you know well.

Graham Bodie, a professor of integrated marketing and communication at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has studied listening for almost 20 years, and his data suggests listeners’ responses are emotionally attuned to what speakers say less than 5 percent of the time.

Anyone who has shared something personal and received a thoughtless or uncomprehending response knows how it makes your soul want to crawl back in its hiding place.

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Possibility Management: Men’s Culture in Archearchy – A Three Step Checklist

#Wisdom/MensWork

I believe we are in a transition from patriarchal-orientation to something else. I learned about this from Ian MacKenzie. I highlighted the pieces that stood out.

https://possibilitymanagement.org/studyingit/article/mens-culture-in-archearchy-a-three-step-checklist/

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Archearchy is the sustainability-conscious culture of archetypally initiated adult women creatively collaborating with archetypally initiated adult men. Archearchy is unstoppably emerging around the world through simultaneous personal experimentation of several millions of people beneath the radar of mainstream consciousness. You are probably one of the experimenters. I thank you from my heart for your courageous efforts.
For example, if a child makes a mess, who cleans it up? The answer is, the parents clean it up. (In a patriarchy Mom cleans it up.) Modern culture is making huge messes with no intention at all of ever cleaning them up – ocean acidification, children on brain drugs, fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure, corporate lobbying, burning tropical rainforests, etc. Modern patriarchal empire is centered on child-level responsibility.

Modern culture has developed “corporate personhood” to protect individuals from having to take responsibility for their actions. Modern economy teaches by example that instead of being responsible you should be “smart.” Being “smart” means to lie, cheat, sneak, deceive, and avoid detection while taking as much as you can. “Smart” people make profits by externalizing costs:
– to the general public (through government subsidies),
Modern culture has developed “corporate personhood” to protect individuals from having to take responsibility for their actions. Modern economy teaches by example that instead of being responsible you should be “smart.” Being “smart” means to lie, cheat, sneak, deceive, and avoid detection while taking as much as you can. “Smart” people make profits by externalizing costs:
– to the general public (through government subsidies),
– to less “modernized” cultures (through “trade agreements” and sweat shops), and
– to future generations (through raping the planet’s precious resources, while bribing corrupt officials to permit dumping toxic and radioactive wastes in other people’s backyards to poison them for 50,000 years).

What if men’s culture in archearchy is so different from what we know that the best we can do as men is come together and begin each meeting by grieving the crimes and horrors of 6000 years of patriarchal men’s culture? Crimes and horrors done to women, children, animals, and the Earth, that to a large and damaging degree still continue today?

Third comes our patriarchal habits of being single-fighters, lone-wolves, free-lancers, easy riders, entrepreneurs – heroes in our own mind. We have learned to trust no one.

There is a short film made by Ian Mackenzie about Stephen Jenkinson, a next-culture elder, sometimes called Griefwalker, in which Stephen says, “Human beings are not born. Human beings are made. Human beings are made by other human beings. And if you ask, ‘How do you make humans?’ the answer is, ‘Well, you’ve got to kill off their childhood.’ ‘Because why?’ ‘Because the childhood doesn’t give way, that’s why.’ And then you need a culture that proceeds as if the greatest gift you can give kids at a certain age is the chance to be human.”