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The only reason we ask people how their weekends are is because we want to tell people about our weekends.
- Chuck Palanimma
In 2013, broadcast producer David Isai had the idea to make a very ambitious show. His idea was brilliant, and it quickly became an international weather vane. But the idea isn't new.
I don't mean to kill David's achievements by saying this, but I want to introduce the man who inspired him: the legend of broadcasting - Staz Turkel. Staz Turkel has dabbled in nearly everything radio at the age of 29—he's acted in radio soap operas, aired news, wrote ad copy, and even hosted a show on Chicago Radio. A show named after himself. He has interviewed countless big names on this show, including: Dorothy Parker, Martin Luther King , Bob Dylan , and Tennessee Williams .
But it wasn't the celebrity interviews that earned him the Pulitzer Prize . Turkel is best remembered for his interviews with ordinary people who would not be known and unknown. Turkle spent many years amassing thousands of hours of interviews into an oral history. He traveled all over the United States, walking around the streets, lingering in restaurants and restaurants, listening to people tell their stories. He met people who lived through WWII and the Great Depression, just asked a few questions and listened to them quietly, letting the tape recorder record it all.
He wrote a book in his early years called "Work: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About It" It's not a fascinating title, the characters in the book - garbage collectors, haircutters Teachers, hotel clerks, piano tuners, and dozens of other professions—none of them are in the glamorous professions that people see. If you pass them by at the grocery store, you won't even notice them. But the stories that happened to them were so gripping and heart-wrenching, that they and their lives were unique. Not only was the book internationally acclaimed, it was even adapted into a Broadway opera.
Turkle has been insisting on interviewing and writing. He interviewed more than 5,000 people and accumulated more than 9,000 hours of interview recordings. This is a precious treasure of human history and humanities. The New York Times called him "a man who listened to America" when it published his obituary.
Staz Turkle often says that part of his success is due to childhood experiences. He grew up in Chicago , where his parents ran a small hotel. Various people came and went at Turkel's house, including many new immigrants. As a child, Turkel liked to sit in the lobby of the hotel and listen to the stories of those travelers. That's when he learned how to listen and has an unquenchable passion for hearing other people's stories. In his memoirs, he wrote: "In interviews, the only attitude I carry is respect. As long as you listen carefully, the other party can feel your respect. Because the more you listen, the more willing they are to talk to you. I'd love to open up to you."
This reminds me of David Isay again. Decades later, when Staz Turkel walked into people's kitchens and dining rooms to hear their stories, Isai found it was time to listen to the world again. So he started a project, which you may have heard called StoryCorps. The idea for the project was simple: he installed a recording booth at New York's Grand Central Station, and then invited people to walk into the booth and record a conversation. Today, StoryCorps has booths in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco. In addition, a mobile recording booth travels thousands of miles across the United States each year, collecting diverse stories from people willing to share conversations.
StoryCorps has been incredibly successful. Isai and his colleagues have received thousands of tapes of interviews from the platform, and a selection of interviews are broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition every Friday. Every time I see someone crying while listening to the radio, I think they must be listening to StoryCorps story.
These stories cover a wide variety of topics, from dating expert interviews to post-war trauma interviews. The recordings range from children interviewing their parents' early lives, to reuniting separated siblings, to soldiers recounting long and lonely nights of military deployment.
StoryCorps doesn't attract many celebrities, instead, it gathers some ordinary people. Also, they don't get paid for uploading the recordings. People are willing to sit in a small recording booth for 40 minutes simply because they want their stories to be heard and remembered. Isay said the impact of listening to the move was profound. "Listening is a respect for others," Isai said. "There's a joke that I'm a bad listener...I'm just too distracted by my phone and email...but that's what StoryCorps is about. Why. It teaches us to listen, and in this age of loud noise, makes listening attentively a gift. It makes us wrap our arms around other people's shoulders, shake them awake, and tell them, 'Hey! Let's talk, Tell me what you think is most important to you.
Isai's words resonated deeply with me. First of all, he admits that he is not a very good listener, but also recognizes the power of listening, and Actively looking for ways to be better , and I am also trying to improve.
In fact, everyone is trying to understand how to listen to others, but few people listen with their hearts. That is to say, people only listen with their ears, but do not understand with their hearts , respond and remember. The inability to do this is not a personality flaw, it's just a weakness of human nature. Listening to others is not easy, it seems to be the case with humans.
Anyone who has ever been with a baby will Discovered that people are not born to listen. At the beginning of life, we only know how to make noise The "father of listening". As early as the 1950s, he carried out a series of listening experiments, in his book "Are you listening?" "It can be concluded that because there is no practical standard for listening, the average person does not know how to listen. Although they have ears and can hear very well, they rarely have the appropriate auditory skills to make their hearing functional and perform what might be called listening.
Humans love to talk. Speaking is useful and can support and even shape our personality. Scientists at Harvard University have found that pleasure centers in the brain are activated when people talk about themselves. The researchers asked study participants to talk about themselves and their own perceptions of something, and then asked them to talk about other people and their perceptions of other people, while plugging into a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to make observations. The researchers found that when participants talked about themselves, the midbrain limbic dopamine system became highly active locally. And this active area is the same as the area of excitement when humans have sex, smoke cocaine, and eat candy. You read that right - talking about your own pleasure is like having sex or eating chocolate truffles .
What's even more interesting is that the study participants didn't actually know someone was listening to them. They thought they were talking to themselves. It seems that people still enjoy talking about themselves, even when the object of the conversation is air.
This shows that we may not be very objective when evaluating the success of a conversation. How many times have you felt good about yourself after an interview, thought you were done, only to be surprised to find out that you didn’t get the job? There may be thousands of reasons why you're not hired, but one possibility is that you talk too much about yourself and hear too little. Because of this, you feel so good yourself, and the person across the table doesn't necessarily feel the same. If we use our own feelings as a criterion for judging the success of a conversation, we are likely to be misled by the dopamine produced when we talk about ourselves.
In another experiment, the researchers asked participants to answer a variety of questions and respond accordingly.With varying amounts of money as bonuses, people can choose to answer questions of their own choosing. They can choose to answer questions about themselves, about others, or about a fact. Once again, the
researchers found that people choose to answer questions that reveal their personal information, even if those questions are associated with a smaller bonus. They could accept a bonus 17% lower than the average in order to talk about their feelings and thoughts. "Just as monkeys were willing to give up juice to see a good mate in a group, and college students were willing to give up money to see attractive mates, our participants were willing to give up bonuses to think and talk about themselves," the study said.
Our tendency to speak rather than listen can get in the way of having a great conversation. I find the word "I hear it" more and more in everyday communication, ironically, we need to show that we are listening in this way. First of all, the act of "hearing" is passive, and does not indicate that one is actively listening to the other party. And more importantly, in fact, many times we say we "hear" when in fact we are not listening at all. One day I went to the grocery store to buy something and said to the cashier, "My eco bag is stuck at the bottom of the shopping cart. Please wait a minute, I'll take it." She looked me in the eyes and said, "Okay, no Question. I heard you." And she was already putting my purchases in a plastic bag while she spoke. I had to repeat it twice before she really understood.
Have there been many times when someone said to you "you didn't hear me at all" and I think what they were really trying to say was "you didn't listen to me". So, I deliberately train myself to stop talking immediately whenever someone complains about anything like that. And almost every time someone complained that I didn't hear what they said, they got it right. I've already lost my mind. One of the best ways
can help you listen attentively is to memorize conversations, although we rarely associate memory and listening skills together. The memory research I mentioned in Chapter 6 was done in the 1950s. Researchers have found that if we don't pay attention to what we hear, we forget half of it within 8 hours. Even if we listen very carefully and attentively, after a few months, we forget 75% of the content. Remember, active listening is defined as: hearing, understanding, responding, and remembering. However, this is not something humans are born with, and has been increasingly forgotten in recent decades.
There may have been a time in human history when we were better at listening. With recent technological advancements, it's easy to forget that reading material has only been widely disseminated in the last few hundred years. In the past centuries, the main source of information and educational heritage of mankind has been achieved through word of mouth. Before the invention of the printing press, human education relied heavily on the ability to listen. It is only in modern society that we begin to think that listening to others is a waste of time.
It's no surprise that today's way of getting information further compromises people's ability to listen. When we read articles online, the plethora of pictures, videos, and links control the excitement of our brains, and our brains have learned how to skip. It ignores details and nuances and goes straight to searching for and receiving what the brain perceives as the core content.
researchers found that these online reading habits have also eroded our offline print reading habits. Today's students have a much harder time reading War and Peace than when their parents and grandparents were younger. Also, we don't perform any better when listening to someone give a long speech than when we browse a long article online, and it's hard to resist clicking another page or checking our email. We also learned to glimmer through our conversations.
If you're used to expressing yourself in 140 words or less, if someone takes 10 minutes to describe what's going on at their job, it's going to be hard for you to stay focused while listening to them. Even online, articles use a lot of charts, graphs, variant fonts, and pictures to enhance the readability of the story, and many people read only the headlines. People's brains become very terrified of focusing on what other people have written or said for long periods of time. difficulty. Neuroscientist Marianne Wolf calls this condition the "Twitter brain."
While few of us are good, active listeners, most are ignorant of our own incompetence. AccentureThe consulting firm surveyed thousands of people across 30 countries and territories, almost all of whom claimed to be good listeners but turned out to be deceived by themselves. 98% of those surveyed feel distracted most of the day, more than half feel the digital way of working is a distraction for them to listen to others, and 86% say they stay focused during conference calls Multipurpose. Remember, humans are not capable of multitasking. You can't listen to the phone while checking e-mail or printing a document. People seem to be unaware of the daily habits that interfere with their listening, so they think they are good listeners when they are not.
Most people know the importance of listening, but few take any action to improve their listening skills. When asked about the importance of listening, most business people and academics say that listening is one of the most important skills an effective professional must possess. However, less than 2% of articles in business journals address the topic of active listening. At school, too, it's easy to find a public speaking class, but there are very few that teach you how to listen. Unfortunately, it turns out that listening is a skill that must be taught. A study by
Australia shows that active listening is a conscious act that must be part of a given teaching, in other words, students learn to listen better if they are aware of how they are being taught how to listen. This skill cannot be acquired in the process of taking other courses such as math and history. The researchers are particularly concerned about the role of facial expressions and body language in communication, as they believe both are key to effective listening. "As a listener, in order to 'listen' to others, you need to understand not only the literal meaning of verbal communication," the study says, "but also the true meaning of non-verbal communication."
opens up by using With space conference technology, the experiment appears to be a resounding success. Open space meeting technology refers to a form of meeting organization that has a specific focus, but does not set a meeting agenda, which can limit the use of computers throughout the meeting and increase face-to-face communication. Students are given an assignment and are divided into groups to discuss together in a large open conference room. They were told to listen carefully, think hard, and be ready to make meeting closing remarks. The researchers tried to answer the question experimentally: "Does the students' understanding of the task deepen by listening to each other?" The answer seems to be yes.
Listening consumes energy and requires our intense concentration, not just auditory sensory activity. There are three types of information conveyed in a conversation: language (the literal meaning of words), posture (facial expressions, gestures, body gestures), and intonation (the way we speak).
We all know that words alone are not enough to convey information effectively. Many joked that a "sarcasm font" was needed on emails and social media to let others know we were just kidding at times. We've all received emails that look malicious or insulting, but in many cases, that's not what the sender meant. Understanding what other people are trying to tell us requires more than just reading the literal meaning of words. Listening to others requires us to engage our senses and give our full attention.
But many of us don't get that wholehearted into a conversation. People only see communication as an opportunity to express their needs and opinions, not an opportunity to hear the ideas of others. “Most people don’t listen to others to understand them,” says author Stephen Covey , “but to respond to them. Likewise, we talk to people because we want to talk, not because we want to hear them. .
Our conversation tends to feel like a bad concert. The violinist plays one piece and the pianist plays another piece. They can look at each other kindly and nod politely, but if they play It's not the same score, and the end result will just be a discordant cacophony of noise. It's hard, but not impossible, for
to break the habit of talking about themselves without giving others a chance to breathe. First, try Listen to what the other person thinks. When the other person is speaking, think about whether their words have a deeper meaning; observe their facial expressions and gestures, and think about what they are trying to say. You can also ask questions like: "Does this mean...? ""youDo you mean...? "Maybe they have a voice, what do they mean? Why did they tell that story at that point? What's the meaning of it?
Also, predict what they will say next. Only say it in the present moment. It is possible to predict what they will say next. Of course, there is a certain risk in doing so, because you may be trapped in your own imagination and presupposition of others, rather than based on what they actually tell you. Prediction. Saying the second half of the sentence without waiting for the first half of the sentence can be very self-righteous, so you'd better keep your guesses rotten in your stomach and not say it. However, the associations and predictions will keep you in the right conversation.
's next piece of advice is especially important in the current political climate: We evaluate the evidence and don't jump to conclusions. That means we listen to what other people are saying, not some specific words or names, just assume where they stand and what they want to say.
We often understand people out of context based on just a few words. If someone says they support the Second Amendment, we often feel like we've Know who the other person is. We don't listen to what they have to say anymore because we think we can predict everything they say. On some topics, we seem to have chosen our position early in the morning and don't want to listen anymore to any objection.
There is no one in life who speaks with the same voice as a news anchor on TV. When someone makes an opinion that differs from yours, don't be too hasty to keep them out, measure what they offer the argument. Imagine if someone is right, what does that mean? Or, where did they get the information? You can ask yourself: What is your source of information about that? It's what they actually said, not what you think they said or could say. Don't label them simply liberals or conservatives , don't use the same formula to communicate with them. Please listen first Respond to what they actually said. That means, sometimes, you have to ask them to clarify their position; it also means that you probably don't know how to respond. But there's also a positive in questioning what you're hearing Meaning, that's a sign that you're really listening.
Finally, try to summarize in your own mind what you heard. In this way, you can coordinate the thoughts that arise in your mind. Relive what others have said If you do, put it in your own words, and you'll immediately see if you've missed something or still have questions at some point. Then you can follow up with a good question like: "How did you get from the post office? to school? I don't seem to understand. "Remember, active listening isn't about sitting dumb and putting up with someone else's tirade. If that's all, a robot can do the job. Listening is a job, it requires movement.
I listened to a lot of operas as a kid. My grandfather wrote 8 Opera. At home, we play his music a lot, and of course listen to Verdi , Puccini, and Mozart . Many American kids know Wagner only in Bugs Bunny (Bugs Bunny) and I've heard the whole Wagner mythical opera "The Ring of the Nibelung", but I never liked it from the bottom of my heart. I thought opera was boring. After
entered college , I plan to study classical opera. But in my freshman year, I transferred schools halfway. I found out that the new school only provides scholarships for vocal students. And I only have 4 days to prepare for the exam, when I have to sing an art song and a Opera aria . I crammed countless operas during those 4 days. Although I can't remember what I sang afterward, I fell in love with the opera after performing it in front of the faculty jury.
What the hell happened? After listening to the opera for so many years, I finally stopped listening to it as background music, but listened to it with my heart. Before that interview, even when the lights were dimmed when I was enjoying the opera in the opera house , I just sat under the stage and didn't listen to it seriously. I just let the music flow through my ears, but I was thinking about other things. So, when I really listened to my heart and really listened to it, opera music There were huge waves in my heart, the experience was like being guided by the gods. And sometimes, when I useA similar feeling occurs when the mind listens to others.
In the broadcast world, the host's goal is to talk as little as possible. We must try to let the interviewees talk as much as possible, because if only the host is talking, the recording material will definitely be useless in the end. Therefore, we have developed a habit of asking questions as concise and direct as possible, shutting up after asking, and listening to the guests carefully.
And some of the interviews that I thought would be boring, were surprisingly fun. I once did an interview about Michigan's purple lily snails and was fascinated by the stories of those scientists. They have sacrificed their lives to protect this small, unassuming mollusk, the . I used to spend a lot of time wandering around gas stations, interviewing passersby there. I've met all kinds of people with different backgrounds and varying income levels, all heading towards their respective destinations, all with their own unique charm and intelligence.
If you want to be smarter, listen with your heart; if you want to make your marriage stronger, listen to your significant other; if you want better friendship, stop chattering and listen to your friends. "The most fundamental of all human needs," says Dr. Ralph Nichols, "is to understand and be understood by others. Listening is the best way to understand others." Literally , listening, is the most important skill I have developed in my life, bar none.
Alright, I can't go on quoting anyone else in this chapter. When it comes to the importance of listening skills, there are countless wise men in the world who have said countless quotes that are better than what I can say. But allow me to end with the words of my favorite interviewee, Salman Rushdie . In his book "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights" (Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights), there is the character of a genie who has the magic of hearing other people's voices. When I asked about the character Rushdie, he said, "She just needs to put her ear to your heart to discover your deepest desires...I think writers should be the best listeners. As a writer, you have to There's an ability to hear people's real heart and to bring those truths to life. So yeah, listening is great magic.
