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 totally agree.

This is also completely true when trying to talk to new people: being curious trumps all tricks and made-up sentences you can find. That was actually an epiphany for me, where I realized that my difficulty with starting conversation with new people stemmed from my lack of curiosity -- just like you wrote, I thought I had them figured out. Turns out I'm not that great at figuring out people I never spoke to.

Fascinating. A possible counterexample is that I have noticed in myself (and others) a tendency to sometimes be calmed down or reassured by even a mechanical repetition that is known to be mechanical by the recipient. This can happen in spite of consciously thinking "them saying that shouldn't work," and being annoyed at it, at the same time as feeling better because of it. In the instances where it has worked, I have found myself hearing back what I said and having an internal response like, "Yeah! You get me!" And my wife has done the same thing.

Granted, it doesn't happen every time; I think it's partly a question of what words are used. Indeed, on reflection I think it might have to do with parrot-phrasing rather than paraphrasing. At least the instances I remember of this working, were times where I used the same words as the other person, or vice versa.

This suggests to me that there exists some mechanism by which reflection is perceived as supportive, such that it can produce some effect even in the absence of curiosity.

Great post!

I had some similar thoughts about how to listen to other people's problems here:

Start by trying to understand what problem the person is trying to solve. "I've been trying to sign up for dance lessons but can never seem to get around it." One possible approach would be to immediately start offering ways for the person to sign up for dance lessons. Often a more fruitful one would be to first ask - why do you want to attend dance lessons? Maybe it turns out that the person doesn't actually care about learning to dance, but is feeling bad because their friend, a great dancer, always gets all the attention at parties. Then the actual problem is not "how to learn to dance" but "how to get other people to notice me". It's quite possible that not knowing to dance isn't actually the biggest issue there.

Test your understanding of the problem. When you're formulating an understanding of the problem, it can be useful to frequently verbalize it to the other person to make sure that you've understood correctly. "So you seem to be feeling bad because your partner just became the President of your country while you mostly spend time playing video games, is that right?"

A rule of thumb that I sometimes use is "do I feel like I understand this problem and its causes well enough that I could explain to a third person why this person wants to solve it and why they haven't been able to solve it yet?" If the answer is no, hold off proposing solutions and try asking more questions first.

Even "obvious" problems may benefit from questions. Someone once mentioned that they tend to often jump to being critical of others, which tends to be harmful. Here the causal mechanism seemed to be pretty obvious, but asking "how does it tend to be harmful" was still useful in bringing out details of the exact nature of the typical criticism and how people tended to react to that.

I agree with your main idea about how curiosity is related to listening well.

The post’s first sentence implies that the thesis will be a refutation of a different claim:

A common piece of interacting-with-people advice goes: “often when people complain, they don’t want help, they just want you to listen!”

The claim still seems pretty true from my experience: that sometimes people have a sufficient handle on their problem, and don’t want help dealing with the problem better, but do want some empathy, appreciation, or other benefits from communicating their problem in the form of a complaint.

I've spent a few years volunteering at an online emotional support site, and the difference between good listeners and the rest was exactly that, a genuine interest in the other person. Reflecting, empathizing, asking questions comes naturally when you want to understand what the other person is going through and where they are coming from. It is only rarely that you can suggest something they didn't already know, but you can certainly help them clear up their own thoughts and feelings and be able to figure things out for themselves. If you just go through the motions of active listening, you come across as robotic and insincere. Then again, some people don't care about curiosity or interest, just the act of someone listening, repeating, recapping and paraphrasing is good enough.

I think the advice in this post is true and valuable with regards to the importance of developing a deep understanding of the complainer. I do also think (based on my own experience as both complainer and listener) that sometimes people want empathy or a sounding board rather than advice. That doesn't mean they literally don't care about ever solving their problem, but rather that first they need emotional support (in cases where they're wanting empathy) or space to think out loud rather than prescriptive advice.

Promoted to curated: I really liked this post, it was practical, concrete and I think also surprisingly important. I also think I myself benefit particularly much from it, since I think I often struggle with a bunch of the stuff this post addresses. 

The "cargo cult" aspect of repeating back information reminds me of advice I used to read in "how to date" books back when I was on the dating market (and didn't really know the first thing about dating.). Those books often talked about "mirroring" behavior. Supposedly, when two people are into each other, they (sometimes? most of the time?) start to mirror each other's behavior. The books' advice tended to be: if you're into someone, you should start mirroring her behavior (I say "her" because the books I read were generally geared to straight men). On the other hand, maybe "mirroring" is a dynamic that develops from mutual attraction.