Listening for the Sake of Understanding

I’m in business school, so listening to professors is something I do in class every day. In school, regardless of level or discipline, we pay attention to our teachers because we trust that they have knowledge to impart. In doing so, we open our minds to them. By understanding them, we believe that we can enrich our own thinking and develop new skills.

However, I don’t feel we bring this same attitude towards most of our conversations or debates, especially if we’re speaking with someone we don’t agree with or perhaps dislike. When someone around me espouses an opinion I don’t share, my initial reactions are often to try to prove them wrong or to simply disregard them. If I were to engage with that person, my intention might be to change their mind or at least prove them wrong in some way that made me feel like I got the upper hand. In contrast, when a professor expresses an opinion that I initially disagree with, I more actively try to question my own thinking and hear out their points to see if I need to re-evaluate my stance before starting to debate or adamantly state my case.

This makes some sense—education is time-consuming and expensive, so we expect our teachers to have knowledge that we seek, or why else would we be there? In a way, we pursue education because we want our minds to be changed, or at least broadened, by experienced individuals with specialized knowledge. Most other people in our lives don’t have this distinction and we don’t afford them the same level of engagement.

But what if we tried? I think that by making a point to more deeply understand other people, we can actually become more at ease with our own viewpoints and develop the ability to hold more complex ideas in our mind.

To do this, we can try to uncover the underlying human need that informs the other person’s viewpoint. A contentious topic in the United States is gun control. Someone who favors strict firearm regulation might be baffled and angered by the perspective of someone who proudly supports the Second Amendment and wants to maintain or ease people’s access to firearms. A key realization here is that the point of deeper engagement may not be to come to agreement. Especially with divisive topics like this one, it’s naïve to expect one side to completely convince the other. Rather, we listen to those we disagree with in order to understand where they are coming from, ultimately with the hope of coming to a more nuanced solution that benefits both parties.

In this case, groups on either side of the argument may be motivated by the same essential human need: safety. Those who support gun restriction may have experienced gun violence in their life and believe that eliminating firearms from civilian society will increase everyone’s safety. Others may support gun ownership because they believe it actually contributes to safety, and their reliance on firearms for protection growing up in a remote area may have influenced this stance. Oftentimes, our opinions and beliefs are deeper and more individualized than blanket labels like pro-gun or anti-gun, but we wouldn’t know this without first being curious as to where the other person’s beliefs come from.

In 2022, for the first time in nearly thirty years, Congress passed meaningful gun legislation in the form of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Republicans and Democrats found enough common ground in a shared concern for safety to produce something that keeps guns away from dangerous people while preserving gun rights. When we stop trying to defeat the other person’s argument and start trying to understand our shared needs, we create the conditions for something more lasting than a one-sided victory.

While the gun control example is at the scale of national debate, this practice also applies to our daily exchanges, at home or in the workplace, far from congressional or town halls. If we take on this stance of listening to understand before speaking to persuade, we may be able to achieve meaningful compromises and lasting solutions to our most challenging, collective problems.

If you found this interesting, we’d invite you to listen to episode three of the Facing the Moment Podcast, Repairing Broken Dialogue, wherein Toufic Hakim, PhD, speaks with Jen Wofford, MSW, about how to approach divisive conversations so that they lead to genuine connection and understanding.