It’s simple, but not easy.
It’s not hard to convince someone that becoming muscular is a challenging task. You have to put in the effort, eat right, and progressively overload your muscles to slowly become stronger. But a lot of people do not seem to believe that becoming a good listener is also something that needs work. In theory it looks simple. Like breathing meditation, you only need to focus on something you are so used to doing — breathing, and that’s it. But if you have never meditated before, you’ll find something this simple to be hard to actually practice.
I argue that it’s the same with listening. One can hear, but it doesn’t make them a good listener. But what do I mean by that? Let me start off with something my doctor once reminded me, when I told him I find it difficult to help someone mentally ill.
“Your job is to care, not to cure.”
When we talk about listening to people, especially in the context of listening to someone going through dark times, we usually do it because we care about the other person. That’s great, but I think we ought to put more emphasis on the “not to cure” part too. More often than not, when I finally mustered enough courage to tell someone about my problems, it’s almost certain that the first thing they do is to tell me what I can try to fix the problem, or how I should be thinking. And most of the conversation will revolve around those, giving me the impression that people are trying to fix me more so than listening to me.
Let me make this clear: The intention to help is good, but trying to fix someone’s depression usually only leads to frustrations on both sides. There are many reasons to this, some examples:
- They may feel very demotivated to try anything
- They may have unaddressed concerns they are not even aware of
- They just hope to have someone understand what they are going through
When the listener does not get the response they’d hoped for, after some time, naturally they’d feel irritated. But we can avoid this by shifting our mindset: Instead of listening to give advice, try to listen to understand. Based on my personal experience, we tend to find it difficult to accept a view we do not agree. We know that everyone experiences life differently, yet somehow, when it comes to listening, it can become insurmountably challenging to emphatize with someone whose thinking is unbelievable from our perspective.
“How can someone so lucky still feel that their life sucks?”
“Why wouldn’t they try harder?”
“Why are they so fixated to this destructive thinking pattern?”
The universe is so vast, and if we believe that humans can create infinite possibilities, then it follows that there are ways of thinking that wouldn’t make sense to us. Here’s the thing: You do not have to adopt their views to agree with what they say. But let’s take one step back first — do we even know their views? Do we really understand them? After listening to so many people, I only find my judgements on them to be proven inaccurate again and again. The depths of their despair, the story of their lives, the hurdles they have to face everyday… Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that the person we are listening to have also lived 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year. How they see life isn’t something that just happened in a split second — and therefore we should be prepared to humble ourselves, that we can listen for hours, and still only know very little. And that’s okay.
It’s very hard to open up nowadays to other people, and even harder when we intend to reveal our vulnerabilities. So it’s important to keep in mind that there is a time element involved. It takes time to build trust, so they might not say everything, and that’s okay; over time, they will feel safer, and you’ll get to understand them on an even deeper level.
Let them rant. Help them express themselves. Validate their feelings. Once the mindset is right, listening will be more effective.