My Braces Could Teach Me A Lot About Active Listening and to be a Better Researcher If I Would Only Shut Up and Let Them
“Being unobtrusive can help. It has been said of one brilliant field worker: ‘Other people have presence. He has absence.’”
As a qualitative design researcher I try to practice — to live — the ideal of being a “great listener.” The obstacle most of us need to overcome to get there is described by indi young in her Practical Empathy. This is one of the most concise and direct ways of describing the typical way we listen in our culture I’ve ever read; I try to be conscious of this mindset all the time:
Fall into the Mindset
How often do you give the person you’re listening to your complete attention? According to Kevin Brooks, normally you listen for an opening in the conversation, so you can tell the other person what came up for you, or you listen for points in the other person’s story that you can match, add to, joke about, or trump.
It feels different to be a true listener.
Listening should be the vast majority of what any interviewer or researcher does, and fortunately life presents daily opportunities to hone this practice, this orientation toward the world, this perpetual opportunity to be a student, to learn.
Which is why I was sincerely looking forward to the prospect my recent acquisition of “adult” braces posed: to be forced to really listen to conversations without being preoccupied with composing my own contribution. Because talking really hurts.
An opportunity presented itself at the recent #ethnobreakfast discussion (topic: who is the subject of ethnographic research?). Always a gathering of intelligent, articulate people, if there was ever any conversation that did not need my input or perspective at all, it was this. I could just sit back, observe, and absorb.
And yet — I could not keep my pie hole shut.
No. I just had to let my thoughts on the matters of defining study populations and behavioral domains be known to everyone present — even despite my deep shame at realizing what an egomaniac I truly am (You will hear my words!), even though my less-than-48-hours-old braces felt like a cheese grater slicing my mouth with every peep, even though I forced everyone to try to decipher what, exactly, I was actually saying as I slurred and spittled my garbled two cents.
I could not even observe and absorb much, either, as I was listening to the discussion through a haze of triple-consciousness:
- Trying to actually hear the important and insightful content of the discussion itself
- Surrendering to my conceit and irrepressible drive to say my words, asking myself, “Ok, if you must insist on talking, are you actually contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way?”
- Ultimately, being surprised and embarrassed by my inability to just quietly, humbly, listen
I told myself that it’s ok, I’ve been socialized into a culture in which conversations are more competitive than contemplative, or that the best listeners actually are active and engaged. But really I’m just enamored with the sound of my own voice and being heard (All eyes on me!).
Fortunately another “teachable moment” arose soon after with the wonderful evening at SFMOMA orchestrated by the “The Ladies on the Design Team at Dropbox.” Roughly 20 women in UX design and research were treated to an architectural tour of the new museum, and engaged in a robust discussion afterwards over dinner about the similarities and differences in designing physical and virtual spaces.
Now, I wasn’t entirely unbridled in this conversation as 1) I’m really self conscious of eating like a feral child with my new braces, so I tried to literally keep my mouth shut, and 2) the majority of women were designers (some architects, but not researchers) so it really would have been disruptive to insist on hammering through the design-focused discussion with my social science/research hot take on things.
It was a wonderful, thought-provoking discussion, and I regained a bit of self-respect being able to control myself and truly listen and learn.
Being a great listener remains aspirational for me — but fortunately, there is perpetual opportunity to improve. As Robert S. Weiss frames it in his classic Learning From Strangers,
Being unobtrusive can help. It has been said of one brilliant field worker: “Other people have presence. He has absence.”
