Can Better Listening Improve Your Relationships?

Courtney: Welcome to Health Matters, your weekly dose of the latest in health and wellness from NewYork-Presbyterian. I’m Courtney Allison.

When talking to someone, we can have the best intentions to listen well. But if you think about it, are you just waiting for your turn to talk? And how does that get in the way of a deeper connection with people in your life?

Joining us this week is Dr. Steven Mazza, a clinical psychologist with NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia. He describes how listening can be a super power, what gets in the way of good listening, and how we can be present for those we care about. It turns out—better listening isn’t just a service to others; by listening well we can also help ourselves.

Courtney: Hi, Dr. Mazza. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Steven Mazza: I’m really happy to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation.

Courtney: So, you’re a mental health specialist and I imagine that involves a lot of listening.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Mm hm.

Courtney: I’d love to hear: What do you consider the qualities of a good listener?

Dr. Steven Mazza: Okay well, what comes to mind first is presence. It’s a hard thing to define. It’s really the way you are in a room with somebody. And it’s something that you can develop more and more of over time with consistent practice.

Not only is presence necessary to listen well, but it allows you to engage in a way that will support the other person.

So let’s, if you’re open to it, I can walk you through what it means to be present.

Courtney: Yes!

Dr. Steven Mazza: You know, how to practice that, and then how that opens the door to effective listening.

Courtney: Yes. That would be great.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Everyone has this superpower that they may or may not be aware of, and most people don’t practice it.

So I’ll walk you through what the superpower is. Notice how your feet feel on the floor right now. And for listeners, feel free to do the same if you’re sitting down. Do you notice any sensations in your feet?

Courtney: Yes. There’s a little bit more pressure. I think I, you know, my ankle twisted a little bit as I’m settling it in.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Sure. Okay, were you as aware of the sensations in your feet before I told you to put your attention on them?

Courtney: No, not at all.

Dr. Steven Mazza: No, okay. So there’s different names for it. You might call it attention, awareness, consciousness. We all have it and we can direct it different places. Do you know where most people’s awareness is most of the time?

Courtney: Themselves. Their thoughts.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Nailed it. Yeah, their mind, their thoughts. And that’s a problem during a conversation where the intention is to listen and support someone else.

When I first started I would mostly be listening to the thoughts I had while someone else was talking. So someone else is presenting some kind of problem to me that they’re experiencing, and then I’m focusing on what I should say next and how I can help them solve the problem. So my intentions were good. You know, I’m trying to be a helpful friend, colleague, partner, whatever it may be. But rather than being fully present with them, I was more focused on myself.

And in the end, I’m not serving them as well when I’m focusing on my own thoughts and my own solutions rather than their thoughts, and their feelings, and their experience in the moment. That changed over time. And it’s a continuous practice. It’s still changing and evolving.

So the default is for our attention to be on our own thoughts, on our own feelings, and there’s a consistent practice, the way I just had you move your awareness into your feet, to move it out of your mind and onto the other person. And that’s something that if you’re really attentive, you are going to be practicing this moment to moment throughout a conversation.

That’s the practice. That’s step one. Now, while you’re present, you actually have the power to, rather than jumping in and acting on your own emotional urges to either solve problems or to judge the other person’s experience. For example, why are you worrying about that? It’s no big deal.

Right, that’s out of your own emotions. You have the power to listen, rather than react. It’s not easy because you’re going to experience a lot of thoughts and feelings that come up that are trying to control the conversation, but the idea behind this listening practice is you are rising above your own urges and your own thoughts, which will create space for them to speak and for them to feel supported by you.

Courtney: How do you direct all your attention on the person? Like, how should I be thinking about talking with you right now?

Dr. Steven Mazza: Sure, so it’s unrealistic to expect that all of your attention is going to be on the person continuously. It’s just not really possible because the mind, constantly creating thoughts. So that’s natural. The mind is just going to fill the space.

Courtney: Right.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Alright, so during a conversation, the goal isn’t to stop thoughts because that would take a lot of effort during a conversation to stop your thinking. The mind’s gonna chatter. It’s gonna talk. It’s gonna come up with thoughts. The idea is: what you have control over is not the creation of thoughts, but are you putting all of your attention on them or not? So as your mind creates thoughts, you notice that you’re lost in them, and you bring your attention back to the other person.

And so you might focus on the person’s tone of voice, you might focus on their facial expressions. The more attention you have on them, the more you’ll pick up on cues that you weren’t even aware of before, because you were too focused on your own stuff.

By being quiet and just focusing on them, you’ll find that they end up just continuing to talk. And they may come to their own solutions with your support, with your supportive listening. Not only that, you give them the space to feel their feelings.

Courtney: Yes.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Which often is the issue in the first place. There may not be a solution to the outside problem, but if you can help them work through their emotions they can better work through and accept the outside problem because they’re not blocked with shame, guilt, fear, whatever it may be.

Courtney: Is it possible to retrain your brain to be a better listener?

Dr. Steven Mazza: Yes. Yeah, it takes a lot of practice and it takes a shift in what your intention is. So, first of all, you have to want to be a good listener. This isn’t going to happen naturally unless it’s something that you really want. Hopefully by people listening to this podcast, they’re thinking this is worth trying. My, the way I engage in conversation could be totally different and my relationships could really evolve and change in positive ways if you give it a shot.

Courtney: Mm hm.

Dr. Steven Mazza: But then you have the intention. Then it’s all about actually practicing it moment to moment. And it’s just like any habit. At first it’s not gonna come natural to you. But over time it’s just gonna become oh, this is a conversation, this is the time that I pull my attention out of my mind and into the other person’s facial expressions. And to me, this is not something that you learn in a week. You learn in a few months. This is a lifelong practice of transcending yourself to serve others.

Courtney: So in that vein, I wonder, can you speak to some more of the benefits of listening, how you see that it helps people?

Dr. Steven Mazza: Sure, absolutely. So when you’re listening to someone, I’d say one of the primary benefits is that it helps build the relationship you have with them. That’s beneficial for you and for them. So if you’re a parent, and your child is coming to you with some problem they’re experiencing at school, perhaps they didn’t do well on a test, and if you are there just to listen and support them, they are going to feel comfortable coming to you with issues.

Courtney: Yeah.

Dr. Steven Mazza: That builds the relationship, it means they’re more likely to come to you again in the future. In opposition to that is if they bring up having done poorly on a test, the mind tells you, thoughts come up, like, how do we fix this? How do we stop this? And if you immediately judge the child by saying, why didn’t you study more? It’s an understandable reaction from a parent. It just doesn’t serve the relationship or the child in the long term. Because what you might find is they’ll withdraw from you rather than coming to you when they have challenges.

Courtney: Yeah.

Dr. Steven Mazza: So number one is, it improves the relationship. It helps the child or the friend or the partner really feel safe and comfortable. It also helps the other person process their emotions. The emotions are often the biggest barrier to the person working through a situation well. If someone is anxious, ashamed, angry, it’s unlikely they’re going to be able to handle the situation with clarity, with ease, with perspective. So as the listener, it gives the person permission to feel their feelings.

Courtney: Yeah.

Dr. Steven Mazza: It can really facilitate the process of healing when, if someone’s been holding on to something for a long time, some kind of emotional, it could be a memory, it could be an emotion that they haven’t worked through and they’re in the presence of someone who’s listening deeply, it might provide them an opportunity to feel safe enough to go there.

Courtney: If someone tells you they want help to become a better listener, where would you start?

Dr. Steven Mazza: Okay. So, I’ve got three simple steps here that I would focus on. Okay. Number one is practice being present. That goes back to taking your awareness out of your mind, out of your thoughts, and continuously bringing it into the present moment onto the other person.

Okay. Number two is to resist your own urges to speak. So there’s an acronym that we use in the field called WAIT. Why am I talking? And generally, it’s because there’s something we’re feeling inside that’s uncomfortable, that’s pushing us to say something, rather than because it’s going to serve the other person. So often we feel uncomfortable with other people’s pain that we want to solve it.

Right away we’re pulled to, Oh, well, you don’t have to worry about it because of this or it’s going to be okay because of that. So number two ask yourself, WAIT. Why am I talking? That’s probably one of the hardest parts here.

And then the third is that when you are talking, the emphasis of what you say is about showing understanding and helping the person feel that their emotions are okay. That’s also known as emotional validation.

Because if you jump in with a solution, typically the person might feel a little bit of resistance to that, if they don’t feel understood first. And so it’s not to say you can’t ever offer advice, that’s not what I would recommend, but you want to prioritize having the person feel understood.

Alright, so three steps to review. Be present, resist the urge to speak, and then when you do speak, rather than focus on solving problems, you’re focusing on helping the other person feel understood, and helping their emotional experience feel accepted and okay and safe.

Courtney: Yeah. And sometimes I’ll ask outright, are you in a place where I can offer advice, after I’ve done the listening and I do have thoughts and I’ll ask to, kind of, transition and make sure they’re receptive. Because sometimes you just want to talk. Maybe sometimes you’re not looking to problem-solve. You just want to vent.

Dr. Steven Mazza: At least the person knows that you will respect that they may not want to hear it right now.

Courtney: Yeah.

Dr. Steven Mazza: It really shows a sensitivity.

Courtney: What if someone’s saying something you really don’t agree with? Or you’re feeling a little uncomfortable because you, it’s not just sitting with a friend going through a difficult time. Someone’s saying things that really are stirring up the feeling to want to argue or defend.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Okay. Yeah, this is a really common one. It’s probably one of the most challenging situations to practice this. So let’s say somebody is attacking you verbally, right? Criticizing you for something that they perceive you’ve done. You disagree with their perspective, so it’s, the emotion right away for most people could be anger. The urge is going to be to defend yourself. I certainly have that urge. I work on it in my relationships.

I would say it often goes two ways. One is it escalates. Both sides escalate and become more defensive.

Courtney: Yes.

Dr. Steven Mazza: The other leads to withdrawal. And sometimes it’s probably best to just say, let’s have this conversation later.

Courtney: Yeah.

Dr. Steven Mazza: You know, because if you’re really frustrated, it’s just not, you know, to fake it, to fake words while you’re angry.

Courtney: I really understand what you’re saying. It’s a little different.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Right, right. There’s so much nuance here, you know. I wish I could just say there’s one way to do it. But it’s really about meeting yourself where you’re at and like those times where it’s just like, I can’t have this conversation right now.

Courtney: Yeah.

Dr. Steven Mazza: But I’ll have it in a little while.

Courtney: Yeah, that makes so much sense! So, can you offer some ways that being a good listener like that can help in different kinds of relationships we haven’t talked about yet—like maybe at work?

Dr. Steven Mazza: Absolutely. So, at work is a great scenario. And so, if you can approach, and this is actually true of all listening, if you can approach it as, okay, someone’s coming to speak to me and I’m here to provide them support, not to judge, not to solve problems, but to just be here to listen, it’s very likely that they will want to speak to you more in the future, that they will enjoy being around you, and that they might even speak well about you to your colleagues, right?

So this is a really good way to get a good reputation in a, you know, in any kind of work environment is to be a good listener. This is where it works for you as well as for others, but it’s especially helpful if you’re a manager because there will be, there’s always competing demands among employees.

Everyone’s got things that they’re struggling with and if they can feel safe coming to you with these things, rather than that you might be judgmental or critical, the better relationship you have with them, the more likely they are to want to work for you instead of against you.

But what I’ve learned in my clinical work is really that it comes down to service. And when the focus is on serving others, it does end up benefiting you in the long term, but that’s secondary.

To have genuine concern and care for other people and demonstrating that in the way you listen is bigger than revenue. Right? It’s bigger than what it’ll do for yourself. It’s about acknowledging that you’re part of a greater community and that your own presence and awareness can help serve and support and contribute. And so it’s really based on values.

Courtney: Thank you so much. You definitely give all your presence. This was so wonderful to talk to you and I’m so grateful for your time. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Steven Mazza: Oh it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Courtney: Our many thanks to Dr. Stephen Mazza. I’m Courtney Allison.

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