(Portuguese) I want to tell you
why I'm interested in listening.
When I was 17 years old,
I started to suffer from a pain in my throat.
Psychiatrists called it globus hystericus,
completely psychosomatic.
Eventually I developed depressions,
and even considered suicide, and I could not relax.
At the age of 25 when I tried yoga,
I felt as if somebody was putting a nail into my throat here
and it was coming out from the other side.
So I learned to cope with the pain
by working many hours and ignoring what was going on inside,
so I couldn't feel anything from here down.
And in this way, I was able to raise a family,
succeed in my career,
and things were as if they were OK,
until by the age of 46.
I was hit by a crisis
that was sparked by a consultant
using questions from an appreciative inquiry.
She asked:
"When were the relationships between men and women ideal?
And could you please tell us a story
about a moment at work in which you felt full of life?"
I was stand.
First, I realized how much little joy I had in my life,
and second, I realized that answering this question is changing me,
thanks to somebody listening to me.
Then I allowed myself to try a variety of things
such as: massage therapy, psychodrama,
storytelling classes, voice classes,
Zen Buddhism workshops,
and more recently dialectical behavior therapy
and things started to change for me.
First I could feel the pain again but I didn't run away from it.
Eventually I even started to feel anxiety,
which I didn't know what it was until that age.
But later on, I won some moments of tranquility, quietness,
and moments of joy.
And I started to ask myself, "What made it possible?"
And my answer was that I was so lucky
as to raise myself a village of people who would listen to me.
So, then I decided to research listening.
And today I would like to share with you the results of this research.
So, I first looked in the professional literature
in my field of management and organizational behavior,
and in one top journal, out of 3,000 papers,
I found zero discussing listening.
In other top journal,
out of 4,000 papers, two discussed listening.
And while it reflects something
about the disinterest of researchers in listening,
I think it reflects the disinterest of humans in listening.
Watch with me this graph.
This shows what people are searching in Google
from 2004 until 2015.
The red is the amount of searches for the word "talking",
and the blue is for "listening".
This is what people are interested in.
And you speaking Portuguese do not have to worry about
(Português) "talking" in red versus (Português) "listening" in blue.
So I started to look at what theories exist out there about listening
and I'll show you three,
starting with the idea
that, actually, the listener dictates the speaker's speech quality.
If he's going to listen to you, naturally you'll talk more,
but you'll talk more coherently and you'll tell more interesting stories.
And if this is not enough,
if you tell more and more interesting stories
you commit whatever you have said to your memory,
so you know more about yourself,
such that if a child comes home and tells the parents,
"Oh! We did this and that in school,"
and the parents say, "Not now. Have a shower and we'll have dinner,"
the child will remember
that whatever he or she did in school was not that interesting.
That will be commited to memories.
Thus, the collection of our listeners slowly, imperceptibly,
changes our self-knowledge.
If this is not enough,
listening in a special way could even change personality,
a listening that is nonjudgmental and emphatic.
Let me explain to you how could it be that listening would change personality.
For that, I have to paraphrase Pirandello from his book:
"Uno, nessuno e centomila" or "One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand".
From now I'm going to act, so don't get scared.
I see that you're laughing at me.
That is fine, continue to laugh at me,
but do me a favor.
Do you remember the case that you had
that in your home there was a good friend sitting with you
and, suddenly, a new friend was knocking on the door,
and you, what did you do?
With an ugly excuse,
you asked the old friend to go home,
because you were afraid
that the old and the new friend will not get along.
I see that you remember this case, so do me one more little favor.
What do you think would have happened if, instead of throwing out from your home
the good old friend, and let me add, the stand good old friend,
you had left home for half an hour
and, within this half an hour, asked them to sit in your living room?
Tell me what do you think would have happened
when you came back home?
Don't you think it's possible
that one of them would say, "Wow, what an interesting person!",
and the other one, "You don't believe it! Thank you for this introduction!"
So, you see, that is exactly what would have happened.
So, now, let me ask you one more question.
Who the hell do you think you kicked out from your home?
It is not the good old friend because he or she
"will not get along with the new one."
We've just established they'd have gotten along just fine.
Let me tell you.
You kicked out from home the character that you present to the old friend
because this one has absolutely nothing to do with the character
that you want now to present to your new friend.
And now that we discovered that you have two creatures in your mind,
who knows what is the truth?
How many creatures do you have inside?
Is it scores, hundreds or, perhaps more accurately, thousands?
So, I thank to Pirandello two things.
First: (French) Congratulations!
Seventy years before the psychologists,
you described the self as a multitude and not as a unity.
We say "my self-esteem", as if there is one self there.
But the second thing, Mr. Pirandello,
what wrong did the people attending TEDx do to you?
And now we'll go home and think,
"I have this character and this character, and I'll get crazy,
like your book's hero."
And here comes listening.
My understanding is that when you really listen,
a person will start to hear hidden characters inside him or her.
But not only recognize different parts of the self,
but it allows to build bridges between them.
So the elements of the self could live together.
So let's see what is the evidence.
Now to collect the evidence, you know, some people collect stamps.
I collect scientific papers on listening.
And every paper that has numerical data,
I take it and put it on a pile to see the overall picture of what we know.
And this process is called meta-analysis.
I've done many of those on many topics,
and let me first summarize to you the results.
This is the result.
One person listening creates two people with benefits:
the listener and the speaker.
Let's go into details.
For example,
experiments show that a poor listener indeed creates poor speakers.
My own team shows that a good listener
indeed makes speakers who have more complex attitudes and less extreme.
And finally, research on training suggests that listening could be taught.
Let's see more data.
There is also evidence
that good listeners are also good performers, for example:
physicians who listen well tend to have less malpractice losses;
detectives who listen well tend to listen to new information
unknown to the police, from the suspect;
salespeople who listen well sell more;
principals who listen to their teachers,
their students have better grades in school;
and finally, supervisors who listen, their employees have less accidents.
Let me show you even more.
Let me explain this graph of meta-analysis.
On the first line you see that I found in this collection 13 studies
that are accumulating information of almost 8,000 people
and it suggests that if you listen to other people,
especially if you are the boss, they'll think you are a leader of people,
that you know how to lead the people aspects in leadership.
You will feel more psychological safety,
you'll say what is in your mind,
you will trust the listener.
If it's your boss, you have higher job satisfaction;
if you're a physician, your patient will be more satisfied;
if you're a boss, your workers will have more commitment;
if you work in a hospital and listen to your patient,
there will be less violence against the staff;
if your manager listens to you, you'll have less burn out,
your performance is higher and maybe a little bit even less depression.
And let me tell you
that everything to the right of the line here
is considered a strong association in my field.
Let me explain what I mean by strong association.
Let's take the case of job satisfaction as an example.
If I want to predict, to focus on your job satisfaction
and I know how much you're being paid relative to other people,
I can slightly predict your job satisfaction.
But if I know whether your boss listens to you or not,
I have a predictor that's 13.5 [times] stronger and more accurate than your pay.
Next, in my research, in past years,
I was studying the destructive effect of feedback on performance.
I found out that, out of 607 experiments, in close to 40% of them,
after feedback, whether positive or negative, performance goes down.
In 38% in listening, in contrast,
I didn't find any evidence that listening can cause damage,
perhaps 5% of them showed it doesn't produce anything effective.
My most conservative estimate
is that giving feedback is 7.5 times more dangerous than just listening.
Talking could cause you trouble.
So, if listening is so useful,
why is it that most of us have difficulty in listening
most of the time?
I want to introduce to you the enemies of listening.
These are boredom, dominance, fear of intimacy, trauma and cost.
Let's talk about each of them, alone.
My approach is: let's collaborate with the enemies of listening
rather than fight them.
The first enemy is boredom.
Some people may talk your ear off,
and you say, "I can't listen to this anymore."
You want to leave the room or want them to leave.
What can you do?
You can ask them to tell stories.
Instead of asking, "What's your name?",
"Could you tell me something interesting about your name?"
You can ask these people, and in general,
after they say whatever they say,
"and what else", and wait.
Sometimes the boring person will start to tell you the truth
or what's really important.
And it's not going to be boring anymore.
Next, all of us want to gain social status.
It's perhaps an evolutionary force that we cannot fight.
But we can do it in two different ways:
we can dominate other people
by intimidating them and instilling fear in them
or we can have some skill that people want to imitate to get from us
and we build prestige.
And we found that if you listen,
you’re going to lose social status based on dominance,
but you will gain social status based on prestige.
So it's up to you to choose how do you want to build your status.
And then some people, when you try to listen to them,
they get nervous.
You ask them questions that are not comfortable.
For those people, try to talk to them at first only about technical things.
And then, when you listen to people, you may start to hear horrible stories,
about the Holocaust, about rape,
about cancer, death, premature death.
You may feel burdened that now you need to help the person who shared the story,
but you should know that often
what the other person wants is nothing but your listening.
If you listen and believe it is helpful, you will not have such burden.
And last, listening is a cost, it's an effort.
So that's what I suggest to you:
spread your eggs, don't start right now to listen to everyone,
it's impossible.
Every day choose one, two people to listen to just a little bit more.
Then, you should respect your limitation of how much you really can listen to.
And to build your energy to do that,
you will need somebody to listen to you as well.
Actually, everything that I have said is not that new.
Let me show you what is written in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible:
"Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water,
but a man of understanding will draw it out."
That is, each of us have an advice, a counsel,
to our own problems and challenges
and the value of this advice
is like water which is a source of life.
That is, the advice that we have for ourselves is a source of life.
But a man or a prisioner of understanding will throw it out.
This is the other that will bring our own wisdom outside.
So, I'd like to conclude with two dreams that I have.
One, I wish that in 20 or 30 years from now
every child in every school will learn reading, writing,
and listening.
And my other small wish
is that, during the break, the breaks here today and tomorrow,
you will go and ask somebody around you,
"Could you tell me a story about good listening?"
Enjoy it.
(Applause)