Want to be a better persuader? Become a better listener.

Here’s Part 1 on how to do that

This is the first in a series of pieces that show you the journey I took to become a better listener. If you want to become a better persuader, it’s a journey you could join, too.

Where I began

When I want to teach people what bad listening looks like, I don’t have to look far. I just share the first few minutes of my first canvass conversation on video.

Though the convo happened in 2009, I remember it well.

For 14 minutes—the entire conversation—Patrick was in his car in the middle of the street with the motor running. Why were we talking in the middle of the street? Because I gently knocked on his driver-side window as he very slowly backed his car out of his driveway. Before he shifted from reverse to drive, he rolled his window down and we started talking.

The conversation was cordial. Patrick was kind. In the moment, I thought I was totally in control and doing great.

I was half right. Though he had the car, I drove the conversation. But later—watching the video—I realized, reluctantly, that I was a walking, talking example of the #1 fail in listening.

As the pithy social critic Fran Leibowitz put it: “The opposite of listening isn’t talking. It’s waiting.”

What she meant—and what I saw myself doing—was staying quiet while Patrick spoke; but I was not listening. I was thinking ahead to what I would say once he shut up. My brain and mouth were locked and loaded.

How the conversation started

Here’s how it went, once Patrick rolled down his window. I introduced myself, got his consent to videotape, then mentioned the November 2008 election. Patrick told me he never missed a chance to vote and then continued:

Patrick: My first vote was for Roosevelt.

Dave: Well, lucky you, what a great person to get to vote for.

Patrick: Yeah.

Dave: The issue we're talking about today came up in the last election. It's about marriage for gay and lesbian couples. You may remember, it was on the ballot as Prop 8.

Patrick: Right.

Dave: Do you remember how you voted?

Patrick: I voted for it.

Dave: Okay. So you voted yes to ban marriage for gay and lesbian couples.

Patrick: Right.

As we continued, very quickly I began doing bad listening

Dave: What was the most important reason for you for casting your vote that way?

Patrick: I just believe in it. I was in the Navy you know, and things were a little different then. The first day in bootcamp they took everybody in for psychiatric examination, and I was new then to that sort of thing. I came from Rochester, New York, and that's a hick town.

Dave: I grew up in Chillicothe, Ohio; Rochester's pretty sophisticated by comparison. So the Navy was the first time you ever heard about gay people?

Patrick: Oh yeah. We didn't know what gay was. I was just a stupid Rochesterian.

Dave: Well, probably not stupid, but you didn’t know.

Patrick: When I went to New York City and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I learned an awful lot about life.

Dave: Have you ever had friends who were gay or lesbian?

Patrick: I'm sure, I've never questioned them. If they want to be that way, it's fine. I have no idea about it. I just know that I believe that a man and a woman should be married.

Dave: What's your concern if gay or lesbian couples got married?

Patrick: I don't know why they would want to.

How did my responses reveal I wasn’t listening?

Because rather than explore what Patrick just hinted at—the origin of his unflattering assumptions about gay men—I switched subjects.

Dave: I'm a gay guy.

Patrick: I can tell.

Dave: You're not the first one to say that. The reason I'd want to be able to get married, I was in a relationship for 17 years with a guy and we broke up several years ago, but the reason is that I'm hoping I'll fall in love again. When I do, I want to be able to make a serious commitment.

Patrick: Did you ever want to be with a woman?

Dave: Well, when I was six, I knew I was gay—

Patrick: Is that right?

Then, I turned my self-intro into a hypothetical, and a parable

Dave:

Yeah. I knew I was attracted to guys. So for me, my hope is that if I am lucky enough to fall in love again, I hope I can make a lifelong commitment with somebody. And to able to have that be as strong as possible, I'd want to be able to get married. So that's why I would want it, and I think for gay and lesbian couples who are in long term committed relationships, that's the hope.

Patrick: Why do you have to be married. Why can't it just be a partnership?

Dave: If I'm married to somebody and a problem comes up, something comes up where they're rushed to the hospital, an emergency. I want to be sure that if there's a life-or-death medical decision, I'll be part of that. If we were married, people would more quickly understand our relationship, so I'd be able to help protect my partner.

Why do I regard my response as a hypothetical?

Because it was not a story from my real life. At the time, I did not have a partner. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I was hardly dating. There was no-one in the picture I might marry, much less Mr. Right with an acute medical emergency.

Instead, I was intent on making a point. I offered my “story” as evidence that I was right about LGBT marriage and Patrick was wrong. I offered a parable. I was trying to teach him a lesson.

Then, Patrick temporarily rescued the conversation by talking about his actual life.

Patrick: You're telling me something that I really know. My wife and I were married for 66 years.

Dave: Congratulations.

Patrick: She passed away last November.

Dave: I'm so sorry.

Patrick told me more about his wife and his grown kids, all heterosexual. Then, he gave me a second chance to listen by circling back to the topic he brought up at the start of our conversation. Returning to it meant it was truly top of mind for him.

But instead of exploring what mattered to him, I offered a pre-planned argument.

Patrick: In the Navy, they were very careful about sexual orientation.

Dave: Sure.

Patrick: People coming in.

If I had been listening to him, I would have paused right here and thought for a second: what is he getting at?

Since I know my gay history, I actually knew what he was getting at. He was referencing the way the U.S. armed forces identified men they thought were effeminate, weak, defective. The identification process was public, and humiliating to everyone rejected.

If I had been listening, I would have asked something like: “Why was the Navy so concerned about finding and removing gay men?”

After listening further, I might well have asked: “What did you take away from seeing all this happen right in front of you? What did this teach you about gay men and what they are like?”

I’m guessing that Patrick might then have said to me—very politely—that gay men don’t fit in, they’re strange, they probably are mentally ill. I realize now that that was likely his view of gay men. This was the socially approved view at the time, and he was hinting he would talk about it with me. But I chose instead to make the case for marriage, as though it was unrelated to his assumptions about and likely prejudice towards gay men.

Here’s how I continued

Dave: Sure. Do you think that you'd be affected in any way if gay and lesbian couples could get married? Would that affect your life?

Patrick: You know, at this stage in my life, I don't think anything would affect it.

Dave: When this comes up for a vote again in a few years, it might not affect you very much, but it would affect me and gay and lesbian couples. Would you be willing to reconsider?

Patrick: I still would vote for no marriage.

Here’s where we stood ten minutes into our conversation

Patrick had now brought up twice that the very first place he learned about gay people was when he entered the Navy, and the Navy excluded gay men, didn’t allow them to enlist, viewed gay men as undesirable and grossly inferior. It’s likely that Patrick kept coming back to this story because it was central to his understanding of who gay men are. He couldn’t even imagine gay marriage, which is what he was getting at when he said, “I don’t know why they would want to [get married].”

Finally, I did a little better and asked about Patrick’s marriage

Dave: If I may ask, was there a time in your wife's life near the end where she really needed you to be able to protect her as best you could?

Patrick: Took care of her for the last eight years.

Dave: Yeah.

Patrick: She was in a wheelchair for the last two.

Dave: Yeah.

Patrick: Other than that, before that she was using a walker.

Dave: And nobody would ever have dreamt of questioning your right to take care of her.

Patrick: [with some heat] No, that's right.

Dave: Right. Like if you had...

Patrick: [raising his voice] Why would they?

Dave: Well that's right, because you were married and it was obvious to people that, of course you'd be taking care of her. I think the reality is if you've got two gay people, even if you got a couple that's been together 20 years, you can't count on people taking it for granted that way.

Patrick: Well, right now I can tell you that if the vote was tomorrow, I would vote the same way.

What did I learn?

1.     If I don’t listen better, I won’t learn much about the other person. Then, I have no chance to change their mind.

How can I conceivably persuade someone to reconsider their point of view when I have zero interest in understanding their specific point of view?

2.     To listen better, I need to stop thinking ahead.

My best next question is rarely the one I formulated in advance. It’s much more likely to be the question that comes to my mind after I have listened to what the other person just said, particularly when they are telling me a story about their real, lived experience that has emotional weight for them.

Maybe you’re thinking, it’s hard to give up the habit of planning ahead.

Yes, that’s true. Changing a habit of is easier said than done.

But here are a few practical things that help me enjoy the conversation as it is unfolding, instead of fixating on driving the conversation.

• Before I knock on the door, I remind myself: I won’t learn while I am talking; therefore, what I have to say is never as important as what the other person has to say. Or as a great improv teacher, Jason Shotts, once told me, “The other person’s truly stupid idea is 1000 times more important than your brilliant idea.”

• When they open the door, I don’t talk fast. I say hi like a normal person. I smile. I make eye contact. I shake their hand if they’re open to it. My voice and demeanor are humble. I explain in one short sentence why I’m there; then I ask them an open-ended question, so they can kick off our conversation. Then I shut up. Maybe they’ll need a moment before they start to talk.

• As they talk, I not only listen; I take notes. That way, they can see that I realize their words are important. Also, as I write, it reminds me not to interrupt. After all, they are talking.

• As I write, I hold my clipboard so they can see what I’m writing if they want to. Why not? The less mysterious I am, the less I seem like a possible jerk.

3.     Stop thinking of the other person as an obstacle to changing their opinion. They’re more like your partner.

• When they stop talking, I give them a beat or two of silence, because maybe they have more to say. If I stay quiet, they may continue. Giving the other person a moment to be sure they’re done is what I call “the opposite of interruption.”

• After they stop talking, it’s OK if I need a moment to think: what have they just told me that is most important to them? Even if I don’t yet know why it is so important to them, I can say, “It sounds like this was an important moment for you, have I got that right?” With Patrick, I could have specifically asked, “This moment you remember in the Navy was when you were what, a teenager? It sounds like it stuck with you; am I hearing you right?” If he said yes, then I could ask, “what did it make you think about gay men?”

4.     If the other person starts to tell a true story from their life, this is the time to listen with your very greatest concentration.

If you listen closely to their story, it almost always reveals an assumption of theirs, or a prejudice, that came to their mind once they knew what I came to talk about.

In Patrick’s case—even in the short version of his story about Navy that I allowed him to tell—there were big hints of what the major obstacle would be to getting him to reconsider LGBT marriage. For decades, he has held onto big assumptions about what gay men are like. Patrick was kind to me; he was also prejudiced against gay men. Patrick had either never met a gay man before me, or he’d met gay men but they never came out to him. That’s where Patrick was starting.

But if I had been listening, I could have started there, too; and then I would have at least directly addressed his seriously inaccurate assumptions about gay men.

5.     To make it easy for the other person to tell a true story from their life, skip the hypotheticals or parables; instead, tell a true story of yours.

Telling true stories deepens the conversation. Particularly once the other person is sharing a story of theirs, we have no problem getting to everything either of us want to talk about. That’s because they are enjoying talking with me. They’re glad I came.

6. Try offering unconditional curiosity to each person you meet.

Unconditional curiosity means that I want to understand the other person and see the world through their eyes whether or not I will see them immediately change their mind. When I offer limited or no curiosity, I’m too fixated on winning them over before I really know them. I’m not actually curious about them. I just want my pre-planned result.

But if my hoped-for result is that they will change their mind, change a habit, change their vote, reduce their prejudice, or reconsider how they see things, any of those are so much more likely to happen when we both want to be in the conversation together.

Think about the last time you changed your mind about something important to you. It doesn’t happen often, right?

When I think back to the two most important times I’ve changed my mind, it was because someone listened to me and didn’t judge me. Instead, they wanted to know more. Can’t we do the same for others? We must.

Because, as you’ll see in my next Substack post, sometimes people want to change but they’re having a hard time doing it. We can help them, and it’s not that complicated. We can help them by being much better listeners than we usually are.