Kunsten at lytte til andre – Sådan får du bedre relationer gennem bedre samtaler

If there's one skill I wished I'd learned years ago it's this: listening.

Listening will propel your career, improve your relationships tenfolds (and even spark up your sex life), understand intricacies and complexities that is the world, improve your learning & knowledge, and make the world a safer place.

When I look at the world today (and my own personal life as well), I realise that listening is screaming in demand and scarce in supply. It's one of the reasons we witness wars, climate change, toxic masculinity, racist/caste violence, violence against women, rise of jingoistic politics, and unhappy relationships.

We all want to be heard but we rarely get it. We all want to listen but we rarely offer audience to people (especially loved ones) who need it. Why? We simply do not know how.

Kate Murphy's book is fantastic and distils the essence of listening. Yes, one could refer to a dictionary and be done with it. But there's a lot more nuance than just hearing & understanding. There are so many levers involved in the process it requires us to fully utilise all our faculties at our disposal, it's not easy. We often get overwhelmed and eventually fail to listen – even if we are trying our best, even if we are making a conscious effort to do so.

Remarkably, after reading this book, I've learnt to listen better and noticed that the quality of my life has improved by leaps and bounds.

I highly recommend this book. Let's have some wine and indulge in a conversation, shall we?

DNF at 33%.

There are a couple of valid points about listening (and some questionable, anecdotal ones), but this book could have been an article. Almost 1/3 in and nothing truly groundbreaking was brought up.

A welcome addition to the canon. Much more readable than Supercommunicators and less dated than Nonviolent Communication. Well organized and referenced. Written with compassion, sensitivity, and humor.

This is probably going to become my first-choice recommendation for people waking up to the importance of listening. Even though it was published in 2019, it's well tuned to the problems of 2025: loneliness, attachment theory, cell phones, identity politics, and the importance of silence (both ambient noise and not speaking). I lurrrrved the opening of the last chapter, When to Stop Listening: a pompous blowhard professor mansplains humor to her. I'm quite sure that person is by now aware of this book and his presence in it, and I wonder: is he cringing in shame now, striving to become a better person? Or is he digging his heels in defensively? Because that's really the root of the problem: those who most need this book are the least likely to read it.

She has a Recommended Reading list at the end, books she considers masterpieces of the art of listening, and War and Peace is first on it—a choice that delights me, because I thought the same thing when I read it. Unfortunately, Middlemarch, a book I found insufferable, is also on that list. I will have to grit my teeth and give it another try.

Every politician should have to read this book. Every leader should read this book. Frick every human should read this book.

I think my favorite tidbit from this that shows how powerful true active listening can be is the person referenced who said one of the reasons they married their spouse is they always leave a pause after he finishes speaking, showing they're really processing what he said.

I can often struggle with allowing silence in conversations and life in general and this book has really opened my eyes to how powerful that silence caj be.

Learned about concepts like shifting conversations and asking better questions. This is one I will probably re-read at some point because it was really good - but since I had it on audiobook at work sometimes I was pulled away. (ironic, right?)

I felt like I learned a lot from this book.

While reading this book I put some of her advice into practice and noticed immediately the results looked a lot like she said they would.

She also writes very concisely and paces the book so that it keeps your attention and tells you the info you are there for but doesn't linger on unnecessary bits.

One note: there was one paragraph talking about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and she used it to back up a claim she was making. While it is argued in general that there are some parts of the hypothesis that can be seen as possibly correct, the SW Hypothesis has been proven false and using it as support to an argument made me pause for a sec and wonder about other research mentioned. Maybe she knows about the false proof of the hypothesis and was merely using it to demonstrate a point? I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, the rest of the book was so great.

Not much new information for anyone with a social science job or background, but it's always good to have a reminder that you should talk less and listen more.

A good read! Very well researched and written by someone who knows how to make her writing interesting. I appreciated the focus on something that we take for granted, though it got preachy about phones and social media at times. I'm grateful for the reminder to listen, to actually try. It really means a lot. 

Depending on my mood, I read nonfiction to varying degrees. Sometimes, I'll read like 3 or 4 nonfiction books in a month, and other times I won't touch one for almost a year. I was in the latter category and hadn't read a nonfiction in like, 4 months, but decided that I should try out #nonfictionnovember. While I had lofty goals to read a lot of nonfiction, I only read one. This one.

The premise of You're Not Listening is pretty simple— we, as humans, are a LOT worse at listening than we are at talking. Especially as we become increasingly politically, economically, socially, and physically divided, it is ever obvious just how BAD we are at listening (pretty much 2020 could be a use-case for this entire book). We interrupt each other, our minds wander, and we often project our own problems on other people; our inability to listen prevents us from creating truly meaningful and robust relationships.

So noted, we're horrible listeners, but how exactly can we become BETTER listeners? Well, that's kind of what the book is about. Murphy does an excellent job of dividing this topic into digestible chunks, balancing anecdotes, interviews, and (arguably) most importantly, methods to improve your listening.

To be candid, unless you REALLY lack basic self-awareness, I doubt that anything you read in this book is going to really be something you've NEVER heard before. Like sure, don't cut someone off in the middle of a conversation, don't raise your voice, don't ask biased questions— but isn't that kind of obvious? (Rhetorical question, because yes, it should be kind of obvious). But what I think this book does incredibly well is it consistently highlights numerous (and I mean, pretty much like 70% of the book) examples in which better listening = better outcomes. People are happier, closer, and more trusting than ever after improving their listening! So that, for me, is why I loved this one— it inspired me to WANT to really work on my listening, so that I can really improve my relationships.