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Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, by Mark Goulston
IN HIS early career psychiatrist and author, Mark Goulston, intervened with suicidal and violent individuals. This eventually led to him training hostage negotiators for the police and the FBI. He has developed an uncanny ability to get through to virtually anyone, and the methods he uses form the basis of ‘Just Listen’. He is now a business psychiatrist.
Everyone has their peculiar needs, desires and agendas. They have secrets that they are not sharing with you. Most are stressed, busy, and often feeling overloaded. To cope, people put up mental barricades that make it difficult to reach them.
Everyone, every day, is trying to get through to people. From his experience, Goulston has identified two facts. The first is that simply listening to people will change both their lives and yours. And the second is that “nearly all people… will respond to true, agenda-less listening in an authentic and heartfelt way”.
One doesn’t need ‘a magic touch’ to get through to people. It’s an art, a science, and easier than you think.
To get through to others most people persuade, encourage, argue, and push, and the outcome is resistance. Goulston’s technique is quite the opposite: you listen, ask, mirror, and reflect what you’ve heard. When you do, the other person feels “seen, understood, and felt” and will be more positive to you. The central tenet of this book is that you get through to people not by what you tell them, but what you get them to tell you.
The first part of the book outlines rules and thereafter techniques that apply to a variety of situations. These range from dealing with prejudices to effective selling, to dealing with bullies, complainers, whiners, obstructers, and more.
The rules Goulston describes are universal, despite our lives and our problems being very different. This is because our brains work in similar ways. “When you understand something about how the brain moves from resistance to buy-in, you’ll have a huge edge,” he asserts.
Our brains have three layers that evolved over millions of years, each one overlaying the more primitive ones. There is the reptile brain, the mammal brain, and the primate brain. The most primitive is the reptile layer, the part that acts and reacts. It is the ‘fight-or-flight’, or the freeze of the ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ part of your brain.
If a stranger menacingly approaches you in a dark parking lot, your body gives the amygdala part of the reptile brain, the power to throw a switch. This diverts normal impulses from the highest levels of your brain, because you don’t have time for higher-level, analytical thinking. You fly into action as you sense the threat to you.
“Picture the amygdala as a full-to-the-brim pan of water on a stove. Heat this pan of water gently, and it can simmer gently for hours. Crank the heat up to high, however, and eventually the water will boil over catastrophically,” Gouldston explains. This process is called the ‘amygdala hijack’, and your reptile is now flying the plane.
Inner drama queen
More evolved is the mammal layer; it is your “inner drama queen”.
The primate layer of your brain is the part that weighs a situation logically and rationally, and generates a conscious plan of action. It collects data from the reptile and mammal brains, sifts it, analyses it, and makes practical, intelligent, and ethical decisions.
When you are talking to a manager, customer, spouse, or child whose lower brains are in control, you’re talking to a cornered snake or a hysterical rabbit. Your success hinges entirely on talking the person up from reptile to mammal to primate brain. Goulston’s techniques are designed for dealing with angry, fearful, or resistant people to prevent the lower brains taking control.
An important aspect of moving people to their higher brains involves ‘mirror neurons’.
Scientists studying macaque monkeys’ prefrontal cortices found that the cells fired when the monkeys threw a ball or ate a banana. Interestingly, these same cells fired when the monkeys watched another monkey performing these acts. VS Ramachandran, a pioneer in mirror neuron research, calls these ‘empathy neurons’, because they dissolve the barrier between oneself and others.
Most people, from the CEO to the lowest on the organisational chart, feel that they give their best, only to be met day after day with apathy or hostility. This explains why people feel so overwhelmed when someone acknowledges either their pain or their triumphs.
“Making someone ‘feel felt’ simply means putting yourself in the other person’s shoes,” Goulston explains. The effectiveness of making a person “feel felt” is a function of the mirror neurons. It creates an irresistible biological urge that pulls the person towards you. The consequence of feeling ‘felt’ is an openness to you and your ideas, and ensures that there is no amygdala hijack of their ability to reasonably respond to you.
'Call me Ron'
When the talks between president Ronald Reagan and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev appeared to be at a standstill, Reagan looked behind his adversary’s stubborn face to see a leader who truly loved his people. In a moment of brilliant simplicity, he invited Gorbachev to “Call me Ron”. This broke the cycle of two leaders digging in their heels and getting nowhere. Gorbachev not only accepted the invitation, he joined Reagan in ending the Cold War. That was a buy-in of global proportions!
When bad things happen and you resist the impulse to act and make matters worse, you will discover valuable things that you would never have learned but for the adversity. The key is poise under stress, and this comes from being in control of your thoughts and emotions. Most people know how to handle a tense situation intelligently, but they don’t know how to do it fast.
The very first step is not to deny that you’re upset and afraid. If you can, for a few minutes do not talk to anyone. Research by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA shows that when people put words to their emotions - ‘afraid, ‘angry’ - the amygdala cools down almost instantly, so that the prefrontal cortex, the intelligent part of the brain, can go to work. When bad things happen, it is not the time to try and fool yourself that you are “cool, calm, and it’s fine”.
Goulston said: “Of all my books, I am proudest of and most enthusiastic about this one.” Read this book, you will understand why you can stop hitting your head against the wall trying to get through to people. What you need to do is to look for the loose brick. This book is the loose brick.
Readability: Light ---+- Serious
Insights: High +---- Low
Practical: High +----Low
* Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.
