I can’t claim to be a good listener, but I’m a better one after reading this book, which I revisit annually for a refresh. Murphy is a reporter, so listening is her job, and she went looking for people who are better at it than she is. A CIA agent. A bartender. A focus group moderator. A priest. An air traffic controller. The top furniture salesman in the country. The most useful thing I learned is what she calls the shift response versus the support response. Somebody tells you something and you either shift it toward yourself — same thing happened to me, here’s what you should do — or you ask them to keep going. Most of us shift constantly and don’t notice. She backs it with the neuroscience and sociology, spends a chapter on what phones did to all of this, and makes the case that listening is the active position in a conversation, not the passive one.