One of the pleasures of being the father of a boy scout lies in the opportunities I have to expand my social circles. The only problem is that, unlike a cocktail party, there is no bathroom to excuse myself to when the conversation around the campfire gets dull. The other evening I found myself trapped with another scout dad, a franchise electronics merchant who had met his sales quota and recently returned from a company-sponsored trip to Switzerland. He couldn’t stop talking.

"We just got back from Switzerland," he announced glumly. "The soda pop there was more expensive than the wine. Can you believe it?"

"I can believe it," I answered. "I used to live in Switzerland."

There was no acknowledgement at this point, not even an automatic "Really?" He just went on. "There’s a place called Bemburg—"

"Ballenburg," I corrected politely.

"Yeah, Ballenburg," he said without blinking, "this museum place where you can look at a bunch of old chalets."

"I know."

He was just getting warmed up. "And the food! It’s nothing but cheese, cheese, cheese!"

"Like fondue," I offered.

"They have this stuff called fondue where you dip bread into melted cheese."

"Did you try raclette?"

"—And there’s this other thing called raclette, where you melt cheese and scrape it on to potatoes. Bo—ring."

I tried a positive tack. "I’ll bet the trains were on time."

"The one good thing in that country is that all the trains are exactly on time."

"Weren’t the mountains nice?"

"We went to the Matterhorn. Didn’t look like Disneyland. You have to take a train to get there."

"No cars allowed in Zermatt, huh?"

"There’s no cars allowed in Zermatt. That’s the town below the Matterhorn. Hard to get to, but it was worth it. The only place in the whole darn country where I found a good old American cheeseburger and fries."

The campfire had to die down before this guy’s soliloquy did. I had been simply a foil, a mirror for him to talk to himself. "Most of us talk more than we need to," communications consultant and Reagan advisor Roger Ailes said in his book You Are the Message. "Most of us tell people more than they need to know." The world is full of people, as the saying goes, who tell you how to build a clock when all you asked for was the time of day. Certainly, more than half of talking should be listening. But it has to be quality listening as well. When we listen to patients, are we just waiting for them to finish talking? Do we sound like the guy at the campfire, bulldozing the conversation through our listeners’ sensibilities?

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reportedly mounted a "listening tour" to help her decide whether to run for president of the Czech Republic. We should be on a listening tour every day in our offices. Ailes advises to not only listen, but study the people you talk with. Concentrate. Watch for signals from their eyes, face and posture. Pull your mask aside so they can see your expressions too. Listen for intent as well as content. The payoff comes with not only better rapport but enhanced understanding. "A good listener is not only popular everywhere," Wilson Mizner said, "but after a while he knows something."

From Inscriptions, Journal of the Arizona Dental Association, 14(10):27, April 2000.  Dr. Eric Curtis is author of Hand to Mouth: Essays on the Art of Dentistry, Quintessence, 2002.

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