I have spent a surprising amount of my working life looking as though I am not listening while listening very carefully indeed. I might be looking away, doodling, turning a fidget over in my hand or staring at a point somewhere over your shoulder while I work out what I think. None of those things are particularly convincing performances of conventional attention, but they are often the conditions that make attention possible for me.
For years I tried to make my listening look more recognisable to other people. I would hold eye contact for longer than was comfortable, keep my hands still and concentrate on appearing attentive while a substantial part of my working memory was occupied with monitoring whether I looked attentive enough. The absurdity is that the more effort I put into performing listening, the less capacity I sometimes had left for the actual conversation.
Understanding that has changed how I think about meetings, supervision and training. I no longer assume that the person sitting perfectly still is necessarily processing more effectively than the person doodling in the margin, looking away or using a fidget. Attention has an appearance, but appearance is not the same thing as attention. Some people need movement or reduced eye contact precisely because it helps them stay with what is being said.
My own fidgeting is a good example. I have a fairly ridiculous collection of fidget toys because different days seem to need different sensory input. Sometimes I want a slider, sometimes a twister, and sometimes those little purple magnetic textured balls are exactly what my hands need. The speed, resistance, movement, texture and even colour all seem to matter in ways I cannot always explain, but the effect is usually the same: part of my brain gets enough sensory input to settle, which leaves more of me available for the conversation.
That does not mean every behaviour automatically means somebody is listening, of course. Sometimes people are distracted. Sometimes they have missed something. The point is that we cannot reliably infer the quality of somebody’s attention from whether their body looks attentive according to one narrow social script. If it matters, ask. Check understanding. Give people more than one way to show that they have heard and processed what was said.
This has particular importance in social work because we make judgements from behaviour all the time. A person who does not look at us may be anxious, processing, culturally communicating differently, concentrating or simply more comfortable without eye contact. A colleague who needs silence before answering may not be disengaged; they may be doing the cognitive work of sorting through what they have heard before responding. The gap between observation and interpretation matters here as much as it does anywhere else in practice.
Barry has never cared whether I look as though I am listening. He seems far more interested in whether the right thread moves afterwards. I have come to prefer his standard: less performance, more evidence that the connection was actually made.