Things to Think About

Barbara Walters’ Real Superpower

I was once interviewed by the titan of interviewing, Barbara Walters. Not because I was famous. It was for a job as her Off-Air-Reporter and Producer at ABC News. I’d be doing research and helping come up with questions for Barbara’s “big get” news interviews. I confess, I wanted to work on her celebrity specials, but I had a knack for news, so I had been typecast before we met.

During our half-hour together, this world-renowned Titan of Interviewing didn’t ask me a single question—not even my name. Barbara did the talking. I did the listening. At least that’s what I thought was happening. But something very different was going on. I was experiencing what it feels like to be the hyper-focus of someone’s attention. Barbara wasn’t listening with her ears. She was practicing what I came to call “full body listening.” She used every sense she possessed to take in the other person.  It was as though she was shining a beam of energy at me that let her see things about me that I didn’t even know about myself.

As Barbara continued to talk, my self-esteem soared. I felt like the most important person to have ever inhabited the universe. Without having to say a word, I had never felt so listened to. There was no secret I wouldn’t have confessed. At the time Barbara may have been the one making a million dollars, but I was the one feeling like a million dollars.

I guess Barbara liked what I “said” because I got the job.

In the years I worked with Barbara I learned from her that listening is a full-body engagement that involves all your senses and is intoxicating to the person being interviewed. Every cell in you must turn its attention to the person you are speaking with. And, if it was someone who had committed a tawdry act that had turned them into an infamous newsmaker, Barbara instinctively knew she had to be a non-judgmental listener so they would feel safe to answer virtually any question she might ask.

Barbara Walters had a reputation for being relentlessly hardworking, notoriously competitive, and never taking “no” for an answer.  All true. But Barbara’s real superpower—listening.