Think back to the hours you spent learning to speak.
Speech therapy in elementary school, if you needed it. Book reports at the front of the room. Debate team for some of us. The public speaking unit in tenth-grade English. PowerPoint slide decks in college and every year after that into the workplace. Somewhere in there, you probably picked up a book or read a blog on public speaking — they never leave the bestseller lists. Think about the culture’s worship of the TED Talk, the Moth story hour, or other examples of “The Sage on the Stage.”
Now consider the hours you spent learning to listen. For most of us, it’s about zero. A few of us got lucky — therapists, some coaches, a few others. Maybe you read an emotional intelligence book or sat through a corporate workshop on active listening where you practiced nodding and smiling.
And notice what that workshop actually taught you. Maintain eye contact. Orient your body toward the speaker. Mirror their posture. Reflect back what you heard: So what I’m hearing is… These are great instructions for looking like a good listener. Which raises the obvious question nobody in the workshop asks: why learn to look like you are paying attention when you know actual attention isn’t about performing?
Listening turns out to be one of the better predictors of how things go for people — in relationships, in leadership, in negotiations, in performance. In many studies, it outperforms personality, technical skills, even IQ.
Meanwhile, we’re doing less of it all the time. We are not just bad at listening, but getting worse, in a time when we need to listen to each other more than ever.
The consequences are real—from personal relationships to politics, and you already know what they feel like from the other side. Think of the last time you tried to tell a story to someone who wasn’t fully there. Eyes flicking to the phone, scanning over your shoulder, then the door. Nodding too early, yessing too fast. A hollow echo back of your words to prove they were doing… something.
And what happened to you? Maybe you fumbled through, or you sped up. You cut out the part that was actually the point — the embarrassing part, the funny part, the part that drove home the emotion. You wrapped it up early or told yourself the story wasn’t that interesting anyway. But maybe it wasn’t entirely your fault, maybe the listener just didn’t help you along.
I watched this in my office for years before I understood what I was seeing.
A couple comes in. One partner has clearly done their homework on active listening. They turn toward their spouse, smile and nod, drop in the mm-hmms at the right places. They reflect back something like So what I’m hearing is that you felt alone at your sister’s wedding. From a distance, they get passing marks for their acting.
But the other half of the couple says it all with their body language, folded arms and flat, if not skeptical face.
What was missing wasn’t skill, but genuine curiosity — the real kind, the kind that wants to know something it doesn’t already know. We can all feel the difference between being attentive and acting attentively, on either side.
The partner who doesn’t feel heard doesn’t open up further. The quality of your listening is what tells the other person whether it’s safe to keep taking those risks — and those risks and vulnerability are where the magic happen, whether you’re in a marriage, a negotiation, or a meeting where everyone is staring at their feet wondering who else will speak up.
So don’t listen just to respond, listen to regulate. Not to control or manipulate the other person, but to steady them to safely open up, internally and externally. When they feel heard, they get calmer in their minds and bodies, and a calmer person gets clearer, more honest, more creative, and more willing to take a risk. You are, in a real physiological sense, co-regulating them into the best conditions for them to problem-solve and collaborate.
Good listening is not a nice thing to do for friends and family, nor is it an important thing to do for colleagues and clients. It’s the most powerful tool we have in communication, and it costs you nothing but the effort of trying to get curious. Heck, I spent an hour last week listening to someone explain the nuances of the global gravel industry to me. I could have been bored, but instead I let myself get genuinely interested in some of the threads of the conversation, and had a great time.
You have to get curious — actually, authentically curious, about the specific person in front of you. As Kate Murphy puts it in her book on listening: You don’t need to act like you’re paying attention if you are, in fact, paying attention. I’ll add to that: you don’t need to look curious if you are, in fact, authentically curious.
The last thing you need to know:
- We spend our lives learning to speak, but almost never to listen, and it shows.
- Listening skills predict success across the board.
- Don’t just listen to respond. Listen to regulate.
