How to listen, really listen

I listen for a living. Good counsel begins in the ear, not the mouth.

All useful advice starts with deep listening. If an adviser, coach, or mentor rushes to tell you what to do without first understanding your world—how it looks and feels to you—they’ve missed the plot.

If they lead with instructions rather than questions, that isn’t advising; it’s projecting. Real counsel begins by listening to your world and seeing its texture.

How is it done, this deep listening? I want to share three ways of assembling a more complete picture of what’s really happening.

The first is to listen not just to what is being recounted, but to the underlying motivations. What’s actually driving the behaviours and actions of those before you? What’s their real game? What are they in it for? What are they striving for, and what are they afraid of?

When you listen for motivations, you’re reading the current beneath the surface story. You’re searching for the true stakes: the status to keep, the risks to dodge, the hopes barely named.

The second is to listen to what’s not being said. Every person in the world is an unreliable narrator of their own life. They tell you their version of the truth; their perception of what happened; their beliefs about the situation. Not the truth, which is an altogether more complicated thing. What is missing in the account before you?

Which actors are not being mentioned? Which months are missing from the timeline? How might this story read if told from the other side? Those missing pieces might be the true cause, the constraint, the conflict.

And the third is to listen with empathy. What is it like to be this person? What bitter struggles have they been through, and what allowances must you make before advising? It is easy to be instantly judgemental; way harder to look deeper and see inner turmoil.

To listen with empathy is to borrow someone’s emotional vantage long enough to see the terrain as they do.  To feel the load they carry and the identities at stake for them. When you calibrate to their lived day—fatigue, fear, duty, culture—the answer changes shape and tone; it becomes something a human can actually use.

Advice that doesn’t fit the person is just noise in a kind voice.

This is so, so hard. It’s so much easier to be quick and abrupt and prescriptive. To listen carefully is to expend much personal energy. It costs. And yet. When it matters, there is no alternative.

Life itself should be lived like this, in a state of curiosity that reads the room right. With a keen eye for what’s at stake, what’s hidden, and what it means to those involved.

To listen properly is a form of self-negation. It says you before me. It earns you the right to speak by carrying someone else’s view for a while, without dropping your own rigour and perspective. From there any advice offered is smaller in volume, larger in value.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Curiosity first, certainty later. Hear the pull, the gaps, and the ache before answering.

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