How I Learned to Listen

Papa, can you hear me?

May 02, 2024

Do you think you’re a good listener?

Don’t answer yet. We’ll be right back.

First, to Sweden! The year is 1981. Researcher Ola Svenson, working late at the University of Stockholm, grabs his clipboard and walks down the hallways of the Department of Psychology. He confidently steps into a room filled with 41 other Swedes, participants in a study he has designed. Svenson wants to know how they roll. Specifically, how they roll behind the wheel of their shiny silver Volvo 200.

Sweden’s top-selling car of 1981. But y’all knew that, right?

You may not know the details of this experiment. But you’ve probably encountered the results. Svenson asked participants to look around the room and judge how safe a driver they thought they were based on the average ability of those in the room. He famously found that more than 80% consider themselves themselves above average—something mathematically impossible. He repeated the test with drivers in the US and found similar results; ergo, most of us think of ourselves as “above average” in our skills and attributes. It was an experiment later replicated with mutations across the world. Researchers have found the “better than average effect” when asking employees how they stack against their peers, or how stock traders think they perform versus Wall Street rivals. One researcher ran a particularly cruel experiment where he quizzed academics on their teaching skills versus other faculty members. That must have been a fun staff room on the day of publication.

Eighteen years after Svenson’s driving test, on the Cornell University campus (in the news again, as we speak), a professor named David Dunning wondered why pupils complaining about test results regularly shared the same viewpoint: “I thought I was going to do a lot better than I did.” He teamed up with a graduate student—a Mr. Kruger, not the one you’re thinking of—to discover a previously unknown cognitive bias that all humans share: The Dunning-Kruger effect:

The Dunning-Kruger effect holds that people who are not strong in a particular area tend to be unaware of their shortcomings. When asked to consider their abilities, they are apt to rate themselves higher than they deserve. [It is] a cognitive bias in which a person isn’t aware of what they lack in terms of knowledge or skill. Without these deficits haunting them, they feel better about their abilities than they should.

So, let’s try again: Do you think you’re a good listener?

“You’re not listening.”

Have you heard that lately? I’ve been hearing it my entire life. I’d regularly hear it at school, gazing out of the window, whatever outside being more arresting than the lesson within. A bird picking up a sweet wrapper? I’m binge-watching it. I hear it at home now with my kids, trying to get my attention as I’m engrossed in a book, working at my desk, or—more likely—staring at that fucking glowing rectangle.

Allow me to walk you through the standard defence of a bad listener. Step 1) Immediately get your back up and claim offence: “How dare you?!” Step 2) Reply, with gusto: “Of course, I’m listening!” whilst you furiously attempt to access the last thing your ear copied onto your brain’s clipboard, parroting back whatever remains. Yes, you heard it. But were you listening?

In her 2020 book, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters, Kate Murphy advocated for listening as a core tenet of a well-lived life. Without listening, we’re just a bunch of nodes rattling around in a simulation, bouncing off each other with no real effect. Listening leads to understanding—the critical difference between those who hear and those who listen. Understanding requires more than just our attention—it demands our focus and effort:

Hearing is passive. Listening is active. The best listeners focus their attention and recruit other senses to the effort. Their brains work hard to process all that incoming information and find meaning, which opens the door to creativity, empathy, insight, and knowledge. Understanding is the goal of listening, and it takes effort.

One standard “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” talking point is how different sexes listen. Men listen for facts; women listen for feelings. Men take things at face value; women go deeper. Men are action-oriented; women are other-oriented. This leads to an inevitable cul-de-sac where men don’t listen—they hear, they diagnose, they aim to solve, before moving on to whatever is next. In their mind, a problem has been fixed. On the other side, a partner who doesn’t feel listened to.

Am I a good listener? So kind of you to ask. I built a career based on my listening abilities. I used to work in a record store; listening was my job; I’ve been listening all my life! My time in advertising was spent listening: I’d listen to clients tell me their problems—mums were no longer buying their sugary cereal brand for their kids; middle-class city-dwellers didn’t believe their spreadable butter was worth a £1 price premium. I’d listen to participants of market research groups share strong opinions on washing up liquid and why they held them (answer: because we gave them a £50 incentive to sit in a room for an hour telling us). I’d listen to teammates share perspectives on this week’s key project before attempting to synthesise these disparate elements into a clear, compelling narrative—a problem we could unite behind and solve together, one that would ultimately get a client to sign off a piece of work, get someone to switch to another bank, download a different app, or some activity that would feed the machine and eventually maximise shareholder value.

It was what I did for a long time. Hell, I still do it. It’s the type of work that allows my mind to scratch a particular itch, one it relishes digging its nails into. That’s because this type of work sits entirely in the comfort zone of my cerebrum, snuggled into its favourite corner of the sofa: hear facts, understand problems, and create solutions. This is how I have listened—or mistakenly assumed I was listening—my entire life. Every paycheck I banked during two decades in advertising has been because of it. It has been a cornerstone of my career. But my brain has been taken hostage—an overworked triage nurse working an ER night shift, quickly diagnosing patient symptoms before swiftly delivering a prognosis and sending them to the correct corner of the hospital.

It took a while. But at 41 years young, I have begun to realise my life has been spent experiencing the world as a series of problems to solve—decades spent optimising for solutions rather than offering, as Kate Murphy poetically termed, “the experience of being experienced:”

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention. Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or showing how it should be done.

Listening is about the experience of being experienced.

What on earth does this have to do with parenting, you might ask. Last month, Dr. Aliza Pressman invited Lori Gottlieb, therapist and New York Times bestselling author, to her Raising Good Humans podcast to discuss how we can better listen to our kids. They talked about how your own experience of being listened to as a child—or lack thereof—colours your perspective, leading us to spend more time “interviewing our children for pain” rather than being curious about how they really are:

Sometimes your kids will say, “Oh, I'm really sad because so and so didn't sit with me at lunch today.” And then the parents are terrible. They start getting overly protective, as opposed to “Oh, that must hurt a lot—what do you think happened?” Sometimes parents won't even talk about it at all. They'll say, “Oh, don't be sad. Let's go get ice cream. Let's go to Disneyland.”
They’re not allowed to feel sad. “When I was a child, I felt sad so much. And it felt awful. I felt alone in it. So I will make sure you're always happy.” We don't think this consciously. Do you notice you get uncomfortable when your child is uncomfortable? Well, that's a sign that maybe you need to step back and be able to sit with your child in their feelings—as opposed to having it trigger all of your feelings from when you were a child.

There are a few ways I think about this newsletter. One is an intention for this to be a historical public record of my work in becoming a better dad—an ongoing commitment to look back and forward simultaneously in a valiant attempt to make sense of the present. It’s not outside the realms of possibility that one day, my daughter might want to peruse this first-person narrative on the thoughts and feelings of her old man during the years she was raised. An insight into a world she never understood. What some of us might give for that, eh?

So this essay isn’t intended as a heroic redemption arc—a tale of how great a listener I am. That would be pure bullshit. I remain in the bottom half of the population when it comes to listening. But I’m workinonit. I have a Royal Albert Hall’s worth of headroom to grow. I’ve learned to become more comfortable with uncertainty and to let my curiosity guide the way. I’ve finally started to understand the adage, “You have two ears and one mouth, and you should try to remember that ratio.”

So, what changed? Ironically, the first step towards becoming a better listener was to learn to listen to myself. Not the non-stop egocentric chatter, but a daily meditation habit that could illuminate unconscious biases and thinking patterns, enabling me to develop a more coherent understanding of my internal narrative. The second was the training and work I’ve undertaken during the last few years to become a coach. One early workshop focused on the “levels of listening.” The first level is internal listening, where your mind focuses on your own thoughts, feelings and interpretations. This level can be thought of as “How does what I am hearing apply to me?” or more simply understood as “I am waiting for my turn to talk.” Words go in, but internal chatter ensures the spotlight remains entirely focused on you.

Level two listening involves abandoning that stream of consciousness and activating a laser-like focus on the other person—something popularly referred to as active listening:

Active listening conveys a mutual understanding between speaker and listener. Speakers receive confirmation their point is coming across and listeners absorb more content and understanding by being consciously engaged. The overall goal of active listening is to eliminate misunderstandings and establish clear communication of thoughts and ideas between the speaker and listener. By actively listening to another person, a sense of belonging and mutual understanding between the two individuals is created.

Doing this work made me realise how bad a listener I’ve been for my entire life. It has provided fresh insight into why I can speak Spanish reasonably well but struggle to understand what I hear. I’m ashamed to admit how much of my life has been spent in that first level of listening—waiting for my chance to talk, to share my expertise, to wow someone with my world-class ability to solve a problem.

Learning to listen was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done: a fundamental upgrade to the operating system of my mind. It’s not finished. It’s not even close. I’m currently rocking a Windows XP level, needing all the help I can muster. One great coaching technique I learnt during my training, and one that I’ve used countless times since, is to use physical totems to help cement mental breakthroughs—something in the real world that guides you towards what truly matters. This isn’t a new idea: think of famous “What Would Jesus Do” bracelets, which offer millions of believers a way to connect back to their core values in a time of crisis; or tattoos that recall someone, or something, that was foundational in a personal narrative. Even Leonardo DiCaprio’s spinning top in Inception played the same role: a physical manifestation that allowed him to connect back to reality in a moment of doubt, guiding him back towards his family and the life he wanted to live.

I ask coaching clients to find or buy a small tchotchke to remind them of their progression, direction, and eventual destination. They put it on their desk, less a memento mori and more a constant reminder of the life they want to live. As I write this, I look across my desk and see a few of my own. The most recent was connected to this newfound commitment to listen: I was walking through a narrow Barcelona street last year before I was stopped in my tracks by a store window filled with wooden alebrijes. If you’ve seen Coco, you’ll know these mythical beasts—surreal creatures said to accompany us in the real world before showing themselves as neon hybrids in the afterlife. I looked through the window and felt myself pulled towards a small purple rabbit, lilac and white spots across his body, two giant flaming ears protruding from its head. Here was an object that encompassed what it meant to listen. I walked in, handed my euros to a Mexican abuela, and brought it home before giving it pride of place on my desk.

It acts as a daily reminder of why I’m doing this: because being a better listener improves every aspect of my life. It enriches my relationships at home and out in the world. It makes me more willing to take a beat before jumping to a conclusion, one that would be more informed by my own baggage than anything else. It helps me, I hope, at the end of all this—if you’re reading this, Padme from the future—to be a better dad.

I’m not there yet. But I’m trying Ringo. I’m trying real hard.

Five ways to be a better listener

Not a comprehensive list, but a few things that have worked for me.

1. Ask more questions. Just as it’s impossible to be furious when you’re curious, being quizzical is a path towards true understanding. Try to investigate instead of pontificate. Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature, said, “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”

2. Empathize, don't sympathise. Sympathy is understanding from your own perspective. Empathy is understanding from their perspective. A few weeks ago, I wrote about living with toddlers: “THEY’RE NOT GIVING YOU A HARD TIME, THEY’RE HAVING A HARD TIME. ” Judging by my inbox, this led to a fair few empathy breakthroughs from the dads. Keep going. This takes time and practice, but—I promise—it pays dividends.

3. Pay attention to body language. What are the other person’s energy levels like? Do they seem tense or relaxed? Are their eyebrows furrowed or are they smiling? Body language conveys what words may not. Try to tune into what is not being said.

4. Park your judgments. It’s impossible to be entirely unbiased and without judgment, but you’ll be rewarded by quietening down those voices while listening. Approach each conversation with a mindset of curiosity. That doesn’t mean agreeing with everything you hear—but attempting to fully consider the other person’s perspective without premature judgment.

5. Don't jump to solutions (yet). It's natural to try and solve problems, especially if an appendage dangles between your legs. But when someone's talking, remember that their first need is often to be heard and to feel understood. Summarising the person’s point of view can help ensure you’ve listened correctly (“It sounds like you’re saying ….” ) and gives them a chance to clarify. Focus on listening fully before offering solutions—and knowing that sometimes, a solution isn't what’s being asked for.

But … why?

Why have I written a three-and-a-half-thousand dissertation about listening in a newsletter about parenting? Well, this is me, in public, trying to be a better dad—the parenting equivalent of the “build in public” tech trend. I started this newsletter after my battle with paternal postnatal depression, working through my struggles in public in the hope it might aid others who found themselves stuck in a hole of their own. This thread has permeated my writing, and my ongoing work to become the dad I want my kids to remember.

I’ve been somewhat reluctant to talk about coaching here. I realise that is partly down to an internal worry of people thinking I’m turning this newsletter into a big ol’ upsell. But becoming a better listener has been the most transformative act in my life for the last few years. It has enabled me to become a better parent, husband, brother and friend. It’s enabled me to help dads those dads who have reached out about the Therapy Fund and to facilitate the men’s groups I’ve been working with.

It’s also enabled me to support other dads who, like you, read this newsletter—the last time I talked about this, it inspired other dads to reach out and start working together. Three months later, some have left jobs they hated and leapt confidently into independence. Others have overcome imposter syndrome in their current roles, allowing them to step up or into new roles. Many have completely rethought the role that work plays in their life, and how their definitions of success might be preventing them from the life they want to live.

I spent decades in advertising. It was fun. But it was ultimately unfulfilling. I’m thankful that this newsletter has opened the door to something else. It has crept up on me, sneakily become the most meaningful work I’ve ever done. And whilst I don’t want to turn this newsletter into a weekly coaching pitch, I’m somewhat regularly required to remind you about what I do—hoping more dads might want to work together. I know it will inevitably lead others rolling their eyes and hitting unsubscribe. But I’ll keep going—because coaching offers me the chance to work one-on-one with dads, bringing the same energy and commitment I give to this newsletter every week to those committed to making a change in their lives.

If it wasn’t clear enough from those four paragraphs, I’m terrible at talking about myself. Thankfully, some dads like you are happy to share how the coaching experience felt in their own words:

Working with Kevin was a deeply enriching and transformative experience that gave me everything I was looking for in a coach. At a time when I was working through big questions about my career, family life and the balance between the two, he helped me to focus on the most important questions to ask and held up the mirror to help me work through my own answers. He provides just enough perspective from his own experience to help you feel like you're not the first person to navigate these big life challenges, but also challenges and supports you in building your own path. Whether you're a father, a disillusioned knowledge worker or none of the above, Kevin is a great guide to help you frame up and find your way to answering life's big questions.
— Elliot

Kevin is unique in the world of career coaches. Where many focus on tactical improvements, Kevin takes a different approach that leaves his clients empowered to move confidently in a direction that fits their individual needs and wants. Kevin has been extremely helpful in getting me to rethink my approach and some of the subconscious, built-in limitations I had in place without knowing they existed. He does this with deep empathy, provocative questions, and actionable assignments to get you out of your comfort zone and move in a more fulfilling direction.
— Stephen

Kevin was instrumental in guiding me towards a more fulfilling and purpose-driven career. He possesses an uncanny ability to delve deep into the core of one's aspirations, and with his insightful questioning and unwavering support, he helped me unearth what truly matters to me. He instilled in me the confidence to step out of my comfort zone. Thanks to Kevin's invaluable insights and unwavering support, I've gained clarity on my goals and aspirations and feel empowered to explore paths that align with my passions and values. I am forever grateful for his guidance in helping me discover my true calling.
— Brian

Thank you to all the dads who invited me to be part of their next big step. If any of this sounds like where you’re at, or where you’d like to be, head here to find out more or grab time to talk. Sales pitch over—you can come out from behind the sofa now!

One last thing

If you made it this far, please enjoy this frankly deranged Psychology Today article I found whilst researching his essay, written by a clearly damaged husband going through a rough divorce. Big “IT’S DIGNITY” energy here.