Deep listening: The 8 steps to revitalize any conversation

The story of our life unfolds through our relationships — with parents, siblings, children, friends, neighbors, colleagues, even strangers. These connections are our true wealth. Through engaging with these individuals, we forge our identity, who we are, and where we belong, and we make meaning from our short and precious lives. But our relationships have increasingly become frayed and routine; we are bereft of the recognition and understanding we crave.

And the reason? We no longer invest time and energy in the very fiber that connects us: listening, trapped in transactional lip-service listening. We often only truly listen momentarily, pantomiming the act of listening as we’re “re-loading our verbal gun with ammunition,” getting ready to fire. Then we jump down the throat of the speaker to explain our own ideas, our own solutions, the “right” answer — interrupting meaning and destroying thinking. Even if we’ve learned to listen better, we tend to treat the speaker as a resource. We listen to them to extract information, or because it is expected of us. This type of listening blinds us to what is not expressed in words and can leave a speaker feeling brushed aside or used.

Deep Listening is transformational. You acknowledge a speaker’s humanity when you practice Deep Listening; you grant them respect and empathetic space so they can ignite sparks of fresh thinking. You listen openly to truly learn about them — and yourself. Through an interactive process, your speaker crystallizes their ideas and feels witnessed. They can then share a more authentic story that allows you to understand them far more profoundly, even if you still disagree.

As an award-winning BBC journalist for over 20 years, I thought I was an excellent listener. It was my job after all — to pay close attention, ask insightful questions, and tell people’s stories. But when I started training as an executive coach, I had a startling realization. For much of my career, I had been in the driver’s seat of conversations, just waiting for my chance to ask a brilliant question or share my own fantastic idea. I wasn’t truly listening. It is from this first-hand experience coupled with my extensive research into the work of psychologists and other experts and practitioners, that I have developed the Deep Listening practical approach.

In my book, I outline the eight steps of Deep Listening:

Step One: Create Space. You begin by creating a place of psychological safety for your speaker. You can also make physical changes to your environment so a conversation feels effortless. Your ambition: Your speaker feels cherished and inspired to explore new ideas.

Step Two: Listen to Yourself First. You can’t be open to listening to others until you truly listen to yourself. Through self-reflection, you can begin to forge a more positive relationship to your family of shadows, the unacceptable parts of yourself, so they no longer hijack your most important encounters.

Step Three: Be Present. An elliptical yet impactful aspect of Deep Listening — your presence, which transforms standard listening into a profound encounter. There are many paths to cultivate presence to tackle the internal and external distractions that obstruct true listening.

Step Four: Be Curious. An important aspect of Deep Listening is the qualities you project towards your speaker: curiosity, empathy, awareness of judgments, and respect. Acknowledging that you don’t already know what’s in the mind of your speaker can be transformative.

Step Five: Hold the Gaze. This step explores the power of a steady, warm-hearted gaze and other non-verbal cues to communicate to your speaker that they are being heard. When it comes to reading your speaker’s body language, facial expression, and tone to understand what they are not expressing directly, research shows that tone of voice is the most reliable.

Step Six: Hold the Silence. There are many flavors of silence — one reason you may resist a pause. How can you use a rich stillness to center yourself and signal to your speaker your true respect, giving them the space to think, reflect, and share?

Step Seven: Reflect Back. Learning to crystallize the very core of what you’re hearing can feel tough at first, but there are clues that can guide you as you check your understanding of the meaning of what your speaker has conveyed, directly and between the lines, including their emotions.

Step Eight: Go Deeper. This step explains how your listening can illuminate what ordinarily is hidden — your speaker’s deeper narrative, vital to understanding your speaker — and can include their unexpressed needs and whether their emotions are in harmony or alive with contradictions.

Through Deep Listening, you will be better equipped to reflect on the true purpose of your conversations and imagine what your relationships could be like if you authentically, deeply listened. As you start to question old habits and try new ways of listening, you’ll notice that you begin to understand the people around you in a far more meaningful way, and they, in turn, will become more open to engaging with you.