The universe is not dying to hear from you — not while someone else is finding the courage to speak
What actually happens inside you when you say you’re listening? When I’m waiting for my turn to speak, I’m not listening. When I’m filtering what you’re saying as you’re saying it, I’m not listening. When I’m debating whether I want to agree with you while you’re still talking, I’m not listening. We rarely admit that. Instead, we reach for tools.
Three things for becoming a better listener. Five ways to improve your communication. The endless parade of functional fixes for what we imagine is a functional problem. There’s no trick here. There is no functional alternative to listening.
Because listening itself isn’t functional. It’s something else entirely.
You cannot fake genuine attention. You’ve tried. We all have. You cannot perform your way into actually caring about what someone else is trying to tell you. What usually happens will happen: you interrupt, you offer opinions before they’re asked for, you ask questions that sound engaged but really just create openings for what you’re dying to say. Why does this keep happening? Your heart is still with yourself, with what you think and feel and believe the universe is waiting to hear from you.
When your attention is genuinely on another person, certain behaviors emerge naturally: eye contact, patience, presence. When your attention is on performing these behaviors, the other person feels the difference immediately. They sense they’re being processed rather than welcomed.
What if the issue isn’t that you lack listening skills? What if you’re simply not interested in what the other person has to say? You’re interested in what you have to say about what they have to say, how their words open doors for your insights.
Real listening requires something no workshop can manufacture: the temporary suspension of your own urgency to be heard. It requires taking the other person as worth your full attention. Not because some expert told you to, but because that’s who you choose to be in this moment. This is a quality of the heart. You either extend this quality or you don’t. It isn’t knowledge. It isn’t skill.
When someone is genuinely listening to you, you know it immediately. Something in the quality of their presence changes. Their questions change. Their patience with your struggle to find words changes. Their willingness to sit with your silence changes. None of this can be taught. It emerges from orientation, not information.
The uncomfortable truth most of us carry: we spend conversations waiting to speak. We’ve become sophisticated about this waiting. We nod, we make encouraging sounds, but we’re still waiting. Still treating the other person’s words as intermission rather than the main event.
The universe is not dying to hear from you. At least not right now. Not while someone else is trying to share something that matters to them.
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Whenever you’re ready
Here are ways we can work together:
Facilitation - I create conditions for teams to think more deeply about their challenges and discover their own ways forward. Whether you’re working through strategy, alignment, or complex decisions, I work with the purpose you bring to help you do your best thinking together.
Thought Partnership - Ongoing one-on-one conversations that help you develop effectiveness and find greater fulfillment in your leadership role. Collaborative inquiry into the challenges you’re navigating.
Three-Day Leadership Development Program - Experiential learning where participants work on their actual challenges through structured activities and reflection, developing judgment and authentic voice rather than acquiring techniques.
If you’d like to discuss how any of these might fit your current situation, reply to this email. I’m always happy to chat.