Learnings from listening

Last week I attended a talk at The RSA in London by Stephen Burt on the power of listening. Stephen is a highly experienced leadership coach, so operating in a similar space to me.

I, therefore, invested the time to come to this talk not to expect to learn new core skills, but to learn by deep listening to here the music that Debussy called “the space between the notes”, as I wrote about in “Listening, your superpower”.

As a starting point, I loved the graphic above from Stephen, himself a passionate musician. My favourite slide from his talk.

I did indeed pick up a few powerful observations and learnings. Not all were new to me, but all crystallised and embedded further from listening.

Today I share three key thoughts.

Listening crystallises thinking for both speaker and listener.

One element that Stephen talked about was that by being listened to, the speaker can, simply by that act of being heard as they express themselves, crystallise their thinking, have epiphanies, gain clarity.

My thought from listening to Stephen’s talk, off the back of a week of numerous client meetings across the globe (oh how I love the ease of video calls!), was that when we truly and deeply listen, we can also crystallise…