The secret to better leadership and parenting, and to giving good advice

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During the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, I recorded a weekly podcast and completed my post-master’s program in cognitive behavioral therapy, aka CBT, at New York University. In addition to developing technological intuition and using Zoom for my courses and podcasts while four children scampered about on the floor above mine, the two projects compelled me to develop a skill that might sound simple and natural, but turned out to be highly challenging: the ability to listen.

In the podcast, called “This Is not a Podcast,” in Hebrew, I held conversations with people on the subject of how we form habits – how we struggle with that process in the short run and how good ones (like exercising and eating a healthful diet) are maintained in the long run. I ask, the guests answer and so on and so forth. At first I conducted these almost hour-long conversations like every other conversation in my life, but when I went back and listened to the recordings, I discovered that the moments when one voice overrides another (that is, when I start to speak before the other person has finished speaking) are difficult to listen to and painful to the ears. It’s intolerable to listen to two people speaking at the same time. I realized that I had to allow my interlocutor to complete their remarks and only then to continue with my line of thought to the next question.

To let the other person finish speaking. Sounds almost obvious, right? Yet it was only when I undertook a commitment – not to myself, not even to the other person, but to potential listeners – that I discovered how much of an effort this takes. It was a commitment not to disrupt the conversation the minute any thought enters my head, not to complete the sentence of the other person even if it’s obvious to me what they’re about to say, not to move a step forward to the place where I thought the conversation should be headed – but to take a step back and clear the space to accommodate everything the other person has to say. Until they’re done. Completely. And silence falls. And what do I do then? I ask, “What else would you like to add?”

The necessity of being silent led me to an exciting discovery: When I give people an opportunity to complete their sentences, they get to places that surprise not only me but them, too. At the conclusion of our conversations, after the podcast recording ended, the interviewees remarked as though offhandedly, “You know, I hadn’t planned to say that. In fact, I had never even thought of it until we spoke.” Some of them thanked me for listening, and I was astounded that they’d even noticed it. Maybe it struck them because listening is almost a rare occurrence today.

Well, we do listen. We listen all the time. We listen to our children (“Mom, I can’t find anything to eat”). We listen to our life partner (“I’ll be staying in the office until late today”). We listen to our boss (“For this study to merit publication, you have to get at least 50 more respondents to fill out the questionnaire”). We also listen to things that aren’t aimed at us (when people at the next table in a cafe talk about something, when your children quarrel over who will sit in the front seat on the way home). And almost all the time, nonstop, an inner soundtrack accompanies us in our head, which interprets every event that happens to us, drawing on events of the past and relentlessly imagining what’s going to happen next. It’s the narrator of the nature film that is our life, and we listen to it, whether we want to or not.

But it’s not easy. Especially when the pace of the thoughts that crop up outstrips the pace of the speech of the person opposite us. We can hear between 125 and 250 words a minute. When we have thoughts running through our head, that pace can increase to more than 1,000 words a minute: Our inner thoughts flow more rapidly than the words we are capable of hearing from an outside source. And internalizing what is said to us is also no easy feat: If we listen to someone talk for 10 minutes, at the end of the conversation we will remember about 50 percent of what was said. Two days later that will have diminished by another 50 percent and we’ll be left with the memory of about a quarter of what was said.

It’s not easy to listen and not easy to remember – but it is worthwhile. In a famous 1984 study that has been quoted extensively, entitled “The Effect of Physician Behavior on the Collection of Data,” Howard B. Beckman, who is today a clinical professor of medicine and public health sciences at the University of Rochester, demonstrated what many people feel intuitively. Beckman analyzed audio recordings of people during doctor’s appointments and found that the average amount of time a physician allowed a patient to speak before interrupting was 18 seconds. That happens even though the ability to make a correct diagnosis depends on what the patient tells the physician. Of course, this is not always due to arrogance, but to an attempt to offer help within a clear time frame. Still, follow-up research found that when physicians begin the appointment with open questions such as “How can I help you?” and give the patient time to speak and describe the situation – the probability that they will succeed in getting to the root of the problem rises, and with it also the amount of positive feedback they receive from their patients.

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One of the interviewees on my podcast was Avi Kluger, an organizational behaviorist who teaches managerial listening skills at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Business Administration.

“One of the tasks the students are assigned,” the professor related, “is to go and listen to someone – it could be an employee or their life partner – for seven minutes without saying a word, without jumping in or intervening. Just to listen. Afterward, one student told me, ‘After I listened to my wife, she told me that she had been able to tell me things that she hadn’t had an opportunity to say in 18 years of marriage.'”

I think I understand the general idea that the experts in listening are proposing, and it is based on humility. Even though we are certain that we were once in the shoes of the person opposite us, that we have a suggestion that could resolve their dilemma, that we know better because we are more experienced or smarter – it’s far from certain that this is really the case. Whereupon I made a decision to try to listen.

‘I’ve been there’

It’s 7:26 A.M., and I’m in the driver’s seat. Three children have already taken their place in the car for the drive to school, we’re all waiting for the fourth. Arrival time is updated on Google Maps. At this time of day, every minute of waiting here means another 15 minutes on the George Washington Bridge, on the way from our home in New Jersey to their school in New York. “Mom,” my son cries out, “I can’t find my homework!”

I know what I have to do now. I take a breath. I get out of the car and feel my legs stuck in the ground. “I don’t believe that again, for the millionth time, instead of putting the homework into your bag as soon as you finish doing it, I have to look for it at 7:30 in the morning, when we’re already late!” Maybe it wasn’t intended to come out like that.

Ximena Vengoechea.
Kara Brodgesell

“Listen Like You Mean It” is the title of a new book by Ximena Vengoechea – the source of her Spanish (first) name lies in the Hebrew name Shimon (meaning, “one who listens”), who in the past decade has been director of user research at such large companies as Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter; she is also a writer and illustrator. In a Zoom call, Vengoechea, 35, describes two types of listening: superficial and empathetic. Superficial listening is the most widespread. We hear what the person opposite us has said, but do not achieve a deep understanding of it. Empathetic listening takes place when we get to a point beyond grasping the literal meaning of what is heard, in order to understand what was said and what the other person experienced. According to Vengoechea, that requires humility, curiosity and the ability to imagine what the other side is feeling, instead of concentrating on one’s own emotions.

Vengoechea describes her job as “listening to users” – of a certain company’s products and services – to understand more precisely what they need and what bothers them. Not what the company thinks, she adds, but what’s happening in practice. When one of her staff would come and say she was having a problem planning a study, “my head would immediately move to solutions, and at that stage I was no longer hearing what she was saying.” After recognizing this, Vengoechea says, she tried to stop her own automatic behavior and to ask those she was conversing with, “What do you need now?” Sometimes the answer would be, “Just to get something off my chest” – and then, Vengoechea says, she would simply listen more closely without speaking.

Still, maybe you really do know better than the staff member who comes to you?

Vengoechea: “I think there is a difference between coaching, guiding and delegating or telling someone what to do. I think any parent can probably relate to this scenario: I’ve been there, like, I’m older, I literally know what the right answer is. But, how often does it work if you tell your kid exactly what to do? They’re like, ‘Oh, Mom.’ It doesn’t mean that we can’t help them along the way. But we have to be listening to know whether they are ready for that help, whether they want that help, or whether they want something else. Maybe that person just wants to hear that you believe in their ability to figure it out.”

And very infrequently, on very rare occasions, can it happen that we simply don’t know what the right answer is?

“In the book I talk about bringing in a listening mindset, and one of the key ingredients is humility. We have these strongly held opinions, experiences, assumptions, preconceived notions. And being able to truly listen to someone is about setting that aside, our ego. The most important thing is understanding another person’s experience. And to really and truly understand that, you do have to make the shift from, ‘I’m the expert, I have all the answers,’ to ‘I’m a student. I’m here to learn, And the person I’m talking to is an expert in their own way.'”

A friend and I are on the way to a cool yoga class, and I decide to practice listening as she talks. She tells me she wants to do a tummy tuck. I look at her and say nothing, but I’m certain that my thoughts are visible through my eyes. “Seriously? An abdominoplasty? Is that not the most unnecessary reason to undergo full anesthesia there is, or what? How long does the surgery even hold up? But you look amazing! I don’t believe that the chauvinistic culture we live in has made you want to risk your life for a flat stomach!”

I guess my thoughts aren’t visible, because she keeps talking. “I feel that all the things I’ve gone through in the past few years have been stored up in my stomach – all the quarrels, all the difficulties of the coronavirus have been channeled into there,” she tells me, and continues, “I don’t think it’s an instant solution, I’m not thinking of becoming [Israeli supermodel] Bar Refaeli at the age of 42, but my insurance covers it and I feel like I’ll be able to get up in the morning a little happier.”

I’m really happy I kept silent.

“Learning these listening skills was almost like discovering you have a secret super power – like, oh, I didn’t know that was there,” Vengoechea says. “You and I both wear glasses – so I don’t know if you remember that moment – the first time you get a pair of glasses and you put them on and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize how much I wasn’t seeing!’ It felt like it was permeating my everyday conversations a little. I was noticing that there is a little more texture here, and I could understand a little more deeply what was happening.”

If somebody wants to start listening better, what should they do?

“The first thing is to start to recognize in yourself what stops you from listening. What are the topics that I tune out on, which topics make me emotional or activated in some way that I can’t hear anything anymore? Are there certain relationships in which this dynamic occurs more frequently, where I find I stop listening? What is the way that I usually show up in conversation? How do I typically listen, [what’s] the unique filter that I usually bring into conversations, and is this appropriate?”

It’s not always easy to listen in personal situations, but it’s complicated in a different way when you think of a workplace. Should a boss who says and knows become one who listens?

“If you are a leader who is a good listener, you know so much more about your people: where they’re struggling, and what motivates them, and where things are clicking and where they aren’t. That kind of insight makes your job a lot easier; it makes the team run a lot smoother. If you’re just commanding, just delegating, you don’t have any real insight as to how your team is feeling. The result is that people leave and you’re totally surprised, or a project falls through and you don’t know why. If I know what my coworker needs, what my team needs, it will be a lot easier for us all to row in the same direction.”

Anything else? (That’s me, practicing active listening.)

“Many of us have gotten used to the idea that conversations are fast, there is a vibe. And I think we forget that it’s okay to slow things down, to create that space, for there to be silence in conversations. That doesn’t mean it has to be an awkward silence, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost the other person’s attention. It’s important to agree to feel discomfort during a conversation; it’s an opening to a breakthrough.”

Michael Stanier.
Christopher Holloman

Spilled milk

After finishing Vengoechea’s book, I hear a recommendation from Ronit Kfir, Israeli radio-host-turned-interior designer and blogger, to read Michael Bungay Stanier’s 2019 book, “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever.” I plunge into his Instagram account, and the first thing I come across strikes me as being totally correct: Instead of asking “why” (“Why did you spill milk on the table?”) – ask “what” (“What were you trying to do when you picked up that completely full carton of milk?”). According to Stanier, an Australian-born coach and author, “what” questions reduce the feeling one is being judgmental and allows the other side to respond more openly and substantively. I send him a message and we arrange to speak via Zoom, from his home in Toronto.

Michael, I know why he picked up the milk. He wanted to pour it into his bowl of cornflakes. And I also know why that failed, and in fact I know exactly what he needs to do so that the whole process will be a success, with a spotless table, a full belly and without the need for a bunch of paper towels – and I absolutely want to tell him.

Stanier: “Well, that happens all the time to all of us. It happens 10 or 100 times a day for everybody. You feel like you know better than your boss, your team, your kids, your spouse – all of that. And there is a time and a place to give advice. So if your kid comes to you and goes ‘Hi, Mom, where do I find the bread?’ – just tell them where the bread is. But there are a couple of things to bear in mind. The first is, when somebody asks you a question and says, ‘Help me solve this problem,’ they often don’t actually know what the real problem is. The second is that you should be, to a degree, skeptical about how good your own advice is. We have all these cognitive biases in our brain that make us think that our advice is brilliant, but often our advice is not as good as we think it is.

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you do know what the real challenge is, you figured that out and you have a really good idea. Then the question becomes: What are you trying to do here? Is the big win for you to solve the problem? Or is the bigger win for you to help the other person get better at solving the problem?

“That’s not a rhetorical question, because sometimes the big win is for you to solve the problem. But we tend to assume that that’s always the big win, which is actually not the case. If your kid comes and asks where the bread is, you can spend the rest of your life answering where the bread is, or where the milk is, or where the knife is. Or you can ask: Where have you already looked? What have you tried? What are your best guesses as to where the bread might be? That way you’re making them think and you’re keeping responsibility with them.”

You said that often we think we know what a problem is but that it’s not the actual problem. How can we get to the real problem, then?

“Step No. 1 is to say, ‘Maybe I don’t know what the real problem is.’ And then you ask ‘why?” My child can’t find the bread. Why? Because my child hasn’t looked hard enough in the kitchen. Why? Because my child feels that it’s my responsibility as the mom to find the bread. Why? Because I actually want to take responsibility for everything, because I’m a ‘helicopter’ parent. Why? You use the ‘why’ as a way of getting to the root causes of things.”

I tried to practice active listening, but I found it to be easier with strangers or people I care less about. With people who are close to me, I feel like I can’t help myself, I can’t hold myself back. I have to talk, I have to try and save the situation.

“The question is, how is that working for you?”

Almost as good as shouting at my husband when I know what the right thing to do is.

“When you say ‘I can’t help myself’ – I don’t buy that. What I buy is that you have a habit of jumping in with people you are close to and you care about. As do many of us. Just saying broadly, ‘I’m going to be more curious with people that I care about’ – that’s not enough. The more specific you make it, the more likely you are to have a chance to start shifting your behavior. You have to practice. So when you say ‘I can’t help myself,’ my interpretation of that is, ‘I have some old habits that are hard to break.’ And that’s true. But it is not impossible to design a new habit.”

What I hear you say is that there are two parts to good listening. The first one is acknowledging that I don’t know everything, my solution might not be the best one. And actually this is the part I find easy to believe. The second part is counting on the other side to be able to handle the challenge well. And that part I find more complicated.

“It depends a bit on your philosophy of life. My philosophy of life is that I’m not responsible for the other side’s life. I’m responsible for my life. My job is to do all that I can to support that other person to be better at being responsible for their life. To be just a little patient and say, ‘Look, I’m not going to run the ship into the rocks, we’re not going to sink – I don’t want that to happen. But I am going to let us flounder a little bit. To try and explore what’s possible'” – that is, not necessarily to find a solution to all one’s problems but to develop resilience.

When you work with organizations, do you find that people there have the patience for that kind of process?

“Well, it’s not like we’re going to get back to this in 18 months’ time and see how it’s going. It’s a short experiment: Let’s try it out for 48 hours. One time I was on a skiing trip in Australia with a friend, and we were skiing down the mountain when I suddenly realized that we had got the time wrong. We had to get down the mountain pretty fast or we would miss the bus home. We were not very good skiers. We panicked and tried to ski as fast as we could, and it was a disaster – we kept tightening up and falling over and crashing. And we both arrived at this insight at the same time: Skiing a little slower meant we got down the slope faster. Because there were fewer crashes, there was less chaos. There is something similar here – namely, that slowing down will typically speed things up, because that way you have a better chance of finding the real challenge and the better solution.”

When I tried to practice active listening, I felt like I was helping the other person but it wasn’t a regular chat – I was working on listening. I understand and I feel how helpful it is when I’m listening and not talking about myself or jumping in with advice, but were you able to find a balance that felt right in your own life?

“There is a well-known process of how you integrate a new skill. In the first stage you’re unconsciously incompetent: You don’t even realize how bad you are. The next stage is conscious incompetence, in which you realize how bad you are. Every time someone says something, I’m triggered to jump in with whatever advice or opinion. That’s the least comfortable place to be. The next stage is that you are consciously competent. You see what you’re doing and you’re noticing the effect, but you’re still kind of working at managing the conversation. That is more comfortable but not natural. The final stage is to be unconsciously competent, which is when it stops being something that you’re deliberately deploying and it just becomes a habit and a way of existing.

“With my wife, there are times I want her opinion, and there are times I want her to listen. We’ve been married close to 30 years, and it’s taken us a good percentage of that time to figure that out – and we’re still figuring it out.

“If I’m not sure what she wants from me, I just ask, ‘Hey, do you want to hear my suggestion on how to tackle this or do you just need to get this off your chest?’ And when she answers, ‘I just need to get this off my chest,’ I say, ‘Brilliant. So what else happened?'”