157. How to Listen So the People You Love Feel Truly Heard

Do you ever finish a conversation with someone you love and realize you were already forming your answer while they were still talking? I do it too. It is one of the most human things we do, and it is also the reason so many of the people in our homes do not feel heard.

In this episode, I look into what listening actually is, and why it is so much harder with the people closest to us than with anyone else. We walk through six habits that quietly close the door on a conversation, and I will tell you which one is my own. Then we get practical: three things you can do in your next conversation that change how the other person experiences being with you.

If your child has gotten quieter, or your partner has stopped bringing things to you, this one is worth your time. Listening is a skill, not a personality trait. It can be learned, and what it repairs is often bigger than the conversation you are in.

What you will learn in this episode

Why most of us listen to respond rather than to understand, and why the people we love can feel that difference even when our intentions are good
What is really happening when someone in your family gradually stops telling you things, and why it is almost never about love
What Carl Rogers found about the single most powerful thing you can offer another person, and the simple experiment he suggested trying in your next disagreement
Three places to begin: staying one moment longer, reflecting the feeling before you fix anything, and noticing the pull to leave a conversation internally
Why listening is a learnable skill rather than a personality trait, and what changes in a family when one person starts practicing it

The Listening List

The five books and one short talk that shaped how I listen, with a note on what each one is especially good for. Free to download here: https://leigh-germann.kit.com/785ae24e8a

Download Listening Booklist

The Listening Workshop

I made you a 45 minute workshop that goes deeper than we could go here, with a workbook to work through alongside it. Free through September 30.

Download Listening Workshop

Transcript

Most of us were never taught how to actually listen, and the gap shows up in the conversations that matter most to us. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Listen so the people you love feel truly heard. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I’m a therapist and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way. Welcome back to Leadership Parenting. I’m so glad to spend this time with you today. I want to start out with a question. Do you ever finish a conversation with someone you love? Maybe it’s your partner, maybe it’s one of your kids, maybe it’s your teenager who is actually attempting to talk to you for once. And do you ever have this quiet, kind of unsettled feeling afterwards that something didn’t quite go right? That maybe you talked and that words went back and forth, but somehow the connection that you were hoping for that it just didn’t happen. Or maybe it’s less subtle than that. Maybe there’s someone in your family who’s gradually stopped telling you things completely, not necessarily after a fight, just kind of drifted off. And your connection isn’t the same that it used to be, where the conversations get shorter and the real stuff stops coming out. And maybe you’ve been trying to figure out what happened and what you can do about it. You know, I was talking with a friend the other day about how much we love visiting with each other. And we go out to lunch every couple of months, and the lunches are a lot longer than we always plan on. So now I just block off like three hours of my count on my calendar to have this time with her because she’s such a dear friend. And one of the things that we talked about was why we love being together so much is because it feels safe enough. And that I think because we take the time to let it be slow and let it be a long lunchtime, that we have the opportunity to really listen. When I leave, I feel like I’ve had a chance to share what I’ve wanted to share and that she really heard me. I think we know what it feels like to be on the other side of this, to be the one where you’re trying to tell somebody something that matters to you and something kind of important, and you come away sometimes feeling more alone or just less understood than you did before you started talking, right? And I think that’s why I love being with this friend so much, because that doesn’t happen so much. So these experiences, they’re not small things, they’re the texture of our family life and they have a cause, a specific, learnable, fixable thing that we can do to improve our communication with the people that we love.

When Teens Stop Talking

SPEAKER_00 3:01You know, I was working with a mom the other day who has a teenage daughter, and uh we were talking about some of this mom’s biggest concerns. And one of them that came up in our discussion was how much she was missing this time that she used to have with her daughter. They were still civil, they still functioned and ate dinner together, but the real conversations, the ones that used to happen naturally when her daughter was younger, they seemed to kind of been changing since she had turned about 13 or 14. And now, as her daughter was in that teenage life, which is a specific time of life. I mean, I think it’s really critical that we understand that the teen years, a lot of stuff is going on. So it’s not unusual to see some shifts. But this particular thing that this mom was worried about was how their conversations had shifted. And what she was getting mostly from her teenager was this kind of one-word answer, kind of closed doors around the communication. And she was really trying everything she could think of: asking more questions, giving her daughter more space, staying calmer, but nothing seemed to be working. And she was starting to grieve that relationship and actually kind of rush ahead and start to have anxiety about what might happen in their relationship if they didn’t improve their communication with each other. So I asked her to tell me about the last real time that she’d made an attempt to talk with her daughter. And it was when her daughter had come home from school, upset about something with a friend. And this mom, who is genuinely so loving and so thoughtful, she did what most of us do. She asked what happened innocently. And when her daughter told her, she immediately started explaining her version of why the friend probably did what she did. And then she had all these ideas of how her daughter might be able to work through it and what she could do to handle it better. And then she noticed her daughter kind of started to shut down. And she could see that pattern happening that she’d been noticing for a while. And this mom got really worried and a little bit defensive. And she was like, I’m just trying to help. And then it kind of switched to a little bit of an argument between her and her daughter. As she was telling me this, I knew exactly what happened. And I bet you do too, because when we hear other people’s stories, it’s so much easier to imagine what probably happened, right? Because we can see it with more clarity, with observation. We’re not in the middle of it. I think her daughter did not come home looking for an explanation or a strategy. She came home just wanting to be heard. And she left her conversation with her mom feeling kind of more alone and not understood. So the pattern reaching out, not feeling heard, pulling back, it’s one of the most common things that I see in families. And it’s not about love. There was nothing but love in that kitchen that this mom described. It’s really a skill, a specific, learnable skill that I don’t think we were ever taught.

Listen To Understand Not Respond

SPEAKER_00 6:04Here’s a point that I want to bring up today, because if you’re like me, I’m guilty of this. Most of us are listening to respond. We’re waiting to hear what the ask is from somebody, and then we’re formulating what it is we’re going to say back instead of listening to understand. When we’re listening to respond, we’re actually listening for the moment when we can jump in with our advice or our perspective or our thoughts, our solution, our reassurance, all very good-hearted intentions. We want to help, we want to fix it, we want the person we love to feel better. But here’s what the person on the other end feels they feel like they haven’t actually been heard yet. And it’s very hard to feel close to someone who has not heard you. A psychologist named Carl Rogers spent his career studying what actually helps people in their deepest relationships. And what he found was very simple, but also revolutionary. The single most powerful thing you can offer another person is the experience of genuinely understanding them. Not agreeing with them, not fixing them, not advising them, just understanding them. He described an experiment that I love. He said, the next time you’re in a disagreement with someone, try this one rule. Before either person can speak for themselves, they must first restate what the other person said accurately enough that the first person feels genuinely satisfied that you got it, that they’ve been heard. He said that we will find that this is one of the very hardest things to do in a relationship. But think about how it puts us in a totally different place than getting ready to respond. The work is on us to be the listener. And I think that traditionally what we assume is that the work is on the person who’s doing the explaining, that’s telling the story, that’s sharing the information. And then our work is to give a really great response. Rogers says it’s absolutely opposite. Our job is to strive to better understand, kind of help the person express what it is that they’re saying by slowing things down and really listening to understand. As a therapist, the bulk of my training was learning to listen. So much so that my husband teased me when he came with me to a class to sit in and kind of audit the class with me to see what I was learning in my master’s program. And he walked out and he was like, that’s it. You just sit there and listen and listen and listen. And of course, it was a rudimentary beginning stages of my training. There’s so much more that you do as a therapist in being able to direct the conversation back into the things that are most important to someone. But you guys, that is the core of what we’re taught when we’re working to help somebody through a hard time is can we first just sit with them and just listen, listen to understand before we’re off to the races to fix it? I can’t think of a better skill as a mother for us to practice than this. And maybe one of the very hardest ones of all. Speaking

Research On What Builds Closeness

SPEAKER_00 9:31of therapy training, another brilliant man in the field of psychology is John Gottman. If you’ve spent any time reading about marriage and relationships, then you’ve run across his material. He spent decades studying couples in his laboratory, watching them have conversations, argue, repair, connect. And what he found confirmed everything that Rogers foundationally had pointed to. The couples who stayed close, they’re the ones that he calls the masters of the relationship. They were not the ones who never had a disagreement or agreed on everything. They were the ones who listened. They knew how to listen and turn toward each other and help the other person feel safe enough to keep talking. They didn’t close things down and respond too soon. Gottman developed specific exercises for couples that he uses in his work. And I’ve adapted the spirit of them for families too, because the principles are the same, whether you’re talking to your partner, your teenager, or your child. He called one of them the stress-reducing conversation. It’s so masterful. And it’s actually an exercise where you have a list of questions that you keep with you as the listener. And then you invite the person that’s talking to tell you about their day. And here are the rules around that. Number one, you can’t be critical. Number two, you can’t respond. And number three, you ask open-ended questions to keep the person talking. And you remember what the name of this exercise is? Stress reducing conversation. Now, his guideline is that this works best when you’re not complaining about each other, right? Because when we’re trying to talk with each other and it’s one person trying to complain about the other person, it’s very hard to follow this pattern because we start to get defensive. But ultimately, the pattern still helps us even in that situation. Because if we can stay calm enough to really listen to what the other person is saying and not feel so defensive, we’re going to be able to get to a solution so much faster. But I’m going to table that for a minute. Let’s not talk about it as a conflict that we’re in, but just general listening, this mom listening to her teenager, reducing her teenager stress by fixing it? No. By hurrying her along so she can get the story out faster? No. By asking open-ended questions, remaining calm, and letting her just talk. We have research that shows us that being able to talk to somebody that we trust and that is listening and not trying to fix things, that that reduces our stress. It also increases our connection and our attachment and bonding with the person. Especially when someone is talking about something that’s weighing on them. And the other person as a listener, their job is just to listen. No fixing, no suggestions. Just I’m here. Almost ridiculously simple, right? And I think that we tend to almost expect people to give us an answer. So this could there could be a little tension when you try this and a little bit of awkwardness because we really are used to going to people, talking about things, and expecting to get an answer back. But even though we expect it, because that’s just kind of how us as human beings we like to do it, even though we expect it, it still gets in the way of really being understood. Another practice Gottman uses is when he helps couples understand what he calls the dream within their conflict. So this would be in a conflict with a person. Your job is a listener, let’s say it’s it’s your spouse and they’re telling you something that they’re unhappy about or that they want you to do differently. And instead of getting defensive, our job is to look for the dream in that spouse’s conversation with you, the deeper need that’s underneath their position. Most of the time, when people are arguing about something on the surface, there is something way more important underneath. And it’s not that stupid thing like you didn’t park the car correctly in the driveway, or you left your keys where I couldn’t find them, or it’s not about those minutia. It’s about something underneath it. And our job as listeners is to try to help translate that. And the only way to reach that deeper place is to listen past the surface complaint. These are the skills that researchers and experts are trying to teach us because it requires something from us that doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Staying genuinely curious about another person’s experience long enough that they feel it. That’s the critical part. Not long enough that we think we got it, but long enough that they get a sense that we’re really aligned with them. And that might mean that we need to slow things down and we need to ask a few more questions just to better understand. So the good news, and this is what I want you to really focus on today, the good news is that this is a skill. It’s not a personality trait. It’s not something that you were either either born with or you don’t have. It’s something that we can learn and we can practice and get better at. And I’ve seen it happen over and over again. Relationships that felt stuck can begin to move again. People who have stopped talking, even teenagers, start talking again. Not because anything on the outside has changed, but because we have learned to listen differently. So before I show you where to begin, I want to say something about how this kind of learning actually works. I found both in my own life and in watching families I work with that all it really takes is one good deep dive into us, you, me, truly understanding what listening is supposed to look like. That understanding can change your interactions forever. Not because we’re memorizing a technique, but because something shifts in how we see our role as a listener. That’s why reading a book about listening can be so powerful. Listening to this podcast might be that moment for you where you get a reminder that it’s okay to step back and slow things down and improve your ability to listen to someone. But there are also some great books on this topic. I’ve actually put together a short list of my favorite ones. They’re maybe not the most obvious ones, but they’re the ones that I tend to gravitate toward and that I’ve found to be really helpful to helping me figure out how I can be a better listener. And I think it might give you a deep dive quickly if you’re interested. You can find that in the show notes. It’s a listening book list. And there’s also a TED Talk link to it because I think it’s a really helpful TED Talk if you only have a few minutes. I’ve included a little summary for each book that kind of shows the strength that that book has around the concepts of listening because you might have some specific things that you’re looking for to help you feel more adept, more confident in your listening. So is it worth it to spend a little time reading a book about listening? I think it is. I really, really do. I think one deep dive is going to give you a shift that’s going to empower you all the way downstream in what you do with other people and especially the kids and the spouse in your family. I’m also creating a workshop around this, a little mini training on the key concepts and something that you can kind of quickly consume in a shorter time and actually put into practice. And I’m going to put a link to that in the show notes too. And for the month of May, I’m going to keep it completely free so you can just download it and watch it. Because the month of May, I think of two things. One is my daughter’s birthday, but second is Mother’s Day. And I think moms are the very people that need to know how to be really good listeners. We are the safe place for our children. And on the other hand, wouldn’t it be awesome if the people who loved us were also willing to take a few minutes and learn how to be a better listener. So you might consider going into the show notes and downloading that little workshop for yourself and maybe invite your partner to go through it with you together. Because this isn’t just a skill for us mothers. It’s a skill for anyone who wants the people that they love to feel truly heard. Okay,

Three Practices To Start Today

let me give you a few quick ideas about where you could begin right now to be a better listener. I’m going to give you three places to start. These are not the whole picture. There’s a lot more depth to this work. But if it resonates with you, then there’s more of that kind of deep dive stuff in the show notes. Here are the three things. I think if you practice them consistently, it’ll change the conversations you have with the people that you love. Number one, stay curious one moment longer than it feels comfortable to you. Okay. Curious, that means as you feel that pull to answer, to give a response, to give advice, wait. This is very hard for me, especially because I have a lot of training. I have a lot of thoughts about stuff. And a lot of times people come to tell me things, I think, because they want access to some of that stuff. And my biggest weakness by far is moving too quickly. That I think I’m a good listener, but I don’t think I listen quite long enough. This is one of my goals. So when your child tells you something, when your partner says something hard, whether it’s in their life or something that applies to you, when your teenager is actually opening up for just a second before you respond, ask one more question. Not a leading question that kind of steers them toward the answer you’re about to give them. Just like simple, like tell me more about that. Or what was that like for you? Or is there any more? You don’t have to like be intense and say, I want to know more. You can just say, Oh, help me understand a little bit more about that. I’m curious about what you just said. Just that one extra question sends a signal that you are really, really listening, that you’re not done trying to understand. And people, especially children, especially teenagers, they feel that difference between someone who is done and someone who is still genuinely open and taking stuff in. So stay one moment longer. It’s more powerful than you think. Second tip reflect the feeling that you’re hearing before you offer anything else. I think this is a very important shift because what does it take for you to reflect sadness that you hear your child might be experiencing? It takes you listening, not just responding to what you heard in the words, but what you think they might be feeling. So it sounds like you felt really left out, or it sounds like that was really scary, or it sounds like you feel like you’ve been doing this all alone. Now, does that sound a little therapy-like? It might. So you’re gonna have to put it in your words. But you know why people go to therapists? Because they get answers like that. And if you don’t get answers like that from the people that you’re talking to, you don’t always know whether they really heard you. And I think the next part that’s super important is that you don’t tell them that’s what they’re feeling, you ask them, and then you say, Did I get that right? You let them confirm and correct you before you move on. When you name the feeling, you’re telling the other person, I’m not just processing the words, I’m trying to understand your experience. And you might be wrong. You might say, Oh, that sounds like it might have been really scary. And they might go, No, it wasn’t. Isn’t that great information? Isn’t it okay if you’re wrong about that and you gave it a shot and that’s great feedback? You missed something, and maybe they didn’t share it directly, but maybe now this is an invitation for them to do that. Let them correct you. That’s not a failure. That’s actually the practice that’s working as it should. Then of course you’re gonna have to notice how that feels inside to you, balance that out, and remember this isn’t about you in this moment. This is about them. Even when someone is criticizing you or challenging you, even in conflict, we can say things like, help me understand why this matters so much to you. You

Empathy With Boundaries In Conflict

SPEAKER_00 22:40have a teenager who wants a curfew of 2 a.m. What’s your first response? Heck no, 2 a.m. never. But what if you said, Help me understand why this is so important to you? That doesn’t mean that you’re gonna give in to the 2 a.m. curfew request. But you’ve got two things going on here. You have to respond to your child’s request and do it in a reasonable, boundaried way. But you also need to connect with them and make sure that you really understand where they’re coming from. I think we hesitate or shy away from that because if I understand too much, maybe I will start to feel what they’re feeling and I will start to be swayed, and then I might give in. Well, you might, but I hope you don’t. If you have a strong boundary and your child’s asking to do something that you consider dangerous and not helpful or healthy for them, then understanding how they feel does not have to make you give in to that. Understanding how they feel is going to help you hold your relationship with them as you set the boundary. And maybe together you guys can get to the dream of the conflict, right? For your teenager, why do they want a 2 a.m. curfew? Is it because they want more freedom and more responsibility? That’s a normal developmental thing to want as a teenager. They want more time with their peers. Their friends get to stay out till 2 a.m. Maybe they want to do something that they can’t do because if they come home at 11 o’clock, their friends go on and do this thing that they want to do. None of that means you have to agree to the 2 a.m. curfew. But wouldn’t it be nice to understand what your child is feeling and why they want that so badly? And then could you together come up with other things that would allow them to get at least some of that stuff, right? Some of that peer interaction, as long as it’s in a safe and healthy, boundaried way. And maybe some more freedom. And maybe you can just sit with them, even if they’re frustrated with you, and say, I know, I think I really understand where you’re coming from. I don’t think you’re just a punky kid who wants to do bad things until two in the morning. So heck no, I’m not gonna let you do it. You’re gonna say, I think I better understand why this is so important to you. And thank you for explaining it to me. And I want to hear more about why it’s hard for you right now with all of this stuff going on in your life. And also hard why having a mom who insists that you’re home before midnight or whatever your curfew is, how that weighs onto that. And I’m sorry about that. And that’s the last thing that I want to do to make your life feel harder. And maybe then you move into your response. And I guess all of that was kind of your response, right? But you really have a better handle on where they’re coming from. And you can say to them, I can see that you’re a great kid. You’re not trying to do anything wrong. Now, could they be trying to do something wrong? Maybe, maybe they are. But my guess is even if they’re trying to do something that you consider dangerous or unhealthy or wrong, underneath it, there’s another reason. They’re motivated to do that, not because they’re inherently bad kids. They’re motivated to do that because they’re looking for something and they think that’s going to give it to them. We want to know what that feels like for them, what they’re looking for, and at least better understand it. So if you could find yourself anywhere in these stories, and I don’t know about you, but I’m all over them. Sometimes it feels a little bit embarrassing that I have all this training. And then I know after an interaction with my husband that I did not listen very well. You guys, this is a human tug of war with a brain that is negativity biased and very threat focused. Without a little bit of awareness, we are moving into automated processes of defending ourselves, shutting things down, trying to fix things so we don’t have problems anymore. We have a lot weighing against us to be good listeners. But when you go on a deep dive and you understand the concepts, you can return to that. That’s your formula, that’s your remedy, that’s your path to repair and connection. Our intentions, I believe, are almost always really good. But what we’re talking about today is just a little bit of a different level, a deeper kind, a kind that says, I’m not going anywhere. I’m gonna sit here and listen to you and try to understand I’m with you in this. And this is learnable. I’ve seen mothers completely transform the conversations they have with their teenagers by practicing these three things. I’ve seen couples who’ve stopped talking and are considering separating find their way back to each other. And adult children calling more often because something in the way their parent listens has really invited them to talk to them more. The three things. Stay curious and stay one moment longer than feels comfortable to listen. Second, look for the feeling they’re telling you and reflect it back to them. And third, be aware of the feelings coming up for you as they’re talking and stay open. Those three things are the foundation of a much richer conversation.

157. How to Listen So the People You Love Feel Truly Heard

What you will learn in this episode

The Listening List

The Listening Workshop

Transcript

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