What My Son Taught Me About Listening
There was a period in my life when I thought I was holding it together.
I was managing. Functioning. Showing up to work and teaching the very frameworks I’m about to share with you. On the outside, I looked like I had it handled. On the inside, I was fueled by a constant, low-level fear. The kind of fear that doesn’t announce itself but methodically organizes your whole life around it.
My youngest was a teenager then. We were in the kitchen one evening and he was telling me something that mattered to him. I was physically there. I was nodding. But I was already three steps ahead, assembling my response and preparing the advice I’d decided he needed.
He stopped mid-sentence.
I don’t remember if he raised his hand or just went still, but the words haven’t left me:
Mom, if you won’t listen to me, I’m going to stop talking to you.
He wasn’t angry. He was just being clear. And he was right.
I teach listening. I’ve sat with hundreds of leaders and coached them on the exact gap my son named in me on an ordinary Tuesday. But fear – the trigger I thought I was managing – had taken me offline. I heard him, but I was not listening.
That distinction is everything.
Most of us listen by paying attention until it’s our turn to speak. That’s not listening. It’s actually just hearing. It’s the starting point, but it’s where most leaders stop.
What happens in the space between hearing and responding is where the real work lives – and where most of the losses happen. I use a framework with clients called HUIR: Hearing, Understanding, Interpreting, Responding.
The move from Hearing straight to Response, skipping the middle entirely, isn’t just a bad habit. It’s a survival strategy. It’s what we do when we’re triggered by fear or a need for certainty. We jump to the end because being ten steps ahead feels like competence. In reality, it’s a closed loop. Carol Dweck would call it a fixed mindset in action – it already knows what it thinks. HUIR is what the growth mindset looks like inside a conversation. It stays open long enough to receive something it didn’t expect.
Understanding is the first expansion. It asks you to turn your focus entirely toward the other person and stay curious about what you are really hearing or sensing. It is the choice to prioritize the listening relationship over the clock, and it requires staying in the conversation longer than is comfortable when your brain is screaming at you to move.
Interpreting is the interior work, and it’s the hardest of the four. It asks: what am I bringing into this room right now that is coloring what I hear? This is where low-level fear does its damage. If you don’t name the trigger, it runs the show. You aren’t listening to the person. Rather, you’re listening to your own judgment, your history with them, or your need to prove you have the answer.
I tell my clients to clean your filters. You can’t eliminate them, but you can name them. When you name a filter, you strip it of its power to decide where the conversation goes.
I recently worked with a leader who is exceptionally sharp. She can see around corners and connect dots faster than anyone in the room. These are the strengths that built her career, but they have a cost.
In conversation, she fills in the gaps before the picture is fully drawn. She hears the first few words, and her mind is already reaching the conclusion. She isn’t arrogant. She’s been trained by success to be fast. But because she’s working from partial information, she misses the nuance that only arrives in the second half of a sentence or in the pause that follows it.
This isn’t a flaw to fix. It’s a strength to expand. The question for her wasn’t whether she could connect dots, but how many more dots would become available if she waited for the full picture to arrive.
We often think of listening as an outward act, but it requires an inward stillness first.
I saw this recently with another client. When I asked her a difficult question, she didn’t jump to the automatic response loop. She went still. Her eyes closed for a split second – not to avoid me, but to filter out the noise so she could actually listen to herself. She was giving the relationship with herself and to the question the thoughtful, unhurried attention it required. She already knew how to do this. The practice wasn’t new information.
A key leadership learning for her was that she could turn that same quality of attention she gave her inner world and direct it outward.
The reason listening breaks down is almost always an unmapped trigger. When fear rises, our capacity to understand and interpret diminishes. We skip to the response because certainty feels safe. The antidote is the willingness to notice the loop closing and call it out in the moment:
- I'm feeling defensive right now. That's a filter.
- I've already decided what I think. That's a filter.
- I'm afraid of what I might hear if I actually listen. That's a filter.
Clean the filter. Not once, not perfectly, but as a practice you return to every time you feel yourself rushing to the finish line.
My son gave me a gift in that kitchen. He told me the truth about what my efficiency was costing us. He reminded me that listening isn’t a gift you give to others, it’s the price of admission for a real relationship.
The real metric of leadership isn’t whether you’ve mastered the framework. It’s whether the people in your life, whether it’s your son, your CEO, your team, feel like they have to fight to be heard, or whether they’ve finally found the person who will stay still long enough to listen.
Mary Pat Knight is CEO of Leaders Inspired – an executive coaching and consulting agency devoted to the development of emotionally intelligent leaders. She is also the author of the Amazon #1 International Best Selling book, The Humanized Leader.
The ground-breaking new book, The Humanized Leader: The Transformative Power of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership to Impact Culture, Team and Business Results, is now available in Kindle, paperback, or as an audiobook. To get your copy – or extras for your team, click the button below.
