Summary
Joe and Brett explore the nature of deep listening as a foundational practice. They distinguish between conceptual/intellectual listening and embodied, whole-body listening — where awareness rests in the listening itself rather than in preparing responses, fixing, judging, or managing outcomes. Joe emphasizes that listening is always happening; the question is the quality and caliber of attention brought to it.
Key insights include: listening is a form of receiving rather than doing; management in any form dilutes listening; deep listening naturally creates attunement, presence, and spaciousness; and the body recognizes deep listening somatically even when the mind can’t track it. They explore how listening with the body — to silence, to the inner ear, to sensations — changes the signal-to-noise ratio of what you perceive, letting important information surface naturally.
The conversation extends into business and leadership, where Joe argues that listening is one of the most profound accelerators of business success. Functional teams are ones where everyone feels heard. Great leaders listen first and speak last. The creative capacity of organizations dies when there isn’t spaciousness to listen. Joe warns against making listening into a rule or obligation — it’s a joy, not a should. He closes by flipping the common desire (“how do I get people to listen to me?“) — the answer is simply to become a better listener yourself.
Key Concepts
- Listening is the neglected half
- How we listen shapes what we hear
- Attunement reduces mental chatter
- Management communicates distrust
- Listening is receiving, not doing
- Embodied listening improves signal to noise
- Listening as business accelerator
- Deep listening requires self-listening
- Listening through knowing filters out the new
Key Quotes
“My experience is listening is one of the deepest ways of affecting your reality — the caliber, the quality of your listening.”
“There’s no moment of awake consciousness where you’re not listening. So you’re always listening to something.”
“The world is coming to you — that is the feeling of it if you’re really listening.”
“Thinking that you have to do something gets in the way of listening.”
“The deeper forms of listening have less filters on them… the important information comes to the surface easily.”
“If you really want everybody in your life to start listening to you better, start listening better.”
Transcript
my experience is listening is one of the deepest ways of affecting your reality how the caliber the quality of your listening when you’re listening in that attuned way like we evolve quicker all right so one of the first things that we do in this work is that we teach people how to listen and it’s also interesting that it’s not just one of the first things that happens in the world it’s also one of the things that happens in the middle and later on in some of our more advanced courses we come straight back to listening and so we’ve used the metaphor of the the sushi rice before to talk about some of these really basic kind of 101s that aren’t really 101s they’re actually some of the whole practice that you just get deeper and deeper on and so I’d love to get deeper on the topic of listening today how’s that sound yeah that sounds great great so so let’s get into it what in in the way that we speak about it in this work what is listening and what is it not yeah a so the here’s the weird part about listening is that there’s no moment of awake Consciousness where you’re not listening so you’re always listening to something um maybe you’re listening to the thoughts in your head or maybe you’re listening to the other person or maybe you’re listening to the pain in your foot but your awareness is always on something so there’s a way in which you’re always listening so there’s a caliber of listening or there’s an attention given to listening that changes a lot and so just as a like a very simple experiment if right now you uh put all of your attention if you’re listening to this put all of your attention on your inner ear just like keep all the focus on your inner ear there’s a way in which you’re listening to the inner ear but there’s also a way in which you still are comprehending everything that I’m saying even though your attention is in your inner ear and that’s a very specific quality of listening do another experiment so instead of listening you know paying attention to your inner ear listening to your inner ear see what it’s like to listen to The Silence that surrounds my words that’s in between my words or the frequencies that are silent even when I’m talking if you put all of your focus on the silence again you still understand what I’m saying but the quality of listening has changed a little bit when we talk about listening one of the ways to think about it is we’re actually putting our attention to the listening we’re we’re putting our attention on the listening which is a a very deep receiving allowing like it’s a it’s like it it the world is coming to you is the feeling of it if you’re really listening and the other quality of it is that you’re attuning like there’s an Attunement that happens when you listen and it happens naturally you don’t have to tell yourself to attune if you’re deeply listening to yourself you’re attuning to yourself if you’re deeply listening to another person you’re attuning to them if you’re deeply listening to the sensations in your body you’re attuning to that which means that you’re showing up in a way that there’s a lot of care um respect um understanding would be some of the things that come out of that naturally and so listening is really important and typically what happens is when people are listening they bring a c other qualities to it like I’m listening so I can figure out what I’m going to say next or I’m listening to help fix you or to be of value or to judge you or to so there’s a or judge myself or fix myself or and the listening gets uh diluted by the the attention not just going to listening but the attention going to how am I going to interact what am I going to do next what like how do I feel safe in this environment so and so when we’re teaching listening and as you know like when we teach like the first thing that happens if you’re interested in coaching with us at all is this very long long like set of sessions around listening um what we’re really teaching is that place where you go where you are your attention is in the listening and you’re listening to yourself and another person simultaneously and which is exactly what VIEW is pointing to in you know the connection course yeah as well we don’t talk about listening specifically there very much it is it is the same pointer yeah yeah there’s a lot to unpack from what you just said there’s there’s a tuning which kind of makes me think of tuning in like a radio station tuning like what is it that you’re tuning into or what is the channel that you’re listening on the inner ears an interesting one the tension in your feet also with the the intention are you listening from a place of preparing to respond from a place of trying to remember what like the words that are being said or the concepts which is a very different thing from just letting it land in the body and be you know the episodic memory of what was said being lost but the energetics really landing and being grasped yeah so what what are some things that you would say would stand in the way of listening yeah so again there’s one way to think about it which is you’re always listening so nothing can stand in the way of it and I and I keep on repeating that because one of the things that the mind will do is it’ll make listening a to-do a challenge you have to start trying and all of that is what gets in the way of the listening so yeah so I keep on saying it’s all there all naturally because that allows you to find the listening more easily because it’s just an allowing it’s just a receiving thinking that you have to do something gets in the way of listening the other thing that gets in the way of listening and the most deep way of listening is to be valuable or useful or if you really are listening you’ll what you’ll start noticing is actions arise from the listening as you instead of from the like oh I need to be of value oh I’m scared they’re going to get upset at me oh I’m right there’s just like this yeah deep listening the other the other thing that gets in the way of it is um going into the future and the past often gets in the way of listening right so some way in which you try to manage the future or have managed the past is going to management really in any way gets in the way of of listening yeah I was going to say everything you just described sounded like a form of management listening yeah so that something can happen so that I can respond in a certain way so certain outcomes occur listening with an eye towards the future or the past being seen in a certain way or being managed to an outcome yeah like all so so listening sounds like it’s a the way of listening that we practice is a non-management way of listening correct and it also creates a deep presence because it can only happen right now so which is a state of presence so and there’s and what’s interesting is that it’s at some point as you really really learn to listen you can speak about the future from a deep listening place and you can speak about the past from a deep listening place um but you’re not managing the future managing the past so so that’s it and and there’s a quality if you did that experiment about listening to the silence or listening to the inner ear or listening to your body um while I’m speaking you’ll notice that there’s a kind of a feeling of expansion that occurs it’s almost like your awareness becomes bigger and it becomes more in the forefront there’s more spaciousness that happens and so there is a somatic experience that goes with like a deep listening and so your body can recognize when it’s listening in a way that your mind can’t always yeah and that I’d like to go a little bit deeper into that because the way that we’re often used to listening is to listen conceptually listen intellectually listen to ideas or content and the way that we’re talking about it right now is listening with the body listening with the inner ear listening with awareness and can you talk a little bit more about how how you somatically experience listening and yeah how that changes the quality of a conversation or the quality of the data that you that you gather yeah so on the listening to concepts piece of it you know that’s what the mind might be noticing but the like the the prefrontal cortex might be noticing that but the we’re listening in other ways all the time as well whether we’re conscious of them or not is another thing meaning like we might not be listening to the fact that our body constricts when someone gets angry at us and we don’t want to feel it and so we jump on social media because that constriction is like uh I want to go on but our body there was a listening that happened you weren’t conscious of it that created that outcome so one of the things that I noticed is that when people are just listening to the concepts there’s a way in which they don’t grock the rest of it but when you when you are listening to the silence of your body you do grock the rest of it as it turns out what’s interesting about it is you might like your mind kind of catches up is the experience the mind is like huh like you’re kind of like just listening and then all of a sudden you get it instead of you’re getting it getting it getting it getting it got it so it’s more like the way you would understand a river by just sitting by the river for a while and all of a sudden you start noticing things like oh the eddies happen on the side and the flow happens in the middle and the and there’s something that’s happening at different like the water’s moving at different pace underneath and it is at the top you just stuff you can’t grock any other way but just to be sitting by a river or like people I know who rode rivers for years they understand a river in a way that a scientist couldn’t they can read the water and so there’s a way that you get things that the mind has to kind of catch up with and maybe sometimes doesn’t even understand like the way a basketball player might know how to do a fake without fully intellectualizing it but they know that when they move that little shoulder before they turn left that they always get around the guard or whatnot so yeah so there’s that aspect of it um I noticed that I can listen from a place of awareness and wholeness and silence and I never have a problem grocking information that’s being handed to me or I do but not any more than if I’m fully in my head listening it just it’s just that it requires me not to worry if I’m getting it if I worry if I’m getting it then I’m screwed so it just requires like it’s almost like a trust it’s a trust until it’s not it’s like I know that this will happen and then it’s like it’s like oh will the ice be cold I have to trust that the ice is cold and at some point you’re like ice is cold I don’t need to trust that and but there is that process of learning to trust right and in some cases that ice might the ice for me sometimes feels like the sense of knowing like if I’m if I’m listening to you right now from the sense of like oh I know what we’re talking about we’ve been doing a lot of listening together then all of your words get filtered through my preconception of what I think you’re talking about and that’s a pretty harsh filter and without that filter if I’m if I’m sitting in the unknown I have no idea what was about to say in fact your the internet just cut out a minute ago and I couldn’t hear about 15 seconds of what you said but I was like practice thing that just like being with it and listening and when you came back I just felt the energy in your voice and I was here’s where we are and then was able to continue much much more than like oh I’m lost I didn’t hear the past 15 seconds yeah yeah yeah it does the same thing with oh I have to get this too so you’re saying listening through the filter of knowing which is kind of living in the past I know this thing it will filter out what you hear living in the idea oh I have to get this will also filter out what you hear right and so in a weird way the deeper forms of listening have less filters on them or the filters are more natural is a way to express it where it’s just like oh look at like my experience is the wider forms of listening the listening that are like embodied listening what it does is it’s like the important information comes to the surface easily yeah more easily the signal to noise ratio gets better but it you have to experiment with that you can’t ever trust that that’s just like a thing that you do enough and then you’re like oh wow that works it’s can it be that easy yes it’s that easy yeah yeah so given that so much of what we’ve talked about with listening is about filtering we’re like talking about like what is being filtered what’s not being filtered uh and it might be in relation to a person how does that work with your reality what how does listening the listening affect your reality filter your reality tremendously it’s like it’s an interesting thing because I see so many people worried about what they’re going to say what they’re going to do how they’re going to do it who’s going to see it how the people think about them blah blah blah blah blah and it’s all about like their capacity to penetrate somebody else um like influence and affect other people and what’s fascinating to me is that my experience is listening is one of the deepest ways of affecting your reality how the caliber the quality of listening it affects what people are going to say to you it affects um the information that you’re going to gather but if let’s say you’re doing business and your quality of listening is going to affect how good your product is it’s going to affect how happy your customers are it’s going to affect how much your um employees are happy how much they feel heard like it has a tremendous effect on your reality and that’s just the external internally when you’re listening and you’re listening in that attuned way this is externally as well but internally when you’re listening in that attuned way like we evolve quicker like it’s like there’s just something that happens where it’s like the things that need to come to the surface come to the surface like there’s a respect there’s an attunement just like if a child is deeply attuned to as a kid they just develop holistically quicker better and so it’s the same with ourselves it’s like in a weird way you can say meditation is a listening and obviously a lot of people do it in a way to manage themselves which isn’t a listening but at some point in your meditation you come across the idea that it’s like oh it’s non-management it’s all just listening and and you’ll just notice the development happen so it influences not just what comes to you in the world the quality of people the kinds of information the way people interact with you like if you think in your life who is the people in my life who listen the best and like here’s what you probably don’t feel like what an you know like you’re like oh that I love that person they listen to me well like they’re a good listener yeah um and so you influence how people show up who shows up what information you get and you unfold quicker the more that your capacity to listen to and the people around you unfold quicker yeah what you just said about how listening really well is also listening to yourself and like meditation essentially forms of it can be listening to yourself really ties together a couple of things we’ve been talking about here because when we’ve said that you can listen from your body there’s also a way that what that is is that you’re listening to the way your body’s responding to what’s being said and so your body’s as you said earlier you’re always listening but you know there there’s a phenomenon that we’ve talked about where sometimes somebody will say something completely illogical but they’ll say it with conviction yeah you see this all over the world right now they’ll say it with conviction and people will believe the content because what they’re actually picking up is a conviction and so it’s like there’s a way that the body responds to conviction in a way that might for some people feel like safety might be like okay yeah I can trust this there’s conviction here and they’re not recognizing unless you’re listening to your body to the extent where you’re like oh I noticed that there’s something about the way this person’s speaking that makes me feel safe and it doesn’t seem related to the content and I can separate that out and be like maybe maybe it’s not actually the words that I’m hearing that I’m responding to right now yeah so yeah that’s a really interesting point about listening generally like one of the things that’s important in our teaching about listening is that you don’t put yourself entirely in the other person if you put yourself entirely in the other person it’s it’s not really listening like that’s like you know like there’s almost like a trying to influence trying to make sure that they feel safe trying to make sure that you know like they’re cared for tended to and which is another form of management it like the deeper forms of listening you’re always have some percentage of your awareness in yourself which is an incredibly useful thing like you said with oh I’m feeling their conviction not the intelligence of what they’re saying but also I notice that people who are who are good at listening to themselves they’re less likely to fall for the con they’re less likely to um ignore you know the boyfriend who’s going to turn abusive they’re less likely to run away from themselves um abandon themselves to make somebody else happy etc etc like because the information you’re getting isn’t just from the head the information you’re getting is how your body’s reacting yeah how is my heart getting that mirror and you get the mirror of that yeah yeah yeah how how is my heart responding to this someone saying things that sound nice to me or giving me approval but what why is my gut feeling the way it’s feeling right now yeah yeah exactly yeah so yeah listening has always got a there’s an aspect of attention in your own body to it if you’re listening in that very in a deep way it’s interesting because it’s you that’s a little bit counterintuitive like oh if I’m listening to you I’m fully in you but it’s that’s more management and chasing you than it is being right or or even the the notion that if I’m listening to you I’ll remember all of the factual things that you said which you know like I may be getting more facts the facts might be more about like that might be more inclusive of my response to you and how my all the different intelligences in my system are hearing what you’re saying and so there’s there’s sometimes a a bit of a paradox or kind of something counterintuitive where I might come away from a conversation this especially happens in coaching sessions where the the details just go right in and out but something much deeper lands and stays and then is then a part of the relationship it’s become more like both parties can become more aware of whatever that is that doesn’t have words yeah and there can be more connection with less episodic memory and content remembered yeah and there’s something else that happens like you’ll know like you know this so when we’re doing like an in-person retreat we really ask people not to take notes um and we try to take any notes in the important notes in advance for them um because though they might get it more in their head they don’t get it in their whole body and so trying to remember information often makes it that you grow that you get it you understand it intellectually but you don’t understand it in your body yeah yeah yeah and that brings me to another another question here is a lot of what we’ve been talking about with listening is on the receiving side when someone else is speaking and that might create the idea that you stop listening to speak or ask a question but as we’ve been saying you you’re always listening so how how uh what’s your sense of how listening continues while speaking and asking a question and I asked that from the sensation in my body as the question comes through I’m in that practice exactly going to say you it’s funny to watch you have a question that you’re actually doing um but yeah great question um I notice that when I’m listening and talking when I’m in that deep form of listening I’m talking at the same time I’m very curious about what the going to come out of my mouth it’s like it’s like I’m experiencing it for the first time it’s like it’s an unfolding that delights me the way like why say is like if you’re listening to this there somebody might be like making this into a rule or morality or something and I would say watch out for that like listen like listen listen if you listen to your body if you listen to awareness if you listen to listening notice how it thinks about making a rule or making it a morality or making it something that you have to do it’s um it almost feels like when you have to do it it’s the opposite of doing it you know so I just I just want to put that warning out there for people like somebody’s going to listen okay now once I listen right I’ll be blah blah blah blah like it’s much more of a like oh what a joy what a joy it is to listen like this yeah yeah yeah I’m I’m also curious to talk about uh listening in business yeah what happens if someone’s listening in a board meeting listening in a sales meeting listening yeah to a customer well let’s talk about what happens when you don’t listen people don’t feel heard people feel pissed off there’s a lot more power struggles inefficiency abounds um everybody’s fighting to be heard or decided they can’t be heard you don’t get the best ideas um if you look at say like the Aristotle project that Google did and one of the things they saw was that really functional teams were ones where everybody felt really comfortable speaking and contrary opinions were comfortable and that there was actually everybody’s voice was heard that the relevant voices were heard to the problem that only happens if people feel listened to um that doesn’t happen any other way uh so more functional teams um less likely to get duped in a deal more likely to get a deal done because for instance um when when um I noticed that like when we were interviewing CEOs as a venture capitalist I always knew who would get picked and they were the people who were asking a bunch of questions so the ones who asked questions and then listened were the ones to get the job the ones who were answering questions usually were not the ones to get the job um if you listen to what a venture capitalist wants to hear before you tell them it’s probably better if you listen to what the customer wants before you pitch them it’s probably better so listening basically is one of the most profound ways to make your business accelerate quicker than you know coming up with an idea I got an idea and I’m going to go present it and see what happens it’s like that’s not bad especially if then you listen and see what happens and change because you’ve been listening but like the iteration even if you’re in a high iteration listening is half of the iterative process so listening is just critical and and unfortunately not what a lot of leaders do some leaders are great at it many of them aren’t and when I see leaders who are like not just successful but have a certain level of peace in them they’re all really good listeners they’re all really good listeners and they do things like if they’re senior they’re the last person to speak in a meeting like there if a decision gets made the most junior person starts because they know their opinion is going to influence other folks um they’re just really good listeners because they they know that there’s intelligence everywhere yeah and and that they can they can learn to mine it if they listen yeah and now of course in the context of leadership I can I can imagine people having the question of like this sounds pretty passive if you’re going to run meetings and everyone gets to speak in all of the meetings are you ever going to get anything done and it brings back the question of filtering so there’s you know there’s a way that you know you might be sitting with somebody and you’re like I’m just going to listen to whatever you have to say for the next hour I don’t need to change or filter that I’m just here with you and then there’s times where you’re like we’ve got one hour to decide the direction for the business with a bunch of stakeholders with disagreements and so how does listening come in in that way in in say leadership or you know sometimes in coaching sessions where there’s you know there’s times where we’ll cut people off in mid-sentence because we’re really listening on a different level and have another question that just comes through so how does that interplay work with listening from what might be perceived as a passive listening place to listening in such a way that’s like deeply engaging and filtering in real time with a group for example yeah I mean I thought about we just did a perspective of the decision course and you were there obviously and and um we all had very different ideas of what needed to change in that course and we like if like I think in most companies it would have been like ended in disagreement and some sort of power struggle and blah blah blah blah and we all came in with very different opinions everybody spoke their opinion everybody said what was important to them and we all walked away going oh that felt great and we know what to do and we all felt good about what was going to happen next and you might not have seen it might not have seemed like anybody was listening but everybody deeply considered what was being said saw the truth in it in whatever was being said and that’s what allowed that movement to happen it was like I could say to somebody whoa whoa you just like came down so hard on that it might stop people from presenting other information oh yeah yeah yeah okay yeah that’s not what I meant okay you know it was like that kind of thing was happening all over the call and wait wait what did you mean there okay how did that how did that oh yeah okay I see how that connects to my thought over here and that’s what was happening and that comes from the listening so the listening like you said and I said listening is always happening whether you’re talking or not whether you’re taking action or not there’s not a time when you stop listening the question is are you in that state of like whole body present listening for lack of better words or while you’re talking while you’re doing yeah and and I noticed there was a structure to the meeting that made it feel like I could just listen to like to where the whatever point we were in the meeting there were certain things that were being discussed in a certain format and so that there’s a way that having structure in a conversation or a coaching session or in a meeting can create more spaciousness for listening in certain ways and also sometimes it’s best just to have no structure like if your kid’s having a tantrum you’re not like okay now we’re going to do this phase of the tantrum and then we’re going to do the solutions phase like or I don’t know maybe you do but um but how how do you see that structure playing into listening yeah yeah we just did a brainstorming session and that was kind of like a group listening so we were doing we’re starting the YouTube channel and we were thinking about like how to do teaching videos and Mark and Cat came over to the house and we had a whole bunch of to do and we just kind of sat around and had breakfast and wandered and talked and exchanged ideas and we’re like little anxiety of like oh are we going to get anything done and all of a sudden pop the thing showed up and we were like oh there it is and we had like the most fun day and I believe that the I just saw some of the first products of that brainstorming session and I’m like wow this is so much better than what we were doing before and that came from like a listening of no action isn’t right right now even though we have a time crunch what is it that we’re and we were all kind of listening together for that creative thing and so when you see these big companies lose their creativity we’re not creating new anymore we’re just refining stuff it’s because there isn’t that spaciousness to actually like listen for it wait for it to come and then follow it yeah it’s like it feels like a channeling yeah yeah once once there’s an identity like once the company or the team has an identity this is what we are this is who we are this is how we do it there’s ways that that can provide a lot of structure and direction and there’s also ways that that can add a whole new layer of filters yes to the listen exactly yeah yeah and some filters are great in a company like you have you want to stay on brand and you want to make sure that you’re serving your clients and those kind of things and those filters are great and there’s just like a waiting for it instead of forcing it instead of a management there’s just a I know it’s going to come I’m going to trust just like you would talking from a place of listening yeah yeah so now I want to flip this around a little bit people may be listening to this and they’re like oh yeah listening is great I love it when people listen to me how do I get everybody in my life to listen better you don’t stop it stop stop it stop stop stop it uh if you really want everybody in your life to start listening to you better start listening better that was that’s like the best possible way to do it and um concerning yourself with the way I’d say it this way is if you concern yourself with how people are listening to you then you are not listening to yourself and you’re not listening to them and it’s not within your control and the more you do it the more you try to get someone to listen to you the less the more controlled they feel and the less likely they are to listen to you so if you if you really want people to listen to you then I would say listen just become a great listener and then a it doesn’t matter if they listen to you and b they’re more likely to listen to you because what we really want is to listen to ourselves if we’re listening to ourselves what other people do doesn’t matter so much yeah we will be able to trust that we navigate that world however is best for us exactly exactly yeah awesome yeah wow what a fun conversation thank you yeah I enjoyed it it had an extra spacious quality to it it did I think we were both listening deeply as we were having the conversation that was fun yeah that’s cool thank you Joe and thank you everybody for listening yeah thank you all right take care