Is Anyone Listening?

Life is filled with opportunities for human connection and communication. We talk all the time in meetings and social interactions, but does what we say ever sink in? There have been many times in my life when I’ve paused and asked myself—does anyone listen to what I’m saying? More importantly, am I making an impact? Am I making a difference? Too often it seems like I’m shouting into the wind. You’ve likely felt that way too about interactions with colleagues, family members, and friends.

Today, I’d like to provide some hope to the question “am I being heard?” 

Earlier this week, we had a contractor stop over to the house to look at a series of small projects we’d like done and shoudn’t tackle ourselves. Turns out that this particular contractor worked on the second house Linda and I built back in 2000 and remembered working with us. After a few minutes of getting reacquainted, he turned to me and said: 

“You probably don’t remember, but you said something to me all those years ago that has stuck with me ever since. I was questioning the rationale for not putting a stairwell with direct access from the basement to the garage. Your response was that you and your wife wanted to make sure you interacted with your children when they came into and out of the house as they grew into teenagers. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve incorporated your views on garage stairwells into the projects I’ve worked on ever since and admired your desire to design a home to encourage family interaction and connection.”

I thought for a moment, rummaging through my memory banks for this brief interaction. I have a fuzzy recollection of the event he described, but was thrilled that we made a positive impact on him. It’s important to note that we learned of that impact 23 years later… 

As a leader with several decades of experience, I get feedback like this from former colleagues, business associates, and acquaintances on a periodic basis. Most of the time, it’s completely unexpected, and it’s always personally satisfying to learn that I had a positive impact on someone’s life. I’m also attuned to the fact that I’ve hurt many people during my life with careless words. Very few people expend the emotional energy or screw up the courage to say: “Hey, remember that meeting we had back in 200x when you told me y? I just wanted you to know that your words really stung that day.” So I temper the warm fuzzy feelings that I made a difference to one person, with the knowledge that I likely missed the mark with someone else.

So what’s the lesson today? The main point is to encourage the continual improvement of situational awareness and self-awareness skills. Being able to think in the moment about whether your contributions to a conversation are valuable to the other party or potentially damaging is an incredibly valuable skill. It’s impossible to always be tuned in to how a message is being interpreted, but being more aware of what you’re saying and how you’re saying it can lead to more productive conversations and reduce the likelihood of stepping in a proverbial relationship mud puddle. The goal is to have the number of positive interactions significantly outweigh the negative over the course of your career—for more on this, see my previous Muse on being a Net Giver. It’s important to note that most of the time, you’ll never know if you made an impact or not.

So the good news is that people are listening to what you have to say. The bad news is that you have no control over what people remember, how they’ve interpreted your words, and what has made an impact on them. We all walk around with a ‘one size fits you’ set of lenses that color how we interpret the information we take in each day. Those lenses tend to filter out messages that don’t align with pre-existing points of view and distort what does make it through our mental gate-keepers—a.k.a., the unconscious biases that have accumulated over the years. Be prepared to be misinterpreted—it happens more often than you’d like to think.

One other piece of advice. If you want to be heard, talk less and listen more. Talking less allows room for the brain to exercise your situational awareness and self-awareness muscles. If you’re always doing the talking in one big run-on sentence, it’s more unlikely that a useful nugget of information will be captured and processed by the counterparty to your conversation. 

To wrap things up today, I’ll share one thing that I recall from a brief, but impactful interaction.

A long time ago, a good friend of mine told me: “Live your life like you have a video camera on you at all times.” That simple statement has stuck with me ever since. I frequently remind myself of this phrase and add my own twist: “Live your life like you’re on camera, be authentic, and be a decent, kind human being.”