Most people, if asked, would say they are good listeners. The more honest and harder question is this: are you good at active listening? The difference between the two will determine the quality of every relationship you lead, coach, or care about.
The Wrong Question We Keep Asking
When we ask someone, "Are you a good listener?" we are asking the wrong question. It invites a yes-or-no answer that most people will instinctively answer with a yes, even when the people around them might strongly disagree.
The right question is more specific, and considerably more uncomfortable: "Are you good at active listening?" That question forces a real audit. And for most of us, in most conversations, the honest answer is no — or at least, not as good as we think.
I write this with full humility. Active listening is something I have struggled with for years, and continue to work on deliberately. The people closest to me have made that clear. Which is why this distinction matters so much.
What Separates Listening from Hearing
The difference comes down to intent and attention. Consider these two definitions:
- Listening is an active mental process: the art of paying thoughtful attention with a mind toward understanding the complete message being delivered.
- Hearing is simply receiving information. It is passive and requires no mental engagement whatsoever.
You can hear someone speaking while thinking about your grocery list. You can hear a conversation happening across the room without retaining a single word. Hearing is biological. Listening is a choice.
The gap between the two is where most leadership communication breaks down. Leaders who hear their teams rarely understand what is actually going on. Leaders who actively listen build the kind of trust that keeps people engaged and willing to bring their real problems forward.
What the Neuroscience Tells Us
The brain is not wired for passive reception. When we listen actively, we engage multiple cognitive systems simultaneously: the prefrontal cortex for processing and evaluation, the limbic system for emotional attunement, and the default mode network for meaning-making. Active listening is neurologically expensive. It requires effort.
Hearing, by contrast, happens almost automatically. Sound triggers the auditory cortex and the brain does its minimal processing. No sustained attention required. No meaning necessarily made.
This is why most conversations leave both parties feeling less understood than they hoped. We are operating in hearing mode while believing we are listening. The cognitive shortcuts our brains take mean we are often only partially engaged, filling the rest with assumptions, anticipations, and our own internal commentary.
For leaders and coaches, that 25% is a costly number. It means three out of every four meaningful things your people say to you are not landing the way they were intended.
An Interview That Changed How I See People
Years ago, I was given an assignment as part of a graduate-level leadership program: interview an executive I did not know well, coach them for an hour, and facilitate a positive mental framework throughout the conversation. I was apprehensive from the start. Coaching someone you do not know, in their own office, without an established relationship, is an uncomfortable place to begin.
She had agreed to the session but was not entirely sure why she was being asked to participate. I walked into a very busy executive's office knowing that I needed to earn her engagement quickly. My anxiety was high. But I had been given something valuable by my professor and mentor: a set of genuinely provocative questions.
To trust the process, I knew I had to do more than hear her. I had to actively listen at a level I had rarely practiced before, with no agenda other than understanding.
The Questions That Made It Possible
These were the questions I used:
- If your life were perfect, and your dreams came true, what would your life and work look like in ten to fifteen years?
- What are the values and virtues that are most important to you?
- What kind of person would you love to be?
- Who helped you the most become who you are, or get to where you are?
- What would you wish your legacy to be?
Pause on those questions for a moment. They are not performance questions. They are not status questions. They are questions about what a person actually cares about, at the deepest level.
Here is what happened. In one hour, I learned more about this relative stranger than I knew about people who had worked beside me for over five years. That was a sobering realization. Not because the questions were magic, but because I was actually listening to her answers. For the first time in a long time, my attention was completely on someone else's story and not on my own internal response to it.
After the session ended, I sat in the parking lot for over an hour. The combination of good questions, sustained focus, and sincere interest in another person had turned what started as an assignment into something that felt like a genuine turning point. That is what active listening can do.
Suspend Judgment: Mine for Gold, Not Dirt
The first principle of the active listening mindset is to suspend judgment. This means entering a conversation with curiosity rather than evaluation. It means approaching what the other person is saying as something worth mining for insight, not scanning for flaws or ammunition.
The phrase I find most useful: approach every interaction as a chance to mine for gold, not dig for dirt. That single reframe changes the quality of attention you bring. When you are looking for what is valuable in what someone is saying, you naturally slow down. You stop categorizing and start understanding.
Suspending judgment is particularly difficult for leaders because leadership rewards evaluation. We are trained to assess quickly and decide. That instinct is useful in many settings. It is corrosive in a coaching conversation. When someone senses they are being judged, they stop being honest. When they feel heard without evaluation, they open up.
Maintain an Open Mind
The second principle is to maintain an open mind. This sounds simple. It is not. A closed mind is one that has already decided, and is therefore not capable of receiving anything new.
Think about how many conversations you walk into with your conclusion already formed. You have already assessed the situation, evaluated the person, and decided what you think about the subject at hand. Then someone starts talking, and instead of listening, you are filtering their words through your existing conclusion, looking for confirmation of what you already believe.
An open mind is not the same as having no perspective. It simply means holding your perspective lightly enough that new information can actually reach you. In coaching conversations, that openness is what allows you to hear what is really being said, not just what you expected to hear.
Be Fully Present
The third principle is the one most people struggle with most visibly: be fully present. The other person in front of you deserves your complete attention. That means no multitasking.
This sounds obvious, but consider what multitasking actually looks like in most leadership conversations: checking a phone, half-composing your response while the other person is still talking, letting your mind drift to the meeting that just ended or the one coming up next. These are all forms of not being present, and most people on the receiving end can feel it immediately.
Being fully present is an act of respect. It signals to the other person that what they are saying matters enough to deserve your full mind. That signal, when received consistently, builds the kind of trust that makes real coaching conversations possible.
In the parking lot after that interview, I kept returning to this: I had been fully present for an hour with someone I barely knew, and it had changed both of us. The interview worked not because of the questions alone, but because those questions gave me a reason to be completely there.
The Challenge Worth Taking
These three principles, taken together, are not complicated. Suspend judgment. Maintain an open mind. Be fully present. But simple is not the same as easy. For most of us, applying all three consistently will require deliberate practice and real discipline.
Here is the challenge: go into your next three conversations with the explicit intention of active listening. Not just hearing. Before each conversation, remind yourself to mine for gold, hold your conclusions loosely, and give the other person your complete attention. See what changes.
Our relationships, our teams, and our organizations are shaped every day by the quality of our listening. The leaders who actively listen create the environments where people bring their best thinking, their real concerns, and their genuine commitment. Those environments are not built through strategy decks or performance reviews. They are built one conversation at a time, by people who decide to actually hear what the other person is saying.
Worth a conversation? Reach out to Braintrust and let us talk about what a coaching culture looks like inside your organization.
