Listening to Respond vs. Listening to Understand

Automatically transcribed, so the wording is close but not exact.

Macie: Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of this Is Not Your Practice Life podcast. My name is Macie and if you're brand new to the podcast, welcome. I'm so happy you're here. If you're a returning listener, thank you as always for coming back, sharing the podcast with friends and being a loyal listener. So today I'm going to be talking about something that's going to really help bridge that gap in communication and building stronger interpersonal relationships using your emotional intelligence. I think something that people don't always quite understand when it comes to relationship building and having really good relationships with people is that a big part of connection is our ability to really listen.

And I'm going to share with you the difference between two ways that we listen and the way that you want to be practicing your listening skills in order to deeply. Connect with other people, especially if you find yourself struggling in friendships, struggling to, you know, maybe make friends, keep friends, build connections with other people. Like even if you don't want these people to maybe be your lifelong besties, just having healthy interpersonal relationships requires EQ skills. And the thing about it is, is we don't know what we don't know. So my hope is that. In today's episode, you maybe learn something that you might not already be aware of, so that you can choose if you want to take these skills and practice them in any kind of interactions you're having, whether it's co-workers, strangers, people that you would like to have a friendship with, even your family and even your romantic relationship.

It's a really important thing. So there's two ways that we listen. We either listen to respond. Or we listen to understand. Now, again, we're going to be talking about both of these, but I really want to point to listening to understand and what that means because that is huge in your emotional intelligence skills. So let me start with actually, I'm going to start with listening to respond because this is where most people default to, and it's very natural. It's so part of our humanness. So I'm not shaming anybody that may still. be doing this a lot or doing this at all. Again, we don't know what we don't know. So my hope is to bring it to your attention so you can really pay attention in your interactions.

And not only will you maybe be able to see if you're doing this, but you'll notice where other people fall as well. And maybe, maybe you can share this episode with them and they might learn something new as well. So listening to respond. A lot of times when we're listening to people, whether it's just Our natural way that the brain works, or we get defensive, or we hear something that we want to relate to. A lot of times our brain has this autonomic kind of response where it wants to listen to what someone is saying in order for us to think about what we want to say next. Now, if someone has a really hard time in dialogue and they interrupt someone a lot and they cut someone off a lot. They're really, really in that listening to respond stage.

Now it could be, they could be doing it for multiple reasons. It's not that if we listen to respond that we're necessarily doing it maliciously or we're doing it because we want to be interrupting people or cutting people off. Sometimes this can be due to neurodivergence. Like it could be due to ADHD, it could be due to being someone who really struggles to remember all parts of a conversation and wanting to interject. mid-sentence because you don't want to forget what you want to say. It'll like leave you later. So it's really important to know in this conversation that this is not about, you know, shaming anybody or scolding you for doing this if you do it. It's about bringing attention to something that you may not be aware of so that you can decide the kind of ways you want to approach conversations.

And If you would really like to practice emotional intelligence around this to build stronger interpersonal relationships, which again comes back to EQ skills. So listening to respond is when you're taking in the information in the conversation, and the entire time your brain is focused on what you want to say. So this can show up again in many ways. It can show up as interrupting someone because you have something you want to say and you don't want to forget. But a lot of times it actually happens. when we are when we get defensive, like we we tend to interject and want to speak up or over or interrupt or change the course of a conversation whenever we hear something that we're not particularly in agreeance with or we hear something it gives us that knee-jerk reaction where we're like, well no, that's not right.

And What we don't realize in those moments is we're actually cutting off the ability to deeply connect because we're listening to respond. So it's kind of like someone's talking and we're always, we're always kind of like prepared to punch back. Like even if the conversation is not that serious where it's necessarily necessarily an argument, it's just in the conversation, it's like our defenses are always raised. If you're coming into conversations, listening to respond. Now, on the flip side of this, it doesn't mean that you just sit there and you're mute the whole time, but there's a different kind of energy when you come in to listen to understand. So I want to tell you the difference. Coming into a conversation and being willing to listen to understand is to come in very curious energy.

I tell my clients all the time that curiosity is their superpower. And it's so true. If you are in my community, if you ever Become a part of my community. If you know, if you've been around for a while, or maybe this is your first time, you're gonna hear me say this a lot. Curiosity is your superpower, meaning that when you come in and people are sharing who they are, they're sharing stories, they're trying to connect, you want to be in the place where you can really listen to understand. When you come in and you are willing to listen to understand, and you come in and you're willing to be curious. You learn a lot of things. Anything that gives you that knee jerk reaction, the work here is that you pause and you listen.

And if you feel the need to say something in that moment, it needs to be something like a question to better understand. So the whole point of listening to understand is to remain connected. Even if there are certain things in the conversation you're not necessarily in agreement with, maybe you don't you don't understand how someone might think that or why they're thinking that. And instead of assuming, because here's the thing with listening to respond, a lot of times the energy that comes with listening to respond is just assuming. We hear something, we have an emotional response to it, and remember that our thoughts create our emotions. So when someone's talking and we're in the mood not not mood, 'cause it's really not a mood, but we're we're in the unawareness of listening to respond, we will have this ⁓ kind of energetic aura to assume things and fill in the gaps.

To make sense of it in our brain. Because a lot of times, too, if people come to us and they're different, they have different thoughts, different opinions, which hello, welcome to the world. That's what makes the world go around. Not everybody is going to agree on the same things, not everybody is going to have the same opinions on every single area of life. We're gonna have a lot of diversity there. And interestingly enough, as much as that makes us great as a human race, it also makes things complicated when it comes to connecting and building strong relationships. Because somewhere in our subconscious mind, sometimes differences or things we don't understand almost creates this like a threat.

Like we think it's a threat because we're very tribal people. So when we're listening to something and there's, you know, questions that we have or something that doesn't make sense, we tend to lead with listening to respond because we just want to make sense of it. We want to kind of be like, well, wait a minute, why are you thinking that way? But it doesn't always come off as a very loving hold space. I really do want to understand energy. It usually comes off as interruptive, where you get very maybe defensive, you assume things, and your brain tries to fill in the gaps for what it doesn't quite understand. And because in those moments, ⁓ can be very jarring of an energy, when we've done that, we've actually stopped listening.

If you were listening to respond, here's the tricky thing. There is a point in time where if you're just thinking of the next thing you're gonna say, the next thing you're gonna say, the next thing you're gonna say, you have actually stopped being a present person that is truly listening. You're no longer listening to understand someone in the energy of connecting and being curious. And engaging and staying in that conversation with them. You're now isolated in your own head, having your own thoughts, having your own emotions. And then that drives your system to want to interrupt, to want to call to attention to certain things. And it it creates like this like disruption in the communication pattern.

So ⁓ it's it's natural for us to do this. That's why I'm not saying like anything is. wrong with it per se, but if your goal is to connect and truly build safety in relationships and be a steady presence in someone's life and you want to be someone that is very much a connector and you can hold space and you are a good listener and a good communicator, one of the things you're gonna have to learn is how to listen to understand, which means that as things are coming up in the conversation, It may just be a change how you ask questions or how you maybe pause the conversation to get clarity. It's not necessarily to ⁓ and then start sharing everything that's on your mind. Now, if that's an appropriate place in conversation to do that and that's what the other person is expecting, then that's not problematic.

But we're talking just connecting with people. A lot of times what you want to do is really try to hear someone out. And get really curious as to anything in the conversation that raises your curiosity. If you are actually listening and staying present in that conversation, then a lot of times you're not gonna you're not gonna be in your own thoughts and you're not going to be in your own emotional turmoil, even if you hear something that gives you a knee-jerk reaction, and you're actually able to stay connected to that conversation, even if you walk away from it and you go, okay, we're very different people. We think maybe very different things. But I learned a lot and I learned why like I was able to stay in the conversation to learn why maybe they think that way or what experiences in their life led to them believing those things or you know that being their story, their manual, their belief system, their identity.

And if we are able to practice listening to understand, we can walk away. staying connected no matter really what the conversation is about, especially if the other person was really good at this. Now, the challenge here is that again, our natural kind of default is listening to respond. So if the other person is also someone who really struggles to listen to understand, that's where a lot of times there's a break in communication where it's really frustrating to hear people out. And a perfect example, I'll just use it in romantic relationships. You know, have you ever with your maybe romantic partner, you've tried to express what you're feeling or what your thoughts are. And no matter what you say, you immediately get interrupted with defense mechanisms where they're like, I didn't do that.

I didn't say that. What are you talking about? Or like you're being crazy. What do you mean? Like anything where you feel dismissed. In those moments, whether that's happening with a parent, that's happening in your romantic relationships, it's happening in friendships, that person that you're speaking with is listening to respond. They're not listening to understand. Listening to understand would be the ability for them in that example to regulate their nervous system, to be really curious, to hold space for you, and to ask really good questions on anything they maybe don't understand. The whole point of the difference between the two is one, you exit their world and get into your own. And the other, you stay in their world with them and try to connect to understand.

It doesn't mean that you always have to agree. And it doesn't mean that that that you're avoiding any kind of tough dialogue or conversations when necessary. But it means you are regulated. Listening to understand is staying regulated enough in your nervous system, in your body to stay in the arena of conversation and connection, to connect with another human being, to get closer even with differences as opposed to pulling away. The natural knee-jerk reaction for humans is to pull away, is to literally cut ties and just be like defensive and frustrated, not understand, throw up our hands because again, it feels threatening when we're not on the same page because we're tribal people. And that's why people get into certain cliques into certain groups and where we find our people, we tend to attract and draw into people who are like us, who think like us.

But a part of emotional intelligence is that you can have those groups of people where you're connecting with them and you, you know, you feel close to them because there's a lot of commonalities. But if you don't want to be closed off to the world and to learning, then there is the skill of being. Neutral enough, and you've probably heard me talk about that, neutral enough and in curiosity enough to stay connected, to not pull away or to look at people who are different as threats per se. Okay. So it takes nervous system regulation. And when you're able to regulate your nervous system, you can connect on a deeper, much different level because you're actually listening to understand every part.

We want that out of people. We want our parents, our siblings, our friends, our partner to be able to like hear us. I mean, one of the most common complaints in my coaching practice for, you know, I work mostly with women. So with their partner, their husband, their wife, whatever, is I don't feel like I'm heard. Every single time I go to speak up about my feelings, I'm shut down. I'm told I'm being dramatic. I'm told I'm wrong. We get anywhere in the conversation. I get shut down immediately. They're, they aren't able to hold space for it. They're not able to just hear me first and us dialogue about it. They shut down, they freak out. That's listening to respond. Okay. Now you also have to take accountability for maybe where you're doing this as well, where someone comes to you and they bring something to you.

If you feel that knee jerk response, if you feel immediate emotion coming into your body. That is just a signal to take a deep breath, to slow down and know I have exited the arena. My brain freaked out at what is coming up. It thinks suddenly it's under attack or there's too many differences to be in our happy little bubble. And it thinks that I need to listen to respond in order to defend myself or to prove my point or to say what I need to say. In this moment, Is it possible for me to just notice that, take some deep breaths and lean into the discomfort of it and the knee-jerk reaction of what's so natural and come back to the connection piece to really hear the person who's speaking to me, to ask good questions, to be curious and to try to dialogue about it?

Okay. And you will see the difference when you're able to do this. You will truly be able to see the difference, even if the person that you're trying to do this with isn't. where you're at in the EQ skills. Maybe they know nothing about the difference between these two things. There is still a piece you'll walk away with when you are able to do this skill. ⁓ when both people are able to do this skill, no matter who it is, or multiple people in a group, it is life-changing for the strength and connection and relationships. And this is what my the women in my community see. As they get to know each other over coaching. And then especially when there's an in-person retreat with any of my programs, there's such a listening to understand.

There's such deep connections. They become friends very, very quickly. And that's because there is a difference in how they carry themselves in the conversation. Now, every now and then there's, you know, nobody is perfect. So there sometimes are those moments where we want to listen to respond. We're like, wait. But The difference is when this is in your awareness, you can catch it faster and you can come back to the true EQ work of reconnecting, even if you're totally different human beings. So that's what I want to leave you with today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do your best to practice listening to understand versus listening to respond. And if you have any questions, you are starting to practice this maybe in your life.

The people around you are just not getting it and it's frustrating. And you don't feel like you're getting anywhere. Let me just encourage you to book a free 60-minute consult. Let's talk about what's going on. Let's talk about maybe where you don't feel like you're making progress in any area of your growth. And personally, I will do my best to guide you and help you. And all you have to do is go to macierenae. com and you'll see it on the bottom right corner, book a consult, and you can do it from there. All right, my friends. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will talk to you very soon. Bye.