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Leverage Powerful Listening for Success
By Tom Kagy | 25 Jun, 2025
Great listening is harder than talking, but much more rewarding in your career and personal life.
From an early age we're conditioned to prize the ability to talk. Yet what really makes the big difference in life success is the ability to listen powerfully.
Parents brag about kids who talk precociously. Rarely do you hear parents brag about their kids' ability to listen. This bias for speech over comprehension, especially prevalent among less-educated families, will bias the unfortunate offspring to rely on the wrong skills, resulting in difficult lives.
It's understandable that movies mostly depict leaders, lawyers, business executives or action heroes making moving speeches or expressing incisive assessments of a situation. It's cinematic which is often the polar opposite of how things actually work in real life. Sure, movies don't want to bore audiences to tears by spending too much footage depicting the 100-fold time effective people spent listening raptly to what was being said by voters, clients, other leaders, witnesses, opposing counsel, workers, customers and virtually everyone who has any insight into a situation.
Yes, the cold hard truth is that no one is effective opening her mouth until she's spent at least 100 times as much effort in listening and understanding.
Insightful parents know that the truly valuable and unusual trait in a child is her ability to listen closely and comprehend. For that reason good parents themselves will set an example by listening intently and patiently, with full focus, to what a child is trying to express. This is what teaches kids that the most important skill in life is comprehension, not making whatever sounds float out.
Critical facts and situations are often imparted by what others say — and how they say it.
We all know how to half-listen, especially when we decide that what's being said isn't important, relevant or easy to comprehend. We often make the mistake of taking this bad habit into situations in which power listening — by that I mean 100% undivided attention — is essential to achieve progress or even a breakthrough in business and personal relationships.
By power listening I mean listening like it's your superpower. This entails embracing three rules of listening.
1. Great listening is active, dynamic and powerful, not passive and weak as is sometimes depicted in movies. Great listeners exercising their superpowers aren't merely hearing words; they're actively parsing everything they hear to distill the who, what, when, where, how and why — especially the how and why — from what's being said.
It takes at least three times the brainpower to listen like this as the speaker is expending. That's why great listeners generally earn more money and command more respect that great talkers.
2. Follow up with questions needed to answer the 6 W's (5 W's and an H). If you had all 6 W's answered without a question, you were listening to a truly fine speaker who herself is an absolutely great listener. That's because great listeners have made a habit of asking themselves the 6 W's and try to address them where possible.
3. Watch the speaker's facial expressions and body language. What you're looking for is honesty, conviction and directness (or signs of evasion). A highly trustworthy speaker (and there aren't many, frankly — but that's another topic) will make it clear that they're trying their best to address the questions most likely on your mind rather than trying to evade them by distracting you with peripheral points.
Some signs of sincerity include only occasional appropriate smiling as opposed to constant inappropriate smiling, direct but relaxed eye contact most of the time while speaking, only a modest amount of hand gestures and little or no wild waving or other bodily contortions.
Another good gauge of sincerity in a speaker is that she will address the difficult key points on your mind right up front in summary fashion to let you know that she has no intention of evading them, though she may then digress to explain various secondary or supporting topics that often puts what you assumed were the main points in an unexpected context or different context.
Always remember that in more cases than not, the main points aren't what you assumed they are. But you can't know that until you actually hear out and understand the secondary or background points that will often put an entirely different context to what you had assumed were the main points.
The fact that reality is often quite different from what you expect is one of the most important reasons to listen closely to everything. People who cut their listening short will go away with the same false understanding with which they came into the conversation rather than actually learning the reality, be it the client's true current priorities, the worker's actual problem, or a customer's true objective in complaining.
By becoming a powerful listener you will also incidentally make yourself a good speaker, and an all-around great communicator who tends to add order and efficiency to a situation rather than adding to the chaos that tends to prevail when poor listening predominates.
The fact that reality is often quite different from what you expect is one of the most important reasons to listen closely to everything.
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