Emily Kasriel was an award-winning journalist, editor, and media executive during her more than two-decade career at the BBC. She developed the Deep Listening approach as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College Policy Institute, drawing on her experience as an accredited executive coach and workplace mediator.
What’s the big idea?
In our hyperconnected world, we’ve forgotten how to truly listen. When we listen in a standard way, we’re preloading our verbal gun with ammunition, ready to fire with our own ideas. We treat the speaker as a resource to extract value from, and we are blind to what’s not being expressed in words.
We interrupt, destroy their thinking, or jump in with our own solutions. Our speaker is left feeling ignored, used, or dismissed. Deep Listening encourages a profound way to engage by enabling people to feel safer to express themselves, more connected, and more open to re-examining their own attitudes.
Below, Emily shares five key insights from her new book, Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes. Listen to the audio version—read by Emily herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Create space.
Begin by finding or creating a place of safety for your speaker. Your ambition: to signal respect, so your speaker feels welcome to voice ideas or concerns that they may have never shared with you before. You want them to feel cherished and inspired to explore new ideas.
This begins with the physical environment. Avoid rooms that are surrounded by glass or metal—those can create bad echoes. Instead, seek spaces with a bit of wood or fabric. Use warmer colored diffuse lighting instead of a harsh overhead blue-white light (the kind you see in a hospital).
For challenging conversations, go for a walk in a neutral space to encourage a sense of ease. Even better, find somewhere with trees or plants. Research shows that the natural world has a calming effect and encourages us to see the bigger picture.
Consider how you can create a safe psychological space for your speaker. Perhaps you might express some vulnerability. But choose to listen before you speak (unless you’re habitually silenced in this relationship). You can clarify your intentions upfront to explain about the type of conversation you’re having and its duration. Let them know what will happen with any information that your speaker shares. When you Deeply Listen, your speaker tends to share more, so you need to be confidential about how you treat that information.
2. Listen to yourself first.
You can’t be open to listen to others until you’ve truly listened to yourself. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, you may find that you’re closed off from what the person wants to communicate with you. Your inner biases, anxieties, the need to prove yourself right, or your urge to solve problems can hijack an encounter. Difficult memories, prejudices, or an unacknowledged agenda can rear their heads.
So, before engaging, take a pause. We all have shadows, these unacceptable parts of ourselves that feel young and vulnerable. These shadows aren’t obvious to us, so we sense them indirectly in what we think of as the loathsome traits and actions of others. Have you ever felt uncomfortable trying to listen to an authoritative colleague? Perhaps they remind you of your bullying older brother.
“Self-awareness is the foundation of listening and leading well.”
How do you know when your shadows are pulling the strings? When you judge what you’re hearing in a black and white way, with you 100 percent in the right and the other person blatantly wrong.
Can you acknowledge your family of shadows? Self-awareness is the foundation of listening and leading well. Give yourself the space to begin accepting these shadows. The ambition is to get to a stage where you can witness or even dance with your shadows rather than denying them or trying to annihilate them. Through self-reflection, you can forge a more positive relationship with your family of shadows so they no longer disrupt your most important encounters.
3. Be curious.
Often, we enter conversations assuming we already know what the speaker is going to say. It’s easy to stop listening after a few opening words. We only pay attention to the gist of what we’re hearing. As your speaker is figuring out your intentions, you need to swiftly convey what your prime motivation is for wanting to understand them better.
You acknowledge, through curiosity, that your speaker’s perspective is different from yours, and you do not already understand it, and you cannot infer it. You need, instead, to encounter their world with its own tastes and flavors. Your curiosity sends a message to your speaker that they’re worthy of your time and attention. You validate them as a person without necessarily validating their ideas.
What you come to learn, when you stay curious, allows you to develop empathy for your speaker. You try to imagine what the world looks like from their perspective. You might want to ask, What in your experience has led you to have these beliefs or these ideas?
If you want to communicate empathy through sharing your own similar experience, reconsider. Telling your own story moves the spotlight to you and takes it away from them. If you really understand them, based on your own experience, I believe that your empathy will exude from every part of your body—they’ll feel it without words.
See if you can then cultivate respect. This respect is for their humanity and their uniqueness, rather than anything that your speaker has said or done. It’s also important, when you Deeply Listen, to stay safe. You can acknowledge that these are your speaker’s emotions, not yours. Empathy does not need to mean suffering with them.
4. Hold the silence.
Silence in conversations has a bad reputation. Many people perceive silence as a tactic to intimidate or get someone to talk or concede, especially in negotiations. Silence makes many of us profoundly uncomfortable, so we rush to fill it. This discomfort reveals how deeply our culture conditions us to equate communication with speech rather than with receptive listening. But actually, silence—a warm, inviting, and empowering silence—can encourage reflection, so our conversation partner can become less defensive and more creative.
“Silence can give speakers the opportunity to reflect, gain clarity, and then the courage to go deeper.”
Recent research has demonstrated more win-win outcomes in negotiations when both parties were invited to be silent after the other spoke, rather than zero-sum outcomes. Silence can give speakers the opportunity to reflect, gain clarity, and then the courage to go deeper, and allows you, the listener, the chance to make meaning from what you’ve just heard. Silence takes you to a place where you can both begin to trust each other. Staying silent is not about relinquishing control, but allowing a richer contribution to surface.
In a work context, this can inform you to make better decisions and create a stronger, more robust vision. The invitation is to try sprinkling bits of silence, even a few seconds, in conversation. Notice what emerges: new thoughts, ideas, meanings, or connections. It’s especially important to use silence if you have more power in a relationship.
5. Reflect back.
After your speaker has spoken and you’ve left some silence, you need to reflect back the very core of what you’ve understood. This is not just their words, but the notes between their words and their emotions, whether or not they’ve expressed them explicitly.
Reflecting back isn’t about parroting in a way you might have learnt in an active listening course. It’s showing that you value the real meaning of their story and checking with them that you’ve understood, to encourage them to clarify and go deeper. Stay away, at least temporarily, from your own questions, which takes the speaker down the path you want to go.
Instead, simply reflect back what you’ve heard or give a meta reflection of what you’ve heard so far in the conversation. Maybe you note that everything they say is in harmony with a single point, or you say you’ve heard a contradiction. When in doubt, you can always say, “Tell me more.”
“Try to use your own reactions, even physical ones, to help you sense what’s really going on.”
Sometimes our instincts can be more insightful than our conscious intelligence. Try to use your own reactions, even physical ones, to help you sense what’s really going on. You might choose to use your Third Ear. That’s a term coined by Theodor Reich, he was a pupil of Sigmund Freud. The Third Ear, which I think of as placed next to my heart, allows you to sense what’s unspoken, lying in your speaker’s unconscious. You can look into yourself and notice your own reactions, which might give you clues as to what’s at stake for your speaker.
It might feel uncomfortable to surface what’s really going on. It’s easier to stay at a superficial level. But listening with your Third Ear can be transformative. You might ask a member of your team to take on an additional task. They respond, “Sure, I’ll see if I can make that work.” Their mouth is smiling. But not their eyes. Their words are positive, but their tone is non-committal.
You might reply tentatively, “I’m getting a sense that you’re already overloaded and probably can’t do this, but perhaps you don’t feel comfortable saying no directly. Is that right?” They can correct or clarify. You’ve gone off script and are now having a genuine conversation. You understand them better, and you both feel more connected.
By Deeply Listening, we are fulfilling a universal human need to be genuinely heard, not by having their words reach your eardrums, but by having their reality recognized. When we are truly listened to, we are seen as individuals—unique, irreplaceable, and worthy of respect.
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