Listening, *really* listening, is a rare superpower.

I was a bad listener most of my life.

Then I fixed that a few years ago.

Night & day difference in my leadership ability.

I learned that we can learn to listen well.

A thread on listening (and learning it from movies🎞️)
👇🏾

First, why is listening hard?

It’s because we have:
- the fear of being wrong
- an inability to be present
- a desire for validation
- a lack of curiosity
- the urge to impress
- a feeling of superiority
For an example of *bad* listening, let’s learn from this epic scene from the movie, The Darkest Hour.

The setup: World War II. There are disagreements among British leadership about whether they should pursue peace talks with Germany or an all out war.

Go on, watch the scene.
Really, watch the scene before proceeding to the next tweet.
So what can we learn from this scene about listening?

The superficial lesson is not to interrupt others.

But the deeper lesson is that most of us are like Churchill w.r.t. listening.

How so?

While we may not interrupt vocally, *we are interrupting others with our thoughts*
Think about it for a moment.

Our tendency to constantly have our thoughts swirling in our head when someone is speaking is not too different from us interrupting them.

They don’t know it, but we certainly do. And isn’t that what matters more?

More from Shreyas Doshi

🗓️Recap of March 2021 content

Includes:
Solve THE problem
3 types of product leaders
Levels of product work
Getting work done
“I don’t know”
Good people, bad managers
Customer segmentation
LinkedIn Envy
On communication
Important definitions
Life-changing books
& much more..

👇🏾

A story that often plays out when we are not rigorous enough about the importance of the customer problem our product


The 3 types / hats / modes of product


An extremely important observation about product


A thread on getting work

More from Life

You May Also Like