Are you truly listening — or just hearing? In this episode, we explore the art of listening with Christine Miles, a passionate advocate for the listening movement. Christine unpacks the powerful difference between hearing and active listening, revealing that while we were told to listen, we were rarely taught how. She delves into how the subconscious mind distracts us and introduces The Listening Path—a practical guide to fostering deeper, more meaningful conversations. Get ready to unlock the transformative power of real listening and discover how it can open the door to genuine connection and endless possibilities.
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The Transformative Power Of Listening: Unlocking Connection And Possibility With Christine Miles
Have you ever had that conversation that you never want to end, one where your heart noticeably fills with warmth, your body pumps full of energy, and your mind opens to what is possible? I had one with Christine Miles. Christine is on a mission to create a listening movement, to create a space for the world to connect more deeply.
We dive right into the listening path she discovered and navigate through a series of experiences and ideas that will guide you to listen with your entire body. Christine reminds us that many of us were told to listen yet never were shown how to listen. Suppose you are human with a willingness to listen with your heart, and in that case, you’ll benefit from this conversation and notice how expansive your listening can open up discoveries to live a life built with joyous possibilities. Dig deep and enjoy the journey.
Christine, welcome to the show. It’s so nice to see you.
Great to see you too. Thanks for having me.
I’m excited to get going here and to chat about what’s on your mind. What do you notice? What’s at the top of your mind these days as you enter this conversation and the new year in 2025?
The Problem With Listening
My top of mind is to make sure that everybody knows that listening is a problem that they need to solve and that we are going to solve it. Let’s get going. The world is a tenuous place in a lot of ways, and technology is at the top of the list and we have to build a different muscle so that we can continue to learn how to connect and solve world problems.
That’s a pretty daunting task, and don’t we listen all the time? What do you mean?
We hear all the time, we don’t listen all the time. You know that, though.
You are spot on. You have a goal. You have a movement. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you are doing there?
You and I share this. There are 2% of people worldwide who have any form of listening training. I did a keynote with 200 leaders. Three people raised their hands. One person had listening training for four days, which was highly unusual. I think four days of listening for a lifetime, and he was way ahead of the curve, but I have a master’s in Psychology and Education. I’m a Certified Structural Systems Family Therapist. I have zero years of formal listening training, and that’s the common story. I learned when I was little, but it’s too common a story, and then we are wondering why we are struggling to listen. It’s not obvious to figure out the root cause. We haven’t been taught. We have been told. I want to change that. My mission is to change that.
I love how you talk about this as it’s a listening movement.
The Listening Movement
A couple of things that it takes a lot of people to create a movement. Part of my work has been around helping adults for a pretty long time learn this vital skill, but I always say, “Do you want to learn to ski at 5 or 45? Let’s get on the mountain sooner because we are fearless and we don’t have bad habits.” That’s part of why my mission. The younger generation starts in elementary school, and that requires the real heroes, the teachers who help but don’t have anything in their classrooms. The real goal is to help be the X factor to make the movement stick and reach the kids and the parents.
You’ve created, I believe it’s called The Listening Pathway and a bunch of tools and elements that allow the teacher and those experiences to come alive.
Their jobs are hard enough. We designed this program so that it’s simple to implement, it’s fun for them and for the kids, and then we took a systemic approach because that’s my background. How do you fix a complex problem? You don’t treat the symptom, you treat the system. The system is the educators, the parents, and the student. If one of those tripods isn’t getting attended to, we are not going to fix the problem. Every aspect of the program is designed to reach all three constituents.
What are you noticing are the challenges with listening? To your point about the lack of training, the lack of understanding. It’s one of those things. How do we start to realize, “We are not listening.” You mentioned hearing before. What are those signs you’ve been seeing and how are you going about helping people overcome that?
How can you know you have a problem if you haven’t been taught what it is? That’s the first talk. How do you know to fix something that you don’t realize is broken? Most of us have been told, not taught. We equate hearing, which is what we are born with, versus listening, which is a skill we have to develop. If I had never played cricket, how would you know what good cricket is? You need some help with that. That’s the first problem.
The second problem, I believe that our greatest enemy of listening is our brain. Most people think it’s the device that’s in front of us that’s only feeding our brain at different food, but the real enemy is what’s going on between our ears because our subconscious mind is in charge most of the time. It’s hard to listen because I call it a mischievous child like when your logical brain is saying, “Listen, listen.” Your mischievous child is going, “Don’t listen. Come over here,” and there are a lot of inhibitors that get in our way. That’s the root cause of the problem. Technology is gasoline on the fire.
What a distraction.
Technology Vs. Listening
The latest worldwide research is based on the data they collect online, that adults spend 6 hours and 40 minutes on average online a day. If you don’t count their childhood, and it doesn’t increase, this generation will have spent seventeen years online.
That’s amazing.
Also, terrifying.
There’s no connection there, or maybe it’s some connection, but it doesn’t feel like when you think of empathy, our mirror neurons and the whole bonding effect of that, it doesn’t seem like it could reach.
We can’t communicate our feelings with emojis and expect to feel heard, seen, and understood. Technology, it’s not going away. Nor should it. Look what we are doing here, this is amazing. However, I think that we already had this problem. The muscle is atrophying even more. If I look at it like you need a hamstring and a quad to make your leg work effectively, if the quad is the technology, the hamstring is listening and it’s so out of balance that we are going to break our legs because you can’t have that much muscle differential and be successful. That’s what I’m worried about is the diminishing amount of time that we are spending based on the amount of time that we are spending online. It’s so out of kilter, not that technology has to go away.
We can't communicate our feelings with emojis and expect to be heard, seen, and understood. Share on XWhat do we think about when we stop listening or did we ever listen to the level you are speaking to? I love that you are working with the elementary schools and the folks that are helping the next generation and so on to hopefully step into this world that is so divisive and at each other and right and wrong versus everything in between. What’s your take on that?
I do think that in part because of the way we are fed information and we are fed information. We are consuming it, but it’s sometimes like the fast food drive-throughs right there. We didn’t even know we went through it. We are getting targeted to be fed what we want to ostensibly learn more about. It’s skewing things and making it harder to have a conversation. A lot of people have had fractured relationships because of the political divide and things like that. People have moments of listening. There are moments when it happens, but I don’t think it’s something that’s consistently happening and that’s the real problem.
I have a sense when I think about having a conversation that you don’t want it to end, or you could feel your energy kick up or your heart rate maybe go faster or you feel different. I’m curious. Is that a good sign for us to think about, “I’m listening to a different level or the level that’s maybe beyond what our brain’s telling us to do.”
The Experience Of Being Listened To
I don’t know that a lot of people have had that experience, unfortunately. They have the experience of being listened to. When people have that experience, they also don’t always know what’s making them feel the way they feel. My anecdotal knowledge of this and from talking with a lot of people and most people say to me, “Can you help my spouse, partner, child listen better? Can you help me listen better?” We are thirsting to be listened to and understood. I always say we are in a drought of understanding. When you are thirsty, it’s hard to give somebody else water. We want to share it. People are more aware of not being heard or being heard versus not doing it themselves.
It is scary to think that we don’t know we are thirsty.
How could we? It’s like if you were born with the flu, you wouldn’t know you had the flu because that’s always what you’ve known it to be. As I was injured in an auto accident when I was 28, I had 3 years of chronic pain that went acute. Six months after trying out for the United States Field Hockey team for the second time, I went to stand up and couldn’t pull out my shorts.
There’s a lot around getting your arms around what pain is and how you adjust your mind to the pain that you are in, and that’s one of the things. If you are in severe pain, imagine if you were born with it, you wouldn’t know the difference. It’s normal, and some of that is renormalizing what it means to have your daily experience. We have been born with pain that we don’t know we have to attend to. It’s not having the flu or being injured from an early age, but we do feel the impact and the consequences of it. We don’t always know what that’s the definition of it is.
When I think about this, we don’t know what we are missing. We don’t know the space that can occur when we listen. I look at this as a full-body experience when we truly listen and our hearts are involved. We are listening with care. We talk about empathy all the time. Do you think this is a full-body experience?
Practical Listening Exercises
I do. Receiving that, there’s no doubt that it changes who you are when somebody listens. I only know that from the experience that people have with me and their response to me because I see it, and then when I watch other people learn it, and you see it. It changes who the person is, at least in that moment. We teach both kids and adults, “You have to listen with your eyes, ears, and heart to get to your point.” How do you do that? That is the gap. That’s easy to say, but how do you do it?
This is why we believe you need the tools to be able to listen in those compelling ways. One other thing about empathy, because I have talked to a lot of people and some people are like, “My wife is empathetic. I’m not so empathetic,” and I’m like, “Clearly, you are a failure to the human race.” That’s okay because we are not all wired, or our experience hasn’t trained us to be as empathetic. I believe that listening builds empathy. It develops empathy, not the other way around.
I am working with a professor out in Utah and he talks about empathy. It’s one of those things we can build and reinforce. The level of empathy, the way we bond, the way we listen is something that is regenerative within our minds. We get to this point in life where we think we are done growing and we are, we are done expanding. What you talked about gap, it’s expansive. We are expanding within our minds, but it’s connecting to our hearts and soul.
Let’s put it in much more practical terms for those who feel not as empathetic. If you were watching a movie and you weren’t interested in it, or there were no emotions that compelled you to get bought into the story, you would tune out. You wouldn’t relate to it. We are not socialized to ask about feelings. Men more than women, a little better. If you are not looking for the emotions, you are watching a movie that’s not compelling and you are not tuning in. How can you be empathetic to something that doesn’t compel you? That’s part of why when you get the right tools to learn, to ask, to get both, you are watching a much more interesting movie.
As you were talking, I had this feeling of listening. Would you ever pretend that you are listening? I’m sure we all have our best technique, which we think the other person thinks we are listening to, but we are faking it. That’s the worst. That’s what went through my head with what you described. I’m trying to get through this movie.
I don’t want this to sound immodest, but I don’t have an off switch. I started to learn to listen when I was five. I can remember as early as five because of my childhood. I’m not going to say I never miss anything, but I’m so tuned in that I don’t have an off switch to that channel. Sometimes I wish I did, honestly.
I’m an Olympic athlete. I’m the top of the top Olympic athletes when it comes to this, which is why I knew it had to be a simpler process to get people to learn how to do it because if it’s not simple, then we are never going to get out of our subconscious brain. I get down to make it as technically proficient and efficient as possible.
Is there something simply that you could share?
One of the things I start with, even though this isn’t the only thing, it’s something that people can grab onto pretty quickly. The story of the listening path is that you wouldn’t go hiking in the woods unprepared. If I said, “Just go into the woods with your good intentions, see how you do.” You wouldn’t do that. You’d go in with a tent, toilet paper, food, something, or water. Yet we go into the conversational woods all the time unprepared.
We need tools to navigate the path. The listening path is the path to understanding because that’s the goal. The goal of listening is to understand, not just to hear it. It’s to understand and to make sure we are mutually understanding. One of the primary tools in early development is what we call the compass. How do you guide the speaker to tell you their story in a way you can understand? We think the speaker’s in charge. I believe the listeners should be in charge. Great listeners guide the speaker because we are terrible at storytelling. We are terrible at sharing our experiences. If I don’t organize you, the movie’s going off the rails.
The compass helps you point the speaker to stay on the path. There are six primary questions that the best listeners use to get that story and to guide it. There are 4 fact questions and 2 feeling questions. You are guaranteed to get both without thinking about it. One of the questions is, take me back to the beginning, because often people start right in the middle of the movie and the listener thinks it’s the beginning, but when you go to your customer, they start with the problem.
“Your wife says I had a bad day.” It starts with the problem. You say, “How was school for your child?” “Good.” You are in the middle of the movie because you have to go back to get the context where you are going to be lost. Just by going back instead of forward, you open up a different scope and how you listen because you start the movie from the beginning.
That’s a good one. How far back do you go? I’m thinking because we can go far. It’s from today to maybe yesterday when we left off, or maybe it’s the last conversation. What’s your take on that?
Starting Conversations By Letting Others Define The Beginning
The speaker will know. It creates a limbic reaction. The beginning is whatever the speaker believes is the beginning. Rather than me jumping to that conclusion, where’s the beginning? The speaker naturally goes, “How was school?” If a kid says to me, “Good,” I go, “Take me back to the beginning. What do you mean? Where did your day start?” “I had breakfast.” “Take me back further. Did the alarm go off?”
We have to orient people to go back, but they will take us to a starting point that’s pretty natural in their minds if we give them the opportunity. However, sometimes, most listeners want to go forward because of what we do. We want to problem solve, we want to advise, we want to say what happened instead of, “Let me see where this began,” which is the root cause.
One of the things that happens to me, because as I told you, I was in an accident and when I say to people, it changed my life forever. I spent 10 years gutting through it, 10 years more to get back to where I am now, which is still in chronic pain but highly functioning, knock on wood. If I say to people I had an accident, they go, “You are fine now, aren’t you? You are okay,” but they don’t know anything about me at that moment. If they go back, they’d learn a lot about what I learned from that experience and how it formed me and what that did for me versus, “Are you okay?” It’s a very different conversation.
What’s the dynamic there from how people feel about asking that question? Do you feel people feel are intruding or bringing up something you don’t want to talk about? I appreciate that you have been talking back to your five-year-old self about having this accident. The pain that you are living with. I feel for you. It’s an interesting element, but to what extent would you want to talk about it? We are even connecting live. How has that influenced your life?
That’s so honest of you to say that. I believe that if people don’t want to answer it, they won’t. A very rare experience. It’s, “You tell me what you want to tell me,” but isn’t it great when somebody cares enough to ask? If I said, “What happened?” I dug hard with specific questions. That’s a different matter, but to open up and say, “Take me back. Tell me more. I’d like to understand,” it’s not intrusive. It’s a human thing to do and it’s a connection point. Here’s my psychology background coming in. I believe that the uncomfortableness is with the person asking, not the person talking.
The Fear Of Emotional Responses In Conversations
You probably had this. I used to do a lot of management training back in the day. I worked for an employee assistance program, and I’d say to the men that if they had to have difficult conversations with an employee, “What are you most worried about?” They go, “That she’s going to cry.” I get it. The women, “What are you most worried about?” “That he’s going to get angry.” The emotions are what we fear in conversations, and I’m like, “If she or he cries, get them a tissue, give them space. If they get angry, set the boundary this way,” but the emotions are what terrify us because we are not socialized, but that’s how you get the full body experience, as you said.
I used to feel that way, and now I fear when it’s more stoic, robotic, and zombie-like. Now I recognize, “Something’s wrong.” I have been in that category of a certain leader who had to have a certain answer and lead a certain way, let’s move forward. It can do. Rather than get into what’s happening by showing up here to learn. What I love about what you are saying is something we talk about with general listening is to ask the question so we could allow people to speak into what’s available to what they want to speak to.
Don’t shape the story and don’t jump to those conclusions because our brains are going to create a narrative with one. Parents say, “How is school?” “Good.” What’s the narrative? “My kid doesn’t want to talk to me.” Versus you are asking a closed-ended question, they are giving you a close and that’s what you’ve habituated them to do. That’s the narrative that goes off in our brains.
We are forming those judgments all the time because all the impulses are below our conscious level. They are in the subconscious. That’s why you can’t white-knuckle it, in my opinion. You need tools and training to know how to do it, but once you get it, you get it. I had a guy that reached out to me, he’s a realtor at a firm in California. He read my book and he said, “I use these six questions,” the compass questions, which I write about in the book.
He said, “I had a meeting.” He’s been in recovery for eight years and he has a sponsor who he is very close and connected with. He said, “I decided to go into this lunch and only use those six questions and see what happens.” I’m like, “Okay.” He tells me that at the end of the lunch, the sponsor had told him this big story and the sponsor goes, “You are the second person in my life I have told that to.”
He goes, “I needed to hear it, but even more so, he needed to talk about it. We have known each other for eight years intimately. It was amazing what came out because I didn’t direct the conversation. I let the story unfold and I invited it,” and it was pretty profound for him. That’s a very common experience that I hear from people over and over again.
I don’t want to jump to a conclusion. I’d love to hear, as you are engaging in this type of dialogue, how does silence play a part?
Balancing Silence And Efficiency In Conversations
Silence and space is important depending on the situation. It’s a luxury a lot of times. Do I think it’s helpful? I do. I also think it’s very hard for most people to endure that because of impatience and distraction. If we look at business leaders, the head of the company was like, “I got 100 people coming at me. How do I manage that? My brain is on fire.” If you are not both proficient and efficient, so I think time and place and that this is an efficiency skill as well, because you can get to things meaningfully faster. It doesn’t have to take so long. Being quiet in space is not the way to get there fastest.
Listening could be exhausting. It could be tiring. It could be that person is doing this again. “I have to go fix them. I got to give them the feedback.” It’s all these archetypes of listening that we have in our brains that go through our heads, and sometimes we want to get through them. Even stopping about asking the questions, maybe, “How do you want me to listen? How can I help?” To check in maybe to the understanding point that you make.
It’s a good set of tools that could help someone be more efficient. They didn’t show that they were interested. I think about listening as a precious resource where I want to know, do you want to vent, do you want me to give you feedback or do you want me to help you solve something? I’m a fixer. If I try to fix everybody, that’s a problem. If I don’t do it in the right context as you are talking about.
Aren’t you a terrible person that you want to help fix a problem? I always say, “The more you know, the more you want to fix,” because you’ve seen the movie before and you know how it ends and how to get around it. As leaders, that experience teaches you how to solve problems, and when you see them repeat, you know what to do. The problem is people don’t like to be told what to do. Telling rarely works. Even if you’ve seen it before, they need to feel you understand whatever they need to understand to earn the right to problem-solve.
I hear a lot about what you are saying as far as do I ask whether to vent or do I ask for this? To me, it’s a step in the right direction but I also know that I know other person doesn’t know what they need all the time. If I knew that, I wouldn’t have come to you. Venting is tough because venting isn’t productive. As a former therapist, I could tell you this. Venting isn’t always helpful and it doesn’t mean you have to solve the problem, but there are ways to create understanding that it’s not a venting thing.
My nieces wanted to take me to see Wicked. I have seen the musical many times. When they told me the movie was three hours long, as much as I love this movie, I went, “I don’t know if I can hang in that long.” I believe that’s how most people feel about listening. If you tell me they have to vent, I don’t know if I can endure that versus I have a process and a way to make sure I get to the understanding pretty quickly. From there, we can either solve it or not solve it, and then at least the person feels understood, and then that often solves the problem in and of itself.
What type of feedback are you getting? You give it a couple of examples firsthand. Would you be working with folks or are leaders giving you examples of how it’s bringing different results for the business, bringing more joy in the workplace or personally, what type of things are you hearing from kids? I’d love to hear the range of what you are hearing because that happens.
I will start with a business one that’s fascinating and I can’t share the client name otherwise, I would because they are such an advocate. One of our clients had a pretty gnarly situation internationally in one of their offices where they were concerned about some theft. It was a pretty big deal and they had to call the FBI and so on, but the employee was in their corporate office in the States and he couldn’t get someone to come out to interview this person, an FBI agent or a police officer. They tried everything, “What do I do?” I go, “Everything we have worked on is what I said. The same thing. Do what we have worked on and you’ve been taught as an organization.”
The problem is, people don't like to be told what to do—telling rarely works. Even if you've seen it before, you need to show that you truly understand them. They have to feel understood before you earn the right to help solve the problem. Share on XHe wrote me an email. He said, “I can say sixteen interviews later, this works. We got everything we needed,” and he knew how to navigate the conversation. This is a negotiation. This is a sales tool. Listening is everything. That was a pretty profound example. Meeting efficiency, when people have a common language.
Most people here, according to the father of listening, 25% of what’s said, if you have a common language and way to listen, you increase that. The meeting efficiency and results have inordinately gone up in addition to managing conflict and all those other things. From the kids’ standpoint, as we are getting feedback on the program, it was great. We heard from one of our teachers who’s piloting and implementing the program that the kids are so excited when it’s listening path day. They are so excited to learn another element of this and have the experience of what that’s like. That’s the greatest gift ever.
You said it, it’s listening path day. It feels like it’s experiential. Is there an element shared and folks walk away and they live it?
That’s a good takeaway. There are eleven lessons in the program, and so listening path, they implement that lesson for the day, but then they experience between lessons. They are using the tool in the classroom all the time. They are building on that. We sent home a parent guide so the parents learn what the kids are learning.
They get a worksheet. We send them a toolkit for the classroom. All the tools are in the classroom. “Here’s the passport.” They get a stamp or sticker in their passport. Listening is supposed to be discovery. Discover about people, discover history, math, or whatever you are learning. It’s supposed to be fun and playful, not serious and awful like most people think listening is.
I love the distinction, too. It’s about discovery. If we are truly listening for what we didn’t expect or listening to get to a different place, or even listening for differences as elements of beauty and strengths.
Diverse Perspectives And Innovation
You go back to the world place. We think we have to agree so much and if we don’t agree, we shouldn’t listen. You’ve worked for a long time. Would you ever put a team together that all had the same ideas to try to innovate and create a new product?
Not anymore. I did that early in my career. It didn’t work.
We have all probably done that, but it’s so contrary to what makes any sense. The best ideas come from conflict that’s managed, discord that’s discussed, divergent perspectives and ideas. I don’t care if there are ten men or women in the room. It’s not about race, it’s not about sex or any of those things. It’s about having different perspectives that generate a dialogue that creates a more innovative outcome.
I’m serious because there was a team I was working with that wasn’t diverse from a perspective, from a background, from a skills, or even a willingness to learn in a different capacity. What I used to lead earlier in my career was like, “You got to go learn these skills because it’s going to make your job better.” When I went through my awakening, I started to realize, “You tell me what you want to learn, go learn it.” You are going to bring it in some facet.
It was phenomenal that people brought all these different ideas from random sources of learning. We ended up solving problems that we couldn’t solve at a company for a couple of years on a data warehouse project, something that we spent millions on, a small team figured it out because of what you said.
Don’t you think the answers are usually within?
A hundred percent.
It’s how you get those answers from within. You have to listen. What’s the last listening tour that was a listening tour?
I would also say, to add to this, and challenge me if I’m wrong because I would like to know that. I feel like we need to believe in the people so then when we are listening, we care about what they are saying and to also reaffirm them back that we value that. We are bringing it into our thinking, our conversation, our decision innovation, whatever because some of the leaders that I had worked with in the past didn’t believe in some teams and groups and said, “We got to go hire people from those schools.” Some of my most favorite people in the world never went to college or university that are more brilliant in many different ways.
There’s so much research around who’s paying attention and what’s going on and how many problems can be solved at a level of the organization that you would never consider. We work with senior leaders for sure, but I also think movements start in the middle. We often go into the middle of the organization, give them the foundation of listening and then move up from there because it doesn’t help to tell that when they experience that and then they filter it up.
The best scenario is when we could do it all together. Listening is a CEO to an individual contributor skill. It doesn’t matter what aspect of the company you are in; everybody needs that common language to problem solve, sell, be great at customer service, understand how budget discussions could be more productive, whatever it is. I think that that’s part of the magic of what listening can do. It can unlock so much in people at all levels of the organization.
You talked about a bit around setting the place, that’s going to happen regardless of where you are in position. We love talking about setting the conditions like setting the construct. When I was a leader in a Fortune 100 company, I was mentoring people. I hate to say it, but I thought I was better. I wasn’t. When I realized I wasn’t and that I was learning as much as I was sharing, it was like a dual menteeship, allyship, or whatever you want to call it.
We were listening to each other and we were helping each other in a way that was unbelievable. It was fascinating. It was expansive and we both grew. It impacted the whole organization we were in, but it wasn’t one way to what you are saying. If it was one way, we are limited to that one channel, and that’s so limiting, and other people need to grow, expand, and share what they have available to them.
That’s so great that you share that, and it’s not your fault because you climbed the ladder by being good at telling. I know you did because that’s what you were taught, and that’s what most of us are taught. Due to COVID, things have changed dramatically in the last several years. This dispersed workforce, the aging of the Millennials and the Z, it doesn’t work the same way, but that’s exactly how people got ahead. We come in with a solution, not a question.
Tell me what you know. What do we teach salespeople? We teach salespeople how to be so productive, knowledgeable, and bulletproof, and then we are surprised they formulate sales pitches and talk about their solution without understanding what the customer’s needs are. We are telling them to do that, but we are teaching them everything the opposite of that. It’s madness.
I love what you are sharing and it’s your concept of going back to the beginning. What got you into this listening space? Was there a set of moments? I know you shared some personal things already. I don’t know if that got you into that mode or if there’s something else or other triggers.
Listening As A Learned Skill
I wish I had more lanes. Here’s the short story. My mother suffered from mental illness, so I learned to hear what wasn’t said at a young age. My mother was amazing, beautiful, and kind, but it was like, on the surface, she had this external light, and underneath she had this deep pain of sadness. She lost her mother at three months old. She was so sad about her mother’s death. It’s a longer story. I learned that early.
I started to realize as early as high school that anything I was succeeding in was because of that ability. I got a job as a home-based therapist at 22 because I listened. I had no experience. On the sports field, it was because I could understand myself, teammates read the game. Any and all of my success was around this ability.
As I got into working with families and organizations, I saw the common problem was that most people didn’t have the skill that I had. I thought, “They have some real talent.” If they had some of what I could do, it could be an expeditor in terms of their potential and growth. The longer I have gotten into a career, the more narrow I have made into this world because I want to solve the bigger problem, which is to make it simple and easy for everyone.
Thank you for sharing all of that. Part of me thinks, is it part of how you are wired and how you are able to guide and coach folks? These are all learnable elements that you are speaking into and sharing with others. Keeping it simple, which I love that you’ve said that a few times.
I used to think it was how I was wired, and then a couple of things. My dad, he would say psychiatry helped him listen, and then he was a sales guy at Connecticut General and they taught this skill back then. He died a few years ago, and in the last six months of his life, he was slowing down. He was still very with it, which was amazing, but I would come in fast-paced like I’m talking now and he’d be like, “Slow down.” He did everything that I put in a framework and I’m like, “This isn’t an accident.” I watched my nieces and I’m like, “This is family legacy stuff.” I put a description around it. My mother was an amazing listener even though she was thirsting to be listened to.
What brings you joy these days?
Nothing brings me more joy than hitting a ball. I’m an active girl, so I played a lot of sports as a young person. As I said, I was taken out of it for a long time because of my accident, which was painful. I worked my way up to golf and so I can hit a golf ball pretty well. In the last few years, I have managed to get it back on the tennis court. Hitting the tennis ball, I love it. Also, listening to the kids. On a business front, it’s knowing that we are going to reach the kids. I’m so excited. On a personal front, let me hit a ball any day.
You’ve come through many things to get there. Good for you. One last question for you related to this show. Live Your Possible is the name of the show. I love your perspective. What does that mean to you? Are there any ideas you would give our audience here to help people live it?
You can’t make it happen unless you dream it. I never thought I would be back to the tennis court. I always wanted to. There are a lot of things I still can’t do, like I can’t go skiing. We all have limitations, but I do believe you have to at least dream it a little bit or it isn’t a possibility. Sometimes, you have to think bigger than what you think the moment will allow you to do so, and I’m pretty tenacious about it. What do they say? A dream has to become a bowl, but we lose our ability to dream sometimes.
You got to put it out there to make it a reality so it doesn’t become a fantasy. Before we check out here, is there anything else that’s on your mind that you wanted to share? Maybe there’s something that came up that you wanted to put out there.
I appreciate your honesty about what it was like in your earlier leadership days. A lot of people can learn from that because your story in those earlier days isn’t an uncommon one. It’s still happening for a lot of people in the present moment. Life gets a lot easier when you learn the skill because you don’t have to do as much. Other people figure things out.
We are getting more aligned to who we are. It’s a little bit easier.
With your kids, with your spouse, with your friends, or your parents. That’s about all I got.
I’m honored that we are friends and I appreciate and admire what you are doing with your work and the listening movement that you’ve created and the ripple effect that’s on our way. Let me know how we can help you on this journey because I love hearing that the kids are getting the benefit of this to help us change where we are because there’s going to be a lot of change forever in our lives. We might as well be intentional about the future that we all desire and bring that into existence, and you are doing that with all the kids, leaders, and teachers that you are impacting. Thank you.
Thank you. The more in this space, the better. Let’s get it done together. That’s what I say. Thanks for having me.
Let’s go.
Important Links
- Christine Miles
- Christine Miles on LinkedIn
- The Listening Pathway
- Christine Miles’ Listening Movement: Redefining Communication for a Better World on USA Today
- The Listening Path Program
About Christine Miles
Christine Miles is the founder and CEO of EQuipt, a woman-owned training, consulting, and product company, and developer of the Listening Path®.
For more than 25 years, Christine has been teaching individuals and organizations how to listen in ways that transform how they connect, influence, solve, and succeed in every aspect of life. Using her proven system, the Listening Path®, she teaches people how to harness emotional intelligence and empowers them to create cultures of empathy and understanding that drive performance and results. Her approach has been implemented at Fortune 100 companies, universities, schools, law firms, and privately held companies.
Christine is driven by the desire to create a Listening Movement by revolutionizing the way we look at listening, fostering a world where educators, business leaders, and corporations prioritize dedicating time and resources to teach the essential skill of skill of listening to understand.
Christine is also an acclaimed author and keynote speaker. Her book, “What Is It Costing You Not to Listen? The Power of Understanding to Connect, Influence, Solve & Sell” (2021), won the Axiom Business Book Awards’ Silver Award. Christine developed the Listening Path Classroom Program for Elementary Schools, and the Listening Path Boards Games to provide listening education for all ages.
Christine has an M.S. Ed from the University of Pennsylvania, a Certificate of Structural Family Therapy from the Philadelphia Child Guidance Cetner, and a BS in Psychology from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. She speaks to audiences across the globe equipping them to build stronger relationships, cultivate empathy and transform how they listen.
