When was the last time you felt truly heard?

Recently on my podcast Inside Influence, I reconnected with Julian Treasure.

Julian is a five-time TED speaker whose talks on communication have been watched over 80 million times, founder of The Sound Agency, and author of “How to be Heard.”

His insights have been featured everywhere from TIME Magazine to The Economist, and his TED talk “How to speak so that people want to listen” is among the top 10 most viewed of all time.

However, what fascinates me most about Julian’s work isn’t being heard.

It’s how to listen so other people feel truly heard.

As an expert communicator, Julian has identified a huge paradox in our modern world: we’re inventing technology that can listen to our every command, yet we’ve forgotten how to really listen to each other.

This skill – perhaps the most fundamental to our relationships, careers and leadership – appears to be vanishing in plain sight.

The consequences? More significant than we realize.

I’m sharing Julian’s wisdom because learning how to listen might be the most transformative skill we can develop as leaders – both for our professional influence and also our families and communities.

Why we’re losing our listening (and why it matters)

“We are losing our listening,” Julian explains. “It starts at an early age. We don’t teach it in school, so therefore we don’t value it as a skill”.

This decline didn’t happen overnight.

It’s been gradually eroding since we invented writing, then accelerated with recording technology, and now, in our hyper-connected digital world, it’s reached a crisis point.

Between notifications, multi-tasking, and information overload, we’ve developed what Julian calls a “partial listening” habit – where we’re physically present but mentally elsewhere. I don’t know about you, but that one hit home for me.

The cost of partially listening ranges from damaged relationships, missed opportunities, disconnected families and political divide.

As Julian put it: “Listening is actually the sound of democracy, because listening is the doorway to understanding.”

Without the ability to truly listen, we default to making others wrong rather than seeking to understand – a pattern that damages everything we care about.

The fundamental distinction most people miss

There’s a critical distinction that transforms how we connect with others.

 “Hearing is a capability. Listening is a skill.”

Hearing happens automatically – sound waves enter your ears, vibrate your eardrums, and your brain registers the input. It’s involuntary, always on (we have “no ear lids”), and works even while we sleep.

Listening, however, is conscious and selective. It’s what Julian defines as “making meaning from sound” – choosing what to focus on and actively interpreting it through our unique filters of culture, language, values, and experiences.

When we understand this distinction, we can start to make a shift.

The four C’s that transform your listening

Julian’s framework for conscious listening is simple yet profound:

Consciousness: Being aware that listening is an active skill, not a passive state. This means acknowledging that it requires attention and effort – something most of us skip entirely. As I often tell my children: “we listen with our eyes, not just our ears”.

Curiosity: Approaching conversations with genuine interest rather than assumptions. Julian mentioned a quote I loved from Barack Obama: ‘I like to listen to people, especially when I disagree with them”. This position of curiosity opens doors that judgment keeps firmly shut.

Compassion: Listening to understand, not to respond. This means temporarily suspending your need to be right – and instead asking clarifying questions to try to grasp how someone arrived at their viewpoint.

Commitment: Recognizing that listening takes time and energy. It’s an investment in the relationship and the outcome. “You cannot truly listen to another human being and do anything else at the same time”. This is one that, as a mother and business owner, I need to practice.

What I love about this framework is that it isn’t just theoretical – it’s immediately applicable in every conversation you’ll have today.

The RASA technique to repair and reconnect

So now we’ve decided to move from hearing to listening.

What can we start doing differently?

Julian shared four practical ways to immediately shift the dynamic of any conversation or relationship. He calls it the RASA technique:

Receive: Give your full attention to the speaker. Put down your phone. Turn away from your screen. Make eye contact.

Appreciate: Show that you’re present through nods, small verbal acknowledgments, and engaged facial expressions.

Summarize: Periodically reflect back what you’ve heard. “So what you’re saying is…” This confirms understanding and shows you’re fully present.

Ask: Ask questions that open new dimensions of the conversation rather than closing it down. Open-ended questions starting with ‘what’, ‘how’, or ‘why’ tend to encourage deeper responses.

These simple shifts have the potential to transform every relationship in your life, from executive boardrooms to the family dinner table.

What you stand to lose by not developing this skill

When we mistake hearing for listening, we sacrifice far more than we realize.

Professionally, we miss crucial information, make poor decisions based on incomplete understanding, and develop a reputation as someone who doesn’t care.

Personally, our relationships slowly disintegrate.

Those who are closest to us feel unheard and unseen – leading to the all-too-common reply of “you just don’t listen to me.”

Collectively, our inability to listen to (and explore) opposing views threatens the very foundation of our society. The symptoms of which show up in our newsfeeds, on our streets and in our political debate.

In a world increasingly filled with noise, the ability to truly listen might be the most important skill you can master.

Who needs your complete and undivided attention to today?