Notes from a Listening Tour

In the summer of 2023, I found myself unexpectedly in between jobs. With so much of my time, energy and identity intertwined with my startup, the transition was as much personal as it was professional. And I was more or less on my own. So I did what I always do and turned to community. My community. I dubbed it my Listening Tour — a season of meeting with people across all spheres of connection, industry and geography. Some were long-term friends. Others were former colleagues. Some were relative strangers, often introduced with nothing more than a line or two of context.

The point is, I listened abundantly and without agenda.

I’ve never been the Always Be Closing type (🤮), but I’m always imagining possibilities. I connect dots. So it’s natural for me to spot opportunities to help, to collaborate, to contribute to goals. Watering these relationship seeds (and knowing when to prune them) is part of healthy community building, which is far bigger work than any one role or company. And I love it. But for the first time in my working life, I was in conversation without any professional goals and ideas swirling around in the back of my brain. I was present in a different way — and it felt a bit uncomfortable.

The benefit of seeing through lines and opportunities for mutual wins? I had a scaffolding on which I could build a conversation and collaboration. Clear goals and capabilities give us a mental guide to information — helping us process, organize and respond to externalities. But this time I was on my own. Aside from the extremely broad goals of building relationships (which is different than networking!) and exploring what I might do next with my career, I didn’t have an objective to move forward in 30- and 60-minute increments. Unmoored, I contemplated using a framework. Everyone is always talking about frameworks! Surely, that would give my freewheeling conversations the rigor necessary for productivity and pithy posts!

Thankfully my inner rebel screamed at that notion. I had a framework already. I fully understood the assignment. Listen. Be present. Be human. That was it. And that’s why it felt strange at first — we are so conditioned to value our time and interpersonal interaction based on what KPI we moved forward. Output and activity. Measurable. SMART. OKR-able. This wasn’t that. My Listening Tour had a different unit of measurement, and it was listening. Which is a much bigger, active, challenging job to be done than we usually give it credit for.

I listened to:

• ideas and updates that sparked visible joy on a face, lifted a voice and animated someone in a new way;

• subtle shifts in tone as some people realized I wasn’t there for a transactional relationship;

• pauses that pushed through conditioned belief in awkward silences into layers of depth and intention;

• sighs of exhaustion, laughs of delight, regurgitated selling points, genuine answers, declarations of uncertainty, passionate pitches and honest questions;

• problems that excited me and solutions that made me say “what if…”

• how people responded to my agenda-less authenticity

• points where I wanted to rush ahead with enthusiasm or check out because of misalignment

I learned that abundant listening requires actively hearing others as well as your inner voice. Presence isn’t passive — I was often drained after just a couple of calls. The conversations sparked imagination, reflection, lingered sometimes weeks and months after we closed Zoom.

It’s been more than 18 months since that era of my Listening Tour (because I decided it never truly stops.). Starting a new phase of my career delayed sharing my takeaways by much longer than I anticipated. And yet, right now feels like as important of a moment as ever to talk about listening. We’re in permanent whiplash by the pace of news, orders, actions and policies. The economy is always the topic, and the world is still literally on fire. Information is the weapon of choice, and we’re battered by automatic rounds of it day in and day out. We are feeling the weight of this moment in our bodies. We don’t know how to show up. We feel guided by machines and the crowd to make up our minds.

What I’m hearing is that it’s time to listen, actively and abundantly, to sources external and inside.