March 18, 2025 • 11 mins
- Your brain is like a monkey—constantly jumping around, thinking of what to say next, and rarely focused on what others are sharing. Learning to shut up and truly listen, especially during those key moments when your child is trying to tell you something important, is perhaps life's most difficult skill. This preview of Saturday's full interview with Ross Judd reveals why listening is so challenging and how three simple steps can transform your connections with those you love.
Quote of the Episode:
"When we engage, the actual main thing to do here is actually to do nothing. We're not having to fix a problem. We're not having to find solutions. What we actually need to do is to be quiet." - Kylie Coulson
Key Points:
- Don't try to actively listen every minute of every day—it's exhausting and unrealistic.
- Look for clues that indicate someone really needs to talk (unusual behaviour or emotional signals).
- When these important moments occur, engage fully by staying quiet and using neutral phrases like "tell me more".
- Summarise what the person has said to show you've understood.
- Our brains typically prepare to talk rather than truly listen to others.
- Most conversations are like showing "trinkets" from our respective bookshelves rather than truly exploring others' experiences.
- Staying present while listening is incredibly difficult because our "monkey mind" constantly chatters.
- Not offering solutions actually communicates trust that the person has the answers within themselves.
- We typically listen through our own life experiences, which interrupts the other person's thought process.
- Effective listening is a "practice in stillness"—something most humans struggle with
Resources Mentioned:
- 'Listening: A Guide to Building Deeper Connections' by Ross Judd
- '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' by Stephen Covey
- 'The Emotional Lives of Teenagers' by Lisa D'Amour
- Marco Polo app (mentioned as a tool for asynchronous communication)
- Happy Families website
Action Steps for Parents:
- Watch for unusual behaviour or emotional signals that indicate your child needs a deeper conversation.
- When those moments occur, stay quiet and use neutral phrases like "tell me more" rather than offering solutions.
- Practice summarizsing what your child says to show you've understood and to quiet your own "monkey mind".
- Remember that by not offering immediate solutions, you're showing confidence in your child's ability to find answers.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's so hard to be in the moment when somebody
is speaking and what they're saying matters, But our mind
is a monkey and it's jumping all over the place
and making us think of a whole lot of things
that we want to do. We want to say how
we can help rather than just listen. Today we talk
about how to listen better. Hello and welcome to the
(00:28):
Happy Families Podcast, Real parenting solutions every day. On Australia's
most downloaded parenting podcast, we are Justin and Kylie Coulson.
Kylie had to chat with a guy called Ross Yard.
He's written a book called Listening, and today we're going
to preview a much longer discussion that's going to be
played on Saturday about how to listen. How do you
(00:49):
rate your listening?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
What did you say?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
How do you know that was not even set up?
You were so quick, You did that so authentically, and
you were doodling while I was talking that I genuinely,
genuinely thought you were being serious. Got me for half
a second. I asked ross the question, how can we
listen better? And I loved his response. Check this out.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
I would put that in three steps. First one is
don't try to do it all the time. Don't try
to listen better every single minute of every day. That's
just late. You know, that's just too hard. So look
for and recognize the moments. Look for those special moments
when you can tell there's a deeper issue. There's a
whole chapter dedicated to explaining what they are, and there's
(01:31):
lots of clues and hints that people give you, and
the most common one is either emotion or that they're
behaving in an unusual way. Second one is then when
you engage in that moment, just just engage, just be quiet,
shut up, let them talk, and just use neutral hemy more.
(01:53):
And then when they start talking, summarize. That would be
it for me. Three simple steps. Recognize this is a
moment when I can do something different and really connect Kylie.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
So simple when you think about it, and yet so
hard to do.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I was about to say, there is actually no complexity
to this at all, and yet we all struggle with
it so much, so much the idea that we would
try to actively listen every minute of every day is exhausting.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, but I like what he says, Yes you need
to listen. Yes, what your kids are saying matters, But
there are times where you really need to tune in.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
And it's been actually keenly aware of when those times
are being able to read the room. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Last week I did a webinar about really helping kids
to emotionally regulate, and as I describe what it is
to emotion coach a child, I could just hear the
collective groans of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of parents
around the country who were listening to this webinar, going,
I don't have time for that. But the reality is
you don't have to do it all the time. Time
(03:01):
being present and being discerning key moments, key moments. Yeah,
of course, the more you can be present for your kids,
the better, But life is busy.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Well, what I love is that once you recognize that moment,
the actual main thing to do here when we engage
is actually to do nothing. We're not not having to
fix a problem, we're not having to find solutions. What
we actually need to do is to be quiet, to
(03:33):
literally be quiet, to be in the moment, and to
hear what sometimes is not even being said.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Sometimes when someone's talking, all we're doing is thinking about
what we're going to say next. Stephen Covey used to
talk about how when people talk and listen, they don't
really listen, they just talk and then prepare to talk.
And I remember Lisa to More saying, when it comes
to the way we communicate, quite often, it just feels
like we've got these little, you know, trinkets that you
(04:03):
buy on holidays and you put them up on the bookshelf.
She said, When people are talking quite often, it just
feels like we're taking a trinket off our bookshelf and
we're saying, hey, look at my trinket, and then we
put it back up in the other place. It says, well,
look at my trinket or trink it off their bookshelf.
And the idea is, what would it look like, what
it feel like if when somebody took a trinket off
their bookshelf and said, I want to show you this.
(04:25):
What if we said, can I can I become really
carefully and closely acquainted with this? Can I touch it?
Can I feel it? Can I experience it the way
you experienced it. I'm not worried about my bookshelf anymore.
I just want to understand what's what it is that
made you want to share this with me.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah. Yeah. The other night I was talking with a
friend who has never used Marco Polo before.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
This is your favorite app? Oh my goodness. If you
are not familiar with Marco Polo, Kylie gets on Marco
and you and your friends leave each other our long messages.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Well, so here's the thing. Yes we do, Yes we do.
It's not regular. Our way is not regular.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
One way conversation. Somebody would just be driving and mark
owing you and they'll talk for an hour for their
entire drive from Brisbane of the Gold Coast and then
send it in you. Then you've got to listen for
an hour. It's this asynchronous monologue.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So I was trying to explain to this friend who
has not used it before, and she couldn't understand it
at all. And a mutual friend that I communicate with
on Marco had shared it with her and was showing
her how to use it, and her daughter had actually said,
you know that Marco was just snapped for old people.
(05:38):
I love it, but what as we talked about it,
I kind of shared with her. I said, you know
how sometimes you're having experiences in your life and you
actually just need to talk it out. And I said
and when you share it with somebody, they're so busy
trying to fix the problem that you actually never get
the rhythm of being able to just pour.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It out because they don't take the ride. They take
the wheel. They start diverting the conversation into all the
different ways that they want to take it.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yes, and they've got a solution for everything. It's like, no, no,
I don't need the solution right now. I need to
actually just sit in this pain and have a big
winge or have a big cry or whatever it is.
And so I actually see Marco often as just being
the therapy of just being able to talk it out.
And my friends and I both recognize that from time
to time we might just put it on speed too,
(06:28):
because it's not that they're wanting a response. We actually
just need to share it with somebody else.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah. Yeah, So back to Ross and what he had
to say. It ties in quite a lot here. He says,
just look the clues. If they need to communicate, they'll
give you the clue that they need to communicate, then engage,
and then summarize.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
And I love this. I love this because what it
does is it allows the person who's sharing with us
to know that number one, they've been heard, but number two,
there's a real power in not giving them solutions because
in the absence of that solution, what we actually are
sharing with them is the belief that they will find
(07:10):
the answers.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
The answers are inside them. I said this about our
kids all the time. After the break, we're going to
talk about why it's so hard to stay in that moment.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Ross jud is the author of a book called Listening.
We'll linked to that in the show Notes. Had a
really delightful conversation with Ross talking about listening, especially in
a parenting context, and I asked him, why is it
so hard to be in that moment?
Speaker 3 (07:39):
I mean, I would say there's probably not many things
that are harder to do in our experience, like as humans,
that has to be one of the hardest things that
we could ever do. That ability to just keep your
mind out of the equation and focus on what they're
saying is just incredible difficult. And the only way I've
(08:02):
personally found to do it is by this concept of summarizing.
So when I really need to listen to someone, it's
like a conscious thought process that almost hurts, you know,
I'm concentrating on what they're saying and repeating it back
in my head so I can repeat it back when
(08:22):
they're finished and summarize what they've said when they're finished.
It's the only way I've found to quiet and all
of I refer to them as monkeys as well. It's
like you've got monkeys chattering away in your brain. It's
the only way to quiet those voices.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Kylie, how do you stay present when there's so much
going on, you want to say so much. You listen
and then you summarize.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
So this is the this is the big challenge. I
love how he acknowledges that there's pretty much not much
harder the thing for us to do than to be
present in these moments and to quiet the monkey mind.
I love the idea of the monkey mind because I
feel it so often going off in my brain. The
challenge we have is that when we hear someone talking
to us, we're actually listening through our own life experiences
(09:10):
and perspectives. We're actually it's going through that funnel of oh, yeah,
I've done that before, Yes, I know how that feels.
You know I've experienced that or whatever, and we're ready
to show them through our empathetic response of yeah, I've
done that, I've been there, I've felt that that we
hear them, but what we actually do is shut them down.
(09:31):
We stop them from being able to continue the flow
of their thought process and thinking. So, for me, what
I take away from everything this is actually a practice
in stillness.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
Love that.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
This is a practice in stillness, and that's why we
suck at it because as humans we still it's so
unnatural for us.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yes, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
The book is called Listening. Rossjudd is the author. We
have you enjoyed this very quick preview of what was
a It was a delightful common We're going to play
the whole interview on Saturday for your weekend. Listening while
you're doing the yard work, or going for a walk,
or just having a few moments, maybe strolling the aisles
of the supermarket and getting the growth. Don't know, do
you listen to a pod when you're shopping? I can't
(10:14):
do that. I've got to concentrate on one I'm picking
up off the shelves.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
I might run over an old lady.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
If that's not even funny, I don't know why I'm
laughing at that.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
That's terrible.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
A couple ive you said that. That's on Saturday. Thanks
so much for listening. We hope that you've got something
out of it and it helps you to listen better
with your kids. Like I said, a whole lot more
on Saturday with Ross and we'll link to his book
in the show notes. The Happy Family's Podcast is produced
by Justin Rulon from Bridge Media. If you would like
more information and more resources to make your family happier,
(10:42):
visit us at happy families dot com dot au and
tomorrow on the pod, a conversation you don't want to miss.
Your child will see pornography. We're going to tell you
what you need to know. That's The Happy Family's Podcast
tomorrow
It's so hard to be in the moment when somebody
is speaking and what they're saying matters, But our mind
is a monkey and it's jumping all over the place
and making us think of a whole lot of things
that we want to do. We want to say how
we can help rather than just listen. Today we talk
about how to listen better. Hello and welcome to the
(00:28):
Happy Families Podcast, Real parenting solutions every day. On Australia's
most downloaded parenting podcast, we are Justin and Kylie Coulson.
Kylie had to chat with a guy called Ross Yard.
He's written a book called Listening, and today we're going
to preview a much longer discussion that's going to be
played on Saturday about how to listen. How do you
(00:49):
rate your listening?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
What did you say?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
How do you know that was not even set up?
You were so quick, You did that so authentically, and
you were doodling while I was talking that I genuinely,
genuinely thought you were being serious. Got me for half
a second. I asked ross the question, how can we
listen better? And I loved his response. Check this out.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
I would put that in three steps. First one is
don't try to do it all the time. Don't try
to listen better every single minute of every day. That's
just late. You know, that's just too hard. So look
for and recognize the moments. Look for those special moments
when you can tell there's a deeper issue. There's a
whole chapter dedicated to explaining what they are, and there's
(01:31):
lots of clues and hints that people give you, and
the most common one is either emotion or that they're
behaving in an unusual way. Second one is then when
you engage in that moment, just just engage, just be quiet,
shut up, let them talk, and just use neutral hemy more.
(01:53):
And then when they start talking, summarize. That would be
it for me. Three simple steps. Recognize this is a
moment when I can do something different and really connect Kylie.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
So simple when you think about it, and yet so
hard to do.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I was about to say, there is actually no complexity
to this at all, and yet we all struggle with
it so much, so much the idea that we would
try to actively listen every minute of every day is exhausting.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, but I like what he says, Yes you need
to listen. Yes, what your kids are saying matters, But
there are times where you really need to tune in.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
And it's been actually keenly aware of when those times
are being able to read the room. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Last week I did a webinar about really helping kids
to emotionally regulate, and as I describe what it is
to emotion coach a child, I could just hear the
collective groans of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of parents
around the country who were listening to this webinar, going,
I don't have time for that. But the reality is
you don't have to do it all the time. Time
(03:01):
being present and being discerning key moments, key moments. Yeah,
of course, the more you can be present for your kids,
the better, But life is busy.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Well, what I love is that once you recognize that moment,
the actual main thing to do here when we engage
is actually to do nothing. We're not not having to
fix a problem, we're not having to find solutions. What
we actually need to do is to be quiet, to
(03:33):
literally be quiet, to be in the moment, and to
hear what sometimes is not even being said.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Sometimes when someone's talking, all we're doing is thinking about
what we're going to say next. Stephen Covey used to
talk about how when people talk and listen, they don't
really listen, they just talk and then prepare to talk.
And I remember Lisa to More saying, when it comes
to the way we communicate, quite often, it just feels
like we've got these little, you know, trinkets that you
(04:03):
buy on holidays and you put them up on the bookshelf.
She said, When people are talking quite often, it just
feels like we're taking a trinket off our bookshelf and
we're saying, hey, look at my trinket, and then we
put it back up in the other place. It says, well,
look at my trinket or trink it off their bookshelf.
And the idea is, what would it look like, what
it feel like if when somebody took a trinket off
their bookshelf and said, I want to show you this.
(04:25):
What if we said, can I can I become really
carefully and closely acquainted with this? Can I touch it?
Can I feel it? Can I experience it the way
you experienced it. I'm not worried about my bookshelf anymore.
I just want to understand what's what it is that
made you want to share this with me.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah. Yeah. The other night I was talking with a
friend who has never used Marco Polo before.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
This is your favorite app? Oh my goodness. If you
are not familiar with Marco Polo, Kylie gets on Marco
and you and your friends leave each other our long messages.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Well, so here's the thing. Yes we do, Yes we do.
It's not regular. Our way is not regular.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
One way conversation. Somebody would just be driving and mark
owing you and they'll talk for an hour for their
entire drive from Brisbane of the Gold Coast and then
send it in you. Then you've got to listen for
an hour. It's this asynchronous monologue.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So I was trying to explain to this friend who
has not used it before, and she couldn't understand it
at all. And a mutual friend that I communicate with
on Marco had shared it with her and was showing
her how to use it, and her daughter had actually said,
you know that Marco was just snapped for old people.
(05:38):
I love it, but what as we talked about it,
I kind of shared with her. I said, you know
how sometimes you're having experiences in your life and you
actually just need to talk it out. And I said
and when you share it with somebody, they're so busy
trying to fix the problem that you actually never get
the rhythm of being able to just pour.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It out because they don't take the ride. They take
the wheel. They start diverting the conversation into all the
different ways that they want to take it.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yes, and they've got a solution for everything. It's like, no, no,
I don't need the solution right now. I need to
actually just sit in this pain and have a big
winge or have a big cry or whatever it is.
And so I actually see Marco often as just being
the therapy of just being able to talk it out.
And my friends and I both recognize that from time
to time we might just put it on speed too,
(06:28):
because it's not that they're wanting a response. We actually
just need to share it with somebody else.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah. Yeah, So back to Ross and what he had
to say. It ties in quite a lot here. He says,
just look the clues. If they need to communicate, they'll
give you the clue that they need to communicate, then engage,
and then summarize.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
And I love this. I love this because what it
does is it allows the person who's sharing with us
to know that number one, they've been heard, but number two,
there's a real power in not giving them solutions because
in the absence of that solution, what we actually are
sharing with them is the belief that they will find
(07:10):
the answers.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
The answers are inside them. I said this about our
kids all the time. After the break, we're going to
talk about why it's so hard to stay in that moment.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Ross jud is the author of a book called Listening.
We'll linked to that in the show Notes. Had a
really delightful conversation with Ross talking about listening, especially in
a parenting context, and I asked him, why is it
so hard to be in that moment?
Speaker 3 (07:39):
I mean, I would say there's probably not many things
that are harder to do in our experience, like as humans,
that has to be one of the hardest things that
we could ever do. That ability to just keep your
mind out of the equation and focus on what they're
saying is just incredible difficult. And the only way I've
(08:02):
personally found to do it is by this concept of summarizing.
So when I really need to listen to someone, it's
like a conscious thought process that almost hurts, you know,
I'm concentrating on what they're saying and repeating it back
in my head so I can repeat it back when
(08:22):
they're finished and summarize what they've said when they're finished.
It's the only way I've found to quiet and all
of I refer to them as monkeys as well. It's
like you've got monkeys chattering away in your brain. It's
the only way to quiet those voices.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Kylie, how do you stay present when there's so much
going on, you want to say so much. You listen
and then you summarize.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
So this is the this is the big challenge. I
love how he acknowledges that there's pretty much not much
harder the thing for us to do than to be
present in these moments and to quiet the monkey mind.
I love the idea of the monkey mind because I
feel it so often going off in my brain. The
challenge we have is that when we hear someone talking
to us, we're actually listening through our own life experiences
(09:10):
and perspectives. We're actually it's going through that funnel of oh, yeah,
I've done that before, Yes, I know how that feels.
You know I've experienced that or whatever, and we're ready
to show them through our empathetic response of yeah, I've
done that, I've been there, I've felt that that we
hear them, but what we actually do is shut them down.
(09:31):
We stop them from being able to continue the flow
of their thought process and thinking. So, for me, what
I take away from everything this is actually a practice
in stillness.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
Love that.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
This is a practice in stillness, and that's why we
suck at it because as humans we still it's so
unnatural for us.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yes, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
The book is called Listening. Rossjudd is the author. We
have you enjoyed this very quick preview of what was
a It was a delightful common We're going to play
the whole interview on Saturday for your weekend. Listening while
you're doing the yard work, or going for a walk,
or just having a few moments, maybe strolling the aisles
of the supermarket and getting the growth. Don't know, do
you listen to a pod when you're shopping? I can't
(10:14):
do that. I've got to concentrate on one I'm picking
up off the shelves.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
I might run over an old lady.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
If that's not even funny, I don't know why I'm
laughing at that.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
That's terrible.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
A couple ive you said that. That's on Saturday. Thanks
so much for listening. We hope that you've got something
out of it and it helps you to listen better
with your kids. Like I said, a whole lot more
on Saturday with Ross and we'll link to his book
in the show notes. The Happy Family's Podcast is produced
by Justin Rulon from Bridge Media. If you would like
more information and more resources to make your family happier,
(10:42):
visit us at happy families dot com dot au and
tomorrow on the pod, a conversation you don't want to miss.
Your child will see pornography. We're going to tell you
what you need to know. That's The Happy Family's Podcast
tomorrow
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