Hi friends,

You had me yesterday and now you have me again today because my creative spirit is rip-roaring, and I feel like being prolific for a little while.

(Here's yesterday's piece).

Today's piece is about listening. Honestly, the past six weeks have forced more growth and painful introspection than any point in my adult life. Struggle can be a blessing in disguise, especially when it forces reflection, and it feels like the tectonic plates of my values are shifting beneath me. In today's piece about listening, I share one of my hardest-won revelations.

Learning to Actually Listen

I’ve been listening the wrong way my entire life — with just my ears. Maybe you’ve been doing it wrong too.

True listening is a totalizing, full-body experience. It transcends language. It’s about noticing all the different ways people communicate, from the micro-expressions on their face to the way they rotate their bodies in conversation, or the way they stutter or speed up while talking.

The novice listener sees a conversation as a transcript. The expert listener knows that what’s being said is only a fraction of what’s being communicated. A huge percentage of communication happens in the cadence of speech, the intonations of the voice, and the movements of the body. Most of what people say transcends the content of the conversation.

Whenever two people are talking, they can only consciously pick up on a fraction of what’s happening. One person doesn’t realize how many signals they’re unconsciously sending while the other can’t process how much information is being communicated (and vice versa).

Here’s a game for you to play: Next time you have a conversation, ignore the words. Pretend the content of the conversation is irrelevant. Give all your attention to the vibe instead. Focus exclusively on emotion, posture, speech patterns, and the ever-fluctuating dance of body language. If you really want to get wild, try having a conversation in pure gibberish to appreciate how much you can still say.

Go beyond the ear and expand your definition of listening.

Don’t merely equate it with words. As you do, you’ll awaken to new aspects of communication and the human experience that’ve been hiding in plain sight.

Write of Passage Cohort 10

Noticing is an important part of writing well, too. New Write of Passage students often worry that they don't have enough to write about. They'll fret about "not having enough notes" or needing to do lots of research.

But at its core, writing is social. Students learn to refine their ideas through conversation, both with fellow students and in their day-to-day lives. They notice which ideas get the best reactions and use that response as a signal for what to write about.

Our next Write of Passage cohort runs from April 17 – May 24. In a series of separate emails, I’ll be sharing stories, ideas, and writing-related lessons over the next couple of weeks. Click the button below to hear from me about the course.

​Enrollment is now open, and we're also accepting scholarship applications. You can join through April 12, or until we fill our allotted number of seats.