Issue #137 They Were Speaking, But You Weren't Listening (Here's Why and What to Do About It)

Written By: Brad Pedersen

Last week I reflected on my trip with my daughter Meg to Verbier, Switzerland, and the unexpected speech she gave that left both of us in tears. If you want to catch up you can do so by clicking here.

In the newsletter, I explained that the moment wasn't a gift that simply arrived. It was the result of a significant number of deposits made into what Stephen Covey calls the emotional bank account. An account that is made up of a reserve of trust that either gets built up or drained down in every relationship we have.

I mentioned that the deposit beneath all the others is learning to seek first to understand before trying to be understood.

This week, I want to explore why that one simple shift in perspective has the power to transform every important relationship in your life. 

From there, we’ll unpack the remaining five deposits that, when practiced consistently, create the kind of trust that can withstand disappointment, conflict, and other trails in your life.

Why Understanding Is So Hard

Recently, I met a friend for breakfast. We hadn’t seen each other in months, and I was genuinely looking forward to catching up. If I’m honest, though, I also arrived carrying a few unspoken disappointments about our relationship and I thought our conversation might naturally create an opportunity to work through them.

As he began sharing what had been happening in his life, I leaned in as if I was listening…or at least I thought I was. But while he was talking, I had already started rehearsing what I wanted to say next, hoping to steer the conversation toward my own agenda.

Instead of fully entering his world, I was simply waiting for my turn to bring him into mine.

Before long, an hour had passed. We enjoyed a good meal, covered plenty of ground, and exchanged words. Yet as I drove home, I couldn’t shake a quiet sense of disappointment.

We had communicated.

But we had never really connected.

As I reflected on the conversation later that day, it became painfully obvious what had happened: I hadn’t really listened to him at all. I had heard his words, but I had never slowed down long enough to truly understand what he was trying to tell me.

Had I been fully present, I would have been willing to ask questions. I would have reflected back what I thought I heard him say and given him the opportunity to tell me whether I had understood him correctly. Instead, I spent most of the breakfast trapped inside my own thoughts, trying to drive the conversation in a direction that I wanted it to go.

The uncomfortable truth is that this wasn’t an isolated moment. It’s a pattern that I have fallen into more often than I’d like to admit. And I suspect I’m not alone. I tend to be prescriptive in relationships, speaking before listening. Rather, I would listen just long enough to diagnose the issue, offer an answer, or move the conversation toward resolution. 

But that is not the same as understanding.

And if that is our approach, we turn relationships into transactions where the other person becomes someone to respond to, fix, advise, correct, or convince, rather than someone to truly know and receive.

Transformational relationships require something different. They require us to stay open long enough to not only influence the other person, but also to be influenced by them through choosing to be empathetic in our understanding.

That sounds simple, but it is not.

It has been said that to speak and be heard is oxygen to the soul. If that is true, then one of the greatest gifts we can offer another person is the experience of being met where they actually are, not where we assume they are, and not where we want them to be.

We See The World As We Are

Perhaps this is simply part of the human condition. Each of us experiences life from the center of our own story. We naturally see the world through our own lens, interpret events through our own experiences, and spend much of our time thinking about our own hopes, fears, disappointments, and desires.

There is nothing unusual about that; it is simply where we all begin.

The problem is that while this perspective may come naturally, it also makes genuine connection incredibly difficult. As long as I remain the central character in every conversation, I will struggle to truly enter into someone else’s world.

And yet, that is exactly where the deepest relationships are found.

More than a century ago, William James, often regarded as the father of modern psychology, observed something profound about the human mind. He suggested that each of us experiences life through two perspectives. 

There is the “I” self, the part of us that looks outward toward the world around us, and the “me” self, the part that continually observes and evaluates ourselves in the world.

Both are necessary.

As you drive to work, your “I” self is watching the road, anticipating what other drivers might do. At the very same time, your “me” self is monitoring your own speed, your decisions, and whether you’re about to miss your exit.

Relationships work much the same way. While someone is speaking, our “I” self is capable of hearing their words. But almost instantly, our “me” self begins evaluating what the words mean for us, how we feel about them, and what we’re then going to say next.

And it is when we focus on the “me” self interpretation of someone else's words, that genuine listening begins to break down.

The deepest connections happen when we quiet the voice continually talking about ourselves long enough that we can then become fully present with someone else. 

Unfortunately, most of us spend far more time living in the “me” self than the “I” self. Once you become aware of it, you start seeing this pattern everywhere.

On a video call, have you ever caught yourself staring at your own image in the corner of the screen instead of the person speaking?  During Covid, when video calls became the norm, I noticed myself doing this and realized it was pulling me out of the conversation (now I turn off my self-view on every call). I have learned that the less I watch myself, the more present I become with everyone else on the call.

The same thing happens in our closest relationships. A conversation with your spouse begins to deteriorate the moment you shift from listening to understand into listening to defend, explain, or respond. Real relational value comes from empathetically seeing the world from the other person’s perspective and allowing it to then influence how you show up in the conversation.

I think about this with how I showed early in my life my daughter Meg. When she was younger, she was obsessed with soccer, which eventually led us all the way to Old Trafford to watch a match.

Do I like soccer that much?

Not particularly….but I like my daughter that much.

Seeking to understand someone means allowing what matters to them to matter to you. Not because you have suddenly adopted all their interests, but because you have chosen to care about their experience of the world.

It is not about getting others to focus on what matters to you. It is about understanding them in the way you would hope to be understood, and then loving them according to that understanding.

Done well, this means treating everyone the same by treating them differently, according to who they are and what they actually need and care about.

Before trust can be built, before conflict can be resolved, before influence can be earned, we must first seek to understand before trying to be understood. And that is why I believe why Stephen Covey placed this habit above all the others. 

Five More Deposits Worth Making

Seeking to understand comes first because it makes every other deposit possible. 

Once someone feels seen and understood, trust has somewhere to take root. But Covey reminds us that it isn’t the only way we build relational equity. Five other meaningful deposits deserve our attention.

Pay attention to the little things. Relationships are rarely strengthened by one grand gesture. More often, they are built through a thousand small ones. Remembering an important date. Following up on a difficult conversation. Asking about the thing someone told you weeks ago. The little things are the big things because trust (like money with interest) compounds quietly over time.

Keep your commitments. Every promise you keep is a deposit. Every promise you break is a withdrawal. What makes broken commitments so painful is that people build hope around the words we speak. When our actions fail to match them, trust erodes quickly.

Clarify expectations. I’ve become convinced that many relationships don’t deteriorate because of conflict; they deteriorate because of assumptions. Unspoken expectations are especially dangerous because they remain invisible until someone is disappointed. Today’s unstated expectations will become tomorrow’s resentments.

Live with integrity. Honesty means our words match reality however integrity goes a step further; it means reality matches our words. It is becoming the same person in every room, whether anyone is watching or not. One of the greatest tests of integrity is how we speak about people when they are absent. Few things build trust faster than discovering someone is just as loyal behind your back as they are to your face.

Apologize quickly and sincerely. No matter how intentional we become, none of us will make perfect deposits all the time. We are all going to make withdrawals, whether through carelessness, selfishness, or simply being human. What ultimately determines the health of a relationship is not whether we make mistakes, but how quickly and sincerely we respond when we do. A genuine apology requires the humility to own what happened without defending ourselves or managing our image. Nicky Gumbel captures it beautifully: The first to apologize is the bravest. The first to forgive is the strongest. The first to forget is the happiest.

In last week's newsletter, I shared that the first meaningful deposit I made in rebuilding my relationship with Meg came down to saying two simple words: I’m sorry. It required self awareness and humility which has subsequently led to forgiveness and what has blossomed into one of my most cherished relationships. 

What I Want to Leave You With

Viewed together, all six deposits have something in common. 

None of them require extraordinary talent, they simply require extraordinary awareness followed by a willingness to place the other person ahead of ourselves.

Perhaps that is why they are so simple to understand yet so difficult to practice.

What they require is something much more difficult: choosing, again and again, to step out of the “me” self and into the “I” self, even when it feels more natural to stay focused on ourselves and what we want to say next.

I’ve also come to realize that our most constant relationships require our most consistent deposits. You can run into an old friend after years apart and pick up almost exactly where you left off because the emotional reserve is still there. But the people we see every day – our spouse, our children, our closest friends – draw on that account continually. 

The little things are the big things, meaning that without intentional deposits, the balance slowly declines, often so gradually that neither person notices until a withdrawal is made and there is nothing left to cover it.

The picture above of my trip to Verbier with Meg was an extraordinary experience that I will treasure for the rest of my life. But as I reflect on it, I realize the trip itself didn’t build our relationship. There were seasons when I mistakenly believed I could make up for lost time by buying my kids’ love and attention with things or memorable vacations. 

Looking back, those decisions were often driven more by my “me” self than my “I” self. I was trying to quiet my own guilt rather than asking the more important question: What do my kids actually need from me right now?

The trip to Verbier didn’t create trust; it revealed and amplified what had already been built over years of countless ordinary deposits. 

The extraordinary was only possible because of the ordinary.

That’s how every meaningful relationship is built. We tend to remember the mountaintop moments, but they are only possible because of the thousands of unseen conversations, kept promises, sincere apologies, and small acts of kindness that quietly laid the foundation beneath them.

So this week, pause and ask yourself:

In your most important conversations this past week, were you operating primarily from your “I” self or your “me” self?

Which of these six deposits comes most naturally to you, and which one have you been unintentionally neglecting?

What is one small deposit you could make this week that would strengthen your most important relationship?

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