The Incomparable Importance of Listening

This is my first blog post on my new website. I wanted to write about some technical content, but when I started planning, I asked myself: what is lacking today in many areas? Very often we see projects fail, but we can’t understand the reasons that led to the failure. We had the technology, information, and skills, but somehow we got lost in cognitive overload and found ourselves in a messed-up state of mind.

This can be applied to many cases, from a small project on GitHub to a complex strategic deal, or simply learning a new song or technique on our instrument. Sometimes projects fail due to planning issues (and we will discuss this topic in another blog post), but very often the reason lies in a lack of listening that prevents us from understanding the real needs expressed by our stakeholders.

What is Listening

Listening is the active process of receiving, interpreting, and making meaning from sounds or spoken language. It goes beyond simply hearing (the passive, physiological reception of sound) and involves several layers:

At a basic level, listening means paying attention to sound — words, tone, rhythm, and volume — and decoding their meaning.

At a deeper level, true or active listening involves:

Attention: focusing fully on the speaker without distraction
Comprehension: understanding not just words, but intent and context
Retention: holding information in memory
Response: reacting in a way that shows you’ve understood

Does it resonate? This pattern is very similar to how an LLM (Large Language Model) works, especially Transformer based ones. Attention mechanisms that pick up what matters, frame them in context and produce a response that is conditioned by the input. Yes, this is a very trivial interpretation, but it’s interesting to see the parallelism that is the key to building a model that acts and behaves like a human.

There is only one HUGE difference: emotions. We, as humans, filter and enrich everything with our emotions, and they are driven by our experiences and our inner nature. One could say this is the last milestone that makes us different from machines, together with empathy and self-awareness (gifts also denied to some human beings, indeed).

Emotions play a huge role in human listening. They can amplify content, drive our attention or annihilate it if we are afraid. Learning to Listen (with a capital L) is also the art of learning to understand, accept and manage our emotions, balance our inner world and the outer world. It’s not a coincidence that Mindfulness practices involve active listening, beginning from one’s own breath, to focus and expand awareness.

Listening is Presence

Listening is tied to presence. To be impactful and influence other stakeholders in the decision-making process, you must stay open and carefully listen, ask questions, constantly acknowledge and check messages.

I work in Red Hat, a company focused on open source software, with the role of Account Solution Architect. Red Hat is an amazing company that really invests in people and they let me join an internal accelerator course named Technology Thought Leadership Accelerator (TTLA). I had the luck of connecting with many amazing people and learning techniques of Presence, Influence and Strategic Thinking. The Presence skills are my favourite because I think they can really bring a positive boost in my work and personal life. Being present, in a conversation, with family members, or in the act of playing is something that can and should be practiced constantly, especially in a world of continuous context switching. Well, Listening for me is the key to presence and thus, leadership.

It is also something I experience in music. I love jazz and improvised music, and one of the most important lessons I learned (and still continue to learn) is that you must Listen to the music happening around you, hear thoughtfully what others play and your inner self and the flow of sounds it projects. Chick Corea once said “Play only what you hear”, someone else calls this practice Audiation. This practice takes time to be developed, it’s not easy in the beginning since our mind tends to wander and we tend to switch to Autopilot Mode when we feel under pressure and overwhelmed.

The Autopilot Mode

This is a subject that I’m honestly trying to understand and master myself. I discussed this topic with my TTLA coach some days ago and it was enlightening. It came from a story I was telling about me going in autopilot mode sometimes and starting to play mechanical finger patterns during jam sessions. What came out gave me a lot to think about.

When we are under stress, our prefrontal cortex (responsible for active listening, nuanced thinking) literally goes offline and the limbic system takes over. When this happens we literally stop processing and start reacting. In that state we don’t hear what’s being said (or played), we just hear what confirms what we already think or fear. In music, when nerves kick in during a solo, you stop hearing the other musicians and start reciting the fingering patterns you practiced but you are in a bubble, a very dangerous bubble.

This happens in exactly the same way during a conversation with colleagues or customers. There may be many potential causes, and those are just a few examples:

We go to the meeting/session unprepared. This triggers a state of anxiety that leads us to a defensive pattern.
People with aggressive or unpleasant behaviors. Sometimes this is only a facade for people in high roles like C-levels and they trigger a fight-or-flight reaction.
Fear of not being accepted in our role or by that specific social circle.

When those conditions are met, we start relying on our convictions, which are the equivalent of the fingering patterns mentioned before. We stop listening, we stop asking questions, we stop being present.

How can we recognize the autopilot mode when it happens? What are the signals we’re entering the same old pitfall?

First, let’s consider that this behavior is not inherently evil, or at least it doesn’t have evil roots. It’s the brain’s way of “protecting” ourselves in a perceived danger situation. The problem is it’s a blunt instrument. It kept our ancestors alive but it’s not built for nuanced human conversations or even jazz improvisation.

Spotting the signals, in my opinion, needs reflection work, as they are not the same for everybody. For example, I noticed that when it happens my breathing changes, I lose focus and attention, and I feel like I’m in a bubble. Take a moment to reflect on the last time you felt this way. Try to write down the feelings, the emotions you remember. For example, try to annotate your experience in a personal journal after a tough meeting, make a debrief after a gig, talk to a coach to have someone question your behaviors in a constructive way. If you work with a team, ask for feedback from your peers, be ready to accept any kind of feedback and reflect on it.

Are there any exercises to stop getting stuck in autopilot mode? Short answer is yes. Mindfulness practices and cognitive sciences provide many tools to become aware of our inner patterns. Once we recognize and accept those behaviors, we can start changing them.

How? One simple exercise is breathing. Breathing is a “native” tool that we have from our very birth and there are many different techniques, for example diaphragmatic (belly) breathing: simply shifting from shallow chest breathing to deep belly breathing. This is the foundation of most mindfulness practices — it’s what happens naturally when you’re calm, and doing it intentionally signals safety to the nervous system.

We must be aware that the autopilot mode is not the problem itself, it’s a reaction to a perceived danger that leads us to stop listening. We must accept it as a state that can be changed with an inner work of mindful reflection.

If we choose to avoid such work, we must be aware that the direct consequence of the autopilot mode is an abrupt shutdown of any listening activity. We may know the consequences of it but we tend to underestimate or misattribute them. Let’s dive a little more into the cost of not listening.

The Cost of Not Listening

Imagine yourself delivering a solution to a customer, you prepared slides, calculations of ROI, architecture high-level designs and when you meet your people, you just start talking about your own stuff without checking other people’s reactions or understanding their needs. You don’t even notice that you are losing your audience during the presentation.

You did a great exercise, maybe, but you missed the opportunity of connecting authentically with your stakeholders and potentially developing new business.

Another scenario: you are brainstorming with your colleagues about a strategy and you close down and just want to deliver your vision without listening to others’ points of view. By rejecting their contributions, you may feel you are the smartest person in the room and already have the proper solution. You will probably win your small crusade but you won’t win your peers’ respect.

Or maybe you are at your gig with a band or in a jam session. You enter the autopilot mode and start playing everything mechanically, the music doesn’t flow out and you even make some mistakes. Your fear of doing wrong led you exactly where you didn’t want to.

The cost of not listening is rarely a loud, sudden crash — it’s the deal that quietly dies, the colleague who stops sharing ideas, the music that slowly loses its soul.

Listening in Technical Roles and the Paradox of Expertise

Working in tech sales makes you sit at the intersection of technology and business needs. If you come from past experiences in engineering or professional services, there is a huge leap that is not always easy to grasp. We are the people with technical expertise and vision that customers would be glad to accept as trusted advisors. However, this role is not automatically given, it must be earned.

Technology thought leadership practices try to teach how to gain the trust of our customers by leveraging the practices mentioned above (presence, influence, strategic thinking) and combining them with the technical knowledge. Those practices include, obviously, the development of listening skills.

Mastering technology topics without being able to apply them to business needs is a huge limit for a tech sales professional. In the era of LLMs where an average model can easily provide clear and compelling answers to technical and business questions, being empathic and connecting with people is the true differentiator.

AI replacement in many jobs is already a reality, with companies laying off roles that have been historically led by specialized people. Since most of us cannot win the knowledge race with a multi-billion trained model, we can develop what makes us human (possibly only the best part). Emotional behavior and listening skills are becoming crucial.

But what happens when our very expertise becomes the obstacle to listening? Ironically, the more experienced we become, the more we risk losing exactly those skills.

When we have deep expertise and feel we are the subject matter experts, our brain starts working in a pattern-matching behavior instead of truly listening. We look for hints of our “correct” vision. We hear the first sentence of a customer’s problem and our brain has already categorized it and started formulating the answer — while the customer is still talking. In other words, experts filter aggressively because they think they’ve heard it before, and sometimes they jump straight to the solution before fully understanding the problem. When the customer talks, your brain recognizes the pattern and starts saying “Oh, this is a classic hybrid cloud migration”. And it stops listening.

In the end, the solution proposed may be technically correct but contextually wrong and emotionally detached.

Miles Davis once said “The notes you don’t play matter as much as the ones you do.” Don’t overplay, don’t fill every silence with your voice, leave others their space to express.

Practical Techniques

Are there any techniques that we can develop to improve our listening skills? Sure, we are going to describe some here, with the clear intent of not providing a script, but a set of good habits to be developed and slowly incorporated into our daily behavior. I also have to be totally honest and admit that these are things I still practice myself, with mixed results, but it’s good to have the chance to try.

Here’s a list of a few practical techniques worth considering:

The 2-second pause: before responding, try to pause for 2 seconds, identify and resist the expert pattern-matching reflex.
Paraphrasing back: try to rephrase with your own words what you heard and check with your stakeholder if you understood the content well. This actually forces you to process what was said and fix it in your mind.
Ask one more question: nobody will complain if you are keen to ask questions and try to deep-dive into the content. This is especially useful when you feel sure you already know the answer.
Breathing: we mentioned it before as a great tool to switch back to the prefrontal cortex domain when you feel in autopilot mode.
Self debriefing: After a meeting or a gig, find some time to write down what worked and what didn’t work. Try to notice moments when your listening weakened or stopped.

Listening, after all, is not a destination — it’s a practice, and like any practice worth pursuing, it begins again every single day.