A room full of executives said no.
That question came from John Ascher, a former submarine captain turned consultant, speaking to a group of senior business people. He asked it simply: can you be a 100% listener?
The room said no. Of course not. It’s impossible. You’re always doing something else — formulating your response, making judgments, filtering through your own experience, thinking about something other than what the person is saying. You can’t turn all of that off.
Jimmy said: “I think you can. It’s hard. But it’s not impossible.”
Ascher looked around the room and asked: “Why is Jim right?”
Silence.
What Marcus Wrote
Meditation VI.53:
Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another, and as much as possible be in the speaker’s mind.
Be in the speaker’s mind.
Five words. Written by a Roman emperor to himself on a battlefield in 170 AD. Still the most precise description of what actual listening requires that Jimmy has ever read.
Not: pay attention to what they’re saying. Not: try to understand their point. Be in their mind. Which means emptying yourself out of your own mind (your blackboard) long enough to inhabit someone else’s.
How hard is that!
Why the Room Said No
The room said no because they were describing what listening usually feels like — a partial process, divided attention, one ear on the speaker and one part of the brain already preparing a response.
That’s not listening. That’s waiting to talk. It’s something most of us do most of the time and call it listening because the alternative – just listening — sounds impossible.
But here’s what Jimmy was getting at: the impossibility is a choice. You can choose to be partially present or fully present. The partial version is the default. The full version requires something specific: you have to stop thinking about yourself. Which means, you have to stop coloring what you are hearing with your you.
Stop coloring what you’re hearing with your own experience. Stop comparing what they’re saying to what you already know. Stop preparing your response. Stop thinking about what this means for you.
Stop thinking about you and bringing in what you know or think you know, and just listen.
That’s what makes it hard. Not the listening. The stopping.
The Submarine Captain
Ascher’s background mattered. On a submarine, communication is everything. You cannot afford to half-hear a report from the crew. You cannot be mentally composing your reply while someone is still giving you the information you need to act on. The cost of partial listening in that environment is not embarrassment or misunderstanding. It can be catastrophic.
He brought that standard into the boardroom because he believed — correctly — that it applied there too. The cost of half-listening in business is slower, harder to see, but real. Decisions made on incomplete information because the decision-maker was already deciding while the information was still arriving. Just look at the businesses littering the landscape that failed because someone didn’t really listen.
Marcus’s instruction and Ascher’s standard are the same thing in different clothing. Be in the speaker’s mind. Not halfway there. All the way there.
What Full Listening Actually Produces
When you actually stop and be in the speaker’s mind — when you give your full attention without the running commentary of your own response — something happens that doesn’t happen in partial listening.
You hear what they’re not saying. The hesitations. The thing they almost said and pulled back from. The emotion underneath the words. The gap between what they’re describing and what they’re actually dealing with. You see, in listening, you get to hear the rhythm of language – the intricacies of a human being using words to communicate something. It is truly one of the most amazing experiences another human being can have.
That type of information is only available when you’re fully present, when you are a 100% listener. It’s not available when half your attention is elsewhere. And the good news is, once you do it once, you really can’t go back to half listening. You either are or are not listening.
Marcus didn’t have neuroscience to tell him this. He had decades of managing people, leading armies, hearing counsel from advisors — and the pattern recognition to understand that the quality of what he heard depended entirely on the quality of his attention.
Five words. Be in the speaker’s mind. Eighteen hundred years old. Still true and working.
Read the Meditations with Jimmy at readingwithjimmy.com. Questions and reactions to [email protected].