Author Talks: How to listen with your ‘third ear’

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Emily Kasriel, media executive and senior visiting research fellow at King’s College Policy Institute in London, about Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes (William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, June 2025). Kasriel explores the common barriers that keep us from really hearing each other and shares practical strategies to overcome them. By validating others’ thoughts and emotions, deep listening can dissolve personal and professional divides, fostering more meaningful connection in a polarized world. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.

So most of us only listen in a ‘hollow, performative way’?

We often listen because it’s expected of us. What we’re actually doing is pantomiming listening while we’re preloading our verbal gun with ammunition so we’re ready to fire with our own ideas. We treat the speaker as a resource to extract value, but just the information we think we need.

We get caught in “traps” that prevent us from listening:

1. I need to win. Many of us instinctively believe we’re right and need to prove it. We’re on the lookout for any chink in our opponent’s armor, anything that can be exploited.
2. I am in charge. We see our role as a leader, as someone who explains, who instructs, who adds value. With this mindset, the more authority you wield, the more expertise you have, the more pressure you put on yourself to drive the conversation.
3. I must solve and sort. Someone shares their challenges with you because they want your sage advice. Despite honorable intentions, before you’ve truly heard them and given them an opportunity to devise a solution, you deprive them of agency.
4. I don’t have the time. When I train leaders around the world, they tell me that time limits prevent them from listening. We’re all waging a war, a campaign for completion. We don’t have time to hear all the details that someone wants to share with us.

Yet cutting off conversations also prevents serious concerns and brilliant new ideas from emerging. Sometimes listening is not just about time but also about the quality of our attention. We’re always faced with distractions. Your phone is a top distraction. But there are also mental distractions that interrupt meaning and destroy thinking. We’re blind to what’s not being expressed in words. The end result is that people leave conversations feeling dismissed or used.

Do we really need another book about being better listeners?

It’s so important for us to be heard, for all of us to be recognized. It means that we’re respected and valued. It means our thoughts matter. We’re being taken seriously and, therefore, we matter. There are so many pressures on people at work, so many distractions that we often fail to listen, especially when it matters most.

Deep listening is going beyond simply hearing words and extracting information. It’s about being fully present, setting aside your own agenda, even if temporarily, to listen with genuine curiosity and empathy. Deep listening acknowledges your speaker’s humanity. It creates psychological safety for people to share more openly and authentically. Leaders often fear that listening undermines their authority. In reality, research and case studies show that leaders who listen deeply and well are perceived as effective, considerate, and transformative. Their teams become more engaged and productive. When many teams are struggling with toxicity and burnout, creating a culture of listening has a huge impact on employees’ mental health.

I ran a project with the British Council and the BBC, [which involved training] more than 1,000 people in over 100 countries [on deep listening]. We demonstrated that when people were practicing deep listening, they felt safer expressing themselves and felt genuinely understood. They gained insights about themselves and an openness to reexamine their own attitudes, even when they fiercely disagreed with the person they were listening to.

This scenario mirrors the dynamic in today’s workplace, with conflicts on so many issues, including remote work or DEI. We are living in a time of intense divisions in workplaces, between generations, between people with different political beliefs, and deep listening can help. From training people around the world, I’ve experienced that the breakthrough comes when people appreciate that listening does not signal agreement.

So deep listening starts by first listening to yourself?

You can’t be open to listening to someone else until you’ve truly listened to yourself. If you haven’t taken the time to listen to yourself, you might find that you’re closed off from what the person is trying to communicate to you. Memories, strong emotions, prejudices, or an unacknowledged agenda can really distort an exchange, if you haven’t recognized and addressed these internal challenges first.

We all have “shadows”—unacceptable parts of ourselves—which feel young and vulnerable. They’re buried deep inside us. But they leap up when we’re trying to listen, especially when we disagree. Since these shadows aren’t obvious, we sense them indirectly in what we perceive as loathsome traits and the actions of other people, especially those we listen to. For example, you might feel very uncomfortable, but don’t know why, when you’re trying to listen to an authoritative colleague. Perhaps the colleague reminds you of a bullying older brother. How do you know when the shadows are pulling the strings?

Clues could be when you judge what you’re hearing in a black-and-white manner or when you consider yourself 100 percent correct and the other person blatantly wrong. It’s counterintuitive. Yet the more strongly you feel that you’re right and deny that you’re emotional in any way, the more likely it is that your shadows are pulling the strings.

You need to give yourself the space to begin to acknowledge and accept these shadows. The goal is to get to a stage where you can even “dance with the shadows,” rather than deny them or try to annihilate them. You need awareness of the moments when these shadows come to interrupt, so you can enter a state where you are ready to truly listen to your speaker.

What’s this about using our ‘third ear’?

Your “third ear” enables the whole of you to listen to the whole of them. The term was coined by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, who was a pupil of Sigmund Freud. The third ear senses what is important and unspoken but is lying in the speaker’s unconscious.

Sometimes our own instincts can be more insightful than our conscious intelligence. When you’re listening, you can look into yourself and notice your own reactions, even physically, and be truly open, as if you’re hearing something for the first time rather than having an answer in advance. Rather than anticipating what someone will say, you can be attuned to what emerges instead. It means being courageous enough to allow the noise in the room that really underscores what a person is trying to say but is not expressing in words.

Let’s say you ask a member of your team to take on an additional task, and the person responds, “Sure. I’ll see if I can make that work.” Their mouth is smiling, but their eyes are not. Their words are positive, but their tone is noncommittal. You sense that they’re reluctant. You might reflect your hunch: “I’m getting a sense that you’re already overloaded and probably can’t do this, but you don’t feel comfortable with saying no directly. Is that right?” You’re checking in with them to see if your interpretations ring true.

The person can correct you or clarify. Don’t hold on too tightly to your own interpretation so you understand them better, and you both feel more connected. You’ve gone off script. And now you’re having a genuine conversation.

Using your third ear allows you to go beyond parroting what you’ve heard. It’s about checking your understanding and creating meaning together. This iterative process helps clarify both the speaker’s and your own thinking, and it ensures alignment before moving forward.

What is the value of ‘holding the silence’ in listening well?

Silence in conversations has a bad reputation. Many people perceive silence as a tactic to intimidate, to get someone to talk, especially in negotiations. Actually, a recent paper demonstrates that silence encourages more reflection. Parties become less defensive and more creative. So there are many more win–win outcomes where both sides can benefit, rather than zero-sum outcomes where if I win, you lose.

People fear awkward, hostile, or intimidating silence, but silence doesn’t have to be defined by aggression or emptiness. Instead, silence can be warm, inviting, nourishing, and empowering.

The opposite of silence is interrupting. Silence gives the speaker the opportunity to reflect, clarify, and go deeper, and it gives you, the listener, the chance to make meaning from what you’ve heard. It allows you both to begin to trust each other.

Holding silence after someone speaks gives both parties the space to think more deeply. It’s not about relinquishing control but allowing richer contributions to surface, to better inform your decision-making and create a stronger, more robust vision.

Try sprinkling a bit of silence, even a few seconds, into conversations. Notice what emerges: new thoughts, ideas, meanings, or even connections. Use the pause to become more centered. If it feels awkward, perhaps you can take a sip of water in the meeting. It’s especially important to use silence if you have more power in a relationship. It’s unexpected and powerful.

Don’t we want leaders to speak more and sell a vision than mostly listen?

Deep listening is not about absorbing information passively or relinquishing your leadership. Rather, it’s a collaborative process for both speaker and listener. What the speaker will say will be changed by the nature of your listening. Leaders who listen deeply help co-create meaning. They unlock new thinking and encourage engagement.

Ultimately, listening strengthens a leader’s ability to lead with clarity and purpose. Talking and listening are not mutually exclusive. The first step of the listening that I outline relates to creating the space, the psychological safety, so employees feel safe to share their ideas and concerns.

It doesn’t mean leaders give up their decision-making power. Instead, it ensures that when leaders give direction, it’s informed by a genuine understanding of their team’s perspective. Leaders can avoid deep listening becoming a one-way street by explicitly signaling the intention of each part of the conversation—a time to listen and a time to communicate their vision.

If you’re selling the services of your company or a product, you can start by listening. In doing so, you’ll know more about what the other party really needs and what’s important to the other side. And you can adjust your message accordingly.

In a meeting, if a leader begins by saying what they think, their team will adjust their words to align with what they just heard. And when a leader speaks first, it avoids diverse perspectives and challenges from being aired and creates groupthink.

Instead, you can listen first and then respond to their ideas. When you hold a different opinion from your speaker, listening first can be even more powerful. When people feel truly listened to, research shows, they dial down what’s called their “attitude extremity.” They hold their own ideas less forcefully. They become less defensive, more open to hearing other perspectives, including your own. So your own message is more likely to land.

So deep listening is not right for all occasions.

Deep listening is not right for every occasion. It’s helpful when you feel there’s underlying things that aren’t being expressed, and when you feel very differently from the person you’re listening to and want to understand them more deeply.

The book has great examples of the importance of keeping eye contact as you’re talking or listening to somebody. It’s akin to the role of touching. People sometimes lightly touch you on your shoulder or on your arm. Perhaps it creates a bit more connection and empathy within the normal cultural bounds. Does touch actually play a role in having a much more meaningful conversation?

What role does physicality play in deep listening?

Touch is powerful in a personal context. It can convey warmth, empathy, reassurance—even solidarity—and can signal understanding and caring, especially if the person who’s talking to you is in a moment of distress or celebration.

Given the very different dynamics in the workplace, you’re stepping into dangerous territory if you want to use touch. That’s the case especially if you’re a different gender from the person who you’re listening to, or if you’re more powerful than your speaking partner. There are ethical dimensions of deep listening in the workplace. When you deeply listen to someone, you are signaling connection without trust and without touch. You’re doing it with your eyes, your posture, your attention, and with your intention, curiosity, empathy, and respect. That creates a space of trust, where people might share thoughts and emotions they wouldn’t otherwise.

Leaders must be acutely aware of the responsibility that comes with deep listening. You must be mindful of the boundaries between what the speaker chooses to share, what they make of being encouraged to disclose, and what they might not have intended to say. If a conversation enters sensitive territory, the advice is to take a pause and check if the speaker is comfortable continuing. The pause gives the speaker the option to stop. You might need to agree to keep the information that’s already been shared with you confidential.

There are a lot of inherent power imbalances in the workplace, and deep listening should never be used to manipulate, coerce, or extract information for personal or organizational gain. Instead, deep listening is about creating genuine understanding and respect.

Engaging deeply in someone else’s experiences, especially if it’s traumatic or distressing, can be very emotionally taxing. Leaders need to be aware of their own limits and not take on more than they can handle. They need to get support or refer to professionals when necessary. I devote two chapters to the ethical dimensions of deep listening in my book because they’re so important.

Is it fair to say that you’re not a fan of multitasking?

All of us need to multitask some of the time because we’ve got so much to do. Yet giving undistracted attention and listening to someone who chooses to share with us or who’s a member of our team signals to them that we care. There are many other activities that we can engage in, but we’re choosing to listen to them. Being listened to in this way feels tremendously empowering for any individual and can allow them to think new thoughts and do new things that they might have never imagined. That feels very exciting.

I feel really enthusiastic about the idea that with my book, more people can help tackle the challenge of polarization. They will deeply listen to those around them, including those closest to them, their work colleagues, and to others who think differently.

Watch the full interview

Visit Author Talks to see the full series.

Learn more