Lesson 6: How to Listen Without Making It About You
Audio Transcript
One of the most profound and often overlooked acts of emotional intelligence is learning how to listen—truly listen—without shifting the focus back to yourself. It sounds simple enough. Let someone talk. Don’t interrupt. Nod occasionally. But genuine, present, ego-free listening is much rarer than we think. What most of us have learned, often unintentionally, is how to wait our turn. How to appear engaged while silently preparing our next response. How to scan for relevance—what does this mean for me, how do I relate, what’s my story here? But when you’re listening with the primary goal of finding your own entry point into the conversation, you’re not really listening. You’re positioning. You’re managing. You’re holding the emotional spotlight while pretending to shine it on someone else.
This isn’t about blame. It’s human nature to want to relate. To want to connect through shared experience. To bridge emotional gaps by saying, “I know exactly what you mean, that happened to me too.” And in some contexts, that can be comforting. But if we’re not careful, we can slowly begin turning every conversation into a mirror, rather than a window. And when someone is in pain, struggling, grieving, or even just reflecting on something vulnerable, what they often need most is for the spotlight to stay where it is—on them. Not as an act of ego, but as an act of care.
Listening without making it about you means staying in someone else’s emotional experience without rushing to insert your own. It means resisting the impulse to compare, to advise, to fix, or to respond with your own anecdote. This doesn’t mean you can’t share at all—it just means you let the moment belong to the other person first. And for many people, that pause is incredibly hard. Because sitting with someone else’s emotion, especially when it evokes something in you, can be deeply uncomfortable. But that discomfort is where presence begins.
I once worked with a woman named Lynn who had a teenage daughter, Amanda. Amanda had been going through a difficult time socially—feeling left out by friends, navigating anxiety, and questioning her identity. One day Amanda came home and opened up in tears about something that had happened at school. Before Amanda even finished her story, Lynn jumped in with her own. “I remember when I was your age,” she said, “I didn’t have many friends either. High school is hard. You just have to push through.” From Lynn’s perspective, she was trying to comfort her daughter. She wanted Amanda to feel less alone. But from Amanda’s perspective, the moment slipped away. She shut down. She nodded and said, “Yeah,” and that was it. The opening had closed.
When Lynn and I talked about the interaction, she was heartbroken. She had wanted to connect, not deflect. But she realized that her instinct to share came more from her own discomfort than from Amanda’s need. She hadn’t actually stayed with Amanda’s emotion long enough to understand it. She had reached for her own story as a way to manage her helplessness. And that’s something many of us do, especially when we care. We think we’re helping by relating. But sometimes, helping means saying less. Holding more. Letting silence do the work.
There’s a kind of listening that changes people—not because it solves anything, but because it allows someone to feel fully seen. No redirection. No quick resolutions. Just, “I hear you. I’m with you. I’m staying here.” That kind of listening feels like emotional oxygen. And yet, it’s often the hardest kind to offer, especially when what the other person is saying activates something in you.
This brings us to an important psychological truth: sometimes, we make it about us without realizing it because we haven’t dealt with our own emotional backlog. If someone tells us they feel invisible, and that taps into our own unresolved wounds of being unseen, we might either rush in to compare or defensively try to distinguish ourselves from the feeling. Either way, we leave the moment. Emotional intelligence asks us to become aware of our own emotional triggers—not to suppress them, but to separate them from someone else’s story. To be able to say, “This is bringing up something in me, but I can tend to that later. Right now, this isn’t about me.”
This kind of self-regulation in conversation is a discipline. It takes practice. It means noticing when you’re about to pivot the conversation and choosing instead to ask a deeper question. It means hearing a friend talk about their stress and resisting the urge to match it with your own. It means letting someone express their sadness without trying to cheer them up immediately. That’s not cold. That’s presence. That’s honoring the integrity of someone else’s experience.
I once had a colleague named Mateo, one of the most emotionally attuned people I’ve ever worked with. During one of our faculty meetings, a team member shared something difficult—she was going through a divorce, and it was affecting her focus and energy at work. Most people responded with quick condolences, a few generic reassurances. But Mateo simply said, “Do you want to talk about how that’s showing up for you right now?” He didn’t offer advice. He didn’t talk about his own experience with heartbreak. He just made space. And the way she opened up afterward was stunning. It wasn’t that Mateo had the perfect words. It was that he had no need to center himself. His focus stayed entirely on her emotional landscape.
That’s the goal here—not to erase your own thoughts or experiences, but to know when they belong in the conversation and when they don’t. When someone comes to you with something real and vulnerable, they’re not asking you to match it. They’re asking you to witness it. They’re asking for emotional space, not emotional competition.
This applies not just in moments of crisis, but in everyday conversation. When someone shares an accomplishment, a fear, a confusion, or a dream, notice what your instinct is. Do you immediately think of your own experience? Do you relate before you reflect? Do you listen to understand—or to respond? There’s no shame in recognizing these patterns. But the work of emotional intelligence is to slow down enough to notice them. To choose presence over performance.
And yes, this requires emotional maturity. It requires the ability to feel your own emotions without needing to express them right away. It requires the humility to let someone else’s moment take up space without feeling erased. It requires trust that your voice matters even when it’s not the one speaking. And it often requires unlearning what many of us were taught—that connection means similarity, and that empathy means always saying, “Me too.”
Empathy can sound like “me too,” but it can also sound like “tell me more.” It can sound like “what was that like for you?” or “how are you holding that right now?” It’s not that your story doesn’t matter. It does. But not every conversation is the place for it. Emotional intelligence means discerning the difference.
As we close this lesson, I want to invite you into a simple but powerful reflection. Think back to a time when someone truly listened to you. Not just nodded politely, not just mirrored your experience—but really stayed with you, without judgment or interruption. How did that feel? And now think of a time when you tried to open up and the other person immediately made it about themselves. What shifted in you? What closed off? These are the moments that teach us what presence actually feels like—and how we can offer it more often to the people around us.
You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be present. Listening without making it about you doesn’t mean erasing your voice. It means creating room for someone else’s. It means offering the rare and healing gift of attention that asks for nothing in return. And in a world where so many people feel unheard, that kind of listening isn’t just emotionally intelligent—it’s revolutionary.
I’ll see you in the next lesson.