HOW YOUR EGO PREVENTS HEARING

For high quality coaching, you need high quality listening. And to achieve high quality listening, you have to push beyond the “normal” kind of passive, distracted listening that plagues us. You have to push far beyond it and learn how to actively and accurately listen to someone in a deep and focused way. It’s this deep listening that’s the key to transformational coaching. Yet as noted in this series, these are numerous things that can prevent this development. Among them is your ego. In his 2009 book, Mojo, Marshall Goldsmith writes about this. He speaks about the problem of having “the need to be smart.” He describes the problem in these words: “One of the most pernicious impulses among successful people is our overwhelming need to prove how smart we are. We become poor listeners—so invested in presenting self as smart that we believe we don’t need to hear everything that people tell us; we’re smart enough to tune out people and still succeed.” (2009, p. 66)

In a similar vein, Danny Tuckwood, Meta-Coach in South Africa, wrote after Morpheus #34, Why People Can’t hear.