Two Ears, One Mouth: Creating Space for Others & Reflections on a Toxic Work Culture
"You have two ears and one mouth for a reason, Molly"
“You have two ears and one mouth for a reason, Molly” - my loving dad, circa 1991-2010
Historically speaking, listening was never my strong suit.
As a kid, this wasn’t all that abnormal, or problematic. Apart from my parent’s frustration, no one was protesting an outgoing little girl who wasn’t actively listening to the other party. As an adult, though? Not so cute.
The last word? It was mine. The answer to the question you didn’t even ask me? I had it. The person that inconsiderately and enthusiastically interrupted you mid-sentence? That was me. Adorable, right?
Sigh.
There was a soft but nagging voice in my head during the conversations I felt passionately about; that voice couldn’t help but steer me wrong or distract me.
Not yet, Molly, they’re still talking!
You can’t forget this response—it’s perfect. Keep repeating it until there’s an opportunity to interject…
Another point, okay, remember that one, too. You definitely need to get that one in…
I was hearing the words of others, but I wasn’t really listening to or digesting them, only the ones inside my own head. Not only that, but no one spoke faster than me.
“It’s not a competition of how many words you can get out before the other person has time to speak, Molly,” my dad would tell me during my teenage years.
Then with years lived, life experiences, increased emotional intelligence, and eventually less alcohol consumption, this began improving. But in 2005, I started a job listening to pre-recorded sales calls to analyze and critique salespeople, providing written feedback. I was forced to listen (this is how I made money in college), but I was only listening so I could assess. So I could judge what the person was and wasn’t saying correctly.
That was a close-ended question. The customer can literally just say NO to that! Ask open-endedly, and give them options to choose from to help lead them to the answer you want to hear!
This rep is SO monotone, come on! Ramp up that enthusiasm! Your voice inflection can be better than that! Project confidence!
It didn’t all sound like that in my head, but most of it did, especially after I had wracked my brain time and time again in search of various ways to articulate the same message to uncooperative recipients. Then I would change the tone from my analytical inner dialogue and focus on what the agent did well, so I could give kudos first and foremost to set myself up for easing into constructive criticism.
It was super judgy. But it paid well, and I could do it from anywhere back when remote jobs didn’t really exist. The outgoing little girl of my youth was frothing; so much to say! So much feedback to give! It fueled that childish desire to “be right” from my earlier years.
This remote work evolved into in-person sales training, teaching salespeople in the automotive industry in Chicago. I also worked in Milwaukee, Detroit, Boston, Virginia and Florida. In those days, the clientele consisted mostly of middle-aged men who’d rather bet on my bra size than sit down to hear my presentation. Presently, the staff in the Business Development Centers (BDC’s) mostly handle the work rather than salespeople, and these departments are often filled with twenty-something-aged women. In comparison, the lack of stress in training clientele nowadays is like a wet dream for me, whereas ten to fifteen years ago, I was the wet dream.
Like the blue pantsuit, honey. It says confidence and authority… especially behind such a big desk. There’s something about a woman in power that gets me goin’…
Were they always receptive or desiring the training their employer signed them up for? Fuck no. That’s comical. With the pushback I received given the nature of the work along with my age and gender, I had to be on the ball: right every time, setting myself up so these guys couldn’t easily object, but if they did, I would overcome their objection with confidence, clarity, and even an over explanation just to cover my bases. Without missing a beat, or taking an extra breath, I got them bought in and in my back pocket.
The repugnant rapid speech and distracting inner dialogue of my past became the spinach to my Popeye.
It was my job to have all the answers, which fed that formerly silenced little voice in my head that armed me with all the right words and laid out my next three moves before the other person was even done voicing their initial thought. Would I help people improve their sales skills and job performance? Absolutely. But I wouldn’t get there unscathed.
You wore your hair up today. I like to see a little neck.
Even just ten to fifteen years ago, at least in the midwestern automotive industry, these inappropriate and blatantly sexist daily encounters were expected to be shrugged off. In the face of them, I remained an inwardly sensitive and emotional being, but adopted a cloak of armor.
2014 - A moment in the office
My four inch heels clicked with conviction in the oversized showroom. On the inside I was screaming “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” with angst and resentment. On the outside my voice projected confidence and authority with a rigid tone as I looked out on my cliquish, lackadaisical audience: “Let’s go ahead and get rolling.”
I felt like I was living in a bad 90’s sitcom.
I became bitter, resenting the work and struggling to compartmentalize Molly the trainer from… Molly the rest of the time. Eventually, I wore the façade both in and out of work.
Let me get that for you, miss… What time is your lunch hour?
These former years are jam-packed with lessons and offer explanations for harbored resentments, anxieties, and defensive reactions. Eventually, these experiences along with my dad’s cancer diagnosis fueled me to make changes, trying on different hats, dabbling in graduate school, and living a life of travel. These moves served me well and were distraction enough from the dissatisfaction in continuing the same work to some degree throughout all of those years.
Once I relocated back to the states and my travels ceased, it was time to revisit my means of money again since I would need to increase my workload to pay for life within four walls and the new lifestyle that came with that. On a whim during the pandemic, while consulting work had run dry anyway, I signed up for a life coaching class.
The debate to pivot from consulting to coaching had long been on my mind or even to do similar consulting work but in a different industry. For over a year, life coaching classes appealed to me and went into the “saved for later” folders both on my devices and in my mind. This was for fear of judgments around the stigma of “Life Coaching.” Was it bullshit? I finally pulled the trigger in the summer of 2021.
The majority of the reflections I’ve revealed here about listening and having all of the answers were born from that class.
There were heaps of takeaways from the class, mostly in general kindness, respect, and ethics throughout facilitating genuine communication. The golden rule in life coaching is the opposite of everything I had been taught in the workforce yet the same as everything I had conversely strived for outside of the office: Don't have the answers. Pair that with my deeply embedded, toxic association between being wrong and enabling gender inequality, having previously been the only woman in power out of fifty general managers, sales managers, and finance and insurance managers for a major corporation.
I had some work to do.
Life coaching is all about making space for the client to come to their own conclusion. In contrast, the sales training I’ve been referring to, much of the work is about teaching the client how to lead the customer to the conclusion they want. Though the questioning in life coaching is also open-ended and the goal is to lead the client, the whole point is to avoid clouding the result with biases—personal or professional experience, advice, stories of similar scenarios, etc (for those who have been to therapy, some of this will sound familiar).
As you might imagine, this was a fucking nightmare for me.
With some practice, I thrived. Rather than offer suggestions, I would ask insightful questions that prompted the client to consider and voice their options and solutions and to identify layers beneath the surface of what they thought the issue at hand was. I became comfortable with pauses, even long pauses, recognizing the importance of allowing space for further thought and reflection by the client. To my surprise, when I left this space open rather than respond right away and fill the void with another question, the client would continue talking after the pause.
I had quite simply never allowed for that level of space before. I get enthusiastic and am pretty excitable which affects my tone and pace.
But I learned how to create more meaning and impact in the conversation by utilizing the space and giving it room to expand, even to the point where it seems uncomfortable.
I gotta say, this really blew my fucking mind.
It was as though I began approaching every conversation with curiosity. First, curious as to how the other person genuinely felt and how they could help themselves, as well as how they came to their opinions, and what I could learn from it all.
Rather than being stuck in a loop of reassurance and solutions as I had formerly been, I learned to listen each time as if I was absolutely certain the other person knew something that I didn’t.
Sure, every single human knows something that I don’t, and the same undoubtedly goes for you, but to engage with that in mind, with complete humility, is a whole other level of curiosity.
Humility has also never been my forte.
It would seem that, most of the time, people don’t want advice, even when they voice a problem to you. They do, however, want you to listen.
If someone wants solutions presented to them, they will ask. Being an expectant mother, and generally someone who reveals a whole lot of shit about their life to other people, I’m no stranger to unsolicited advice.
It may seem that I’m on board with the life coaching profession and the class I took. But just wait a minute, why should someone pay me to ask them open-ended, thoughtful questions? I’m not sure they should.
This is where the waters of life coaching become murky for me.
I remember presenting the question of “why me?” to one of the training coaches. Why should someone, let’s say, hire me to be a life coach who specializes in weight and body image? She answered with “why not you?” Her point was to bring imposter syndrome to light, and my point was that there are people out there who are certified in health coaching, have had personal experience with eating disorders, fitness training, or body image issues, and that I’m not one of them.
Marketing myself as such didn’t settle well with me (and I have a degree in marketing) whereas the idea of marketing myself as a business coach or business development coach or sales coach, having seventeen years of experience in those matters, settled well. I simply refuse to believe that there is no relevance there, but I watched others in the class soak it up like sponges. For me, the imposter syndrome answer might be encouraging and uplifting and light and fluffy for many, but I perceived it as a sales ploy to get buy in.
So why choose a niche if I can’t utilize my experience in that field anyway? The answer is marketing. Why do so many successful, even famous, coaches specialize in areas they have heaps of experience in if they can’t give advice, offer solutions, or voice personal experience? In addition to time in the industry being a selling point, the answer is that they do give advice; they share resources, information, tools, etc.
It seems to me that these successful coaches are consultants with industry specific knowledge that is relevant to the client (gained from time in industry), have training in questions of discovery and motivational interviewing (gained from a life coaching class), and are equipped with interpersonal skills like emotional intelligence, active listening, and empathy (gained from life experience).
When voicing both my interest and hesitations to a dear friend prior to taking this class, she told me that she believed the adversity I had faced in recent years along with other life experiences stood to help others. My dad once said he thought I could one day use everything I’d been through to help others. I believe these things could be true, but through writing about and sharing those lived experiences.
The class as a whole, however, did end up being more worth it than not. I answered eighteen-month-long questions about the life coaching role and industry while growing confidence in my ability to pivot industries in my consulting work. Just as there is always the potential to learn something new from any conversation, there is always the potential to gain knowledge from a class of any kind, whether it be in a new or existing industry for the learner. Most importantly, given my new listening skills, in the time following the class I had some of the most meaningful conversations with loved ones that I had in years, if not ever.
Resources on listening