Deep Listening Separates Understanding From Agreement

Emily Kasriel says many people avoid listening to ideas they find disturbing because they fear being contaminated by them—or forced to change. That fear can turn disagreement into a contest of insistence: each person explains themselves more loudly, hoping the other will finally understand. Kasriel calls the equation of listening with agreement a “dangerous myth.”

She traces the confusion to an early lesson. Kasriel remembers a teacher shouting, “Listen to me!” as a command to obey and be quiet, not an invitation to understand. As adults, we may still experience openness to conflicting ideas as a threat: Will we lose ourselves, or be forced to change our minds? Avoiding those encounters can feel safer, but it deepens divisions in families, communities, and nations.

Deep listening, in her account, means trying to understand what another person means without treating that effort as endorsement. It applies to ordinary relationships as well as political, cultural, and generational divides. Kasriel says the approach draws on her work as a journalist and executive coach, as well as ideas from scholars, psychologists, and peacebuilders. She describes it as an eight-step approach, with examples that include noticing one’s own reactions, staying curious, and making space for the other person to speak.

Kasriel learned the cost of not listening while reporting in Ethiopia early in her career. She had secured an interview with Meles Zenawi, then president and later prime minister, at a time when his opponents were tortured or disappeared. Zenawi wanted to discuss record maize, sorghum, and barley production in a country with a history of famine. Kasriel kept returning to human rights.

She does not say that challenging him was wrong; holding the president to account was essential. The failure, she says, was that her questions became a way to confront him rather than understand him. Zenawi withdrew behind his desk and ended the interview early. Kasriel walked away empty-handed. Her point is not that a journalist should set aside hard questions, but that curiosity can keep a conversation open enough to pursue them.

That experience also informed her view that people who regard themselves as rational are shaped by judgment, emotion, and personal history. In conflict, each side can cling to the sense that it occupies the moral high ground. Kasriel argues that listening across disagreement is difficult partly because people may be protecting their own values and identities, not merely defending a position.

In Latvia, where Soviet rule left a traumatic history, tensions ran high after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kasriel describes threats of reinvasion as real and suspicion falling on Russian-speaking Latvians, roughly one in three people in the country. She was invited to train Latvians and Russian speakers to practice listening across that divide.

One participant, Ilona, found the approach unnatural at first. Kasriel says Ilona cautiously began using the eight steps, including taking time to listen to herself and notice what her neighbor might bring up in her. She had to accept that she did not yet know what the neighbor thought. Perhaps the neighbor reminded her of a bullying older sister, leaving Ilona feeling eight years old, powerless, and trapped. Perhaps she noticed herself judging the neighbor as selfish. Or she saw that she was projecting onto the neighbor qualities she found difficult to accept in herself.

Ilona tried to notice discomfort, judgments, and possible projections before letting them dictate what she heard. She then attempted to set her own reactions aside enough to attend to what the other person wanted to share. She did not manage this every time; some exchanges still left her defensive and tight-jawed. But noticing that response gave her room to try something simple: silence. A warm, empathetic pause, Kasriel says, can give the other person space to reflect and the listener time to make sense of their perspective.

Kasriel also calls attention to what she terms a “third ear”: listening for what matters but remains unspoken. She places it, figuratively, next to the heart. In Ilona’s case, Kasriel says, the neighbor may have felt safer and begun to trust her, allowing a deeper story to emerge.

Kasriel says a global research project with the BBC and the British Council recruited more than 1,000 people across 100 countries to train in deep listening. She reports that participants felt safer expressing themselves and more connected, and that they also began questioning their own attitudes. She has also seen other research showing that people soften their beliefs when they feel truly heard.

Her example is Hera, a Lebanese Muslim who told Kasriel she had once avoided Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Hera had judged some families for allowing girls to marry at 11 or 13, seeing their lives as not properly Lebanese. Her shift came when she understood emotionally, not only intellectually, that listening to people with different perspectives was not a surrender or betrayal of her values.

Hera now works each Tuesday with teenagers at a school for Syrian refugees. Listening to her students has helped her understand that more than one perspective is possible. She remains passionately opposed to child marriage and is trying to deepen her understanding while staying true to that conviction.

Kasriel invites people to choose someone who sees the world differently—not the most extreme case, but someone whose disagreement genuinely hurts—and try to listen with as much curiosity and openness as possible. She advises noticing discomfort and resistance, and whether it is possible to move past them, even awkwardly.

For Kasriel, repeated encounters of this kind have made her feel more alive by opening the possibility of connection across differences. The aim is respect for another person’s dignity and full humanity, whatever they stand for.