Listening Is a Skill We Rarely Teach

You know how some conversations leave you feeling understood and others leave you feeling strangely exhausted, even if nothing “bad” was said?

That’s rarely about what was spoken. It’s about how well someone was listened to.

Listening is often treated as a personality trait, but it is a skill, one that degrades under pressure, fatigue, distraction, and cognitive overload and in modern work, those conditions are everywhere.

This blog explores why listening breaks down at work, how fatigue quietly erodes it, and why improving listening is one of the most effective ways to protect wellbeing, reduce conflict, and improve performance.

What We Mean by Listening

Most people don’t struggle to hear, they struggle to stay present.

What often happens instead of listening:

• Mentally preparing a response

• Jumping to problem-solving

• Filtering information through assumptions

• Listening for confirmation, not understanding

• Getting distracted by notifications, time pressure, or emotional reactions

Listening requires cognitive space and when that space is crowded, listening becomes shallow.

Why Listening Is So Hard When People Are Tired

Listening is cognitively expensive and it requires:

• Attention

• Emotional regulation

• Working memory

• Curiosity

• Tolerance for ambiguity

Fatigue reduces all of these, when people are tired:

• Attention narrows

• Patience drops

• Emotional reactivity increases

• We default to shortcuts

This is why tired teams don’t just communicate less, they mislisten. This means interruptions increase, assumptions multiply, misunderstandings escalate and none of it is intentional.

The Cost of Poor Listening

When listening breaks down, organisations often see:

• Repeated conversations that go nowhere

• “We’ve already discussed this” frustration

• Conflict that feels personal but isn’t

• Disengagement and silence in meetings

• Feedback that lands badly

• Leaders feeling unheard by teams and vice versa

Poor listening increases:

• Emotional labour

• Cognitive load

• Stress

• Feelings of being dismissed or misunderstood

Over time, this erodes psychological safety, one of the strongest predictors of performance and wellbeing.

Listening as a Human Factors Issue

Listening doesn’t fail because people don’t care. It fails because systems overload attention.

• Back-to-back meetings

• Multi-tasking culture

• Constant digital interruptions

• Pressure to move quickly

• “Just get to the solution” expectations

These environments make good listening neurologically harder, which means improving listening isn’t just about telling people to “do better”.It’s about designing work that allows listening to happen.

What Good Listening Actually Looks Like at Work

Good listening looks like:

• Letting someone finish without rushing

• Reflecting back what you heard

• Asking clarifying questions instead of assuming

• Pausing before responding

• Being willing to sit with uncertainty

• Not needing to fix everything immediately

This creates:

• Clarity

• Trust

• Reduced rework

• Fewer misunderstandings

• Lower emotional load

Listening well is one of the fastest ways to reduce friction at work.

Why Listening Protects Wellbeing

Feeling heard is regulating, it calms the nervous system, reduces threat responses, and increases trust and connection.

When people feel listened to:

• Stress reduces

• Engagement increases

• Energy returns

• Conflict de-escalates

Designing for Better Listening

You can’t force listening, but you can support it.

What helps:

• Better designed meetings

• Clear agendas and expectations

• Slower conversations when stakes are high

• Explicit permission to ask questions

• Reducing cognitive overload before important discussions

• Normalising “Let me check I’ve understood…”

At an individual level:

• Notice when tiredness is driving impatience

• Pause before replying

• Ask yourself: “Am I listening to understand or to respond?”

Why This Matters Now

In work there is now more information, more pressure and less space. In these conditions, listening becomes one of the first things to go and one of the most powerful things to rebuild.

Listening is a core performance skill in complex systems.

Final Thought: Listening Is an Act of Care

Listening tells people:

• You matter

• You’re safe to speak

• Your perspective counts

In tired, stretched systems, that message is powerful and often, it’s the difference between a conversation that drains energy and one that restores it.

About the Author

Written by Georgia Hodkinson, GMBPsS. Organisational Psychologist and Founder of Georgia’s PsyWork Ltd.

Georgia specialises in fatigue, cognitive load, communication, and wellbeing, helping organisations design work and conversations that support clarity, psychological safety, and sustainable performance. She is currently completing Stage 2 of the BPS Qualification in Occupational Psychology.