Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

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Andy Earle: You are listening to Talking to Teens where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We are talking today about failures to listen to our teenagers and what those failures might be costing us.

Interestingly, 96% of people think that they are good listeners.

And only 2% of people have had any formal training on how to listen more effectively.

But yet nearly everybody agrees that listening is a very important life skill.

The type of listening that we're talking about here is transformational listening that goes beneath the words that your teenager is saying to really get to the heart of what they might not even be able to articulate.

Our guest [00:01:00] today, Christine Miles, is a listening expert who leads workshops all over the country and is the author of numerous books, including What is it Costing You Not to Listen? Christine, welcome to The Talking to Teens Podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Christine Miles: I'm very excited to be here I love serving parents and children, so it's really a privilege.

Andy Earle: Well, you have been doing all kinds of workshops and events and books for a long time, focused around listening. We spend so much time thinking about how to say the right thing, deliver our message in the right way. But the other aspect we don't necessarily give as much attention as we should.

Christine Miles: We do not need to perfect what we say. That's what we've been so focused on. If we say it right, it'll just mean it's communicated well.

I say let's flip the script and let's learn to listen instead to understand. Then we don't have to be perfect in how we say something.

[00:02:00] So at least devote more time to it.

Because right now there's zero years of education formally in elementary to high school. And quite frankly in corporate training. Worldwide, only 2% of people have any kind of listening training.

So that is a huge gap in my opinion. The good news is listening has always helped me succeed. It's the only reason I've been successful at anything. I often say I'm not the most naturally talented individual. I'm smart enough, athletic enough, skilled enough, but not great just naturally at anything except for this ability to listen.

And it has basically supercharged every other ability that I've had. Including on the sports field. Which people may not really think about listening on the sports field, but listen to your coaches, be able to take feedback, being able to read the game, understand your teammates, how to motivate yourself and others.

These are all parts of listening. I really overachieved there as well. As early as high school, I knew that was happening.

The reason I learned to listen was largely because of my mother. I grew up with a mom who [00:03:00] had mental health issues, stemming from the loss of her mother at a very early age.

She, her mother died from childbirth. A deeper story there. So my mother, she was motherless her whole life, but also felt like she was the cause of her mother's death. Complicated problem. And my role in the family was really to understand the pain that most people didn't see.

'Cause my mother was very exuberant and beautiful and warm and loving. And what people saw on the surface was not what she experienced below her surface. And they had trouble reconciling that beautiful outward appearance with the sadness below her surface. I was very well aware of it and learned to pay attention to that and understand things probably a little bit beyond my scope at a young age because I learned the skill of listening.

So it came from a place of difficulty in some ways, but also it really gave birth to a pretty amazing gift in my life.

Andy Earle: You talk about transformational listening. There's a line I really like about listening differently. It goes beyond being empathetic to [00:04:00] truly understanding another's experience, understanding them and their story. Really seeing them hearing not only what is said, but also what's not said.

Christine Miles: Yeah.

Andy Earle: That's deep.

Christine Miles: It is deep. But we all know what it feels like when we have that experience. So unfortunately it's more rare than we'd like it to be. And more often than not, when I ask people, when was the last time somebody didn't listen to you?

That's a really easy thing to conjure up. It's harder to conjure up when did somebody really listen in this different or transformative way. But it's profound and is what I call the gift of understanding. I've made it simple, but it's not something we inherently know how to do.

Most of us, because of years of not being taught to listen and just being told to listen, we think about listening in a very rudimentary way. Pay attention. Let me show you that I'm listening rather than really finding the meaning of what is said. And that's really what listening is about: is finding out what the person meant and helping them figure out what they meant.

[00:05:00] That's a transformative experience. And there's not simple processes out there to really help people learn how to do that. Part of that is we're not socializing kids with emotional language. Part of finding the meaning means you have to find out about the feelings, not just the facts.

This is why listening education's so important. We need to socialize them and help them learn the language of listening and how to find those things out from an early age so it's not so daunting.

Because by the time we're adults, we're going: is it okay to ask that? Versus: how do you feel today, Andy? That's not an intrusive question, but by the time we're adults and years of not asking, we believe it's intrusive rather than an actual gift of, I wanna know you and understand you.

Andy Earle: You have impactful stories throughout the book. One comes from your college experiences on a field hockey team. You have this impression of yourself that you're slow getting your feet going when you need to jump into a new direction. But then [00:06:00] you really start to question that when you spend some time with a friend.

Why was that impactful, was that a story to include book on listening?

Christine Miles: I was a really good field hockey player. But I had stick work. For anybody that knows field hockey, it's all about the stick.

All sports are about footwork, but I had enough stick skills that I got around it. I was fast enough, but getting started was really hard. I'm tall, I have long legs. I don't look like most field hockey players in the United States, which is more shorter and quicker muscles.

So one summer I was with a friend of mine who was a sprinter on the track team, and she said, let's go out and train. Sure, why not? We got to the field and I went, what was I thinking? She put us on the the end line and said, we're gonna do 25 yard sprints.

And she said, 1, 2, 3, go. She was almost at the 25 and I was barely off the end line. And I felt ridiculous. And she said, you don't know how to run. And I went, what are you talking about? I've been running all my life. And she said, you absolutely do not know how to run. Let me show you how to set up, how to make the quick start, where to put your hand, how to place your fingers. [00:07:00] It was very detailed and very specific. And she was right. Nobody ever showed me.

And I thought, that's exactly what we're doing with listening. We're just telling people to show up. We treat listening like walking. You have two legs, you'll learn to walk. You have two ears, you'll learn to listen. But hearing and listening, and especially listening differently, are not the same thing.

So we need to give them the tools to do it in a systematic way that works rather than just guessing, like I was.

Andy Earle: A powerful idea from the book, something you refer to as a My Purpose story. What is that? How do you find that or help someone to discover that?

Christine Miles: We know a lot more now about this thing called emotional intelligence.

How are we smart a way that we can use our emotions and our thoughts to really make sense out of things? And Daniel Goldman did a lot of research. He's kind of the guru of emotional intelligence. And 90% of star performance comes from emotional intelligence. So for all the parents that are raising their kids to go to the best school and to get the best grades [00:08:00] and to do well academically, it's so important. And it's only a sliver of what you really need to be to be really successful.

It isn't the straight A student that does the best in the workplace. It's the a, b, C student that knows how to read the room, that knows how to understand things that make sense, how things persevere through adversity, et cetera, et cetera. So we need to teach both. And listening is not just about listening to others.

It's about listening to yourself whether you're listening to yourself or others, this is a foundational skill to emotional intelligence. It's what I call the foundation of the house. When you learn to be more self-aware and you learn to be more aware of others, you're building the foundation of what the emotional intelligence really means.

Young kids aren't necessarily gonna know this at this age, but by the time we become young adults, most of us already have a purpose and why we do something. We don't know how to talk about it, define it. And it's part of how you start to know yourself is what makes you tick.

What do you love? [00:09:00] So My Purpose story is really how to tap into that. My story, I told you a little bit about that with my mother, but I always say, if I just had one word to describe why I do what I do, the word is understanding. Whatever I do personally or professionally, I am lit up by understanding things, understanding others. Every bit of work I've done in my career and what I do personally, fundamentally, that's at the heart of it.

And when we can help others tap into that, it helps them really lead, live, and work with more purpose.

Andy Earle: That's powerful.

Clients often say to you they don't mind when you tell them them something about themselves that they don't want to hear. But you say it comes down to listening how does that work?

Christine Miles: Yeah. None of us really like to hear what we don't want to hear. Bad news about ourselves, or feedback.

We might be open to it, but it's hard. I always say that listening to understand, it earns you the right to do all the things you want to do. Salespeople wanna sell. They go into a client meeting, not just to make friends. They go in to [00:10:00] sell a product or a solution.

Now, I believe most people wanna be helpful in that situation. They're not just in it for the money. There's certainly exceptions to that. But what we tend to do is try to help too soon. Or we try to advise too soon. Or if we have a spouse or a child, when they have a problem, we wanna fix it. We wanna problem solve.

It's hard to see others in pain. And sometimes as a leader, as a parent, a friend, we have to tell people something they don't necessarily wanna hear, for their own good. And how do you do that? Most of us just jump right to it.

We just start telling. And it's well intended most of the time, but it's ineffective because, principally. People don't like to be told what to do.

Andy Earle: But doesn't it make it better if you say, don't take this the wrong way first before you say it. That's okay, right? Because you've primed them.

Christine Miles: Well, I usually feel worse.

Andy Earle: Don't get mad going into that. Hey, now. Now don't get mad about this, but I just need to tell you something.

Christine Miles: We think that helps, right? We're still gonna hit 'em between the eyes. I don't like don't get mad. Of course I'm mad.

Andy Earle: Really, whatever is coming I know I'm not gonna like it.

Christine Miles: [00:11:00] Exactly. I hate you even more. The idea is more, let me make sure I get you before I tell you what I think you should do or what I think about what's happening. And

We're not taught how to do that either. Because again, we wanna be helpful. But when we get somebody, it earns us the right to tell them something they don't wanna hear.

I had a guy on a call, this was a couple years ago now, I said, look, I gotta tell you something right now that I'm pretty sure you're not gonna like. And he braced himself and I told him, and he goes, wow, I don't know why that doesn't bother me. And I said, well, I spent 15 minutes making sure I understood you very carefully before I dared to go there.

And he goes, I knew I was talking a lot, but I didn't realize how much more comfortable I felt because you allowed me to go there. He felt understood before I told him.

So that's why it's not an accident. You have to earn trust in a different way to really be able to tell somebody something they don't want to hear.

Andy Earle: How do you get people to tell you what's really underneath what they're talking about? I love this line in the book, you talk about how people never tell you the whole story at [00:12:00] first. There's always more there. How do you help them, feel comfortable going deeper?

Christine Miles: A lot of people ask me if, or they'll tell me, because 96% of people think they're good listeners. By the way. That's the stat. And it's still boggles my mind. That's not even possible. 96% of us are good at anything, let alone listening. But again, we don't have a measuring stick for that that's familiar. So we're not really basing it on. It's kinda like our driving. I think driving slower is better than driving faster. So I rate myself better than you do if you drive faster. So there's all that.

I ask people, should I, do you want vent or do you want me to give you some advice? What do you want me to do with this listening thing? And I'm thinking, they don't necessarily know. If I knew that I don't need you to listen if I had all that figured out.

So our job as the listener, and this is a paradigm shift, is to guide the speaker to tell their story. Because people are by and large pretty bad storytellers.

We're not organized in how we do it. This is a skill we're also not taught, even though we love to learn from stories and we're wired to listen to them. [00:13:00] We're not really good at telling them. So the person usually starts somewhere in the middle. And I'll give you the perfect example for parents.

Son, how was your day today? Good. That's a common answer. It was good. It was okay. And parents get frustrated 'cause they don't talk more. Well, you were just dropped right in the middle of their movie. You didn't know it. You have to learn to organize your child to tell you their story.

So good is the middle of the movie. And we need to get all the movie back to the beginning. Movies have different parts, just like stories do. And when you're listening, you're always listening to a story. So we need to know how to uncover the story like a good journalist does.

Journalists don't go in and the person goes, here's the story for you. Typically they have to find it. Listening is the same as journalism that way. When we're trying to understand somebody, we have to navigate that path to understanding.

Andy Earle: You have done all these exercises with people coming up with the right questions to uncover that story.

A lot of times our instinct on what questions to ask to [00:14:00] uncover someone's story are wrong. What are the misguided strategies that we might use that are not necessarily helpful?

Christine Miles: Well, here's another way we've been tricked. Because one of the things about listening that we're told is be curious. And curiosity means good questions.

And then we spend years academically being taught how to ask questions that are smart. We're told asking good questions means that we are good listeners. The problem is that questions interfere with listening just as much as they can help. Because we shape the story by the questions we ask.

I live in Philadelphia, and there's a road called the School Kill. And it's notorious for just being log jammed all the time because there's nowhere to go. If there's something on the side of the road, we are done. So when you're in traffic on the school pill, you're thinking, I know there's an accident ahead.

Waze is telling me that. I could see that. I'm not gonna be the person that rubber necks when I get up there. And I'm not gonna slow this traffic down. And what happens? We [00:15:00] get there and the first thing we do is turn to see what happened and we become part of the problem and slowing everything down.

That's the analogy to questioning. When we are asking very specific questions, we're just chasing what's interesting to us and what we're curious about, rather than what really matters to the person talking. It can distract the speaker. It can take them off the path.

It takes them on all these side trails and they get lost in what we call the conversational woods.

Andy Earle: You've found that limiting your questions, instead of trying to come up with many creative questions gets you better results.

Christine Miles: It absolutely does. And most great listeners will tell you, ask open-ended questions. this is a best practice. You don't need 20, you just need a few. That's why the six, we call it the compass because it's how you guide and point the speaker in the right direction, and those six questions help you navigate the path to understanding. And they're all open-ended.

Take me back to the beginning. Then what happened? How'd that make you feel? Tell me more. [00:16:00] The one that sometimes confuses people: Hmm. That's the fifth. Because that's almost the nodding version of Tell me more. And then, it sounds like you felt, and then you fill in the blank of the emotion. So four fact, two feeling questions.

You're guaranteed to get both parts of the story, and you don't have to think about it. You don't have to think what's the best open-ended question to ask. Just let the questions do the work.

It's really easy to miss the person when we're listening. Because we focus on the situation so much. And it's not our fault, it's because we're confused. You know what happens when you go to a movie 10, 15 minutes late. Or even at your home, if you start in, you're confused.

Well, who are the characters? Where am I? What's going on? And it's annoying. And it's easy to lose interest if you don't get engaged really quickly. So we know that we can catch up with the movie, but in a conversation we're confused because we're dropped in the middle. We don't really know what's going on.

So we're disoriented and we're trying to figure it out. In the midst of that, we often lose the person because we don't know how to get [00:17:00] back on track. That compass will get you back on track. We call it the compass again because it helps guide the speaker, so you're never lost in the conversation.

All you need is one of those questions to get back on track. I talked to somebody last week and what I really appreciated and noticed was when they were confused, they used it as a mechanism to realize they needed to go back. Instead of going forward. And most of us, when we're confused, we get agitated. And we start to get frustrated with the person talking, rather than to seeing that as a signal that I have to guide that person to get me unconfused.

Yeah.

Andy Earle: I find a lot of value in your book. I would highly encourage people to check out a copy of What is it Costing You not to Listen? Can you talk about where people could go to follow updates from you or to learn more about your work ?

Christine Miles: You can get the book on Amazon or any major outlets. Go to the listening [00:18:00] path.com. Your listeners can download the Compass if they just wanna learn more about that. It's the first thing that pops up on the website. That's a freebie.

Andy Earle: Amazing. I would highly encourage people to check it out and engage further. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today and share all this with us.

Christine Miles: Thank you for having me, Andy. I really appreciate it.

Andy Earle: We're here with Christine Miles talking about our failures to listen to our teenagers and what those failures might be costing us, and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Christine Miles: And in our brains, we are polluting the story that we listen to or hear all the time because our own subconscious brain is telling us to do everything but listen.

We are thinking of our responses. We are reminiscing about the stories that what I've just said reminded you of. Or I'm agitated because my kid's just told me he got points detected from his homework. So our [00:19:00] brain is wiring and firing and is polluting the story that we hear. If somebody gives you that, sort of, yes, not really. You're getting that response that really means no, you gotta keep listening and go deeper.

Like, what are we missing? What aren't we getting and understanding from them? We're, skimming the surface on so many things because we don't know how to do it.

People feel. Whether they're at business or at school or at work or wherever, they're feeling. So, if we're not dealing with that, we're missing a big, big part of the story.

Andy Earle: Want to Want to hear the full interview? Sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable, and your membership supports the work we do here at Talking to Teens. You can now sign up directly on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.