Inside Out and Why Nobody Listens | BJ Oldroyd
Listen With Intent to Understand: Why Your Feedback Falls Flat Without It
You’re sitting across from someone. They’re talking. You’re already formulating your response.
You’re not listening. You’re waiting.
This is the gap that kills more conversations, derails more teams, and damages more relationships than any other single thing. And it’s so common that most people don’t even notice they’re doing it. They think they’re engaged. They think they’re hearing. But there’s a difference between hearing and listening, and the difference is everything.
Inside Out shows this perfectly. There’s a scene where Riley’s parents are at the dinner table. Mom’s trying to communicate something. Dad’s sitting right there, but he’s completely checked out, his internal emotional world is a chaos of confusion, deflection, and zero actual attention. He has no idea what she said. And when she finally asks him to weigh in, the result is pure friction.
Sound familiar?
The Cost of Listening to Reply
When you listen with the intent to reply, you’ve already lost the conversation.
Here’s what’s actually happening in your brain: the moment someone starts talking, your mind is already spinning through possible responses. You’re not absorbing what they’re saying. You’re waiting for your turn. You’re planning your counterargument. You’re thinking about how you’ll defend yourself or prove your point.
In the business world, this shows up most brutally when feedback is on the table.
Someone says, “Can I give you some feedback?” and instantly, before they’ve even spoken, the receiver is in defense mode. The ego kicks in. There’s a sense of threat. The internal voice says, “I’m about to be attacked. I need to be ready.” So instead of opening up to what might actually be useful information, you close down. You get defensive. Your face gives you away (ask anyone who’s worked with someone whose emotions are written all over their face). And the person trying to help you feels it. They back off. The conversation dies.
The feedback never lands because it was never actually received.
This is ego at work. Not arrogance, just the normal human protection mechanism that says, “I need to protect my image, my competence, my worth.” And that mechanism, while sometimes useful, is a communication killer.
What Changes When You Actually Listen
When you shift from listening to reply to listening to understand, everything changes.
The first shift is internal. You stop defending and start curious. You stop planning your response and start asking questions. Real questions. Not rhetorical ones. Not “gotcha” questions. Genuine questions born from actual uncertainty about what the other person means.
This is where clarifying statements come in. If someone says something, repeat it back. “So you’re saying X, Y, Z?” If you misunderstood, they’ll correct you. If you got it right, they feel heard. Either way, you’ve just signaled that you were actually paying attention, and that alone changes the dynamic.
The second shift is external. Your body language changes. You’re not sitting there with a furrowed brow (which reads as anger or disagreement, even if you’re just concentrating hard). You’re leaning in. You’re smiling with your eyes. You’re showing up as present, not as someone waiting for your turn.
This matters more than most people realize. If the person talking to you thinks you’re zoned out, they won’t open up. They’ll give you the surface version. They’ll hold back. And you’ll never get to the actual issue.
The third shift is relational. When people feel genuinely heard, not just tolerated, but actually understood, they trust you differently. They’re willing to be vulnerable. They’ll tell you what’s really going on. And in the context of work, this is where real feedback loops happen. This is where people actually change and grow.
The Practical Moves That Actually Work
So how do you actually do this? How do you move from listening to reply to listening to understand?
Take a breath before you respond. This is not nothing. It’s the difference between reacting and responding. When you pause, actually inhale, exhale, you create space between what you heard and what you’re about to say. That space is where your actual thinking happens, not your defensive reflex. It’s where you get to choose your response instead of just spilling out whatever your ego thinks it needs to say.
Be mindful of how you’re perceived. If you’re aware that your face doesn’t hide emotion (or that you have a tendency to look checked out), then you’re already halfway to fixing it. You can’t change your baseline expression, but you can shift it in the moment. Raise your eyebrows slightly. Soften your jaw. Smile. These micro-adjustments signal presence and interest, and they actually help you be more present and interested.
Remove the business element when it serves the conversation. This doesn’t mean abandoning professionalism. It means recognizing that humans talk to humans better than managers talk to subordinates. If you’re giving feedback, it helps to first be a person. Ask about their weekend. Talk about something you have in common. Build the human bridge before you walk across the professional one. The customer success manager who talked fantasy football with a frustrated customer for ten minutes before diving into business wasn’t wasting time, he was creating the conditions for the actual conversation to work.
Ask for feedback actively. If you’re the one receiving, don’t wait for it to come to you. Ask your manager, your peer, your direct report: “What feedback do you have for me?” If they say they don’t have anything, dig deeper. “What about this specific thing? Could I be doing better here?” This does two things. It shows you’re genuinely open to hearing, which makes people more willing to actually tell you. And it puts you in control of the conversation instead of waiting for the hammer to drop.
The Deeper Truth: Ego Is the Real Barrier
All of this comes back to one thing: ego.
Not the kind of ego that makes you arrogant or cocky. Just the normal, everyday ego that wants to protect your image, your competence, your sense of being okay. That ego says: “If I listen to this feedback, it means I’m not good enough. If I admit I don’t understand, it means I’m stupid. If I ask for help, it means I’m weak.”
None of that is true. But the ego doesn’t care about truth. It cares about protection.
The problem is that this protection mechanism is invisible to you. You don’t feel like you’re being defensive. You feel like you’re being reasonable. You feel like you’re hearing them. But you’re not. You’re protecting.
The only way past this is awareness. You have to catch yourself doing it. Notice when you’re already formulating your response before they’ve finished talking. Notice when you feel that little spike of anxiety when someone says “we need to talk.” Notice when your face is doing something that’s not matching your intent.
Once you notice it, you can choose something different. You can take a breath. You can ask a real question. You can listen, actually listen, to understand what’s being said instead of just waiting for your turn to talk.
The Payoff
Here’s what happens when you actually make this shift: people open up to you differently. They trust you more. They’re willing to be vulnerable. They share what’s really going on instead of just the surface version.
In a marriage, this is the difference between fighting and communicating. In a team, this is the difference between people who feel psychologically safe enough to speak up and people who stay silent. In a customer relationship, this is the difference between a transaction and a partnership.
It all starts with one simple move: listening with the intent to understand instead of the intent to reply.
It’s not complicated. But it’s not easy either. Because it requires you to be willing to be wrong, to be surprised, to let go of control for a moment. It requires you to care more about the other person’s experience than your own defense.
But when you do it? Everything changes.
The next time someone asks to give you feedback, don’t panic. Take a breath. Ask a genuine question. Listen to the answer. Watch what happens.
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