The Work of Listening

I was in a recent meeting with a colleague when he (politely) stopped me mid-sentence. He said something like, “Hey, I’ve noticed you pronounce the word moment the way my wife does. Maybe it’s a Southern Utah thing.”

I blinked. Then I asked the only reasonable follow-up question: “How should I be saying moment?” He said it again. I told him he was saying the same word twice. So, he said it again. Same result. I started down the road to frustration: I genuinely could not hear the difference. I honestly thought we were saying the exact same word the exact same way. He remained patient as my frustration amped up.

There are plenty of things I’m genuinely terrible at (you’ll not be inviting me onto any of your sports teams, you’ll likely beat me at Words with Friends, and when people start talking about fixing sprinkler systems, they sound like the trombone-voiced teacher from Charlie Brown). But there are a couple of things where I do claim some competency. Internally, I throttled back my insecurity by remembering my own nerd credentials: I play the cello, an instrument built on listening for pitch and tone. I’ve worked hard to learn Spanish as a second language. This is English. What is happening? How am I not hearing this?!?

After continued patience by my co-worker and (finally) sufficient humility within me to really listen, I heard it. I was saying “ma-ment,” while most people say “mo-ment.” And now I hear it. Everywhere.

One of Leavitt Group’s governing principles is Grow Profitably. While we often talk about this principle in financial terms, it also speaks to personal growth: the willingness to stay open, to keep learning, and to invest effort to become more capable over time. Growth takes work and attention.

I still have to work at saying moment differently (correctly?). Sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I don’t. After decades of saying a word one way, that habit feels natural, comfortable. Changing it takes attention. Let me be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with regional accents or local pronunciations. I was communicating just fine. No one was confused about what I meant. Language is wonderfully flexible, and the way we speak carries history, place, and identity with it.

What stayed with me wasn’t the pronunciation, but my struggle to even hear it. Without someone else’s patience, I might never have noticed at all.

There are things we can’t hear on our own. Not because we’re stubborn or careless, but because they’ve always sounded normal to us. We each have ears, eyes, and cultural frames of reference through which we hear, see, and experience the world. Quiet certainty settles in early and rarely announces itself.

When someone tries to point out what we’re missing, it can feel disorienting, even uncomfortable. We tend to listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.^[1] Psychologists call this a kind of blind spot: we assume we’re seeing clearly simply because nothing has interrupted our certainty. Hearing differently takes time. So does learning to trust the person standing beside you, saying, listen again.

There’s a kind of humility required to stay open in those moments. To pause the impulse to say, “No, I already get it,” and instead say, “Help me hear what you’re hearing and what you’re saying.”

Most of us live in carefully curated information bubbles, often without realizing it. Our feeds and algorithms are very good at showing us more of what we already believe, reinforcing the lens we’re used to looking through. Over time, that reinforcement can make our perspective feel not just familiar, but obvious, like it’s simply the way things are. When we mostly hear our own views reflected back to us, it becomes harder to notice what we might be missing, or to imagine that someone else might be hearing a different word entirely. In those moments, patience, both with ourselves and with one another, becomes one of the few ways to break the loop. Civil communication is also critical to avoid regression into the bubble.^[2]

Something I think about often to help my patience to hear people who think differently than me is remembering the difference between values and beliefs. Values are what we care about; beliefs are how we think those values are best achieved. Two people can deeply value the same thing and still disagree about what it looks like to get there.

Take creativity, for example. We might both say we value it highly. But one of us might believe creativity shows up best in quiet spaces, alone, with elbow room to think. Another might believe creativity comes alive in groups, through conversation, energy, and collaboration. Same value. Different beliefs.^[3]

Often, growth is not just about embracing new ideas. It’s also about rethinking old ones,^[4] especially the assumptions that feel so familiar we stop noticing them. That kind of growth rarely arrives as a dramatic revelation. More often, it comes from the patient, sometimes uncomfortable work of listening again. Of slowing down. Of investing attention where habit once took over. That effort compounds over time, expanding what we’re able to hear, understand, and become. And that, in the most human sense of the phrase, is what it means to grow profitably.^[5]