You explain risk to families a hundred times a year. You sign out a sick patient at 6:47 in the morning and the night team has it in three minutes.
You translate between cardiology and the ICU and the family at the bedside, all before lunch.
You are very good at clinical communication. Medical training made sure of it.
Almost none of that training was about listening.
I want to be careful about the distinction. Clinical communication is structured output, getting the right information from your head into someone else's head, fast and accurately. Listening is structured input. It's the part where you find out what is actually being said, including the parts the other person didn't put into words. They are not the same skill. We were drilled in one and assumed into the other.
Dr. Elizabeth Parks is a communication scholar who has spent her career on listening — specifically. She is not a physician. She came to this work through the Deaf community, where the question of how do we actually hear each other cannot be taken for granted the way the rest of us take it for granted. That detail is what made me want her on the show. Most of what we read about listening in medicine is written by people who learned listening the same way we did, by assumption. Elizabeth learned it from people who had to build it.
What she said that I keep coming back to: listening is a cultural practice before it is an individual skill. If the room you're listening in doesn't reward listening, if every meeting is structured to extract decisions rather than surface concerns, if the loud answer always wins, if the S styles in your division never get asked by name, your individual listening skill cannot save you. The system will route around it.
That landed for me as a division director. It will probably land for you somewhere too.
The full conversation is forty-six minutes. We get into her LISTEN framework, the link between listening and trust, and how to handle the conversation where the listening is the hardest part. If you're driving home from a long day this week, give it that drive.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on You Tube
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— Ben
P.S. If something from the episode lands for you, hit reply and tell me. I'm trying to write about issues we wrestle with in our professional lives, and the only way I learn that is when you tell me.
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