The Importance of Listening to Teens Effectively

Christine Miles, author of What Is It Costing You Not to Listen?, teaches us how transformational listening can deepen connections with teenagers by hearing what's unsaid, asking the right questions, and creating life-changing conversations.

Full Show Notes

We all think of ourselves as pretty good listeners, right? But consider this: 96% of us claim good listening skills, yet only 2% have ever had formal training in how to listen. As parents, teachers, or mentors of teenagers, we spend so much energy worrying about what we say in conversations—we want to give advice, teach life lessons, and help teens make the right decisions. But the truth is, we often completely overlook the real key to meaningful communication: our ability to listen deeply.

Most of our listening approaches barely scratch the surface and simply skim the basic facts of a situation. However, teens rarely communicate straight to the heart of what’s truly bothering them. A surface complaint or confrontation can disguise deeper emotional struggles. How can we move beyond mundane conversation and create more meaningful connections with the young people in our lives?

Our guest Christine Miles, author of What Is It Costing You Not to Listen?, is a renowned listening expert and speaker, who has spent her life empowering people to tap into what she calls “transformational listening.” Christine’s groundbreaking work has led her to teach listening workshops nationwide, helping families, educators, and corporate teams unlock deeper understanding, resolve problems, and build authentic connections through the power of listening better.

In this thoughtful and eye-opening episode, Christine shares powerful insights from her personal story and her professional expertise to demonstrate exactly why listening is so crucial, and how developing listening skills will profoundly affect all aspects of our relationships with teens.

Why Teens Need Transformational Listening

Christine introduces the idea of transformational listening, which goes beyond empathy and allows us to truly hear not only the words teens speak but also their underlying and often unspoken feelings. Transformational listening helps us understand each teenager's unique experience. Christine explains how listening provides teens a safe space to truly open up by guiding them to reveal parts of their story they may not even be aware of themselves.

One major reason parents and teens experience poor communication is because teens rarely start at the beginning when they share their story. According to Christine, we usually get dropped right in the middle of a teenager’s internal narrative, causing misunderstanding or confusion. Parents often mistakenly assume that teens don’t want to talk or be open. Christine teaches us how to navigate conversations strategically to capture the whole story and not just surface details.

How to Stop Getting in Your Own Way

Most of us unconsciously interfere with our own listening ability, making typical mistakes like asking too many questions or imposing assumptions onto teens’ stories. Christine helps us recognize and prevent these conversational pitfalls by sharing simple but incredibly effective techniques she calls the Listening Compass. We'll learn a small but powerful set of open-ended questions that invite teenagers to dive deeper without feeling interrogated or misunderstood.

Christine also explains how to notice important non-verbal listening cues by paying attention to what teens aren't saying. Mastering this technique helps teens feel truly understood, even when they're struggling to articulate what's actually bothering them, allowing us to support or steer the conversation positively without forcing direct solutions on them prematurely.

Discovering Your Teen’s True Story

Christine emphasizes the incredible power of finding the "tipping point"—the moment in stories or conflicts when a decision or realization occurs and everything shifts. Often teenagers present us with a seemingly minor problem (like shoes or school struggles), but beneath the surface lies a complex mix of emotions or concerns teens don't even consciously realize. By engaging in transformational listening, parents can genuinely empower teens, helping them discover and navigate their emotional challenges and even reach deeper insight about their own decisions.

Christine shares impactful stories and case examples, illustrating how parents and mentors using these listening practices earned trust and ultimately became part of life-changing turning points simply by listening in a new way.

Taking Listening to Real Life

The beauty of Christine's approach is that the tools she teaches can be practiced right away, leading to rapid and transformative results in relationships with teenagers. Christine shares moving real-life examples—not just from parenting, but from workplaces and friendships—where transformational listening has allowed meaningful conversations to flourish, deeper trust to build, and healthier emotional decision-making to happen.

Christine explains why feelings do matter, even when societal messages often teach us to keep emotions separate from work or challenging situations. Her insights expand our emotional intelligence, improving not just our teen relationships but demonstrating how attentive listening benefits nearly every aspect of our public and private lives.

In this powerful conversation, Christine provides clear steps and tools to start implementing transformational listening immediately, teaching us how to revolutionize the ways we communicate with and understand teens.

In the Episode, we also discuss

• Why focusing on your response interferes with listening effectively
• How emotional intelligence can matter more for teen success than academic grades
• Why saying “Don’t get mad, but…” almost always backfires
• How listening skills can vastly improve communication in workplaces and schools as well as at home

If you want to strengthen your connection with the teens in your life and genuinely help guide them towards growth and emotional maturity, don’t miss this groundbreaking episode! And don't forget to subscribe for more insightful guests and inspiring strategies every week.