How Listening Differently Became Her Superpower

So I learned this very vital skill young, has changed everything that I've been able to achieve and accomplish in my life.

“And I thought, what if we all learn this, how much more successful people could be?”

Christine Miles is an insightful, transformational, and people centered CEO author and the founder of Equip. Through her work, she helps leaders and organizations strengthen communication, deepen understanding, and build more meaningful human connections, creating lasting impact through empathy driven leadership and growth. There's no listening education and schools across the world, and it's the most fundamental skill that we're expected to do and not taught how to do. So my mission is to change that not only to do that, but to do it in a simple way that's scalable.

Like a super high school internet elders, today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's not over, I'm telling how we're. The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. You can live your dreams.

Welcome back to another powerful episode of the Women in Power Podcast for Insight Success.

I'm Raguth here is something that all podcasts listeners should be very good at is listening and Christine Miles is quite the person we should be listening to. Christine, how do you feel? I feel great. I appreciate you shining a light on this very important problem in solution.

“Right on, we literally just finished filming your episode for women in power. How does it feel?”

You know, it feels great and I had a magnificent producer who you had to ask the right questions and help get the right insight. So it's right on par. I loved it.

General, General Lauren, I love it. What are we going to learn about you in your episode? Give us a quick preview.

Well, I have quite a backstory. I think most people do. I mean this comes from a very honest place. I learned to listen differently when I was very little. My mother suffered from mental illness. I was living from an early childhood loss. She lost her mother from childbirth and I learned to listen differently as a kid and really shine a light on what most people didn't see. What was below the surface? Just like my mother's pain was below the surface. Warm, exuberant, loving on the surface, but underneath she had this pain and sadness. So I learned this very vital skill young.

It's changed everything that I've been able to achieve and accomplish in my life. And I thought, what if we all learned this, how much more successful people could be. So this is a cause and a business for me.

“A cause and a business. So no pun intended. But what are we listening for? Is it just beyond what we can hear auditorially? Are we looking and feeling frequencies?”

Speak more into it. Yeah. So I think we're very much giving the surface in general. It's really nobody's fault because we're told to listen and not taught how. Sure. I think some of us listen at a different frequency. I think that's an empathy thing. I think some of us are more wired for empathy. We're more wired to tune in at a different frequency. But empathy builds when you learn how to listen. So I think we can all get to a different level when we do this well. Yeah. That's something I admit that I struggle with. I don't listen. I don't even think before I speak. I just speak and I've learned now as of in my 40s.

That it requires a little bit of emotional intelligence and a little bit of assertiveness over your how you react to something because I'm not quite listening. What are some key steps are folks that are just on this path and they're like, wait a minute. What makes me I feel like if I'm in my better listener, I'm going to be a better person, a better leader. Yeah, better leader, better person, better partner, better parent. So it's a soft skill that has hard outcomes and it's not your fault that you're not listening well.

The brain is the greatest enemy. So think about what's firing and wiring in your brain. You're thinking of your own story, your own impulses, your own thoughts, your own feelings. It's all in our subconscious brain. What you just described emotional intelligence is putting those things kind of into our conscious mind. So ironically listening builds that muscle when you learn to do it, but we're white knuckleing it because we're just relying on good intentions instead of the idea of behavior. Let me look at you to listen. This is what active listening has been kind of reduced to, which is really just how we perform at listening rather than actually do it.

So what I intend to do is revolutionize how we listen to understand by not focusing on behaviors, but tools. I love it. I love how you're nailed it. The performance of the act. It's something we are all guilty of. And I try not to be what we're doomsgrowing, we're paying attention to television set and our phones and our iPads. Someone's yelling at us. Someone's asking someone at our bus. We're feeling something and that was just 30 seconds ago.

So what's the antidote to that is to give them the tool. So here's the metaphor of the listening path, which is the new and breakthrough way of listening to understand. You wouldn't go hiking in the woods. Maybe you wouldn't anyway. I don't know. Some of us wouldn't. But if I sent a drop you in the middle of the forest, you wouldn't go in unprepared for sure. We're in the conversational woods all the time unprepared. There's all kinds of side trails. There's all kinds of trouble. So what's the path to get to the understanding of the summit? Well, you need those supplies. So metaphorically, we give the tools for your backpack so that you can understand.

You wouldn't go in the woods without a map, right? So here's the probably the biggest takeaway I can give for your listeners today is that when you're listening, you're always listening to a story.

Yep. But people drop us in the middle, not at the beginning and work confused right off the floor. So we live in a world of misunderstandings. Every day your kids says you say you can have a school. They drop you in the middle of it. You don't know it. Your spouse has a problem coming home for more. You're dealing with a project of work. Whatever it is, we're in a sea of misunderstandings. It's the job of the listener to sort that out to guide the speaker to tell their story in a way that makes sense to us.

If you don't have a map, you don't know where you're going. You're going to be lost all the time. What do you say to folks to me that aren't really listening to the data that you're saying, but I'm really listening to the harmony and the music of your timber? Like, I respond more sonically to you as opposed to the data you're feeding me is to plus two equals six. Sorry, that was not, that was bad map on purpose. Two plus two, so you're listening for more of the emotions more of the feeling you're feeling your way through the conversation.

Well, if you were watching a movie and you only listen to the feelings, would that be enough to get the story?

No, but I'm a filmmaker as well. I'm looking at the framing of the shot, what's communicating to me visually, how the actors and frame emoting and how the lighting. But that's beyond auditory. That's visual now. But you know what you're looking for. Exactly.

“Okay, so that's why we need tools. If you know what you're looking for, it's easy to find it. It's like the highlights.”

If you know the key at the bottom, you know what the animals look for, you see them in the forest. The same is true in the conversation. We make some people tune more into facts. That's more typical than what you're describing,

the tuning into the feelings because we're socialized to not tune into feeling so much.

So you have the opposite problem, which is a great problem to have. Awesome. But you need to learn how to get those facts to cause just two parts of the narrative facts and feelings. And that's one of the tools that's on the map. Again, if you know what you're looking for, you know how to find it.

But it's frustrating for me because you're absolutely right. I'm more about the feeling and the reactivism and artists. And when it starts getting into the granular data, I'll have a mini panic attack and I'll get very aggressive and mad and I'll throw a five-year-old tantrum. Because I can't even fend myself because the charisma no longer works. Like, I can do the charisma thing for a 20 minute podcast.

But on that 22 minute, boy, my spit. Because I've been listening to much. I'm responding too much. And I just like how much can I keep up this energy, which leads me to my next question.

“Like, how do you feel like entrepreneurs or thought leaders really communicate to each other?”

I'm not saying telepathically, but there is a image of telepathian there. Well, I think this share of passion that is a rare thing that a lot of people are so tapped into. Because when you're an entrepreneur, you better have purpose and passion. What you're doing, or you're going to give up. And I would say we're all in a tunnel and we're just chipping away to see where the light is.

We're going to for a mile away or an inch away. So entrepreneurs share that. But my experience is that most people still focus more on talking and telling than they do on listening and understanding. And I think we miss a lot because we're not trained or taught or given the right tools to learn how to do that. So what exactly are you learning? What's the end goal? So I'm listening better.

How am I supposed to feel now? Am I supposed to be more successful? Or is money just going to magically spring out of my pocket because I paused before I had a thought? Like, what happens after someone meets you and you kind of rewire them? Well, the key is about how you make other people feel, not just how you feel because when you give the gift of understanding, you're connecting on a different level and you're seeing beyond what's on the surface. So we're solving the wrong problems. We're fixing the wrong things. This is the core business that you're in is like helping people understand really what their power is and their work.

So that they're understanding themselves so they can communicate it. Correct.

“That's what listening does. It helps uncover the real problems, the real needs, the real pains, the real insight.”

So it's a joint venture of discovery rather than, you know, just the outcome of what we're getting. It's really, it's how we're getting there together. So you spoke of the origin story of this superpower and you connected it with with family.

Well, I saw how people didn't listen to my mother, which he expressed her pain.

So they would try to talk her out of her pain. Well, things are great. You have a good life now. So I saw that and I saw well-intended people who weren't able to understand what they couldn't see, the invisible. I also saw my father as an entrepreneur who said, you better understand your clients and listen to them deeply and understand all the things they're not telling you. And uncover that so that you can serve and he wanted to serve them. He was a financial planner, not just understand them.

So that it was an active service which led to outcomes and results for both him and for his clients. In many ways, you kind of have to say you're client from themselves.

Because I've come, especially now the last couple of weeks where I've been very exposed to the vulnerabilities of all of our clients.

And how far they will go to get something, I was just like, well, time out. You don't need to go that far. You're actually revealing darker parts of your, of your own self by just revealing this bit of information. I've already profiled to. Now I know how to speak to you, how to act to you, how much time I spend on you. Because I listen to specific key elements of your nature. And it's a fortunate but also a very unfortunate superpower because you kind of start to really get a sense of what a human being, how far they'll go at whatever cost.

And it could also be a negative and could be a positive.

“How do you speak to people that once you reveal their, their true sense?”

How do you pull them back from the negative or push them towards the light? Because I guess what I'm trying to land on here is, as I'm trying to listen to is, exposing one's true self. Once you kind of unlock it, how do you keep the guards whales up and keep that superpower ascending? Yeah, for the other person you mean? Yes. So I think the, all skills can be used for good or for evil, right? So, but I think that when we, when we help people be vulnerable and uncover more about themselves and what they need or what they want or how to get there, then we can serve them better.

So I think that when you understand and you get to these real issues, the real person, then that you help them, you service to them, right, and help them understand who they are, so they can drive those results. For sure. Yeah, my dad used to say, "I can't just know about their financial needs. I have to understand what they want for their kids." But they want for their uncle, their aunt, the whole family picture, so that I'm not just serving just one pause here, but their bigger picture needs. For sure. To me, I listen to the handshake when you, when you greet someone or the eye contact, how long that contact is.

There's a, there's a completely, my philosophy, my personal opinion is that there's a completely different sublayer to communicating between humans, animals, that is happening subconsciously, that goes beyond just speaking. Yeah. And I discovered that those, those portals and my, my adventures in California, I will say. The, the force is very real and I feel like as entrepreneurs and as thought leaders, our job is to educate and lead people into that right path. I mentioned tools, what, what tools do you, should people use or are you using in, in your work?

Yeah, so we teach elementary classrooms through a licenseable program to business leaders, so whether you're a large technology company or you're a fourth grader, the tools are really very similar.

“And so the only way to get good at something is to do it the same way every time.”

That's the, you know, any processes make it systematic. This is how I hope to scale and plan to scale this in an educational way. So those tools are all based on a hiking metaphor. Like I said, a map is one of those tools.

We know that stories have, they follow a certain path. If we're always looking for a story, we know that's what we're looking for.

Well, we better get the beginning. We better get the struggle. We better get the different parts. So that's another tool. And then one of the most powerful is what we call the compass, which is, what are the questions you asked to actually get the story and get to that hidden story, but beneath the surface, to see what others can't. And there's, on the compass, there's six powerful questions that our clients have said, just those questions alone, change the game on what they're able to discover in client meetings, students in a lesson.

So like one of those is taking me back to the beginning. Sure. We people start in the middle. We miss the beginning of the movie. We have to go back.

“Most people want to go forward. How do the movie end?”

Not where did it begin? And most of the insights are in the beginning. It's funny to mention that because when folks are sitting in minor recessions or sitting in this chair, I visually just see, like, here's your middle. I want to know all this visual stuff that we're beginning before. Before we, and then I go, so what happens is the moment you leave that door and then it's your forward. And I visually go, hey, hello, I see you. This is a visual indicator that you're on the path.

And I just may be a weirdo with stripes on, but. Well, you're a storyteller. Yeah. Yeah. In the movie business. So, but most people don't know that people aren't organized in telling their story.

It's just that in life, we don't think of it that way. We don't think of it that we're helping people tell their story.

That's a total reframe of how we listen is that we're the guide. We're the, we're the director in the movie. The composer, the Phantom of the Opera is like the comics. Yeah. Every time I do my housekeeping rules, I'm like, I am just an ominous voice in the background guiding you through your timeline of success. It's told by you.

“Yeah. And that falls a very clear path, doesn't it?”

Yes. We know as storytellers that falls a path. Storytelling and listening, story gathering is, I call it the same skill inside out. Yep. When you're telling a story, you're trying to make a point.

When you're gathering or listening to a story, you're looking for the insight. Yeah. So, the same things, just in two different realms. Oh, I sometimes while I'll even close my eyes to listen to the timber of the voice and go up a bow. And I'm like, oh, there is the ending.

That sounds like an ending to me. And then it still happens. They were like, and this is what happened. But there's in the timber of their voice. I'm like, as an editor and a visual story tower that kind of sees it through audio. And like, that's the ending.

That's, let's move on. Yeah. You can't train that.

“That's something you go to film school, go, well, that's the line.”

Yeah. And you can clearly see, you know, there are studios. Our hosts are have different styles. One host will actually, they know, do that again. Do that again.

It's like three takes. Like you ruin the magic now. Yeah. You had to capture. Yeah.

You got to keep the cameras rolling. Just capture that one bit because we have a CEO that is feeding 30 people. And they're figuring out how to do it. Right. So that's a lot of pressure.

And our job is to make sure they sit here and look and feel amazing.

So they can empower and feed 60 more, 90 more and 30 days. That's right. No, I mean, yeah. You feel your way through things. Yeah.

Like just going through that math in my head. You felt right through it. And that's because of your guidance. I just because you're just sitting and I'm listening to your shirt. You're listening to matters.

Listening matters. Let's talk about your collective, what you're working on. Yeah. You quit this a name I keep hearing. Equipped.

Yeah. So we're equipping children in adults with the very important human skills. The 21st century skill is listening to understand. Because we're living in a technology world, as you said. AI is taking over the long human things.

And the differentiator is how we understand ourselves and others. And listening is the factor. That's the key.

“And how do we shine a light on all the things that other people can't see?”

Yeah. Corritualism is going to take quite the change in the next decade. Yeah. I mean, the books are going to be rewritten. Now that we've got AI in play, technology in play, higher learning in play.

There's many more billionaires per capita life. There's a vibrancy happening in the world. Yeah. And it's either the yink to the yang, but neither can exist without the other. Yeah.

And how it's what do we know about AI?

So I've got the quality of the question to ask. It's critical thinking.

I was doing a math podcast with a teacher who talked about, you know, the AI is going to do the formulas. It's how do we talk about it, explain it. How do we make those connections until and tell them understand the story for others? So my mission is to change that there's no listening education in schools across the world. And it's the most fundamental skill that we're expected to do and not taught how to do.

So not only to do that, but to do it in a simple way that's scalable. Absolutely. How can people find you before we wrap up? How can people find you and discover you? They can find us at the listening path.com.

They can find me at Christine Miles' lessons. And, yeah, reach out. Let us know how we can help your organization or your school. Christine, thank you so much for your time and energy. That was fabulous.

Thank you. I hope you were all listening. For another episode of the Women of Power podcast and Inside Success, I'm Regusiers. [ Music ]