Humility Is the New Smart

6

Reflective Listening

Reflective Listening is so important because it underlies all the SMA Skills. Why? Because your thinking and learning are limited by cognitive biases, emotional defensiveness, ego, and fear. You need, then, to truly listen to others to open your mind, push past your biases and mental models, and mitigate self-absorption in order to collaborate and build better relationships. We’ve already shown you the evidence that it’s hard for any of us to critique our own thinking and truly think critically. We’re just too wired to confirm what we already believe, and we feel too comfortable having a cohesive simple story of how our world works. We need to have thinking “partners” who force us to confront those biases, and we need to ...