The Art of Deep Listening with Emma Collyer

Have you ever left a conversation thinking, “That could have gone so much better…”? 

In today’s episode of Call IT in With Dar, we’re exploring something simple—but incredibly powerful—the art of deep listening. My guest, Emma Collyer, is an executive coach, emotional intelligence practitioner, and communication expert who helps leaders transform difficult conversations into moments of trust, connection, and growth. Originally from the UK and now based in Canada, Emma brings a grounded, practical, and refreshing approach to communication that can change relationships both personally and professionally. 

Today, we’re talking about how active listening—not interrupting, truly hearing people, asking better questions, and becoming more present—can completely shift the energy of our conversations and deepen trust in ways many of us never learned growing up. 

This is such an important and timely conversation. Let’s dive in…or rather Let’s Call IT in! 

Transcript

Have you ever left a conversation thinking, “That could have gone so much better…”? In today’s episode of Call IT in With Dar, we’re exploring something simple—but incredibly powerful—the art of deep listening. 

My guest, Emma Collyer, is an executive coach, emotional intelligence practitioner, and communication expert who helps leaders transform difficult conversations into moments of trust, connection, and growth. Originally from the UK and now based in Canada, Emma brings a grounded, practical, and refreshing approach to communication that can change relationships both personally and professionally. 

Today, we’re talking about how active listening—not interrupting, truly hearing people, asking better questions, and becoming more present—can completely shift the energy of our conversations and deepen trust in ways many of us never learned growing up. 

This is such an important and timely conversation. Let’s dive in. 

Speaker Dar 

Emma, welcome to Emma. Before we dive in, I would love it if you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in this work of active listening. 

Speaker Emma 

Yeah, thanks for having me here. So, I guess my journey started quite a few years ago. I'm from the UK originally, and I'm now located in Canada, but I got really interested in coaching as a subject area, and as part of that, active listening is a key skill that we learn to use, and I've, over the last few years, I've been working with organizations in Canada, and it's coming up more and more as something that people don't do often enough, and is an easy fix, and so I've just really started talking a lot about active listening and having good conversations in the work that I do, and it really resonates with people, and so this is this is just something that I kind of do do a lot of right now, and there's some easy things people can do to make it effective. 

Speaker Dar  

Wow, I'm sure our audience is ready for an easy fix, especially, especially when it comes to those difficult conversations that we all have. So I'm going to have you dive into our topic, and difficult conversations. 

Speaker Emma  

Yeah, I think difficult conversations come up not only in the workplace, but also in our personal lives. You know, we, we often have those moments where we maybe have to provide somebody with feedback on a situation or share something that you maybe think the person receiving it doesn't want to hear it or you're upset when they hear it, so there's a lot of blocks that come in into this conversation, and so then active listening is a skill that you can use to really help with those difficult conversations, so sorry, 

Speaker Dar 

yeah, I was just gonna say, so where do we start with developing this skill? 

Speaker Emma 

Yeah, I think the first thing is just recognizing the difference between how we often listen right now, which is pretty passive. We maybe are only listening at the surface level. We often listen with the thoughts going on that we want to think about how we respond, and so we're not really giving the person our full attention, and so that is the first thing I always talk about, is how can you give this person that you're listening to right now your full attention, and often it's closing down distractions, so not looking at your phone, not doing something else at the same time, actually focusing in on what they're doing, what they're sharing with you. Other things that I then talk about is your eye contact. Are you making eye contact with the person that you're listening to? Because that indicates you're listening. Is your body language mirroring theirs, or are you looking away in a different direction? And then other things I often talk about to confirm that you've heard what they've said, you can summarize back to them something that they shared, and this confirms that you're listening to them. Another piece of that is also asking questions to clarify what you've heard. When you combine all of these things, you're giving a really powerful message to the other person that I value you. I really want to understand what you're sharing with me, and I want to dig deeper. I'm really interested. So, those are the kind of key things that we can do immediately, but we often fail to do all the time. 

Speaker Dar   

It is very interesting that we need to be pre, I call it present, but we need to give the person our full attention and close distractions, and there's so many people that I think I can think about a conversation I've had with them and. Out comes the phone, or they have the phone, and that's definitely a daily distraction for some people, and I love eye contact and body language. And then when you said, and then they summarized, I 

thought, oh, okay, that's what I'm gonna do right now, which I just did, and ask my next question. So, do you have any stories that you'd like to tell about difficult conversations and using some of these techniques, or even not using some of these tax techniques and the transformation that people have gone through. 

Speaker Emma  

Yeah, I think I have. I guess I'm trying to think of a few different pieces here, but I guess I'll just share that I'm working with an organization right now in Toronto, and they've actually been asking me to go in and train. I've trained over 150 members of their staff now around this, and active listening is one of those key skills that they have been using, and I think they've just recognized this huge shift in people being open to having a conversation and really being willing to dig into what the problems and the issues are that they're facing, and therefore they can move forward much more quickly, and they're seeing this across the board, and I believe this is the main reason why they keep asking me back, because I keep training different cohorts, they're seeing such a huge shift in performance and openness amongst individuals that is kind of like almost, you know, why didn't we do this earlier, because it is such a change, change of mindset and change of efficiency and productivity. 

Speaker Dar  

Yes, that's a great example of 150 people, and you keep being asked back, so active listening is definitely a key. So, you could lead our audience through a quick activity that you might use with these people that might be appropriate. 

Speaker Emma 

Yeah, I think I would just encourage you, you know, if you're sitting with somebody right now, it's just to be very self-aware. So, what? What are you actually doing in that conversation? You know, I think of myself sometimes. I'm like, I'm making a grocery shopping list, or I'm thinking about the next thing I need to do. I think just switching off those other things that we often have going on in our minds and focusing in on that person, maybe just try asking a question, or even summarizing what they've just shared with you, because I think you'll find it will dig far deeper into the conversation, and it builds another layer of trust with that person. So, I think those will be my two challenges: asking a question and summarizing what you just heard. If you're sitting with somebody right now, and you've been in a conversation, or maybe you're about to have a conversation with somebody, and trying those out. 

Speaker Dar  

So, lean, actually, what I've been doing is leaning in, taking notes, thinking of questions, and summarizing. (Emma, Those are great, great examples.)Thank you. You're welcome. I find myself sometimes saying a summary just to see if my perception of what they're saying is what they're actually saying, 

Speaker Emma 

That's a great technique, and I think we often, or I often find, we can go into a 

conversation and we can come out with very different perceptions of what has just been discussed or has been agreed, and this is often what happens in the workplace, particularly. We come away sometimes confused, and so summarizing what you've heard gives you an opportunity to make sure you know exactly what you have heard, and maybe what was agreed, because that's that is often the biggest area for miscommunication, and then people are, you know, disappointed that something's not been done, and it was because we didn't fully understand what was being asked of us. So that summarizing back is huge. So, yeah, thank you for mentioning that, 

Speaker Dar  

.Yes, I know it makes a huge difference for me, because it's very interesting when, when there's maybe three or four that heard the same conversation, but have entirely three or four different interpretations of what was said. 

Speaker Emma  

Yeah, for sure. It can be very confusing. 

Speaker Dar  

Can you tell us a little bit about the free gift that you have available for our audience? 

Speaker Emma  

Yeah, so if you go through it's called” Need More trust.com” and you'll get through to a hand, a kind of a little video of me talking about feedback, and how you might approach providing feedback to somebody. There's also a handout and kind of downloadable document to go with that as well. So, just talking about some different frameworks that can be helpful in those situations, and particularly if you're thinking of those difficult conversations, just gives you a little bit more support in dealing with those. 

Speaker Dar 

Yes, support with difficult conversations. And we'll be putting that link in the show notes for everybody, so you don't have to listen to this over again to get that information. It'll be in the show notes. So, before we conclude, what else do you think that our audience needs to know today? 

Speaker Emma   

My goodness, so there's so many different things. I think just when we think about active listening, the first step is self awareness, and I think just remembering that that is always where we need to start before we take action and do something. So just being aware of our feelings, how you know, what are we doing right now? How do we want to show up? I think those are the key pieces. 

Speaker Dar   

Yes, the importance of that. Pause and observe yourself in a difficult conversation is great advice. I think we can all take that away from today, so thank you, Emma, for being with us, and for how easy a fix you said it was. If we work on those things, I can see that vast improvement in listening will result from this podcast. Thank you for coming on today. 

Speaker Emma   

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure being here. Speaker Dar   Thanks!!!!! 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai