Nicki Kennedy Voicecast: Conversations around voice, stories, sound and identity
How does voice shape who we are and how we’re heard?
In this podcast, executive coach, voice coach and classical singer Nicki Kennedy explores the power of voice in all its dimensions: spoken and sung, personal and professional, fragile and fierce. With guests ranging from artists to business leaders and politicians, survivors to advocates, each conversation uncovers the ways voice carries our identity, our stories, and our place in the world.
Blending science, psychology, and the arts, this is a space for listening deeply, questioning assumptions, and rediscovering the human voice, and what it means to have a voice that counts in the world.
Nicki Kennedy Voicecast: Conversations around voice, stories, sound and identity
The Lost Art of Attention: Why is it so hard to listen?
I'm inviting you to join me in a reflection on listening. This is a meander through the topic of hearing, listening, and truly understanding the people around you. There is some philosophical and spiritual leaning here, but ultimately there's practical advice about how to stay calm and use listening skills in moments of conflict or confrontation. There's advice here around negotiation and how listening and truly respecting another person's space can bring you to a better understanding with others. There's also some reference to Eastern philosophy, and spiritual and religious traditions, and to modern psychology. But it lives in the practical, ultimately.
If you enjoy the listening and you would like to find out more, please visit my Substack at https://substack.com/@khpc? , where, in the coming days, you will find the article that this reflection is taken from. There you will find the references to studies and sources, so that you can delve a little deeper yourself!
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Today, I'm going to talk about the lost art of attention. I want to just unpack this a little bit. Something around listening, and listening in order to really make sure that people have a voice, because listening is a key part of that. This is VoiceCast with Nicki Kennedy, exploring voice in every sense, the sound you make, the story you tell, and the presence you bring. I'm Nicki Kennedy, your host, a classical singer, vocal health and rehabilitation specialist, and an executive coach. And my work is about helping people transform, find new directions, get unstuck, and express themselves in ways that feel authentic and true. Together we'll look at how your voice and your presence can shape change in work, in life, and in yourself. I call it the lost art of attention because we do know that people's attention span and ability to focus is really less than it was. And so a bit of a conversation around what that might mean for us. And this is really going to be a reflection on mindfulness and meditation as well as listening, whatever that might mean to you. But it's not going to sit in the spiritual realm. There is something practical here about how you have conversations with people when conversations are difficult or challenging, conversations in relationships, and how the art of listening can make a real difference. I'm going to begin with a quote from Lao Tzu, my absolute favourite at the moment. I've been reading the Tao Te Ching, which is the piece of uh writing that sits around Taoism. And he says, the sage is one who hears the unspoken and sees the unseen. Of course, I think Lao Tzu is talking about something pretty esoteric and uh and spiritual and perhaps a little vast. But actually, even when you sort of distill that down and think about what that means for people who are engaging in coaching and counselling work, that is where we really sit. We are looking to hear what people are saying, but we're also looking to see what people are not saying. What is missing from the story? What is the body language telling us? What is the way that somebody's carrying themselves telling us that isn't being spoken in words? So this is about deeper listening and silence and space so that you can hear things that might be in the environment around you. You can hear opportunity knocking at the door, and it requires a little bit of space and a little bit of calm. So I'm going to start by telling you a story which I haven't really shared with anybody before. So quite a long time ago, I experienced an event where my hearing was compromised by nerves. I walked out onto a stage with an orchestra and choir, waiting to hear what I was going to offer, but I couldn't actually hear the orchestra properly. I mean I could hear them, but I couldn't hear the detail, and I I mean I think the conductor even said to me, Can you hear the orchestra? Because I was getting out of time with them. I'd given a recital at the very prestigious Wigmore Hall in London the night before, which had left me on a massive high and really exhilarated, but also very, very tired. This is one of the world's great stages. It's an absolute privilege to be asked to perform at the Wigmore Hall. And so, of course, a lot of my focus had gone into that concert, and there was a huge sense of relief when it was over, and the exhaustion really piled in. But I had put another concert back to back with it, and I had to travel to a different venue in a different city, a different orchestra, and I turned up ready and confident, ready to give my best, because it is something we do do as musicians. We have to sometimes have intensive periods of a lot of work because sometimes there are fallow periods. And I was confident I'd be fine. But actually, I walked out onto that platform and I couldn't seem to hear properly. Nothing was landing, and I felt totally disconnected, disembodied, and removed from what was going on. I lost all spatial awareness and I had lost any sense of grounding or solidity, and weirdly I did seem to have lost my capacity to hear properly. Later, I came to understand that what I was experiencing was a stress-related response because under stress the brain protects itself by narrowing focus. Cortisol floods the system, and auditory pathways can contract. And we stop processing the subtleties of sound. The body decides effectively that listening is non-essential and it prioritises other things around survival. So if you think carefully, you can probably think of a time when you've experienced some very disturbing incident or a state of shock, and somehow you've lost your balance, your awareness of what's going on around you, any sense of connection with the earth beneath you. And that disembodied feeling can make you feel positively lightheaded and ungrounded. That small collapse of perception for me at a quite oh well, it was a quite high-stakes moment, and it stayed with me. And it's taught me that listening is not simply an act of the ear, it's it's just a whole part of the regulation of your nervous system. In coaching and counselling, as I said, a lot of our training focuses on the quality and depth of our listening. You would think that was easy or obvious, but it's actually not, because the literature, everything about speaking and communication tends to be around speaking rather than listening. If you think back to Aristotle and Quintilian and the Byzantine rhetoricians and all of the public speaking workshops you've ever been to, people are very concerned with how to persuade and influence by putting a point across better. And pausing, pacing, inflection, prosody, all these different things, techniques of speaking with impact. But listening is as much at the heart of successful communication as any speaking, and it affects relationships, teamwork, and much, much more. Now I'm not a religious person in terms of being fully signed up and committed to any church, although I was brought up in an Anglican tradition, and I have spent an awful lot of time in church buildings as a musician. That's part of what we do. But I find it fascinating to turn to religion and spirituality, and in particular the kind of hardcore mystics of the religious traditions, to find out more about the art of listening and the business of giving other people's voices space to sound. I was delving around to prepare this episode and I started looking at the Benedictine order of monks because I was interested in their silence. The rule of Saint Benedict began with a single imperative really, which is obsculta or listen. And the monks were told to incline the ear of their hearts, and that's a phrase I love, inclining the ear of your heart. I think I'm going to think of my heart as having ears from now on. Obedience in Latin, ob audire, literally means to lean towards sound, so listening. And they had a great silence each night. It was called the great silence, and it was where you would only really have any conversation if it was an essential conversation once you had set down for the evening until the following morning at morning prayers. And I would think that would mean a couple of things. One is that any speech later has greater impact, but also it gave the monks the ability, the moment, the opportunity to turn it inward and to focus on what was happening both inside themselves and around. And for them that would have meant listening for the voice of God, being able to hear the voice of God. For somebody else, that might mean listening for what the world is telling you, what opportunity might be out there, what else you might not have thought of when you're trying to solve problems. We've drifted a long way from that kind of patience. Today, apparently the average person interrupts after about seven seconds. And there are some great studies, including from the University of Wisconsin, that suggest that our minds wander for almost half of every waking hour, and that we can only sustain true focused listening for about 17 seconds before sliding into inner commentary. I think for me 17 seconds would be stretching it. I think I probably would last about five. So we constantly have thoughts invading, popping into our heads, and we constantly have our next contribution in a discussion ready well before the appointed moment. And we fight to keep that thought in our head. And so during that time we're not really attending anymore to what's actually being said. In short, we're listening to reply rather than to receive, and we're spending our time scouring a conversation for a place to just insert our own view rather than listening to really understand. So I was asking ChatGPT to come up with a few interesting places where I might look to find out what people had to say about listening and the thoughts and the history of listening. And it came up with Simone Vey. Simone Vey was a French philosopher and mystic, and she called attention the rarest and purest form of generosity, which I love, it's the idea of listening as being the most generous thing you can do. To her attention was not effort, but surrender. She called it decreasion, the emptying of the self, so that truth might come in. And that bit about emptying of the self really resonated with me because it crops up in all these other mystic traditions, in all the religions. It's the kind of common thread, it's detachment, letting go of the ego, it's zen, it's Buddhism, it's Taoism, it's yoga, it's mystic Islam, it's mystic Judaism, and then is resonating in modern psychology as psychologists and psychotherapists are advocating mindfulness to their anxious clients. So, in a sense, it's all stuff that we've known across cultures for thousands of years. We wrote, absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. It requires a stillness rather than willpower. And she talks about a kind of relinquishing rather than grasping at things. And again, that kind of crosses boundaries into the Taoism again and the Wu Wei, which if you've heard of that, is it's about effortless action. It's about not doing, it's about doing, but it's doing with the flow. It's about round pegs and round holes, it's about not grasping for things, but moving with what is easy. To really truly listen is to actually allow another view and reality to exist beside your own without immediately trying to reshape it, I think, to fit your own bias and experience. I would seem it's very difficult to allow people to be different from one another without trying to influence a change, to bring them more in line with one's own worldview. And actually at the moment, I think we're seeing such polarisation. Leaders are lasting all of five minutes before they're being ousted because people can't tolerate that their views are different from their own. We are not prepared to accept somebody's opinion whose worldview is not the same as our own. And it makes for pretty big conflict, I think, on the global stage. And I think it's really important in business and in relationships generally, that sense of allowing somebody to be different. So Vay's language was spiritual, but her insight is completely practical. If we pay attention, we can put ourselves aside for a moment, and that means we can make space to hear others. And if you're negotiating with somebody or if you're trying to understand someone's position in order to find a way to get them to come to agree with your position, you really do need to listen. We're going to take a short break now, and when we come back, we'll be looking at how the brain works with listening and hearing and what that means for us in conversation and in challenging conversation, how we might stay calm to get the best results out of somebody and to really hear what they're saying. So, what of listening in the brain? It turns out that it's metabolically quite expensive. The brain works by prediction. We we the brain predicts things and then we kind of turn off a little moment later with uh with the actual information. So when you walk into a room, your brain has already predicted half of what you're going to see, and it actually protects us from overwhelm. It means we can cope with large amounts of information because we've already predicted some of it. There are functional MRI studies from places like Stanford and UCL that show that attentive listening, active listening is lighting up lots of bits of brain, prefrontal cortex, temporal lobes, limbic system. And the brain is racing ahead of speech by about 300 milliseconds. That doesn't sound much, but it's predicting what will come next. And it means we're always half a beat ahead, and we're perhaps listening a bit to our own expectations as much to the other person. Under stress, the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that deals with fear responses, it then hijacks our attention and we start scanning for threat. And that can take us into a form of dysregulation and disconnection, which uh really makes sense of that rehearsal I experienced. It is fatigue and adrenaline pushing my system into a survival mode, uh, and it shut down my ability to hear, my listening. When we feel unsafe, tiny muscles of the middle ear stiffen and they filter out some of the higher frequencies that carry human prosody. And that's what do I mean by that? That's the variety of tone that brings warmth, nuance, and emotion. So when when you hear someone speaking really dully on a monotone like this, they've not really got the prosody which makes you want to step in to what they're saying. So we literally, under stress, stop hearing emotional connection. That is something else. I mean, I'm fascinated by that. So the question obviously is how do you get back into the room? So if your hearing has shut down, what should I have done on that day? What would have helped me? And the answer to that is apparently interception, clocking into your body and listening. People who are able to accurately perceive their own inner workings, heartbeat, breathing patterns, score higher on empathy and listening accuracy. And actually, apparently, I'm delighted to say, opera singers do have a very strong interreception. You can see why they've been working for years on playing an instrument that you can't see. You could almost say then that listening begins in the body. So maybe the question really isn't why listening is hard, but why calm is so rare. I was thinking about this this week after working with a client who asked me how to remain calmer in their role. They're someone who's known for and is excellent at challenge and holding people to account, but can lose composure. And they were asking how they could stay calmer for longer, and I figure that that's a really important thing to be able to do. If you do lose your composure, you will lose your power of listening and hearing, and then you won't stay open under pressure. So if you're in a situation where you're negotiating or having a challenging conversation, you're not going to be able to stay in an open place and able to respond well if you have lost that composure, if your emotions are running high. Think of it as seeking out the difference between being, for example, a boxer who has very high levels of intensity, highly aggressive, tunnel vision, no need to read the room there, and maybe a footballer who has to have spatial awareness and a lower intensity level. They need to read the pitch, they need to know where the pass is coming from, they need spatial awareness. And I think it's that level of composure we're looking for in difficult, challenging conversations. We're not looking to be like the boxer, heightened aggression. In acceptance and commitment therapy and training, which is a model that I use when I'm helping people with performance anxiety and who are experiencing what I was experiencing on that day, that complete cognitive whiteout, uh, that you will recognise if you've ever stood up to speak in front of lots of people and you've just your mind's gone blank and your hearing has gone. So, one of the key skills that we use in it in ACT is diffusion. So thoughts might be coming into your mind and you learn to notice them and label them. Because we are constantly assaulted by a barrage of thoughts, but we don't even notice them half the time. But if you can spot them and say, oh, I'm having that thought. I'm having that thought that tells me I'm going to be rubbish or that I'm going to get this wrong. Or it might be a positive thought, but noticing it and labelling it is quite key. We can do the same with emotions. We can see and feel them coming up in ourselves rather than getting all bound up with them. So I'm angry can become I notice that anger is coming up in me. And noticing the emotion surfacing in the body and naming it can help us just stay a little calmer for longer. And there's my dog just having a little ask to go out, so bear with. A perfect moment for a very short intermission, and when I come back, we'll just have a little look at what silence can do for listening and why it's so difficult to allow silence into the space. But every now and then he finds that he has other things he'd like to be doing. We had a pigeon in the first episode, I seem to remember. So back to this business of noticing and labelling the emotions and the body sensations. When we listen to ourselves and to our own signals, we extend the same grace outwards towards the person opposite, and they feel heard and understood. And it's fundamental in coaching, especially, I might say, in Gestalt coaching, which has its roots in deep human psychology. We really want to understand and share what the conversation is bringing up in our own bodies and thoughts, and that encourages the client to notice the same sorts of sensations for themselves. The good news is that physiologically, staying calmer for longer is a totally trainable state. Meditation and breath work do bring physical calm. Extending the outbreath regulates the heartbeat and it allows the mind to stop grasping and instead settle down and just be. I know that meditation is not for everybody. A lot of people say, oh yes, I've tried that, didn't work. And actually, most of the time, the funny irony is, and I include myself in this, that the people who need it the most are the people who find it hardest. Because if you've got a rapid brain that's always busy, it's going to be really challenging to sit and be at peace and quiet with that mind and notice all those thoughts. But I promise you, it makes a huge difference to your ability to ground yourself and stay calm when you have difficult or challenging conversations or when you need to listen. In leadership, calm acts like a kind of stabilizing gravity. So being calm means you can stay in a conversation that is uncomfortable for longer. So you don't close things down. If you're needing to challenge, for example, but you deliver it from a place of calm, it will land as respect rather than attack. So that being calm and being able to listen has a massive bearing on the outcomes of difficult conversations and challenge. And in music, I notice the best conductors, in my experience, they don't impose their expression. They'll communicate intense energy, but they allow space for musicians to let expression flow from themselves because musicians know how to listen and they know how to ground themselves and be truly present. That's actually what I was missing on that day in Birmingham. I wasn't grounded, I wasn't present, and I wasn't listening. I got through it, but I doubt it was very edifying for the audience. So going back to Simone Vey, she believed that attention was actually a moral imperative. Like to pay attention to another person in her eyes enables them to exist. That's a philosophical idea of existence only really being possible if you are heard. And she said the capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing. It is almost a miracle. It is a miracle. There was a Harvard study, which is often quoted actually, that found that employees who felt intensely heard by managers showed higher trust and engagement even when outcomes were unfavourable. The content of the conversation mattered less than the quality of presence of the person having the conversation. That is really important. So even when the outcome was unfavorable, employees who felt intensely heard were more trusting and engaged. So listening is not really a soft skill, but it's almost an ethical stance, actually. It says you exist and I see you. You matter. What about silence? We rush to fill it because it feels awkward and it's begging to be filled. But in real listening, silence is essential. Again, I'm going to go back to the Tao De Qing to Lao Tzu. He says, Who can wait quietly while the mud settles? Who can remain still until the moment of right action? And I think about that, letting the mud settle as a listener. If you wait while the mud settles, if you become attuned to the person you're hearing, and you notice that they're thinking still, that they're not done with thinking, that they've disturbed something in the bed of the river, and that mud is still settling, you should wait. Just give them the time to let that come back down because there's often more to come. I love uh Nancy Klein who always asks that question. Uh, in her she has a wonderful book called Time to Think, and it's about giving time and space in listening. And she asks always, is there anything more? And waits. And very often there is. So going back to the Eastern philosophies, maybe the task isn't to listen harder, but to listen softer, to unclench, unhurry, unknow. I was listening to a podcast that I love the other day about Taoism, and this wonderful Taoist monk, I suppose he is, uh, or was, I think he's now died, unfortunately, but he talks about martial arts and teaches us that to engage in combat with somebody stronger than ourselves, we can't win if we try to meet force with force. Instead, we need to yield a little and soften, wrong footing the opponent. So when the noise quietens around us and within us, we begin to hear again not just sound and words, but maybe deeper senses and meanings. In the coming weeks on VoiceCast, I think this idea of listening and giving people a voice is going to be quite important. I'll be speaking with a couple of people who understand this from different worlds. The first is Dr. Derren Evans. She's a forensic medical examiner and an assistant coroner here in Jersey. She spent her career giving voice to those who cannot speak by supporting uh survivors of sexual assault and other such things, objectively collecting evidence but believing their story, allowing them to come to her and allowing her to collect that evidence and allowing her to present and prepare a case if a case needs to be prepared for them. And now as assistant coroner, she's actually giving a voice to those who can't speak, the the dead, which is a fascinating idea. The other guest I'm looking forward to talking to is the clinical psychologist and musician David Junkos. Dave Junkos. He's based in America and he helps performers rediscover freedom through compassion rather than fear. And and I did my training with him in acceptance and commitment training, and I do try to get along to the occasional supervision with him too, and stay in touch, because that psychological flexibility that we can tap into and really move is something he's written the book on when it comes to musicians. And so there's a lot of great insight there. So I really hope you'll be there to join us with those conversations and to, as I say, feedback, ask questions. Let me know what you'd like to hear more of, and we will find out more about what it is to have a voice and how we can use it. Thank you very much. You've been listening to VoiceCast with Nikki Kennedy. For me, voice has always been more than just sound. It's presence, connection, music, transformation. I hope this episode has offered something to carry with you into your own conversations and your own story. So drop us a line, be in touch, and until we meet again, I hope that your voice finds the space it needs to be really heard.