Are You Listening Loudly?
Here is a question worth sitting with: when was the last time someone could tell you were listening?
Not just hear it when you spoke, but actually see it, feel it, in real time, while you were there taking it all in?
Vanessa Van Edwards, behavioural researcher and author of Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication, recently featured in Time Magazine on exactly this problem. She runs corporate workshops and trainings around the world, and she opens with a simple question: are you a good listener? Almost everyone says yes.
Then she asks if they mind watching a recording of their most recent Zoom meeting.
What she finds, almost every time, is that her clients are still-faced, offering no visible signals that would let a speaker know they’re being heard. They are listening. They just don’t look like it.
The video era has changed how we receive information
There is a quiet cultural shift most of us haven’t noticed yet. The rise of video, both calls and passive consumption, has trained us to receive information with a flatter, more neutral face. We mute our microphones and, in doing so, mute our cues. We sit still because movement feels awkward on camera.
As Van Edwards puts it: “We’ve started to mute our own cues, and it’s gotten worse over the last few years.” And the cost is real. “Every person worries in every interaction that they’re not being heard, and they also worry that they’re not being understood.”
For leaders, that cost compounds. If the people around you don’t feel heard, they stop sharing. They hold back ideas, concerns, the early signals of a problem. You may be an excellent listener and still be creating a culture where people don’t feel safe to speak.
Listening loudly
Van Edwards calls the solution “listening loudly.” It means signalling through your face and body that you’re not just present but truly tuned in. She’s deliberate about framing these cues as a gift rather than a technique. Done sincerely, they tell someone they matter.
Here is what that looks like in practice.
Listen as if for the first time. One of the quieter ways we stop listening is by assuming we already know what someone is about to say. It happens most with people we know well, a longtime colleague, a direct report we’ve managed for years, where we have a mental script for how the conversation will go. Communication expert Julian Treasure calls the antidote listening “as if for the first time,” deliberately resetting to the curiosity you had before the script existed. Genuine curiosity, he notes, is one of the four essentials of good listening, alongside being conscious, committed, and compassionate.
Mirror the emotion they’re bringing. Amy Arias, who teaches interpersonal listening at the University of Nevada, Reno, makes the point that the same words land entirely differently depending on what your face is doing. When your expression matches the emotional register of the person speaking, you begin to actually feel what they’re feeling. That’s not performance. That’s rapport being built in real time.
Raise your eyebrows. Van Edwards describes the eyebrow raise as a universal signal of intrigue, one that works across cultures precisely because it’s instinctive. “When something is really interesting or curiosity-provoking, our eyebrows get out of the way so our eyes can almost see more.” Whether your reaction is positive or negative, the movement itself reads as engagement. Used in moderation, it’s one of the clearest signals you can send that you’re actually tracking what someone is saying.
Try the slow triple nod. Not the reflexive bobblehead nod that signals impatience, but a deliberate one-two-three rhythm that Van Edwards describes as a nonverbal “dot dot dot.” It tells the speaker to keep going. It functions like a highlighter on what they just said, without you having to say a word.
Tilt your head. A slight head tilt, one ear moving toward the shoulder, signals that you want to hear someone better. Van Edwards calls it a warmth cue. It works in person and on screen.
Lean in. When we want to smell, taste, or hear something better, we lean toward it. The same instinct applies in conversation. A forward lean is one of the clearest nonverbal signals of genuine interest available to us, and it works just as well on a video call as it does across a table.
Front toward them. Van Edwards calls this the “three Ts,” toes, torso, and top, all angled toward the person speaking. The cue sounds small until it’s absent. Think of a meeting where someone’s chair is swivelled away, or a conversation where a person’s feet are already pointing toward the door.
Match your vocalisation to their emotional weight. The small “uh-huhs,” “no ways,” and “reallys” we drop into conversation do a lot of work. The key is calibration. A chipper “oh!” in response to something genuinely difficult lands as a mismatch the speaker will feel immediately.
Let pauses happen. Some of the most powerful listening cues are the ones you don’t perform. Not rushing to fill silence when someone is searching for words. Not reaching for your phone when something sparks your curiosity. As Arias puts it, “it may not matter what our intention was. What’s going to matter more is their perception of the behaviour.”
Try the lower-lid flex. This one is subtle but surprisingly effective. A slight tightening of the lower eyelids, the instinctive squint we use when trying to see something more clearly, reads in conversation as intense focus. Paired with a slight forward lean, it signals that you are not just present but locked in.
Listening is work
Arias asks her listening students at the end of every semester how they’re feeling. The answer is almost always the same: exhausted. She teases them about it. They push back: “but we were listening.” And that, she tells them, is exactly the point.
Most of us don’t think of listening as energy-dependent. But it is. And the leaders who do it well, who make people feel genuinely heard, don’t just create a nicer working environment. They get better information. They build more trust. Problems surface earlier. People bring their actual thinking rather than the version they think you want to hear.
The reward for that effort, as Arias puts it, is that the speaker walks away not just feeling heard, but feeling felt. There is an emotional component to listening that shows up in your face, your posture, your pace, long before you say a single word.
That is what it means to listen loudly.