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The discipline of listening more than you speak

Talking makes us feel we exist. Listening asks for something else: stepping out of the spotlight, holding your attention and resisting the urge to reply. That’s why it’s harder. In plenty of workplaces the rewards go to whoever speaks up first, wraps things up fast and stakes out a clear position. The person who truly listens can come across as less brilliant. Yet that’s usually the person who best understands what’s going on.

Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, captured it in a simple and demanding image. He told a young man who talked too much that we have two ears and one mouth so we can listen more and speak less. He meant it as a discipline, far beyond good manners. People who talk too much learn too little. People who can’t stand the gap between what they hear and what they say end up in a conversation with themselves, even with someone sitting right across from them.

Keeping quiet while you rehearse your comeback is still talking, just on the inside. Real listening means letting the other person’s words land in full, even when they’re uncomfortable, contradict you or take a while. It takes a certain self-control: no interrupting, no finishing their sentences, no jumping in to correct. That restraint is a sign of good judgment.

In leadership, this skill becomes decisive. Leaders who don’t listen make decisions on partial information and create distance while believing they’re close. A team where nobody feels heard ends up protecting itself: it filters what it says, waters down what matters and saves the truth for later. The cost isn’t always visible right away. It shows up in shaky agreements, in decisions that have to be made twice and in a slow erosion of trust.

There’s also a kind of listening aimed at yourself. Before you answer, before you defend yourself, before you take the floor. That pause lets you separate what you really want to say from what you just want to get off your chest. Far more conversations are ruined by haste than by a shortage of ideas. Speaking too soon is often a way of not being able to sit with uncertainty.

Building that habit changes the quality of your relationships and your decisions. People who listen closely pick up on what’s left unsaid, the nuance that changes the diagnosis, the objection that heads off a mistake. In life and at work, that edge is quiet and it compounds. It doesn’t make for a show. It makes for clarity. And clarity, kept up over time, is worth more than eloquence.

In the end, listening more than you speak is less a strict formula and more a direction. It’s a reminder that words carry weight and that not everything that can be said should be. People who learn to take in more than they put out lose nothing. They find their footing. And when they do speak, they’re more precise.

If you listened two to one, twice as much as you talk, how would your life change?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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