How your nervous system shapes listening, curiosity, and connection
(Part 1 of 3)
Contrary to what many may believe, communication problems are not so much about words as they are about attention.
This series will hopefully allow you to find ways to better communicate across your relationships, enabling them to continue to grow and thrive.
Let me walk you through 3 scenarios, which may feel familiar:
At Home
It’s late, it’s been a long day of activity and the kids are finally asleep. The house has gone quiet. You and your partner are standing in the kitchen.
One of you shares how stressed they are feeling. Maybe that’s you or maybe you are the one hearing your partner’s stress and jumping quickly into trying to find a solution.
Without knowing how, the whole exchange escalates to a fight “You never listen” vs. “I am only trying to help.”
You maybe storm away or go quiet or try to justify what you feel while your partner also reacts defensively, leading you both to a dead end.
As you climb into bed, you feel angry and blame either yourself or your partner for what has occurred, intuiting a pattern but unable to see it as you tell yourself “it’s always the same…”
At Work
You have been managing your team for some months and recently received “negative” feedback around how you are engaging them.
You’re trying hard to lead with clarity and efficiency; your calendar is packed and your inbox is relentless. Slack keeps pinging…
You enter a meeting focused on the task at hand.
A lot is said… and yet somehow, nothing meaningful lands. You leave unsure whether people truly “got it,” even though part of you thinks they should.
You walk out frustrated and burdened but you quickly focus on the next task.
Or maybe you are one of the meeting’s participants who left the meeting with a sense of having much to contribute though you did not say it or you felt you were not heard.
Out with a friend
You are out with a friend and openly share an emotionally charged challenge you are facing (marriage trouble/aging parent/health issues).
Your friend is quick to try to make a positive spin on the issue, or quickly jumps to tell you about their own troubles or clearly changes the topic.
You leave the meeting feeling lonely with your troubles.
Or maybe you are the friend who felt uncomfortable or overwhelmed when hearing the emotional topic and you feel you tried to help and did not know how.
At the end of the day, you both feel you did something wrong. You both sense a small distance between you.
The real trap: judging instead of noticing attention
As you read through this you might sympathise with any of the people described and even jump quickly to judging someone’s character or behaviour.
But the truth is that we ALL fall into these communication traps and most of the time, it’s not because we don’t care. It’s because our attention is compromised.
Attention isn’t just focus. It is a combination of presence and regulation.
If your nervous system is in rush/defend/shutdown/perform (flight/fight/freeze/fawn), you can’t truly listen; let alone stay curious.
As we grow older and acquire greater responsibilities, we find ourselves with less bandwidth, dealing often with higher stake issues and we can easily default to speed, certainty, distraction and the urge to “fix” situations – to react rather than respond.
Sounds familiar?
When that happens both our listening and curiosity are compromised.
Listening requires enough safety and bandwidth to receive without immediately steering. Curiosity requires enough internal openness to tolerate not knowing for a moment.
If you are feeling stressed, tired, time-pressured, or emotionally flooded, your brain and body tend to reduce nuance and increase certainty. In those moments, we all will naturally grab for solutions, arguments, narratives, or distractions. We don’t lose intelligence but do lose access to it.
And this is not because we’re bad communicators, but because we’re trying to regulate ourselves.
In situations like the ones I shared, I invite you to instead of asking, “Who’s right?” or “Why are they like this?” try more useful questions:
“What state am I in right now?”
“What state am I creating in the other person?”
Take the examples above, in each scenario, a part of you is trying to protect something:
At home: one nervous system is reaching for closeness and reassurance; the other is reaching for fairness, respect, and not being blamed.
At work: one nervous system is reaching for clarity and momentum; the other is reaching for safety to contribute without getting it wrong.
With a friend: one nervous system is reaching for being met and held; the other is reaching for relief from helplessness and emotional overload.
Protection isn’t wrong..it’s mammal, it’s human! But protection narrows attention and with a narrowed attention we are more likely to default to patterns we later regret.
🕵🏽♀️
A simple practice: find your “attention tell”
Think of similar situations you have experienced lately.
Most of us have an early warning sign that our attention is about to collapse.
When you’re no longer really listening, what happens first?
- You speed up?
- You interrupt?
- You start preparing your response?
- You go blank?
- You get overly logical?
- You smile and nod but drift away?
- You fix?
- You defend?
- You shut down?
Pick one that is most like you. That’s your “tell.”
Not something to judge…something to work with.
You can begin to get more familiar when this happens in real time and also you may begin to create space for choice:
How might a grounded open version of you respond instead?
Allow yourself to imagine a different response. Imagination is also practice, because our brains don’t only learn from what we do, they also learn from what we rehearse. When you vividly picture yourself pausing, softening, listening, or asking a better question, you’re strengthening the neural pathways that make that response more available in real time.
Centering practice: A 10-second nonverbal effective reset
Next time you notice your tell, try this as an experiment:
– Exhale slowly: making your out-breath longer
– Drop your shoulders and unclench your jaw
– Widen your vision: Take in the room, not just the person’s face
Then ask yourself one question:
“What matters most right now?”
You don’t have to answer perfectly. You just need to interrupt your autopilot.
Where we’re going next
You don’t need to become a perfect communicator. You do need to become a better “noticer.”
Because once you can notice where your attention goes under pressure, you can regain power of choice: to slow down, to repair sooner, to stay curious a little longer, to find new ways to respond and to turn “it’s always the same” into “we’re learning a new way.”
In the next posts, we’ll go deeper into two skills that expand attention when life compresses it: listening and curiosity.
For now, just start here:
✨✨Notice your tell. Practice 10 second reset. Start to engage with a new response.
