Effective negotiation starts with exceptional listening, not just speaking.

A good listener makes speakers more articulate, creative, and open to solutions.

Listening skills predict success in relationships, jobs, and negotiations.

A few years ago, I was asked to teach mindfulness to a room full of cops at a mandatory training. I should have known from the word "mandatory" how it was going to go.

I stood at the front of the room doing my best, watching arms fold across chests in real time. Eyes wandering to phones. One officer in the back made basically no effort to conceal that he was doing his Candy Crush. I pressed on—talking about the breath, the nervous system, the science—and the harder I tried, the faster the room checked out.

I bombed. Thoroughly.

Later, turning it over in my head, I kept coming back to the same uncomfortable question: Whose fault was that, really? I'd walked in with my slides and my research and my agenda, and I'd talked at that room rather than with it. I hadn't listened to what they actually needed, what they were afraid of, what might have made them lean in rather than check out. I was so focused on what I wanted to say that I never paused to wonder what they needed to hear.

I've spent a lot of years thinking about communication—as a psychologist, a teacher, a parent, and someone who gives close to a hundred talks a year on the science of the mind. And the single thing I keep coming back to, the thing that research confirms over and over again, is this:

We have it completely backwards.

Think about how much of your education was devoted to speaking. Speech class. Debate team. Book reports in front of the class. PowerPoint........

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