5 Kinds of Listening That Will Help You Navigate Life’s Biggest Transitions

The Hidden Art of Hearing What Life Is Really Telling You

Quick Snapshot: What You’re About to Read

What this is: A fresh look at the overlooked skill of listening, not just to other people, but to your body, your instincts, your grief, your silence, and even your horses (stay with me). For people at a crossroads who sense there’s more signal in their current chaos than they’re catching.

What this isn’t: A lecture about “active listening” techniques for your next Zoom meeting. Not a therapy script. Not a beginner’s guide to feelings.

Read this if: You’ve been through something seismic, a divorce, a diagnosis, a bereavement, a career implosion, and you’re starting to wonder whether the noise of the aftermath is actually trying to tell you something important.

5 Key Takeaways

• There are at least five distinct modes of listening, and most of us habitually use only one.
• Your body has been sending you messages for years. Life crises have an inconvenient habit of turning up the volume.
• Silence is not the absence of information. It’s often the clearest channel you have.
• The shift from surviving to thriving frequently begins with a single moment of genuinely different listening.
• This skill isn’t just transformative for you, it ripples outward, changing how you parent, lead, love, and show up in your community.

Introduction: What You Keep Missing

You’ve read the books. You’ve talked to the friends. You’ve possibly talked to a therapist, a coach, or that remarkably wise woman at the yoga studio who always seems to know exactly the right thing to say. And yet.

Something still feels unresolved. Like a word on the tip of your tongue that won’t quite come. Like a song playing in another room that you can almost, but not quite, make out.

Here’s a possibility worth considering: You’ve been listening with only one kind of listening.

Most of us were taught a very narrow version of listening. We learned to decode words, track tone, watch body language. We learned to wait politely for our turn to speak, which is arguably not listening at all. Nobody taught us that listening is a whole landscape, with territories we haven’t explored yet.

In this article, you’ll discover that the art of listening has dimensions you almost certainly haven’t visited. And that those unexplored dimensions might be where your next chapter is quietly waiting.

The Woman Who Learned to Listen to the Wind: A Story

Vivienne Hartwell had always been an excellent listener. Her colleagues said so. Her ex-husband had certainly made use of it for eleven years. Her adult children rang her when they needed to process something, which was flattering and exhausting in equal measure.

So when her marriage ended at fifty-three, when the house she’d lived in for two decades was sold and the children diplomatically declined to take sides, and when she found herself standing in a rented flat in Bristol with a box of books and absolutely no idea who she was without the role she’d been playing, her first instinct was to do more of what she was good at.

She listened. To her friends’ advice. To podcasts about reinvention. To a well-meaning sister who suggested she “get back out there” with the optimism of someone who had never experienced a dating app after fifty. She listened to her own internal monologue, which at 3am was particularly unhelpful and surprisingly creative in its cruelty.

What she wasn’t listening to was everything else.

She wasn’t listening to the fact that her jaw ached every morning from clenching it in her sleep. She wasn’t listening to the small, persistent voice that whispered she’d been performing competence for so long she’d forgotten what it felt like to simply not know something. She wasn’t listening to the way her shoulders dropped, involuntarily and entirely, whenever she walked near water. She wasn’t listening to the hunger she felt for open space, for movement, for something that wasn’t a screen or a support group or a well-intentioned casserole left on her doorstep.

It wasn’t until she found herself, somewhat unexpectedly, at a retreat in the south-west of France, walking a stretch of the Camino de Santiago and met a couple of enormous Friesian horses, that something began to shift.

The horses were not subtle about it.

Vivienne had approached the largest one, a glossy black mare named Toos, with the same polished manner she brought to everything. Chin up. Smile ready. Words forming. And Toos had simply, calmly, turned away.

“She’s not being rude,” said the retreat facilitator quietly. “She’s responding to what you’re actually broadcasting, not what you’re saying.”

Vivienne stood very still. The morning smelled of pine resin and dry grass and something indefinably ancient. A bird called twice from somewhere in the trees. The sound of her own breathing was suddenly very loud.

“Try something,” said the facilitator. “Don’t try to connect with her. Just… notice what’s happening in your body right now. Not your thoughts. Just sensations.”

Vivienne felt slightly ridiculous. She also felt, to her own surprise, the sudden sting of tears behind her eyes. Her chest, she noticed, felt like a fist. Her feet felt uncertain on the earth, as if she wasn’t quite sure she had permission to stand there.

She stood with that. She let it be there without immediately filing it under “things to address later.”

Nuit turned back. She stepped forward slowly and rested her enormous nose against Vivienne’s shoulder. The warmth of it was extraordinary. Vivienne’s chest released something she hadn’t known was locked.

Later, sitting with the horses in what the facilitator called a storytelling circle, working through the Purpose Pivot Protocol course together, Vivienne tried to articulate what had happened. “I think I’ve been listening to everything except myself,” she said finally. “Not in a therapy-cliché way. I mean literally. I’ve been processing everyone else’s signal and treating my own like static.”

Over the days that followed, walking the ancient pilgrim path with its gravelly path and its extraordinary light, Vivienne began to learn something she hadn’t expected to learn at fifty-three. She learned that her body had been speaking a language she’d never been taught to read. That silence, real silence, not the anxious absence of noise but the spacious kind you find on a hillside at dusk, carried information she’d never stopped to receive. That other people, listened to properly, without an agenda, without her formulating a response, were telling her things about her own life she’d missed completely.

She walked back into her flat in Bristol with blisters on both feet and something settled behind her eyes that hadn’t been there before. She wasn’t fixed. She wasn’t certain. But she had begun, for the first time in a long time, not just to listen, but to actually hear.

Why Are There More Than One Way of Listening, and Why Does It Matter Now?

Most listening literature focuses on interpersonal communication, which is useful, but also somewhat like teaching someone to appreciate music by only discussing the lyrics. It misses most of the instrument.

Here are five distinct modes of listening that, together, create a full-spectrum capacity for receiving and making sense of life:

1. Cognitive Listening: Are You Decoding or Actually Listening?

This is the listening most of us default to. It’s linguistic, analytical, and concerned with content. What were the words? What was the argument? What’s the information? It’s valuable, obviously, but it’s also the mode most prone to filtering everything through your existing beliefs and assumptions. When you’re in the middle of a life crisis, cognitive listening alone can keep you cycling through the same conclusions without ever arriving anywhere new.

2. Somatic Listening: What Is Your Body Trying to Tell You?

Your nervous system is an extraordinary information-processing system that has been quietly archiving data about your life for decades. Tightness in the throat. Restlessness in the legs. The peculiar heaviness that settles in the chest when you’re contemplating something that isn’t right for you, even when it looks right on paper. Learning to read somatic signals isn’t mystical; it’s practical intelligence. After years of working with people navigating grief, illness, and major transition, the physical vocabulary of distress and desire is often far more honest than any story the mind constructs about it.

3. Intuitive Listening: How Do You Hear What Isn’t Being Said?

Intuition is not guesswork dressed up in spiritual clothing. It’s pattern recognition operating below conscious awareness, drawing on everything you’ve experienced and observed. Learning to distinguish genuine intuitive signal from anxiety-driven catastrophising, or wishful thinking, is a skill. But it’s one worth developing, because your intuition is often processing information your conscious mind hasn’t yet assembled.

4. Environmental Listening: What Is the World Around You Saying?

This is perhaps the most undervalued mode, and the one that retreats in natural environments are particularly good at activating. Walking an ancient path, noticing what draws your eye and what repels it, what landscapes make you feel expanded and what makes you contract, these are not merely aesthetic preferences. They are information about who you are and what you need. For thousands of years, humans read their environment constantly. We haven’t lost the capacity; we’ve simply stopped practising it.

5. Relational Listening: Are You Listening to Connect or to Manage?

True relational listening, listening without an agenda, without formulating your response, without filtering what you hear through the story you’ve already decided is true, is rare. It’s also transformative, both for the person being listened to and for the listener. When you genuinely hear another person, you inevitably hear something about yourself.

How Does Developing This Skill Change More Than Just You?

Here’s the part that might surprise you. This isn’t just personal development. When someone moving through a major life transition develops the capacity for multi-dimensional listening, the effects don’t stay contained.

Children who grow up with a parent who has learned to listen somatically and intuitively, who models sitting with uncertainty rather than immediately resolving it, who demonstrates that silence can be comfortable rather than threatening, those children develop a fundamentally different relationship with their own inner lives.

Friendships deepen in quality, if not always in number. There’s a particular kind of attention that people who have done this work bring to a conversation, and people feel it. They don’t always know what’s different, but they notice they leave the conversation feeling genuinely heard, sometimes for the first time in years.

Communities, workplaces, families, they all shift when even one person within them develops this capacity. Not in a grand, dramatic way, but in the quiet, persistent way that actually changes things. The person who pauses before responding. The one who notices when someone in the room has gone silent in a meaningful way. The one who asks the question everyone else was too busy talking to ask.

Life transitions, like break-up’s nd divorces, are often the catalysts for exactly this kind of growth, not because suffering is ennobling in some tidy way, but because the old coping mechanisms genuinely stop working, which creates an unexpected window of openness. The question is whether you use that window to rush back to the familiar, or to genuinely explore what else is available.

What Are the 5 Most Common Listening Mistakes to Avoid?

Mistaking information-gathering for listening. Listening is not research. The moment you enter a conversation, an inner experience, or a period of silence with a specific objective in mind, you’ve narrowed the channel. Most of the interesting data arrives sideways, in what you weren’t looking for. Try entering experiences with curiosity rather than a checklist.

Treating your internal noise as the enemy. The anxious chatter, the intrusive thoughts, the midnight catastrophising, these aren’t obstacles to listening. They’re actually information, often about where you’re carrying unresolved fear or unacknowledged need. The practice isn’t to silence them but to hear them differently, with a degree of compassionate curiosity rather than alarm.

Listening only when things are quiet. Real listening needs to be portable. The most useful moments often happen in the middle of ordinary life, a flash of recognition while loading the dishwasher, a sudden clarity on a walk, a body sensation that arrives uninvited during a meeting. If you’ve only practised listening in curated, peaceful conditions, you’ll miss most of the signal.

Confusing listening with agreement. This is a significant one for people-pleasers and caretakers, which, if you’ve spent decades being the competent, supportive one in most rooms, you may be. Listening deeply to someone does not mean you agree with them, will do what they ask, or are responsible for resolving what they’re feeling. It simply means you’re genuinely receiving their experience. The confusion of these things leads to either defended non-listening or exhausting over-empathy.

Skipping the body and going straight to meaning. This is where most cognitive, analytically-gifted people come undone. The temptation is always to move quickly to interpretation, to make sense of the experience before you’ve actually fully had it. Staying in sensation, in what’s physically present, for a little longer than is comfortable, is often where the real information lives.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Before You Read Further

Place both feet flat on the floor. Take one slow breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Do it again, unhurriedly.

Ask yourself, without needing an immediate answer: What have I been too busy to hear lately?

Don’t analyse. Don’t write anything down yet. Simply sit with the question for thirty seconds and notice what, if anything, arises. A sensation. An image. A word. A resistance.

That noticing, right there, is the beginning of a different kind of listening.

Carry the question with you today. See what it draws to the surface.

Further Reading: 5 Books Worth Your Time on This Subject

‘You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters’ by Kate Murphy (2020). Murphy, a journalist, spent years interviewing people about listening and produced one of the most intelligent, readable books on the subject in recent memory. What makes it particularly useful for people in transition is her unflinching examination of how we use busyness and talking as avoidance strategies, and what it costs us. A genuinely honest book.

‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Bessel van der Kolk (2014). If somatic listening is new territory for you, Van der Kolk’s landmark work on how the body stores and communicates emotional experience is indispensable. It’s written as a clinical text but reads with surprising humanity. Essential for anyone who has been through significant loss or trauma and wonders why their body keeps behaving in ways their mind can’t quite explain.

‘Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence’ by Anne D. LeClaire (2009). LeClaire took a vow of silence every Monday for twenty years and wrote about what she heard. This quiet, beautifully observed book is for anyone who suspects that what they most need to hear requires conditions they haven’t been creating. Particularly useful for people who fill space with sound as a default.

‘Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking’ by Malcolm Gladwell (2005). A popular science exploration of intuitive processing, how the brain makes snap judgements and why they’re sometimes more accurate than careful deliberation. Gladwell makes a compelling, research-backed case for taking the fast, wordless intelligence of intuition seriously. Good for sceptics who need permission to trust their gut.

‘Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges’ by Amy Cuddy (2015). This book sits at the intersection of somatic intelligence and confidence, making the case that presence, which is essentially the capacity to be genuinely here rather than performing being here, is learnable and transformative. Particularly good for people re-entering professional or social spaces after a period of significant change.

P.S. My own book, ‘Embracing Change: In 10 Minutes a Day‘, which grew directly from my work with people navigating exactly these kinds of transitions. It’s a practical, daily companion for the period when you know something needs to shift but you’re not quite sure yet what or how. Short enough to actually use. Honest enough to actually help.

5 FAQs: What People Are Actually Asking About Listening and Life Transitions

Q: Is it normal to feel like you’ve lost the ability to listen to yourself after a major loss or change?

Completely normal, and almost universal. Significant life disruption floods the nervous system with threat signals, which narrows attention and pulls focus outward to perceived dangers. The inner channel doesn’t disappear; it gets temporarily overwhelmed. Recovery of self-listening capacity is genuinely one of the most reliable markers of healing progress.

Q: How do you tell the difference between intuition and anxiety? They both seem to come from the same place.

This is the right question and it doesn’t have a lazy answer. Generally, anxiety tends to be loud, urgent, repetitive, and future-focused. It catastrophises and demands action. Intuition tends to be quieter, more certain, present-focused, and often arrives in a single clear impression before the mind starts arguing with it. Learning to distinguish them is a practice, not a formula. It helps to sit with both and notice what changes, and what doesn’t, over time.

Q: Can listening practices actually help with grief? It sounds abstract.

Not abstract at all. Grief, in my clinical experience, is one of the most physically held experiences humans have. The chest heaviness, the throat tightness, the particular exhaustion, these aren’t metaphors. Learning to listen to grief somatically, to stay with the physical reality of it rather than immediately reaching for meaning or resolution, is often the most direct path through it.

Q: I’m quite an analytical person. Will any of this actually work for me?

Particularly for you, possibly. Analytical thinkers often have exceptionally well-developed cognitive listening and chronically underdeveloped somatic and intuitive listening. The good news is that once analytical people understand the rationale for developing these capacities, they tend to approach it with impressive thoroughness. The challenge is tolerating ambiguity long enough to let the non-verbal information arrive. Worth trying.

Q: What’s the quickest way to start?

Stop talking for five minutes in a situation where you’d normally fill the silence. Not to be more helpful. Not to process something. Simply to notice what happens in that space, in your body, in the air between you and whoever else is there. Do that three times this week. See what you notice.

Conclusion

The transition you’ve been through, or are still in the middle of, hasn’t only taken things from you. It has also, inconveniently and rather rudely, removed some of the noise that was preventing you from hearing certain things.

That’s not a silver lining presented too quickly. It’s simply a fact about how disruption works. The familiar structures that organised your attention, your role, your daily rhythm, your identity, they were also functioning as filters. Some of what they filtered out was useful. Some of it was the very information you most needed.

Learning to listen differently isn’t a technique. It’s an orientation, a decision to treat your life, including its silences, its physical sensations, its unexpected moments of clarity, and its stubbornly recurring questions, as a source of genuine intelligence.

“The next chapter doesn’t announce itself with fanfare. It tends to arrive quietly, in the space between what you’ve stopped saying and what you haven’t yet found the words for. Listen there.” — Dr Margaretha Montagu

Walk the Camino. Hear Something New.

What if seven days of walking an ancient path in the south-west of France could give you back access to a part of yourself you’ve been too busy to reach?

The Crossroads Camino de Santiago Retreat was designed specifically for people at exactly the juncture you’re standing at: after something major has changed, before the next chapter has quite come clear. Gravel paths, extraordinary light, solo/small groups, and storytelling circles that include, yes, Friesian horses who will respond to what you’re actually broadcasting rather than what you’re trying to project. Led by Dr Margaretha Montagu, physician, NLP master practitioner, and retreat host for over twenty years, with thirty-plus guest testimonials from people who arrived at a crossroads and left with a direction.

Seven days. Good walking shoes. An open heart.

5 Questions to Sit With

(Not to answer immediately. To carry with you.)

• Which kind of listening have you been relying on almost exclusively, and what might you be missing as a result?
• What has your body been trying to tell you that you’ve been too busy to hear?
• Is there a silence in your life right now that you’ve been filling with noise? What might be in that silence?
• Who in your life genuinely listens to you, without agenda, without advice, without fixing? And when did you last do the same for someone else?
• If the disruption you’ve experienced was trying to redirect your attention towards something, what might that something be?

About Dr Margaretha Montagu

MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist, Storytelling and Life Transition Coach

Twenty years as a physician with a specialist interest in stress management. Fifteen years hosting transformational retreats on the Camino de Santiago. Author of eight non-fiction books on divorce, loss, unexpected illness, and navigating crisis.

Ready to explore what’s next? Start with the Turning Point Quiz