The Unseen Power of Listening: Why the Best Leaders Don’t Speak First

How emotional intelligence turns good leaders into great ones

One of the most powerful takeaways from my conversation with Christopher D. Connors was a theme that keeps coming up in my own leadership journey: listening is everything.

Not listening to respond. Not listening to control the narrative. But listening—truly listening—to understand, connect, and build.

Chris said something during our talk that really hit me. He said that leadership is “personalized, connected influence.” That phrase stuck. Because if you think about it, you can’t personalize your influence if you’re not tuned in to the people around you. And you can’t connect meaningfully if you’re just waiting for your turn to talk.

We’re in a world that rewards noise. The louder you are, the more you're seen. But leadership? That’s not about volume. It’s about presence. The leaders who have shaped me the most—coaches, mentors, even my parents—weren’t the ones who dominated the room. They were the ones who asked good questions, paid attention to the little things, and made you feel like what you had to say mattered.

That’s what I admire most about Chris. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t just write or speak about emotional intelligence; he embodies it. And it starts with his ability to listen deeply, whether he’s coaching executives in Silicon Valley or helping his son’s baseball team find its rhythm.

I’ve spent the last few years talking with neuroscientists, bestselling authors, elite athletes, and spiritual teachers. You’d think the common thread would be discipline, or grit, or brilliance, and those things show up. But time and again, the one trait that surfaces in the best of them is this quiet superpower: they know how to listen to themselves, to others, and to what their life is trying to teach them.

Chris also talked about something I’ve wrestled with myself: the tendency to fear feedback. I used to avoid it. Even in corporate leadership roles, I often found myself doing mental gymnastics to defend my decisions rather than open myself up to critique. But what changed my leadership was the day I realized feedback, especially the kind that stings, isn’t an indictment. It’s an invitation.

An invitation to grow. To stretch. To stop pretending you’ve already arrived and remember that leadership, like life, is a process.

Chris calls this shift “subordinating the fear.” That phrase gave me pause. Because so many of us let fear run the show, fear of being judged, of not being good enough, of being exposed. But what happens when we flip the script? What happens when we ask…

What if the fear is a compass pointing us toward the work that matters most?

That one question might be the key to everything. And Chris didn’t just talk about it in theory. He gave me a very real, very personal example from his own life, something that shifted his mindset, redefined his emotional response, and helped him step into a deeper, more grounded version of leadership.

And that story... is where this gets really good.

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