Communication – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

Do you know how you end up doing what you do? How you make those quick, natural, unconscious decisions? Certainly, there’s pondering when you make ‘important’ decisions.

But what about those that don’t demand much thought, that you’ve done so many times and assume are suitable? Do you know how they affect others? The risks involved that remain unspoken but certainly color ongoing activity and relationships?

Unless you know the consequences of your (unconscious) decisions, you can’t know the risks you face.

I’d like to share a story of how unconscious choices have consequences and offer some ideas to have more conscious choice.

CASE STUDY

I mentor a wonderful company in India (Orchvate), led admirably by two visionary women (Panchali Banderjee and Geethanjali Ganapathy) that trains, places, and supervises neurodiverse people into Indian corporations. In a world where diversity, especially neurodiversity, is still not easily accepted in corporate environments, their important work provides both people and companies terrific services and opportunities.

One of my jobs has been to assist Orchvate in building a structure that’s less dependent upon the founders and more organized around growth, supervision, authenticity and servant-leadership.

After a recent monthly team meeting – our second, conceived to ensure all would be involved in cultivating a cohesive culture – I noticed leadership had failed to send out a ‘thanks for attending’ follow up notice.

I wrote Panchali reminding her to send a follow up with a cc to me. What I received was cut and dry – a great effort (to the point, professional, and practical) but lacked the kindness, support, acceptance and inclusion we were trying to engender.

I wondered how she decided to use those words and tone after all our discussions. Here was our conversation.

SD: How did you decide to write the note the way you did?

P: I didn’t decide.

SD: But you did. You chose the words and the tone. Everything we all do involves choosing some things over others.

P: I just wrote it. It was something I needed to do.

SD: Just because your decisions weren’t conscious didn’t mean you didn’t make decisions. You just made them unconsciously.

P: Oh! I never realized I needed different choices!

SD: Most leaders do the same thing – assume their natural choices are effective – without realizing there may be unintended consequences. Let’s figure out when you must make choices more consciously. Remember when you sat down to write this. What comes up?

P: That I needed to get it done.

SD: So this was a task, a DOing (the quantitative) rather than using it to connect authentically – a BEing (the qualitative)? Did you realize you omitted the way you usually speak from your heart that makes it so easy to connect with you?

P: I never consciously thought of it! It was a task. I realize now I tend to treat certain things as tasks to be done rather than moments of connection.

SD: So your DOing is a task orientation that excludes the BEing! Huh. Hopefully next team email will combine the two, maybe by using ‘kindness, authenticity, connection’ as your goal or task.

P: I could do that!

CONCLUSION

Choice. The essential element necessary to recognize the risks that emerge from unconscious decisions.

For those of you wanting to try generating decisions more consciously, here are some Facilitative Questions™ to help you going forward:

How will I know that something deserves my time to stop and deliberately consider my full range of choices before doing what comes naturally? To include both the DOing and the BEing where it’s appropriate?
How can I trigger myself to consider the unspoken – but real – risks that each communication from me produces, before I send anything out?
What new skills must I learn so my communications match our beliefs, to help the teams and supervisors incorporate them into their work?
What do I need to think of to remember to use qualitative words and include kindheartedness in my messages?

Panchali was initially unaware that her choices represented a risk to the changes we were instituting. But this problem isn’t hers alone. Most leaders respond to their tasks without conscious choice, certainly not realizing the consequences.

How will you know when you need additional choices beyond your automatic decisions to ensure you’re conveying the essential elements that will avoid risks and assure your best outcome?

______________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen May 18th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

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As managers, professors, speakers, and instructors you’re committed to getting your big ideas across, facilitating decision making, collaborating with students, inspiring creativity and sparking original ideas. But is your audience hearing what you intend to convey?

When I heard two highly intelligent people having a conversation in which neither were directly responding to each other (”Which door at the meeting hall should my friends pick me up?” “There’s parking near the bottom of the hill.”) I became curious. Were they hearing different things that caused disparate responses?

I spent the next 3 years studying how brains listen and writing a book on it (WHAT? Did you really say what I think I heard?). I ended up learning far more than I ever wanted to: like most people, I had assumed that when I carefully listened I could accurately hear someone’s intended message. I was wrong.

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HOW BRAINS LISTEN

Turns out there’s no absolute correlation between what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears – a very unsatisfactory reality when our professions may be based on offering content that is meant to be understood and retained.

Sadly there’s a probability that your Listeners are not taking away what you’re saying. Recent studies have proven that Listeners only accurately hear no more than 35% of what’s been said. And it’s their brain’s fault.

Here’s my definition of listening:

Listening is an automatic, electrochemical, biological, mechanical, and physiological process during which spoken words, as meaningless puffs of air, eventually get translated into meaning by our existing neural circuitry, leaving us to understand some unknown fraction of what’s been said – and even this is biased by our existing knowledge.

In other words, listening is an automatic and mechanical process devoid of meaning – merely a transactional process. We can have no idea how a Listener’s brain has translated our content.

ELEMENTS OF HOW BRAINS ‘HEAR’

In case you want to understand the process, here are the steps brains perform when hearing spoken words.

A message (words, as puffs of air, initially without meaning) gets spoken and received as sound vibrations.
Dopamine, where our beliefs and values are stored, immediately processes incoming sound vibrations, deleting and filtering out some of them according to relevance to the Listener’s mental models.
What’s left gets sent to a CUE which turns the remaining vibrations into electrochemical signals.
The signals then get sent to the Central Executive Network (CEN) where they are dispatched to a ‘similar-enough’ neural circuit (among 100+ billion) for translation into meaning. Note: The preferred neural circuits that receive the signals are those most often used by the Listener, regardless of their precise relevance to what was said.
Upon arrival at these ‘similar-enough’ circuits, the brain discards any overage between the existing circuit and the incoming signals and fills in any perceived holes with ‘other’ signals from neighboring circuits.

What our brain tell us was said, i.e. what we ‘hear’, is a translation of whatever remains. So: several deletions, a few additions, and translation into meaning by circuits that already exist.

In other words, what we think we hear, what our brain tells us was said, is some rendition of what a Speaker intends to convey that gets biased by our own history – what we already know and believe – obviously restricting incoming content to what’s familiar.

The problem shows up in all our conversations but becomes even more challenging when imparting knowledge: neither the Speaker nor the Listener knows the distance between what was said and what was heard. Certainly both assume they’ve heard and been heard accurately.

I lost a business partner who believed I said something I would never have said. He not only didn’t believe me when I told him what I’d actually said, but he didn’t believe his wife who was standing with us at the time (“John. Sharon-Drew’s right! She never said that! I was right next to you!”). “You’re both lying to me! I heard it with my own ears!” and he stomped out of the room, never to speak to me again.

HOW TO CONFIRM OUR AUDIENCE HEARS US

What does that mean for those of us paid to provide information? It means we have no idea if some/all/few of the Listeners hear precisely what we are trying to convey. They might hear something similar or something vastly different. They may hear something quite comfortable or something that offends them. They may misinterpret a homework assignment or a project initiative. It means they may not retain what we’re offering.

To make sure your audience understands what you intend to share, you must take an extra step. Instead of merely assuming your good content or asking inspirational questions are heard as intended, you must assume you don’t know what they’ve heard, regardless of how carefully you’ve worded our message.

To realize what’s been heard and counter any errors I suggest you ask:

Can you each tell me what you heard me say?

You’ll be amazed at what the audience hears! Of course then you’ll be able to correct the errors.

LEARNING FACILITATION™

For those times you seek to impart permanent learning – say, in a training environment – and it’s important that your audience accurately understands and/or learns what you’re saying, I’ve developed a wholly new type of training model.

Learning Facilitation™ works with the brain first to bypass the historic circuits and generate new ones to accurately retrieve and maintain the new data.

It’s great for classroom training and can be amended for management groups and lecture halls.

Call me if you’re interested in learning how to design Learning Facilitation™ programs. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_____________________

Sharon Drew Morgen April 20th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Your important nonprofit or exciting startup will help the world be a better place. But now you’ve got to raise money. You’ve created a terrific pitch deck; have a highly competent management team and terms; have access to good outreach lists; are sending out slick marketing missives that show your professionalism and integrity; and have identified donor prospects with major gift potential. You’ve designed a multi-channel approach to build relationships with small investors and donors to excite them to give more.

Why aren’t you raising all the money you deserve?

It’s not you, your message. or your organization;
It’s not the strength of your relationship or who you ‘know’;
It’s not the market, your competition, your return potential or your marketing materials.

It’s a decision issue. Somehow your investors must choose between giving their money to you or putting it somewhere else that seems equally promising. With a finite amount to invest, they must decide where to put their funds. How will they decide?

CRITERIA VS. CONTENT

Ultimately, people choose to invest based on their own choice criteria and beliefs. While your purpose is undoubtedly important and your pitch deck substantive, unless a startup matches an investor’s criteria and they know the risks involved with investing in you, they will do nothing, regardless of how compelling your goals, marketing, market share, or growth potential.

Funds, after all, are not sitting there waiting for you to show up. You may be requesting money that

competes with other investments in their portfolio;
represents some sort of risk to them;
is earmarked for something/someone else;
needs stakeholder buy-in;
may be outside their stated goals, relationships, strategy, beliefs or agreements.

For the most part, decisions are made unconsciously before content is directly considered, not to mention you have no access to the hidden or historic events, political mind-fields, or unconscious biases that dictate someone’s choice criteria.

By including some new thinking, it’s possible to enable prospective investors to uncover and share their criteria within your session, providing you the opportunity to discuss any objections right away, then offer them the exact pitch to match their needs.

HOW PEOPLE CHOOSE

Sadly, regardless of your worthy cause or important product, people won’t give you money unless it meets their unspoken criteria. It’s here you unwittingly lose investors.

Outsiders (sellers, fundraisers, etc.) can never understand the behind-the-scenes, idiosyncratic criteria used to decide. Each person, each group has their own unique sets of rules, beliefs, values, vision they choose from;
Until the personal choice criteria are factored and resolved, until it’s determined that donating or investing in one group vs another does not put the investor at risk, no decision to invest will be made regardless of the importance of your offering or your marketing or outreach efforts;
Our information is only relevant after it fits into the potential investor’s defined initiatives and parameters. And when you offer it before they’ve recognized their choice criteria. They can’t even hear your pitch accurately.

There’s one more factor to consider: Who decides?

While you won’t have access to anyone’s personal decision-making strategies, it’s obvious that unless it’s a small ask, there’s usually a decision team who decide together – several people or just a spouse – and may not be in the room with you.

These people also have unknown criteria that govern their choices – political, humanitarian, profit, trust, etc.; there are personal standards that must be met; and there’s a risk to each choice that must be ascertained. Content details are only useful once primary choice criteria are met.

FACILITATE CRITERIA DISCOVERY BEFORE PITCHING

Instead of assuming the compelling solution you believe details investors should know and developing pitch decks based on these assumptions, begin by leading people directly to their unconscious choice criteria.

I’ve developed decision facilitation models used by many sales professionals to facilitate buying decisions called Buying Facilitation®. It includes the elements involved in how buyers decide, using a form of question I invented [Facilitative Questions™] that enable unconscious criteria to emerge for discussion. Here’s a few to use for fundraising:

What investment risks do you seek to avoid? How will you know upfront that investing with us would avoid these risks?
How will you choose between causes to give money to? What criteria will you use? What flexibility do you have?
How will you and your decision team decide on the amounts and types of groups or organizations to invest in?
What would you need to see from a group you’re considering investing in to be certain our group meets your criteria?

Sample

These questions make it possible for potential investors to find their unconscious criteria beyond their automatic choices. So if I never contribute to causes that involve for-profit business, if a small software group is fundraising to give their employee’s children better healthcare I might go beyond my unconscious criteria and invest.

At my suggestion, one of my clients posed this Facilitative Question™ as her first statement when seeking Round B funding, before pitching. As a woman, she understood she had less than a 4% chance of getting funded and hoped to trigger the investor’s better angels.

What would you need to know about me, my level of skill and professionalism, and my ability to manage a start-up, to trust that as a woman I was worthy of your investment?

Two of the ten potential investors walked out. The other 8 actually applauded, saying they hadn’t realized they had an unconscious bias against women before they even walked in. She had no problems getting funded.

REPEAT INVESTORS

For people who have donated to you or invested with you previously, begin your meeting with a discussion on how they’ll decide to invest or donate again. These folks seem to be obvious patrons, but unfortunately not all recommit.

While we assume we can encourage them to donate or invest more, we might not know what they need to hear from us to do so: What do they need to know about what we’ve accomplished in the meantime? Are they looking for some sign of ‘success’ or to know if we’ve made the change or addition they were hoping for? Do they still trust us? Again, we can assume, but we don’t know for sure.

Good questions might be something like:

What would you need to see from us to be willing to donate/invest again this year?
Due to the political climate and our dedication to an agenda that supports equality, fairness, and food/shelter for all here in Portland, we are asking our current patrons to increase their contribution this year if possible. How will you know that we will use your funds to meet the goals you espouse?

Ultimately, investors and donors need to know they’re giving money to groups that match their goals and beliefs. Giving money is a choice that involves personal criteria: don’t assume people will invest or donate merely because you’ve got a great idea.

____________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen April 6th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, News

Our viewpoints, interpretations and assumptions are so unconsciously biased that we unwittingly restrict our ability to accurately understand, or act on, incoming information. Our brains are the culprit, as they construct the way we make sense of the world; we don’t question what our brains tell us.

Responding from historic personal norms and beliefs, we instinctively assume our perceptions, actions, interpretations, are based on reality. But we invent our own reality. As David Eagleman says in The Brain,

“Each of us has our own narrative and we have no reason not to believe it. Our brains are built on electrochemical signals that we interpret as our lives and experience… there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth via billions of signals triggering chemical pulses and trillions of connections between neurons.” [pg 73-74]

Our brains actually restrict us to seeing, noticing, hearing, understanding, and learning what we already have circuits to translate – what’s comfortable and acceptable – causing deep seated biases. Our subjectivity maintains us.

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In this article I will explain how our brain biases us and what we can do to override the patterns.

SUBJECTIVITY VS OBJECTIVITY

We live our lives subjectively, based on the way our brains code and retrieve our personal, unique, and idiosyncratic beliefs, assumptions, history and norms. We think we’re making good choices when we choose or consider one thing vs another, when we easily reject something because it makes no sense or annoys us. Or worse, when it’s ‘obvious’ to us that one thing should be valued differently than another.

We like to think we’re objective. But we’re not.

The Wikipedia definition of objectivity is “… the elimination of subjective perspectives and … purely based on hard facts.” And “a lack of bias, judgment, or prejudice.” But is this possible? What are ‘hard facts’ when our brain rejects them as faulty? When our brains determine what ‘reality’ is? I suggest that objectivity is only slightly less biased than subjectivity.

Indeed, it’s pretty impossible to experience or interpret most anything without bias. We act, make decisions and choices, communicate with others, raise children and have friends, all from a small range of favored, habitual mental models and neural circuits that come from oft-used superhighways in our brains that we’ve spent a lifetime culling and assume are accurate.

Regardless of how ‘factual’ it is, when incoming data doesn’t jive with our existing beliefs, our brains ‘do us a favor’ and resist and re-interpret whatever falls outside of what we ‘know’ to be true. Obviously, anything new has a good chance of not being understood accurately. Bias is just cooked in; we don’t even think twice about trusting our intuition or natural reasoning when there’s a good chance we shouldn’t.
Whether we’re in a conversation, listening to media, or even reading, we listen through biased filters, and hear what our brains tell us was said – likely to be X% different from the intended message. Unless we develop new neural pathways for the new incoming data, we will only hear what our brains are already comfortable with.

Indeed, our worlds are very tightly controlled by our unconscious, habituated, and brain-based biases, making it quite difficult to objectively hear or understand anything that is different. It takes quite a bit of work to act beyond our perceptions.

WHY CAN’T WE BE OBJECTIVE?

Each of us interpret incoming messages uniquely. Indeed, objectivity is not, well, objective. Here’s what happens: Sometimes

the way the new information comes in to us – the words used, the setting, the history between the communication partners, the distance between what’s being said and our current beliefs – cause us to unconsciously misinterpret bits of data;
we have no natural way of recognizing an incongruity between the incoming information and our unconscious thoughts;
our brain deletes some of the signals from incoming messages when they are discordant with what we already accept as true, without telling us what we missed (My book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? explains and corrects this problem.);
our beliefs are so strong we react automatically without having enough detachment to notice;
what we think is objective is often merely a habitual choice.

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We each live in worlds of our own making. We choose friends and neighborhoods according to our beliefs and how our ears interpret ‘facts’, choose professions according to our likes and predispositions, raise our kids with the same norms and beliefs that we hold. In other words, we’ve created rather stable – certainly comfortable – worlds for ourselves that we fight to maintain regardless of how our biases may distort.

When communicating with others, ‘objective facts’ might get lost in subjectivity. In business we connect with different viewpoints and attempt to convince other’s of our ‘rightness’, and either they don’t believe us or they feel we’ve made them ‘wrong’. Our children learn stuff in school that we might find objectionable regardless of its veracity, or we might disagree with teachers who have different interpretations of our child’s behavior.

And of course, most scientific facts we deem ‘objective truth’ may just be opinions. Folks like Curie, Einstein, Hawking, and Tesla were considered to be cranks because their ideas flew in the face of objective science that turned out to be nothing more than decades and centuries of perceived wisdom/opinions.

The problem shows up in every aspect of our lives. Sometimes there’s no way to separate out objective fact from subjective belief, regardless of the veracity.

I remember when my teenage son came home with blue hair one day. Thinking of what his teachers would say (This was in 1985!) or his friend’s parents, I wanted to scream. Instead I requested that next time he wanted to do something like that to please discuss it with me first, and then told him it looked great (It actually was a terrific color!). But his father went nuts when he came to pick him up, screaming at both of us (“What kind of a mother lets her son dye his hair blue!!!”), and taking him directly to the barber to shave his head. For me, it was merely hair. We both had different ‘objective realities.’

CASE STUDY IN OBJECTIVITY VS SUBJECTIVITY

I once visited a friend in the hospital where I began a light conversations with the elderly orderly helping her sit up and eat. During our chat, the orderly asked me if I could mentor him. Um… Well, I was busy. Please! he begged. Not knowing what I could add to his life and having a bias that folks who asked me to mentor them just wanted me to give them money, I reluctantly, doubtfully, said ok.

He emailed me and invited me to dinner. Um… well, ok. I’d donate one night. He lived in a tiny room in a senior living center, on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks. It was very clean and neat, and he had gone out of his way to prepare the best healthy dinner he knew how to offer. Shrimp cocktail. Nice salad. Hamburger and beans. Ice cream. During dinner he played some lovely music. Just lovely. I was transfixed. Who is that playing, I asked.

“It’s me. I wrote that piece, and I’m playing all the instruments. I have several CDs of music I’ve composed and self-produced. Can you help me find someone who might want to hear it and do something with it? I’ve never met anyone who could help me.” I helped him find folks who helped him professionally record at least two of his compositions.

By any ‘objective’ measure, using my own subjective biases and ignoring the objective truth that we’re all equal and everyone is capable of having talent, I didn’t initially consider that someone ‘like that’ (old, black, poor, uneducated) had the enormous talent this man possessed, regardless of my advocacy of non-bias and gender/race equality.

Unwittingly, we seriously restrict our worlds the way we process incoming data. We live subjective lives that restrict us. And as a result, we end up having arguments, misunderstandings, failed initiatives; we end up having a smaller pool of ideas to think with and don’t see a need for further research or checking; we make faulty assumptions about people and ideas that could bring benefits to our lives. I personally believe it’s necessary for us to remove as many restrictions as possible to our pool of knowledge and beliefs.

HOW TO COMPENSATE

To recognize bias and have a new choice, we must first recognize the necessity of noticing when something we believe may not be true, regardless of how strong our conviction otherwise. It’s quite difficult to do using the same biases that caused us to unconsciously bias in the first place.

Here’s a tip to help expand your normalized perception and notice a much broader range of givens, or ‘reality,’ to view an expanded array of options from a Witness or Coach or Observer position on the ceiling:

Sit quietly. Think of a situation that ended with you misinterpreting something and the outcome wasn’t pretty. Replay it through your mind’s eye. Pay particular attention to your feelings as you relive each aspect of the situation. Replay it again.
Notice where your body has pain, discomfort, or annoyance points.
As soon as you notice, intensify the feeling at the site of the discomfort. Then impart a color on it. Make the color throb.
Mentally move that color inside your body to the outer edges of your eyeballs and make the color vibrate in your eyes.
When you mentally notice the color vibration, make sure you sit back in your chair or stand up. Then move your awareness up to the ceiling (i.e. in Witness or Observer position) and look down at yourself. From above you’ll notice an expanded range of data points and options outside your standard ones, causing you to physiologically evade your subjective choices.

Since the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is one of perception, and in general our brains make our determinations unconsciously, we must go to the place in our brains that cause us to perceive, and make it conscious. Only then can we have any objective choice. And next time we think we’re being objective, maybe rethink the situation to consider whether new choices are needed.

___________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen March 29th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

We all know the importance of listening; of connecting with others by being present and authentic to deeply hear their thoughts, ideas, and feelings. We work hard at listening without judgment, carefully, with our full attention to connect and respect.

But are we hearing them without bias? I contend we’re not. And it’s not our fault.

WHAT IS LISTENING?

From the work I’ve done unpacking how our brains make sense of incoming messages, I believe that listening is far more than hearing words and understanding another’s shared thoughts and feelings.

There are several problems with us accurately hearing what someone says, regardless of our intent to show up as empathetic listeners. Listening is actually a brain thing that has little do to with meaning: our brains determine what we hear. And they weren’t designed to be objective. There are two primary reasons:

Words, considered meaningless puffs of air by neuroscientists, are meant to be semantic transmissions of meaning, yet emerge from our mouths smooshed together in a singular gush with no spaces between them.
Our brains then decipher individual sounds, individual word breaks, unique definitions, to understand their meaning. No one speaks with spaces between words. Otherwise. It. Would. Sound. Like. This. Hearing impaired people face this problem with new cochlear implants: it takes about a year for them to learn to decipher individual words, where one word ends and the next begins. When others speak, their words enter our ears as meaningless electrochemical sound vibrations – puffs of air without denotation until our brain translates them, paving the way for misunderstanding.
Due to the way sound vibrations are turned into electrochemical signals in our brains and uniquely translated according to historic neural circuits, our ears hear what we’ve heard before, not necessarily an accurate rendition of what a speaker intends to share.

Just as we perceive color when light receptors in our eyes send messages to our brain to translate the incoming light waves (the world has no color), meaning is a translation of sound vibrations that have traversed a very specific brain pathway after we hear them.

As such, I define listening as

our brain’s progression of making meaning from incoming sound vibrations – an automatic, electrochemical, biological, mechanical, and physiological process during which spoken words, as meaningless puffs of air, eventually get translated into meaning by our existing neural circuitry, leaving us to understand some unknown fraction of what’s been said – and even this is biased by our existing knowledge.

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HOW BRAINS LISTEN

I didn’t start off with that definition. Like most people, I had thought that if I gave my undivided attention and listened ‘without judgment’, I’d be able to hear what a Speaker intended. But I was wrong.

When writing my book WHAT? on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I was quite dismayed to learn that what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears are often two different things.

It’s not for want of trying; Listeners work hard at empathetic listening. But the way our brains are organized make it difficult to hear others without bias.

Seems everything we perceive is translated (and restricted) by the circuits already in our brains. If you’ve ever heard a conversation and had a wholly different takeaway than others in the room, or understood something differently from the intent of the Speaker, it’s because brains have a purely mechanistic and historic approach to translating incoming content.
Here’s a simplified version of what happens when someone speaks:

– the sound of their words enter our ears as mere vibrations (meaningless puffs of air),

– and face dopamine, which distorts the incoming message/sound vibrations according to our beliefs.

– What’s left gets turned into electro-chemical signals (also meaningless) that

– get sent for translation to existing circuits, with

– a ‘close-enough’ match to historic circuits

– that then discard whatever doesn’t match

– causing us to ‘hear’ some unknown fragments of messages

– translated through circuits we already have on file (i.e. We translate incoming words through our historic circuits, making it almost impossible to accurately hear what’s been said)!

It’s mechanical. And it’s all biased by our own history, regardless of what a speaker says or intends. We hear some subjective version of what we already know.

The worst part is that during the process, when our brain discards signals that don’t match our history, it doesn’t tell us! So if you say “ABC” and the closest circuit match in my brain is “ABL” my brain discards D, E, F, G, etc. and fails to tell me what it threw away!

That’s why we believe what we ‘think’ we’ve heard is accurate. Our brain actually tells us that our biased rendition of what it thinks it heard is what was said, regardless of how near or far that interpretation is from the truth.

With the best will in the world, with the best empathetic listening, by being as non-judgmental as we know how to be, as careful to show up with undivided attention, just about everything we hear is naturally biased. [Note: to address this problem, I developed a unique training that first generates new neural circuits before offering new content so the brain will accurately understand, then retain, the new without bias.]

IT’S POSSIBLE TO GET IT ‘RIGHTER’

The problem is our automatic, mechanistic brain. Since we can’t easily change the process itself (I’ve been developing brain change models for decades; it’s possible to add new circuits.), it’s possible to interfere with the process.

I’ve come up with two ways to listen with more accuracy:

When listening to someone speak, stand up and walk around, or lean far back in a chair. It’s a physiologic fix, offering an Observer/witness viewpoint that goes ‘beyond the brain’ and disconnects from normal brain circuitry. I get permission to do this even while I’m consulting at Board meetings with Fortune 100 companies. When I ask, “Do you mind if I walk around while listening so I can hear more accurately?” I’ve never been told no. They are happy to let me pace, and sometimes even do it themselves once they see me do it. I’m not sure why this works or how. But it does.
To make sure you take away an accurate message of what’s said say this:

To make sure I understood what you said accurately, I’m going to tell you what I think you said. Can you please tell me what I misunderstood or missed? I don’t mind getting it wrong, but I want to make sure we’re on the same page.

Listening is a fundamental communication tool. It enables us to connect, collaborate, care, and relate with everyone. By going beyond Active Listening, by adding Brain Listening to empathetic listening, we can now make sure what we hear is actually what was intended.

______________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen February 23rd, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Imagine being in a strange country where you don’t understand the mores – and aren’t aware you don’t understand them. Say, waiting for scrambled eggs to show up for breakfast in Tel Aviv (They eat salad for breakfast), or saying a friendly “Hi” to young indigenous men in the jungles of Ecuador, wondering why they then followed you in a pack (Looking into a man’s eyes means a woman is ready for sex.).

Because events get interpreted uniquely by different cultures, people like me on the Spectrum are sort of stuck: NeuroTypicals (NTs) make the rules. And from my vantage point they are crazy.

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS

As an Aspie, my internal rules, my assumptions, my responses, and my perceptions are different from a NTs. I hear metamessages (unspoken assumptions) primarily and content secondarily; I respond according to what the Speaker intended (often unspoken) rather than what my (biased) ears interpret. I think in systems, in wholes and experience the world in patterns, not sequences and details as NTs prmarily do.

NTs seem to operate using rules that fit a norm I cannot fathom. Yet somehow, with the majority of humans on the NT scale, there’s agreement that those rules make sense. In my mind, they don’t.

Why should I reply “Fine, thanks. How are you?” when someone asks how I am? It’s a real question that should be answered with how I’m faring, right? If they don’t want to know how I am, why did they ask? And how did it get agreed that a meaningless exchange is an authentic greeting? I’ll never understand.

Why am I labeled inappropriate when I respond to something differently than ‘expected’, and sometimes an interesting add-on to what’s been said? Who says NTs are the ones who understand accurately? Maybe my references and responses are the correct way of seeing. Maybe my references and responses are a great ‘add’ to a conversation that expands the scope of the subject. Maybe my comments are worthy of curiosity.

Why am I the one being too direct? Why aren’t NTs more honest?

Why am I the one who’s deemed too intense? Why are NTs so superficial?

I recently watched my 7 year old friend throw a small toy across the room where his four younger sibs played on the floor. Stop throwing that, said Dad, afraid the little ones might get hurt. My friend again threw the toy. Stop, or I’ll take it away, said Dad. Again, the toy went across the room. Give me that. No more toy.

I said to my young friend, “Your dad was afraid the toy might hurt your brothers and sister. What were you hoping to accomplish by throwing that toy?”

“I wanted to understand how it was spinning.”

“So next time, tell Dad what you want to do and he’ll let you go outside to throw it.” Why didn’t Dad get curious? Why was removing the toy without understanding the reasoning the only option? This was a clear case of NT’s and Aspies considering different aspects of the same problem – something that happens far too frequently in my world.

THINKING IN SYSTEMS LEADS TO MORE CREATIVITY

My Aspie brain perceives a wholly different culture from the world of NTs, with different expectations, referents, assumptions, thinking systems, rules, and interpretations. My systems thinking and different understanding of what’s happening has enabled me to develop new models for conscious choice, different from the long-held biases and assumptions built into behavior change-based conventional business, personal, and healthcare models.

Indeed, with my ability to see, hear, and notice largely unconscious systems, I have devoted my life to unraveling, (de)coding, and inventing models for change in a way that gets to the unconscious systems that generate values-based decisions so change becomes easy and everyone can make congruent choices.

- I recognized that selling doesn’t cause buying and the sales model merely places solutions, overlooking the Pre-Sales change /risk management issues involved when anyone seeks to resolve a problem. I invented Buying Facilitation® 40 years ago to enable sellers to find and lead prospects through their decision making (13 stages) before selling.
- Because of the way I listen I clearly recognize the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. I developed a road map so people can hear each other without bias and wrote a book on it.

Sample

People make decisions via their unconscious mental models and habitual neural pathways. Yet influencers merely lead Others to where the influencers think they should look, rather than where in their brains Others hold their own answers. I developed a new form of question (Facilitative Questions) that facilitates others through to where their own values-based answers are stored.
I noticed that people seeking to change behaviors had trouble maintaining their changes because real change involves generating wholly new synapses/pathways. I’ve successfully trained many thousands of people to change habits and behaviors permanently via discovering, and consciously managing their unconscious brain circuitry.
The training model offers content, assuming, incorrectly, that learners will accurately hear, understand, and store the incoming knowledge. I designed Learning Facilitation, an addition to standard training that enables brains to house, retain, and understand the new knowledge.
I noticed how change agents, healthcare providers, coaches and leaders posed biased questions to promote change and modify behaviors. I developed a model that enables Others to change habits and behaviors permanently by getting into their own neural systems to make change.

Thinking in systems has it possible for me to develop models I’ve trained to 100,000 people globally. Yet I continue to be judged negatively against the norms of the NT world.

How, I wonder, does the world change unless the outliers like me instigate radical change? You can’t do that from the middle. And if more NTs were willing to be curious, look through a different lens, it wouldn’t take people like me decades to instill productive ideas.

RIGHT VS WRONG

So that brings me to my question: How do Aspies end up being the ones who are wrong or on the wrong side of normal? Why? Because my ideas, my speaking patterns, are different? Because they challenge the norm? Why isn’t that exciting? Or fun? Or interesting?

The good news about Aspies is that we’re often pretty smart. Because we think in systems and can see all aspects of something we often are the innovators, the visionaries, who notice, invent, code stuff decades before academics or scientists.

In these days of more openness and a real desire to accept minorities, to communicate and live without bias, maybe it’s time that Aspies are acknowledged as well.

Maybe when NTs hear someone say something that’s a bit off the mark, or rattle on about a topic that’s interesting albeit a bit long winded (We get SO excited by our topics!), maybe they can just say, ‘Hm. Sounds like an Aspie. I wonder what I can learn here. I wonder if I can be curious about something new.’ Then we, too, can have a voice. And just maybe we can become a welcome addition, add our two cents, and maybe make the world a better place because of our differences. Just sayin’.

_____________________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen February 9th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, News

Dear Vendor:

I assume you want my business and care about keeping me as a loyal customer. I also assume that whatever you do, whoever you hire, is paid for by my contributions to your coffers and you need me to keep your business afloat. Why, then, do you disrespect me? Insult me? Waste my time? Infuriate me?

I’m writing to tell you that your voice bots and virtual receptionists stink. They waste my time keeping me on hold for hours – Best Buy once kept me on hold for 13 hours (!). When the tech called at 3:10 a.m. and asked (in a perky voice, no less) ‘So how are you today!?’ he hung up on me when I replied: ‘Angry. Why have you kept me on hold since yesterday? Do you know it’s the middle of the night here now?’ – transfer me to incorrect departments, keep playing that insipid music that makes me want to vomit, offer me useless choices and otherwise make it impossible for me to get through to you.

WHY ARE YOU USING VIRTUAL RECEPTIONISTS?

I’d really like to know why you’re using these insulting bits of software. Are you trying to save money? I would think the customers you lose would cost you money in the long run. Not to mention you’re thinking short-term and fail to remember you’re in business to serve. Indeed, every product you sell is a promise to serve. You’ve apparently forgotten your promise. And while large companies can weather some lost business, smaller companies can’t…not to mention they’ve lost an opportunity to touch customers and brand themselves as a caring company that serves customers.

Do you not realize that by not touching customers when they call, you’re giving up the ability to serve and generate trust, hear what’s going on, or understand and resolve the repeating complaints that might eventually lead to new sales? I can’t tell you the number of times good receptionists have led me to resolutions I hadn’t known about, or given me new ideas and ways to use your products.

Maybe there are other reasons: you think your phone bots and virtual receptionists offer me better help than a real human? Maybe – and this seems most likely to me, your customer – you just want me to stop calling. When I call and get these infuriating ‘voices’ and inappropriate options, and am left on hold forever, I’m sorry I purchased anything from you. I certainly won’t do so again. And when friends ask for referrals, I share a story of how you wasted my time and suggest they find another supplier.

PLEASE CALL IN TO YOUR OWN COMPANY

I have a great idea. Call in to your own company. You might be surprised to find you’re offered unhelpful choices. Or face long hold times (and then get dropped). Or get sent to the wrong department – if you ever even get through. Make sure you call when you have no meetings planned because you’ll be put on hold for minutes/hours to ensure you waste your time.

Oh – here’s a hint. Don’t bother telling the bot what you want as you’ll be misinterpreted or given bad/inappropriate choices (Regardless of the question or offered choices, just keep repeating REPRESENTATIVE until you’re screaming it.). You might find yourself annoyed that you’ll need to call back again and again to get through to anyone or anything! Even your own reps don’t want to place a call into your receptionist to help me find the right department after I’ve been sent down a rabbit hole and some sympathetic employee tries to help me.

WHAT IS YOUR GOAL?

I wonder if you even want me as a customer. But maybe that’s your plan – to get me so frustrated that I’ll not call again? That you’ll hope my problem will disappear itself? I recently failed to get through to UPS to file a complaint against a driver for deeply unprofessional behavior. As he was leaving his van to make a delivery, I asked him to move it from my marked parking spot so I could park. He refused, kept walking away, called me a Bitch, then gave me The Finger. Does UPS want their drivers doing that? I would think they’d want to either fire this guy or at least offer him further training. Are they happy to have this guy represent them? Or maybe they just don’t care about their employees or brand either?

Here’s a question: What do you expect me to do when I need you for information, or product support? If you cared about me or your brand, I’d speak with a human to make sure my complaint gets through to the right place, or my problem gets solved.

It seems you don’t care. I, for one, won’t buy from you again. I look forward to the old days, when companies cared about me and keeping my business. What a shame we all have to be at the wrong end of this nonsense now. Fix it.

________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen January 12th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Have you ever wondered why folks who get trained don’t retain the new knowledge? According to Harvard studies, there’s a 90% failure-to-retain in instructor-led classrooms. Surely students want to learn, trainers are dedicated professionals, and the content is important. But the problem goes beyond the students, the motivation, the trainer, or the material being trained.

I suggest it’s a brain change issue: current training models, while certainly dedicated to imparting knowledge in creative, constructive, and tested ways, may not develop the necessary neural circuitry for Learners to fully comprehend, retain, or retrieve the new information. You see, learners may not naturally have the proper pathways to understand or retain the new knowledge.

The primary problem is how brains ‘hear’. Due to the nature of how brains handle incoming words (puffs of air that face distortions and deletions before being translated by neural circuits to meaning), an instructor’s content may be mistranslated, misunderstood, or misappropriated. Certainly there is no way to retain it as intended unless the learner has precise circuitry that matches the instructor’s content.

Trainers assume their content will be heard accurately. But it’s not, due to the automatic, habituated, physiological, neurological, electrochemical, biological set up of how brains listen. But it can be mitigated by helping students generate new circuits specifically for the new knowledge.

For those interested in learning how brains ‘listen’, my book WHAT? explains it all (with lots of funny stories and learning exercises) and offers workarounds.

Sample

As an original thinker who’s been inventing systemic brain change models for decades, I’ve developed a Learning Facilitation™ model that first trains the brain before presenting the core content.

When training begins by first generating new neural circuits, students can accurately translate, understand and retain the new knowledge and avoid any misunderstanding or failure-to-retain.

I presented my Learning Facilitation™ model at the Learning Ideas Conference in June 2024. Here is a link to the full one-hour presentation. Enjoy.

If you have questions, please get in touch: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

____________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen December 22nd, 2025

Posted In: Communication, News

AI has become integrated into our lives. I’m sure we will continue discussing whether it’s constructive or destructive for quite some time. Certainly it’s been a boon to science and medicine. But does AI squelch creativity? Plagiarize? Important discussions to have. Surely we’ve all benefited.

But to date, AI doesn’t enable the systemic journey a user’s brain must take to discover and apply their core values for personal decision making.

HOW VALUES-BASED, BRAIN-BASED DECISIONS ARE MADE

When people ask AI for advice, they’re largely provided with amalgams of historic information. But this doesn’t enable the neurochemical, very complex, values-based and largely unconscious decision process that would guide users to the:

core values-criteria in their brain
that represents their beliefs, culture, norms, and history
and form the singular, unconscious, and subjective outputs (actions, decisions, behaviors)
that emerge when a mixture of the brain’s limbic system, prefrontal cortex, and dopamine
cull choice criteria from the decision maker’s
- - history
  - mental models
  - personal beliefs
  - time comparators
  - private assumptions
  - norms/culture
and represent the neural activities
beyond the amalgamation of external sources.

In other words, there’s a whole lotta neural processing that must occur before a values-based, personal decision can be reached. And it can’t be done with information.

INFORMATION DOESN’T GENERATE PERSONAL DECISIONS

Don’t get me wrong. Information is vital once values-based criteria are in place. But providing information before the neural work has been completed causes resistance – the reason sales pitches, leadership requests, coaching interactions face so much opposition: the Other’s beliefs, norms, history, assumptions are overlooked and potentially provoked.

Decision making is largely unconscious and uniquely personal – a complex, systemic process that involves much neural organization. Until

the system (the person, family or team) understands and agrees to the risk of doing/thinking anything different;
the system (person, family or team) understands the full set of foundational elements (history, rules, beliefs, etc.) that have mitigated the status quo and must be shifted;
the system (person, family or team) understands its risk of change (and the risk of change must be less than the risk of staying the same) and knows how to manage it with minimal disruption;
the new is congruent with the core beliefs and values of the system;

no new decision will be taken regardless of the need or the efficacy of the information. And the time it takes the decision maker to figure all this out – sometimes a protracted period as we work at piecing together all the elements residing in our unconscious – is the length of time it takes to “come to a decision”.

To make a personal decision, people must align the presenting facts against their biases, values, assumptions, emotions, history, beliefs, reasoning approach, future needs, hopes and fears, then understand and manage risks, all before choosing the actions to take, before making a decision.

Otherwise the new information will compete with what we already assume is true and has been logged in our neural circuits. But it won’t shift core decision criteria, regardless of how necessary or important the information.

AI could help by sequencing and simulating neural processing and actually make values-based decisions quick and efficient.

Sample

WHAT IS A DECISION?

Decision making arises from our neural circuits. Outcomes – behaviors, actions – are merely expressions of the originating beliefs and identity of the system, and require Systems Congruence for change to be acceptable. Even the most necessary information won’t be accepted unless the system believes it’s not at risk.

To choose a new action, to ensure any decision is congruent with the system and won’t cause disruption, specific neural circuits must be discovered, and the systemic, personal elements at the core of all values-based decisions must be managed:

Mind/brain: AI largely focuses on adding ideas (content) to the mind. But the brain is where decision criteria are stored, and that’s unconscious.

Misinterpreting incoming content: Due to the way brains ‘listen’, people only accurately understand 10-35% of the information offered. I wrote a book on this.

Managing the status quo: We are each comprised of several systems administered by our mechanical brain processes. Each activity we perform, all of what we believe, resides in neural circuits that maintain Systems Congruence. New decisions threaten congruence and must be approved by the original system so it doesn’t feel at risk.

Repositioning/reevaluating belief hierarchy: Making a final decision involves a process of weighting values, history, assumptions, and cultural norms and comparing them against future gains/losses…a process unique to each individual and largely unconscious.

Comparators: All change/values-based decisions require comparing historic activity and the decisions that led to the status quo.

Once these have been addressed (a sequential process) and the system feels congruent with the change, users are ready to make a decision and information is needed.

WHAT IS A QUESTION?

AI requires prompts to trigger answers. But the questions currently used prompt historic, amalgamated information and don’t get to the unconscious elements of values-based decision making. Here’s why.

Standard questions elicit data and are biased by the wording, intent, and goals of the questioner – often making assumptions that don’t comport with the user’s unconscious or getting to their specific circuits necessary for decision making. Additionally, people interpret what’s said or any information offered according to their existing neural circuits that represent their history and personal beliefs.

When writing my book WHAT? Did you really say what I think I heard? I discovered that we ‘hear’ (understand, recognize) according to the historic circuits that have been developed over time in our brain ensuring we interpret incoming words according to what we already know and believe. Anything outside these circuits get misunderstood, or misinterpreted.

Due to the way brains ‘listen’ (filled with distortions and deletions) listeners accurately hear only 10-35% of what’s been said. In other words, what we hear, or read will be translated into some version of what we’ve heard or read before and not necessarily an accurate interpretation of the initial intent of the question.

Certainly information that’s far outside what’s already known has no neural circuits to accurately translate it. (Note: I’ve invented a Learning Facilitation™ model that works with the brain to first generate new neural circuits to accurately translate and retain new knowledge.)

When coaching sites use AI to pose questions to help users manage their emotions or make personal decisions, they offer stock questions in hopes of inspiring introspection. But these, largely, don’t enable one individual, with one set of unique problems, a unique history, and unique set of neural circuits to make a values-based decision that is congruent for their beliefs and values. They certainly do not enable users to self-generate unique queries to sequentially lead them through their neural decision making.

To make a values-based decision people must generate unconscious prompts through their own neural circuitry.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS™

In 1988, I read Roger Schank’s book Tell Me a Story that said the only way to find an answer that was tucked away in the brain was to pose a good question. But he never explained what a ‘good question’ was. I already recognized that questions are biased and assumptive and couldn’t understand how it was possible to discover bias-free answers. I became intrigued by the possibility of generating a question that

had no biases, assumptions, or principles that would prejudice the answers;
would get to the specific, unconscious, neural circuits where values-based answers are stored.

As an original thinker, I then spent 10 years figuring out the elements involved to ensure personal decisions could be easily made:

the sequence necessary for the Responder to discover their existing values, patterns, specific reference points;
the route to the specific neural circuits that held the values-based criteria to match a congruent answer;
the specific words, sequences, and sentence structures that would get to the specific neural circuits where values-based choice criteria could be found and managed for congruent, systemic change;
the ability to hear/recognize the next question to formulate to enable the listener’s (user’s) brain to take the next step in the decision-making sequence;
the specific hierarchy of decision criteria that lead to a values-based decision;
the perceptual position the Responder had to be in to hear the question without bias.

I eventually invented a new form of question (Facilitative Questions™ FQs) that is brain-directional and leads the Other to the specific neural circuits necessary to cause change and values-based decisions.

To enable AI to facilitate personal decisions, I believe a rules-based FacilitationAI is needed to prompt sequences of self-generated FQs. Since each FQ that appears is self-generated from a user’s answers, and formulated singularly in unique sequences, none are generic. They can also be used singularly in specific circumstances, like helping customers provide feedback.

FQs can provide a new area for AI:

life/personal coaching;
personal/team decision making;
customer feedback.

I’m happy to discuss and provide examples in detail, but fear adding more specifics in this article will lead to AI developers stealing my IP without the full set of rules. Please contact me to discuss. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_____________________

Sharon Drew Morgen December 15th, 2025

Posted In: Communication

Are Your Unconscious Decisions Risking Excellence? by Sharon-Drew Morgen

I Wanted to Buy but the Seller Couldn’t Sell Me – or Was it a Bot?

Is Your Audience Hearing You Accurately? by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Successful Fundraising: beyond persuasion, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Noise of Subjectivity: how our personal biases shape our worlds, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Beyond Empathetic Listening

How Aspies Think, Why We Do Weird Stuff, and Why We’re Important

I’m a Loyal Customer. Why Do My Vendors Use Voice Agents that Hate Me? by Sharon-Drew Morgen

To Retain Learning, Train the Brain First, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

AI’s Missing Piece: beyond information, by Sharon-Drew Morgen