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

Salespeople know the likelihood of closing a sale is small (less than 5%). Leaders understand the prospect of avoiding resistance during a project is unlikely (a 97% fail rate). Doctors realize the chances of patients following their suggestions are low (95% don’t follow doctor’s orders). Trainers are aware there’s a high probability (80-90%) their audience won’t retain what they’ve been taught.

Rationalizations make sense of the failures: it’s the buyer’s fault for not buying; the stakeholder’s fault for not wanting to change; the patient’s fault for not wanting to be healthy; the student’s fault for not being motivated to learn.

What if none of that were true? What if the models themselves were at fault and the industries merely build in their failure as the price of doing business rather than making a few small changes to achieve excellence?

DOING THE SAME THINGS EXPECTING DIFFERENT RESULTS

Each industry continues doing the same things they’ve always done regardless of the decades-long failure rates (Shouldn’t they be indicators? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?), blaming the Other rather than recognizing the inherent problems.

Globally, in learning institutions, corporations and consulting groups, people teach and apply the same problematic models and ideas that have been accepted through time and adopted as Truth, regardless of their failures.

I was horrified to learn recently that a man I dated decades ago has been teaching my original Facilitative Questions™ to his Harvard MBA students without license or training. I called him.

SD: But I never licensed you! Or taught you how to formulate them! They took me 10 years to invent and take days to learn!

A: I heard you use a couple of them. I figured out the rest myself.

SD: How does your interpretation get to the right neural circuits in the Listener’s brain to help them get to their source criteria for decision making?

A: WHAT? I don’t know anything about that. I just do it my way. They’re just questions.

SD: No, they do not gather information, nor are they based on curiosity. They’re brain-directed tools that make it possible to avoid automatic assumptions so people can quickly make criteria-based decisions.

A: I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal of this.

SD: Well, you’re using my IP, my coined and legally defined term to apply to a conventional practice (questions) that’s so biased there’s no way to capture good data or help anyone make a values-based decision. Not to mention you’re teaching future leaders the wrong thing!

A: They don’t know the difference.

This is how original ideas get quashed and perpetuated: stealing original ideas from the inventors, redefining and misusing them to fit standard thinking, and then propagating them regardless of the cost. And it gets normalized endlessly.

ORIGINAL IDEAS GET IGNORED

As an original thinker I invent, train, and write books on systemic change models that enable Others to discover their own, usually unconscious, answers – which they must do anyway as part of their decision making process.

My models include skills and ideas that run counter to standard thingking: Buyers don’t buy based on solutions (and selling doesn’t cause buying!); leaders overlook first-hand, accurate knowledge before goal setting when they fail to include all stakeholder’s voices, assuring resistance later. When docs forget that patients need a belief change before they modify behaviors, they’re setting up non-compliance. When training models offer content before participant’s brains can accurately translate it, they cannot retain new knowledge.

None of the current models have specific skills that enable Others to discover their own values-based answers and outputs. Rather, they’re rules- and culture-driven and fail to recognize the risks they instigate.

Change, after all, is a risk consideration: unless the risk of change is known and managed, unless the underlying values of the new match the original values, no change will occur: The risk of change must be lower than the risk of staying the same or the status quo prevails.

And standard thinking lacks the tools to guide Others – learners, buyers, clients, patients – to recognize and manage their risks, assuming instead that good information, stories, content, or explanations will provide the ‘proof’ to buy, learn, change.

WHERE STANDARD THINKING GETS IT WRONG

Standard thinking assumes ‘good’ or ‘rational’ information, delivered by someone with ‘credibility’ (a seller, a coach, a leader, a doc, a trainer) will convince and cause change. It doesn’t: information is needed only after a risk gets uncovered and managed, and after the values criteria are engaged. Otherwise there’s no way to know what information is needed.

Not only can there be no evaluation unless the risk is known, brains can’t easily understand content that doesn’t already exist within their historic brain circuitry: Due to the way brains listen, how they receive and translate incoming words/sound vibrations, what we think we hear is unwittingly translated according to what we’ve heard before – all but guaranteeing the status quo continues.

Obviously, this causes all incoming content – pitches, presentations, incentives, stories, and ‘rational’ explanations – to be misinterpreted when it goes against a listener’s history and beliefs.

Sample

CASE STUDIES

A Sales University

I had an unnerving experience in early 2000 that exemplifies how standard thinking prevails regardless of the possibility of adopting new ideas that have a better chance of success.

In the 1990s I keynoted at a sales university. Prior to my talk, I took the opportunity to listen to other speakers and sit in on workshops that taught standard sales models (how to place solutions and counter objections – the Sell Side). I never once heard mentioned the differences between selling and how buyers buy, a separate and unique values-based, risk-avoidance process all folks must go through before being willing to buy.

I must admit I was surprised. My book Selling with Integrity had been on the New York Times Business Bestseller’s list and the reason I was hired for the job. Given the number of copies the book sold I (naively) thought people were at least considering adding tools to first facilitate buying decisions to their selling activities.

Knowing I was fighting an uphill battle to change an industry that had been around since the Serpent convinced Eve to eat the apple, I carefully prepared my talk to at least inspire curiosity. I also spent my own money ($3,000, against my $5,000 pay!) to purchase hardcover books for the audience of 200 that I placed on each chair.

About 10 minutes into my talk, audience members began leaving. Because my ideas went against what they were being taught, and even though Buying Facilitation® would enhance their close rate substantially and instigate trust, they couldn’t even consider my ideas. By the end of my talk there were 9 people left in the audience. And every single one of my books was left on the chairs. Not one – not one – seller-in-training thought my book (free! a NYTimes Bestseller!) worth taking.

Dug in Leadership

Here’s another story:

I once sat next to a well-dressed young man on a flight to Seattle.

SD: You look very professional. I assume you’re going to meet a prospect?

Man: Yes. I’m hoping he likes me well enough to allow me to provide free services for two weeks in hopes they’ll hire me.

SD: So you’re using your body as a prospecting tool. What would you need to believe differently to be able to facilitate your prospect into choosing you without you working for 2 weeks without pay?

Man: You sound just like this book I just read! (My book, of course). She made a lot of sense.

SD: So why aren’t you using her suggestions?

Man: I gave my boss the book and told him I wanted to work with her to learn how to help buyers buy. He read it and told me she was crazy, that sales doesn’t work that way and not to use any of her ideas.

No, sales doesn’t work that way; facilitating buying decisions does. In both case studies, standard thinking prevailed, regardless of the cost.

Sample

WHEN IS IT TIME TO CHANGE?

It’s time we re-examine our assumption that our established models represent Truth.

Indeed, information is the last thing people need when deciding to make a change (see my 13 steps of change).

What needs to happen for standard thinking to evolve beyond current failed processes? When will sellers and leaders and doctors and trainers realize it’s their own models causing the failures – and maybe it’s time to consider adding new skills?

Is it really worth the cost of failure to continue doing what you’ve always done? Yes, it takes courage to do something different. But what’s the risk if you don’t?

______________________________

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 June 15th, 2026

Posted In: Communication

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During a day we make innumerable decisions. What should I eat for lunch? When should I go to the store? Should I complete this paperwork now? Or wait until after the meeting? We make these simple decisions quickly, effortlessly, using top-of- mind answers. But sometimes we must make consequential decisions that need some pondering.

Whatever we go through to get to our final end point, the process is often fraught with confusion, time delays, and unknown risk. To help you minimize these downsides when making important decisions, here are a few foundational elements:

Perspective: Have you collected the full data set necessary for resolution?
Criteria: What are the norms and values you must consider?
Goal: What is the specific goal you seek to achieve?
Risks: What are the threats to specific choices?
Steps: A replicable route to practical decision making.

I’ll take them one at a time.

PERSPECTIVE

One of the problems with decision making is the way your brain presents you with habituated responses. Like when you decide to go on a diet and unconsciously duplicate the patterns you used in previous (failed) diets, or when you stop at the same point when trying to learn a new hobby – again. So much of how we decide is ruled by our brain’s historic biases and restrictions.

To have as broad a range of options as possible with a minimum of bias and restriction, it’s necessary to consider the problem from different perspectives.

Ordinarily we automatically think our standard, familiar thoughts and unconsciously pose our standard, familiar questions to ourselves. I call this perspective Self. Self is our natural state, a largely unconscious idiosyncratic mix of physical, mental, emotional, unconscious and comfortable reactions and ideas. In Self we are the fish in the water.

From Self your decisions are based on your immediate world view – restricted by your momentary feelings, what’s going on in your life, and your history of managing similar issues.This is perfect for daily living. But for making consequential decisions it’s good to have as broad, and unbiased viewpoint as possible. For this you’ll need an expansive perspective that I call Observer/Witness.

Being in Observer offers more a conscious choice with a broader perspective and far less bias. You already do this, albeit unconsciously: the quick intake of breath telling you to be more alert and consider a new choice; that it’s time to go beyond your natural reaction, your standard thoughts and feelings.

You use Observer when raising children, like when your 2-year-old so creatively crayons the wall and you gently guide her to the coloring book but really want to scream ‘I JUST PAINTED THAT WALL!!!’. It’s when you’re fighting with a partner and take a step back to say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s chill.’

In Observer, you notice a broader range of choices that weren’t visible from Self. They were always there, but not habituated like the more-used options. My book HOW? teaches how to do this.

Rule #1: Make important decisions from Observer to perceive a broad range of choices.

Sample

CRITERIA

Values and Beliefs – the basis of any decision making criteria – are the primary determinants for making important decisions as they defend and maintain who you are and what you stand for. Indeed, people often delay making a decision because they fear they’ll overlook something significant, because they don’t know the full set of risks involved.

From Observer you can consider the underlying values that must be maintained in the new decision. They’re often personal, although in team decision making the group must collaboratively agree to the values they want to maintain.

Here’s a personal tale of how my switch from Self to Observer converted my criteria to more authentic, less reactive values and a positive outcome.

A mythic row with a dear friend ended our relationship. He betrayed me! He lied! He broke my values-based criteria of honesty, of my ‘right to be respected!’ But as time passed I began to get a different perspective: I must love with ‘Ands’ not ‘Buts’. That meant (to me) I had to find a way to be in relationship. So I shifted my criteria (and Self perspective) from honesty and ‘right to be respected’ to my Observer perspective: ‘How do we love each other AND be respectful and honest?’ With this new criteria our relationship had a way forward.

Rule #2: Know the criteria you want to meet for your decision and write down some thoughts on what it will look like when it’s met.

GOALS

Goals often include specific target actions and a time limit for completion, and require a well-worded goal. So “I want to go on a diet to lose weight” becomes “I will do the research to find the best foods for my body to find and maintain its best weight.”

Goals must include details that can be evaluated or you run the risk of failure. The more specificity, the higher the possibility of success.

Rule #3: Set a goal using very specific words and expected results.

RISKS

All decisions carry some sort of risk. What risk are you willing to take? Are you willing to switch values? Are you willing to let go of people in your life? Relationships? Money?

Before making a final decision it’s important to know the risks involved in the change caused by the final outcome. Ask the people in any way involved in the final decision what the upsides/downsides are for them. Make sure you pose questions from Observer so you instill as little bias as possible. I’ve invented Facilitative Questions™ that lead to unconscious circuits where decision criteria are stored. Again, I teach them in HOW?.

Your final decision may not be able to address all risks but knowing them in advance is valuable for goal setting. Where there’s a chance the risks won’t be fully addressed, do as much advance work as possible to reduce the fallout.

Rule #4: before making a final decision, know the risks involved for the people, policies, values, etc.

STEPS

Often people begin seeking information too soon. I suggest you wait until you’ve determined the goals, risks, and criteria so you’ll have a more accurate foundation. Then:

Assemble all the elements involved: Know the goals, criteria, people and fall-out from each. Include gathering data (from Observer, to minimize bias) from the people who will be touched by your decision. While you might not be able to meet their criteria, you’ll at least have an idea of the risks.
Determine and manage the risks: Fully understand the distance between where you are now and where you will be once the decision is made. Will the same values prevail? Will jobs or situations be changed? How will this affect the status quo? How will you deal with any fallout?
Gather data: Once you know the risks, goals and criteria involved, gather supporting data (both internal and external) that ensures you’ve got the important elements covered and the risks managed best you can.
Weight the options: You’ll now have the information you need to understand the types of choices and risks. Go back to the drawing board. Get into Observer. Write down a hierarchy of criteria to meet and see how/where they match the options. Weight them according to risks and values. Know precisely the fallout.
Carry out the decision: make sure to personally manage any fallout.

And good luck! Should you require some team coaching to facilitate an important decision, please contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_____________

Sharon Drew Morgen June 1st, 2026

Posted In: Change Management, Communication

Remember when a person would answer a company phone? I found myself shocked recently when a live human answered. “Um, Hello?? Are you a real person?”

When we call a company these days we often get caught in one of those automated loops that lead us from one wrong person to another, from one long hold to another, ultimately landing us where we started, with no resolution, lots of frustration, and rage toward the company. Company websites aren’t any better: no way to connect except via links that either lead nowhere or never get responded to; chat bots that have no idea what you’re talking about and keep repeating perky phrases.

As a paying support customer, I once waited 13 hours for a promised ‘one-hour’ call-back from Best Buy to resolve an urgent technical problem. I went to sleep with the phone in my hand, waiting. When the call came at 3:00 A.M. (!) the tech started by asking me how I was. “I’m sleeping! It’s 3:00 in the morning and I’ve been waiting since 2:00 in the afternoon! And I still have my technical problem!” And he hung up on me. This was particularly egregious given I’d been forced to listen (for hours!) to Best Buy’s ‘hold’ jingle promoting fabulous customer service.

We’ve all learned to accept these indignities, to be ignored if we have a problem, to spend hours attempting to resolve a crisis caused by our purchase. And it’s getting worse.

CUSTOMERS DON’T SEEM TO MATTER

We’ve grown to hate our providers, and they don’t seem to care. But they should. We provide the income for their profit and salaries, certainly enough to hire employees to answer phones or help solve problems. In so many ways, hiring a human would be cheaper than the cost of the automation.

Gone are the days when customer service mattered, when three rings was the maximum number before phones had to be answered to keep customers from being frustrated. That doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Companies now use only two criteria to interact with customers: Time and Cost. And because these companies may be sole providers in regional sectors or global behemoths, users have no choice but to remain customers.

Sadly, there’s no regulation on this, no way to reduce our monthly payment by the number of hours we spend on hold, or the number of problems we can’t get resolved. Until we form a Citizen’s Council, or there’s some sort of regulation – neither of which are likely – we’ll just have to suck it up. Nobody cares, no one is responsible, and no one pays for the problem except us.

What happened? How did our companies go from touting stellar customer service as a competitive advantage to computerizing all human interactions? How did companies decide to stop respecting the very people who keep them successful? Why have they been so willing to cause their customers to distrust them?

POSSIBLE CAUSES

We know what companies pay their ‘C’ level people, their profit margins and how much they pay (or not) in taxes. We know they can afford to hire customer support folks. But somewhere along the way customers became secondary. What’s going on? Is greed the only motivation these days? How did it become a ‘thing’ that customers don’t matter – except for their purchases?

Frankly, I have no way to think about this in an unbiased way. I’ve spent my life developing facilitation models that enable win/win and servant leadership, to respect each individual and engender trust. Making it difficult for the very folks you depend on to get the service they require goes against all my beliefs.

It might come from the momentum of ‘cheap’. Everything seems to require a low price tag, and money becomes the main criteria for choice. We don’t consider what happens when goods are reduced to a price tag, for doing ‘whatever it takes’ for price to be the sole choice criteria. We avert our eyes when we learn that companies use children as cheap labor or when they strip the environment to create cheap products.

We seem to want cheap even when price differentials convey value differentials. Someone once asked the price of my Buying Facilitation® training, a unique model I invented that uses mindbrain connections to help buyers generate their buying decisions. When I told him the price (thousands) he told me he could get ‘almost the same’ course at ATT for $49. I told him to take it 😊

Are we all implicated here? Is automated customer service the fallout from the search for cheap? How did we move away from scrupulous business practices, or good customer care as a competitive advantage? Why isn’t it a simple calculation that happy customers provide more revenue?

Somewhere in the past few years automation became the accepted corporate interface regardless of the toll on customers. And I can’t imagine that focus groups would chose automation and no-human-contact as a preference over being cared for by a human.

BEST PRACTICES

I have some ideas that might stop this nonsense. My favorite is that each call is answered by a representative who owns the problem to its conclusion. I suspect that when companies pay their own folks to sit on hold for hours only to get connected to the wrong department, they just might fix the problems. They don’t seem to respect a customer’s wasted time; maybe they might care when it’s their own time.

Here are my ideas:

Human beings will pick up customer service lines; site links will go to real support people who will respond within 12 hours.
The person who picks up the phone will own the problem.
Customer Care will be seen as a competitive advantage.
Companies will pay bonuses to reps who keep customers happy.
A vehicle – a YouTube Channel, for example – specifically for customers’ complaints. Their grievance gets calculated as a cost to the company, with a running tally of how much money the company owes its customers. At the end of a month the company gets sent a Grievance Bill with the proceeds going to charity.
An advertised day a month of “no shopping” in the companies who don’t serve customers adequately.

Sadly, the very people who sell us services have become adversaries. What do we need to do or say to have our needs met, our voices heard, our time respected? What do companies need to know, believe, or do differently to be willing to provide resources to handle incoming calls, or provide websites that offer support? What can any of us do to knock some sense into their heads?

Does anyone have better ideas that might help? God knows, I don’t.

________________________

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 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 25th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

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 May 18th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

I have a bias. I believe that the job of a seller is to first facilitate the risk management stuff people must complete before the sales/solution placement process begins. After all, until people determine their risk of change and get buy-in from all involved, they cannot, will not, self-identify as prospects.

This factor alone is responsible for low close rates: sellers attempt to place solutions with people who haven’t yet determined they can buy, and the sales model doesn’t offer a way to facilitate the non-sales, cultural, change/risk-related buying decision issues.

First let me introduce myself. As an original thinker and inventor of systemic change models, I’ve been on the cutting edge of the sales industry since 1987 when I trained my first Buying Facilitation® course to KLM (Helping Buyers Buy); in 1997 my book Selling with Integrity was on the New York Times Business Bestseller’s list.

If you’re not familiar with my work, I target the Pre-Sales Buy Side, by leading people through the overlooked personal and idiosyncratic issues they must address before they can buy anything and the determinant of the length of the sales cycle. I’ve trained Buying Facilitation® to 100,000 sales folks globally with an average 40% close rate over the control groups that average 5.4%.

I’ve also kept pretty good company over the decades: David Sandler tried to buy me out before he died (He only offered $1million without residuals); Neil Rackham (Author Spin Selling but not the inventor of the SPIN model) kept telling me to direct my model to buyers instead of sellers; I spent an afternoon with P hil Kotler at Kellogg explaining Buying Facilitation®; Tony Alessandra and Zig Zigler were always ready to provide ideas.

These foundational sales thinkers were very aware, and respectful of my focus on facilitating the Buy Side decision issues before trying to sell. But in general, it’s been a long, hard slog getting the sales industry to think beyond placing solutions, seemingly denying its low close rate that could be greatly improved by first helping prospects understand and manage their unique risks involved with bringing something new into their status quo.

I tell you all this to provide the background for my tale. I’ve been adding tools, thinking, and books to the sales industry for decades yet continue to get pushback. So this opportunity offered me hope.

CASE STUDY

I was excited to meet K on LinkedIn, a woman placing clients into TEDEx speaker slots who seemingly wanted to represent me. Yes!

Shortly after our first contact she turned me over to Sara who immediately bought two of my books and began learning the differences between selling and facilitating buying. Or so I thought.

How smart she was! She seemingly understood my concepts quickly. “I find your ideas genuinely refreshing and think you deserve a broader audience. Your brain-change work, the listening without bias work, are ideas that would leave a room different than when it arrived.” Music to my ears. I was hooked, and very thankful. Finally! Someone who easily understood what I was doing without massive resistance. I certainly was a prospect.

Our correspondence went on for weeks. After she purchased Dirty Little Secrets. I suggested where to start reading to get the full flavor of the model, but she demurred. No, I’ll do it my way and start at the beginning, she said. Um…Ok! In retrospect, if she’d followed my suggestion she would have known how to sell to me!

Just a few emails in it became clear she wasn’t hearing me. When I told her I had several questions and needed a zoom call to clear things up, she declined my request. No, she said. I work on email but don’t worry, we’ll have no problem placing you!

Hmmm. Strange for a seller to ignore a prospect’s request, especially when I asked for a meeting. And her response missed the point entirely.

My doubts persisted when her responses continued to ignore me. When I told her I’d need to understand my own risks before hiring them, Sara again told me not to worry, I wasn’t at risk, that they only charged one fee upfront and promised to do whatever it took to get me on a stage, even if it took years.

Years?? And how could SHE understand my personal risks or quell my fears when she didn’t know what they were?

She was so busy pitching and trying to have ‘the answers’ she assumed I needed that she never asked me questions I needed answers to in order to resolve my doubts: What was their record in placing truly out-of-the-box ideas into mainstream markets? What’s their success rate?Which of my inventions would be best to get placed – my sales thinking? My change management models? My listening/bias ideas? Could they pinpoint specific markets – and how and how frequently did they track this to make necessary changes? Questions that would help me determine my risks to hiring them.

But I had no way to discuss any of this; her interpretations of my queries merely led to biased pitches that didn’t help me at all. She just didn’t understand the difference between selling and facilitating my buying decision process.

And worse, since she was reading Dirty Little Secrets that explained the steps involved in buying decisions, why didn’t she at least try to use some of the ideas she was learning rather than use standard sales methods?

Sample

The clincher was when Sara asked me to meet her boss R who would LOVE to meet me and gave me a link to a 30-minute Calendly. What? She wasn’t the salesperson? And 30 minutes was all we’d need to discuss strategy, ask/answer questions, etc.? I told Sara my concerns:

This seems like a typical relationship sale. Why not try to use Buying Facilitation®?
I don’t do 30 minute sessions. R and I couldn’t strategize, answer each other’s questions etc. in 30 minutes. Doesn’t R have to fully understand what I do so he can sell it?
What sales model are you using that takes so long to place a client?

Her responses were breezy, and ignored each of my specific points, again using my concerns as excuses to promote her solution: Don’t worry! You won’t have to explain anything to R! I’ll fill him in! You won’t need more than 30 minutes! You don’t have risks! We’ll do all the work!

What? Again I felt unheard and insulted. How could I buy from a group I don’t trust? This approach would work only if I’d been fantasizing that a magical vendor would show up with a guaranteed success rate (in a specific time frame), the precise skills, integrity and instantaneous knowledge of my work to represent/place my unique innovations into precise markets, and all I’d have to do was pay them. But none of that, of course, was the case.

I began thinking Sara was either an old-timey relationship salesperson who couldn’t tell the difference between what she wanted to sell and how I needed to buy (For goodness sakes she couldn’t even respond directly to my buying concerns!) or she was a bot.

I’m going with bot.

But it doesn’t matter: whoever I was speaking with demonstrated they weren’t the partner I needed.

It’s sad on two counts:

The sales industry STILL overlooks the need to facilitate Pre-Sales decision issues, those very issues that cause their low close rates and delayed sales cycles.
I liked Sara!

I was a buyer. I really needed this solution. But unfortunately, their sales techniques made it impossible for me to buy. I think I’ll give up trying to advocate for more effective models for the industry and let the Sara and bots of this world take over sales.

____________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen May 11th, 2026

Posted In: Communication

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?

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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’.

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Sharon Drew Morgen February 9th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, News

Inconvenient Truths: how culture, assumptions, and standardization thwart change and new ideas, by Sharon-Drew Morgenby

Making Important Decisions, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Cost of Automating Customer Care, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

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