Deep Listening.

Deep Listening is an eight-step approach, set out in my book and tested with a thousand people from more than a hundred countries in a BBC and British Council project, evaluated in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Participants came away feeling more understood, more connected to the people they disagreed with, and with new insight into their own attitudes.

The session is mostly practice. You will work in pairs and as a group, listening and being listened to, with time after each round to notice what happened in your attention and in your body while you did it.

We include listening to yourself: your own triggers and judgements, and the flicker of defensiveness that arrives before you have decided anything. That work will feel familiar from the mat, and it is what makes the rest possible. We will also spend time on gaze, on posture, on silence, and on hearing what sits underneath someone's words, the feeling or the need they have not quite named.

Then the harder ground: staying present with someone whose view irritates you. Listening this way is not the same as agreeing. You can hear someone fully and still hold your own position, and one of the things people are often surprised by is how much easier disagreement becomes once the other person feels heard.

You will leave with something you can use with a student who cannot quite say what hurts, and with the colleague whose approach has been grating on you for months.

I will have copies of my book with me and am glad to sign them and illustrate them personally.

About Emily Kasriel

Emily spent over two decades at the BBC, where she led the Crossing Divides and SoIcanBreathe seasons after running arts, ideals and religion departments at the BBC World Service. She is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and the author of Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends and Foes (HarperCollins, 2025). Her TED talk on Deep Listening, was recorded in Vancouver earlier this year and is forthcoming on TED.com. More about Emily here.