21/08/2026
The best listening happens on the edges of what's actually being said.
You can listen to the words, and that gives you something. You can listen to the body, the face, the tonality, and that gives you rather more. But the real richness sits in what Margaret Heffernan called weak signals. The subtleties on the periphery. The thing that feels a touch off, that doesn't quite line up.
This came up with a supervisee recently. And what struck me is how many lenses you can pick those signals up through.
An existential theme. A positive psychology angle of what's right here rather than what's wrong. A psychodynamic sense of what's being transferred in the room. Sometimes something that feels like it isn't quite yours or the client's at all, like it's been carried in from another system entirely.
This is the bit I don't think AI will reach, at least not for a good while. There's something uniquely human about sensing that something feels off in a relationship. Right?
It's a big part of why I think human coaching isn't going anywhere.
And the lovely thing is, you don't need to interpret it correctly. You don't need to label it or make sense of it. You just get curious about it, together. And that's usually when the doors open.
If you'd like a space to sharpen this kind of noticing in your own practice, that's a lot of what supervision is for. Come as you are: https://rocketsupervision.com/group-supervision/
