Listening into 2024/2025 - My personal year-end reflections

Life is lived forwards but understood backwards, as Søren Kierkegaard once said. It’s a powerful reminder of why a year-end review matters. While we plan for the future, it is only in hindsight that we can make sense of our experiences and meaningfully integrate them into our lives. Management professor Henry Mintzberg similarly noted that strategy often emerges as a retrospective attribution of meaning to what has already unfolded.

What has revealed itself to you this year? Where did we take action without fully understanding why, only to realize its meaning later? What unexpected events became valuable lessons, and what small moments turned into revelations over time?

Why not pause to reflect on these revelation moments—big or small—that helped us make meaning of our journey? Whether in business or our personal lives, it’s not just moments of success, achievement, or happiness that are worth to recognize. The moments of revelation are equally — if not more — valuable. These are the moments that lift the fog, reveal new paths, and reenergize us to move forward with renewed clarity and purpose.

1. Listening as a catalyst for holistic understanding
   For some time now, I’ve preferred listening to books over reading them. At first, I thought it was just a time-saving habit. But during my yoga teacher training, I learned that ancient cultures used chanting mantras to influence energy states — mental, emotional, and physical. Research confirms that sound vibrations can be felt throughout the body, even by those who cannot hear. This realization shifted my perspective: perhaps I prefer listening because it engages more than just my mind. It becomes a holistic experience and understanding, engaging body and mind, heart and head, thought and feeling, all at once.
2. Listening as a catalyst for transformation
   This year, I discovered that the Sumerians, one of world's oldest cultures, used the same word for ‘listening’ and ‘wisdom’. Listening is about becoming still, opening up, and letting what we hear interweave with what we think, leading us to deeper levels of consciousness. Surprisingly, this applies not just to the listener but also to those being listened to. The author Heinrich von Kleist shared how his thinking improved when his sister simply listened to him. Similarly, MIT innovation expert Otto Scharmer emphasizes the critical role of listening to diverse perspectives to enable something new to emerge - like e.g. applying biological principles to architecture. It's through listening that we can move from (blind) adaptation to conscious transformation. To be innovative, businesses would definitely benefit from strengthening their listening muscle, not just their communication muscle.
3. Listening as a catalyst for social peace
   Discovering the Neuroscience of Peace Lab this year made me realize how important listening is to bridging societal divides. Studies show that feeling heard is more important than agreeing. Many conflicts begin because people feel unheard, leaving them hurt and excluded. Listening, on the other hand, fosters connection, appreciation, and belonging- it is the first inevitable step toward peace. Imagine a social media platform designed to promote listening: post-free days (like the car-free Sundays in the 70ies), daily post limits, or encouraging questions, diverse perspective over messaging own opinions. Would we still feel the need to shout so loudly, so frequently, so harsh to get heard? Perhaps small changes like these could guide us toward a more peaceful, connected world.

Listening into 2025 - my personal ’Nordstar’ questions

This years’ moments of revelation included to value listening more inwardly — to the quieter voice of my heart, my intuitive, emotional intelligence, which speaks through feelings rather than words. For much of my life, my intellectual mind guided my decisions. By inviting my heart’s voice to the table, I dared to trust my emotional intuition more often, even when my mind feared loss or uncertainty. Surprisingly, this led not to more losses, but to richer and more fulfilled experiences and interestingly to more realistic planning.

Are you ready to let 2025 reveal itself to you, rather than only plan it? My intention is to honor our human capacity for transformation and cultivate openness each quarter, listening equally to the wisdom of mind and heart. Reflecting on these guiding questions reveals meaning from past experiences and guides to the right actions ahead, blending both, the wisdom of our minds and hearts:

• What challenging experiences or setbacks (over the last year/period) are you grateful for? What did they lead you to?
• What question would you like to be asked, and how would you answer it?
• What haven’t you forgiven yourself for yet—and how could you do this?
• Which question has propelled your life forward?
• With which question did you impact the lives of others? In which way?
• How did you give back in reciprocity for what you have taken?
• What will you hold onto, regardless of who becomes Bundeskanzler, President, CEO, or any other external changes?
• Whom do you want to listen to—and whom not?
• How would you like to feel, looking back on 2025?
• What if the world [your organization, your clients, or your family] listened to you for a couple of minutes - what message would you like to share? (By the way: in 1967, the Beatles faced exactly this question when they were invited to the first worldwide live BBC broadcast. Their answer? ‘All you need is love.’)

Inspiring listening experiences - our 15-Year Human Facts gift for you

To celebrate Human Facts 15th anniversary, we’re sharing a guide featuring 77 thoughtfully curated questions that inspire meaningful listening moments in meetings. You are warmly invited to download this special gift for you from our Partnering Leadership Academy website (in English and German).

Thank you for the listening experiences we’ve shared and created together this year, and for the intriguing questions we’ve explored — both those we’ve answered and those that remain in reflection.

Wishing you, your colleagues, partners and loved ones a peaceful and rejuvenating season’s break. May it offer us all uplifting moments of listening with open minds and hearts, guiding us from reaction to conscious response, and embracing the courage to wait until a vision of a new reality reveals itself — one that transcends adaptability and honors our unique human capacity for conscious transformation.

With warmest wishes,
Eva