You will practise a ten-minute conversation where the other person talks for most of the time.
Reading about listening is easy, and so is agreeing with it. Doing it for ten minutes while someone else talks, without jumping in to fix their problem or share your own story, is much harder. This exercise is where you find out how much of module 3 you can actually use under a bit of pressure.
You will run a ten-minute role-play with a partner, record it, measure how much each of you spoke, then swap roles, so set aside about thirty minutes. You need a partner, a quiet place or a video call, and a phone that can record.
Ask a friend or colleague who is willing to spend half an hour on this. Explain that they will describe a real problem they have at work or with money. It should be something they actually think about, not an invented case, because invented problems run out of detail after two minutes.
Good topics are ordinary ones. Whether to take a job offer. How to stop overspending on food delivery. A manager who keeps changing priorities. Whether to start investing or pay down a loan first. They do not need to share anything they are uncomfortable with, and you should tell them so.
During the ten minutes you are allowed only four things:
Open questions, from lesson 3.2. Follow-up questions on what they just said. Pauses, where you let the silence sit after they stop. One summary at the end, with a check, from lesson 3.3.
That is the whole list. No advice, no stories about yourself, no "have you tried", no product ideas. If you feel the urge to suggest something, write it down and keep it for after the exercise. The restriction is there because it shows you how much a person will tell you when you stop offering answers.
Ask your partner's permission to record, and explain that the recording is only for measuring talk time and will be deleted afterwards if they prefer. Start the recording, set a timer for ten minutes, and begin with one open question, such as "Tell me about what's going on with this."
Then use your tools. Follow the thread wherever it goes. At around eight or nine minutes, give your summary in their words and ask what you missed.
Play the recording back with a notepad. You do not need anything precise. One simple method is to pause every minute and note roughly how many seconds of that minute were you and how many were your partner, then add the two columns up at the end. If your phone's recording app makes a transcript, you can compare the length of your lines with theirs instead.
You are aiming for your partner to have done most of the talking. While you listen, also mark the two questions after which your partner said the most, or said something new.
Aisyah, who is training to be a financial adviser, ran this with her colleague Ben. Ben's problem was that he spends far more than he means to on food delivery and cannot work out where the money goes.
Her opening was "Tell me about how food delivery fits into your week." Ben talked for nearly a minute. Most of her later questions were short follow-ups: "What happens on the nights you order?" "What makes cooking hard on those nights?" "How do you feel when you check the monthly total?" After that last one there was a long pause, and Ben said that he only orders late after overtime, and that his manager had started scheduling meetings at 6.30pm. The problem had moved from spending to working hours.
When she measured it, Aisyah had spoken for about two and a half minutes of the ten (her figures, for this example). The two questions that opened Ben up were "What happens on the nights you order?" and the one about the monthly total. She also caught herself starting to suggest a meal-prep app at minute four, and stopped.
Now swap. Your partner listens, using the same four tools, while you describe a real problem of your own for ten minutes. You do not need to measure this round as carefully.
Pay attention to what it feels like. Many people find that being listened to properly is unusual. They notice they say more than they planned, and that the summary at the end makes them feel understood in a way advice rarely does. That feeling is what your buyers experience when you do this well, and knowing it from the inside makes the habit easier to keep.
When you finish you will have a recording, a rough talk-time split, two questions that worked, and the experience of both chairs. If your share of the talking came out high, that is useful too. It tells you exactly where to start next time.
Message your partner now and book the half hour, then work through the activity below.
Run the role-play, record it, and write down your talk-to-listen balance and two questions that opened the conversation up.
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