listening to strangers: the soft skill I never realised was unusual

A couple of weeks ago I accompanied my Dad to the doctor's surgery.

He'd had an upset stomach a couple of times during the week and felt the symptoms were significant enough to get checked. Thankfully, after hearing what had been happening, the clinic agreed too and managed to fit him in that same day.

Conveniently for me, Dad forgot to put in his hearing aids. Normally, if he can manage something independently, he'd much rather do that. This time there was no discussion about whether I should go into the consultation with him. I simply went in to be his ears and to remember everything the doctor said afterwards.

The appointment itself was fairly straightforward. After examining Dad, the doctor wanted some blood tests, so we left the consultation room and took our seats outside the treatment room to wait. There were only a few other people sitting there. Nobody was speaking. The whole waiting area had that familiar atmosphere of people sharing the same space whilst pretending nobody else existed, as though conversation might somehow make the wait longer.

We'd only been sitting there a few minutes, however, when the man beside me started talking. He wasn't making polite conversation. He wasn't asking me questions. He simply started telling me about his life.

I don't remember saying very much at all. I listened as he told me he'd been off work for the last few months because his mental health had become so poor. He said that whenever he thought about work, or talked about it, he started trembling, and he didn't really understand why. He explained that he'd arranged to meet the HR lady at work for a chat, only to cancel because he couldn't bring himself to go. Somewhere along the way he'd started doing jigsaws because they gave his mind something else to focus on, something that stopped work filling every spare thought. He even told me that leaning forwards over the jigsaws for so long had damaged the skin on his stomach because of his weight. Only after he told me all that did we finally moving on to the age-old favourite topic of all Northern Irish people - the weather.

By then, Dad's name had been called and he disappeared through the treatment room door for his blood tests. I stayed where I was, continuing to listen to the man beside me, until my Dad came back out, and then we headed home.

I had a few errands to run afterwards, however, I wanted to drop Dad home first and let Mum know what the doctor had said. I knew Dad wouldn't remember everything and, if he hadn't heard part of the conversation, there would be gaps before we'd even left the building.

Once I'd updated Mum, Dad looked across at me and asked about "the man you clicked with". He hadn't heard a single word of the conversation. He'd simply watched us talking. There was something about the way he asked that that made me smile because I could tell he found the whole thing unusual. Dad is very sociable himself. He's always been happy chatting to people. Even so, there seemed to be something that surprised him about a complete stranger sharing so much with someone he'd never met before. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "It happens all the time, Dad. Random strangers sit near me and before I know it, they've told me their life story. It's not unusual." He looked at me as though he wasn't entirely sure what to do with that information. Mum, however, immediately understood. She knew exactly what I meant.

It wasn't until later that I found myself thinking about Dad's reaction rather than the conversation itself. The man in the waiting room hadn't surprised me. Dad had. I'd never really stopped to consider that these encounters weren't part of everyone else's ordinary life.

Looking back over the years, it's happened more times than I could possibly count. I've never consciously set out to become someone people open up to. I've never had a strategy or asked deeply personal questions. It’s just always seemed to happen. People begin talking. I listen. Sometimes they tell me things I suspect they've never said out loud before. Until Dad mentioned it, I'd never really questioned why.

Perhaps that's because, when something happens repeatedly throughout your life, it simply becomes your version of normal. You stop noticing it. You assume everyone experiences the world in much the same way. Only occasionally does someone else's reaction make you realise they've been seeing something completely different.

As I thought about it over the following days, I also found myself noticing something else. The conversation in that waiting room wasn't really driven by talking. It was driven by listening. They're easy words to confuse because they happen together, and yet they're not the same thing at all. I don't believe I listened because I was waiting for my turn to speak. In truth, I don't believe I was waiting for anything. I was simply there while he spoke.

That feels surprisingly uncommon now. I don't really know why. Life simply feels busier now, with so many things competing for our attention. Whatever the reason, I've noticed there are very few people in my own life who simply listen without interrupting when I need to talk, without preparing their reply whilst I'm still speaking or steering the conversation towards themselves. I've become increasingly aware of how much space that creates. Sometimes nothing changes at all except that, for a little while, someone isn't carrying everything on their own.

Looking back now, I also wonder whether this is one of the reasons I eventually found myself supporting women one-to-one. It certainly wasn't something I planned. I never sat down one day and decided I wanted to spend my life listening to other people's stories or helping them make sense of what they were carrying. If anything, it feels as though the work found me long before I recognised it myself.

The same is true of seeing situations from a different perspective. That wasn't something I consciously developed either. It was only after I began working with clients that I realised it wasn't something everyone naturally did.

Perhaps that's why my Personal Support has always felt like such a natural extension of who I already was, rather than a role I learned to perform. The women I support are often carrying lives that span more than one country, relationships that have changed over time, responsibilities that don't fit neatly into one place, and thoughts they've been holding onto for far longer than they realised. Our conversations rarely begin with knowing exactly what needs to be said. They simply begin with making space for whatever is already there.

I don't doubt that I'll continue to think about that morning from time to time. What has stayed with me isn't Dad's appointment or even what the man told me. It's Dad asking afterwards about "the man you clicked with". Until then, I'd simply assumed this was how life unfolded. It took someone sitting beside me, seeing the same conversation through completely different eyes, for me to realise that what had always felt ordinary to me wasn't quite as ordinary as I'd believed.

And perhaps that's true of more than listening. Sometimes it takes another person to notice something we've been carrying naturally for years before we recognise it ourselves.