Bradley James Davies

Bradley James Davies teaches people how to listen, a subject he backed into when his own life came apart.

David Meltzer made the introduction, and the two Brads spent the episode trading on the fact that there are not many of them running around. Brad opened the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast with a line of Davies': our brains are wired to hear but built to be lousy listeners. Then he admitted straight away that he is terrible at it sometimes, which Davies said was already further than most people get.

The teaching comes down to three moves: speak less, speak last, ask better questions. In a professional room he asks people to try listening eighty percent of the time, and to turn as many of the remaining statements as they can into questions. He borrows a rule from elementary school morning circle, where kids honor three other speakers before they speak again, and pairs it with the poker scene in Rounders, where you have thirty minutes to work out who the sucker at the table is before you find out it is you. If nobody in the meeting or at Thanksgiving is violating three then me, it is probably you. Speaking last is the harder one. If you float your idea first, the power in the room does the rest. Hold it, and when someone on the team arrives at the same idea it gets born outside your leadership, and you do not have to spend an ask on it.

Five years ago everything was falling apart. He calls it a record breaking midlife crisis and can joke about it now, after enough time and enough forgiveness with the people he affected. In the middle of it he enrolled at Georgetown University's Institute for Transformational Leadership, a year long executive coaching program he describes as listening school. Everyone goes in having been told they are a good listener. He had been the friend people called in a crisis. Sitting in that program while his own life unraveled, he worked out that the thing he was missing ran through all of it, at the leadership table and the dinner table both. The same skill reopened his father, a college wrestler and math major who left school as a rising senior to enter the draft and served in Marine special forces in Vietnam, a man whose mind has blocked so much of it that he only knows the missions from the records.

What broke his father was not the war. It was a flight attendant spitting on him in his dress blues on the flight home, and he carried that for forty years. They went back to Vietnam together, and this past summer, on the country's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Davies asked him what he was feeling and his father talked for twenty five minutes, with tears. Men keep writing to him about the essay he wrote on it, saying they are going to call their dads. His advice for sitting with a veteran is to buy the coffee, ask for the story, then shut up and let the silences do the heavy lifting, because more is always coming.