April Trail Check-In: The Art of Listening

Sometimes the best thing you can do is show up with nothing to prove.

April has kept me off the trail entirely. And somehow, that's where this month's lesson lives.

For the past year I've been attending vinyl listening sessions called The Evening Ritual, and this month, with nowhere else to be, I found myself reflecting on what they've taught me more deeply than ever. If you haven't heard of them, here's the simple version - you show up, you sit, and you listen. No phones. No networking. No agenda. Just music and presence.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

And it has been one of the most quietly transformative practices of the past year.

What the trail and the turntable have in common

When I got serious about hiking, the trail didn't just get me moving, it got me listening. To my breath. To the birds. To the wind moving through the trees ahead of me. To the sound of my own footsteps finding a rhythm. The trail has always been a place of learning for me, but only because I learned to take it in first.

The listening sessions taught me the same thing. You can't multitask your way through them. You can't half-listen and expect to feel it. Presence isn't partial, you either bring it or you don't.

What a year of showing up has taught me

After a year of attending these sessions, here's what I know:

Presence is a skill. You have to practice it. You have to choose it, repeatedly, even when your brain wants to draft a to-do list instead.

Stillness isn't emptiness. Some of my clearest thinking has happened with music playing while sitting under the stars or in the early morning hours before the world wakes up. There's something about those unhurried moments - no agenda, no output - that lets your truest thoughts finally surface.

And community changes the experience. Showing up alone is one thing. Showing up consistently with others who are also committed to presence, well, that builds something. You start to recognize each other. You don't need to say much. The shared practice is enough.

The leadership thread

We talk a lot about active listening in leadership - nodding, paraphrasing, asking good questions. But I think there's a deeper version of it that rarely gets discussed: the kind of listening that isn't in service of your next response. Listening, that's just... listening.

That's harder than it sounds.

Recently one of my closest friends, Nathalie Agenor, someone I featured in last month's Women's History Month post, told me that one of the things she values most about me is that I'm a good listener. I didn't take the compliment and move on. I sat with it. Because if that's true, I don't think it happened by accident. Some of it was shaped by years of quiet trails and vinyl rooms full of music, but honestly, it started earlier than that. It started with my dad. Listening to records together. Sitting in silence on fishing trips, waiting, watching, just being present with each other. He taught me how to be still before I ever set foot on a trail.

Practicing presence before I even had a name for it.

And then there's this: a colleague told me I remind him of Wendy from Billions, the one people go to when they need to think out loud, calm down, and find their way through something. I'll take that. Not because I have all the answers, but because I've learned that most people don't need answers as much as they need to feel genuinely heard.

That's the difference between listening and truly hearing someone. Listening is a skill. Hearing is a gift. It's what happens when you're so present with another person that they can finally hear themselves.

That might be the most underrated leadership practice there is.

The trail teaches it. The turntable teaches it. April is reminding me to keep learning it.

The trail will be there when I'm ready. Until then, I'll keep showing up - to the music, to the people, to the practice of truly hearing what's right in front of me.

What helps you practice presence? I'd love to know what that looks like for you.