Dave KashenStartup CEO Coach / 2x founder

The Importance of Conscious Listening When Interacting with a Client #startups #founders #business

10 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this short spoken reflection, the speaker explains how they approach client conversations with conscious, empowering listening, asking themselves whether they are hearing the client’s best self. They observe that their own internal narrative is often filled with negative self‑judgments (e.g., “too emotional,” “not good enough”), which affect how they show up. To counter this, they spent a week cataloguing roughly 65 self‑judgments, then practiced self‑forgiveness and replaced the negative stories with positive affirmations such as “I am powerful, I’m awesome, I’m strong.” Reading these mantras each morning reshapes their self‑identity and consequently their presence in client interactions.

Chapters

When I speak to a client, I'm really conscious of how am I listening to them? Am I listening for their absolute best self? And I find that when I teach clients that and they learn to listen to people in a more empowering way, it shifts how people show up for them. And I realized that so much of the time I'm telling myself negative stories about myself. Oh, you're too emotional. You're not good enough. You're weak. That's what we do as human beings. We're constantly telling ourselves these negative judgments and has a real impact on how we show up. So he had me go through the week and make a list of all the self-judgments. I had like 65 of them, you know, this long list, and then go through this process where I actually forgave myself for judging myself that way and came up with a new set of truths. It's become like a mantra for me, like, "I am powerful, I'm awesome, I'm strong." I read those almost every morning and it really shapes who I know myself to be and how I show up.