Listen Again
In a moment when everything feels fixed, broken, and bad, a lost mitten and a negotiation lesson offer a deeper approach
Nothing evokes melancholy like a lost glove or mitten. So many poems have been written about them. They speak of winter decay, and of pairs that are separated and never united.
I thought of this yesterday afternoon as I strolled our dog around the block in the midday sun. There was no wind, so single digit temperatures didn’t feel so terrible. It’s still too cold in Brooklyn for snowmelt, so nothing is wet and drippy. The powdery white dust of snow squeaked beneath my boots. As I stopped to let the dog sniff, this colorful child’s mitten sprung into view with a colorful wave.
Who could be sad about losing this mitten? It’s so joyful! Maybe it wasn’t lost at all. Maybe it was left as a gift, a child’s wave for everyone braving the elements for a walk.
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Perspectives are contagious
That’s a long way to say that I’ve been thinking a good deal about perspective these days. Our perspectives are so contagious. They’re often shaped by broader forces like the news out of Minneapolis, the terror in Iran, the closing of the Kennedy Center. UGH. It all seems so bad, and the bad feels bad, and we’re stuck in bad. Our perspectives feel fixed.
But they don’t have to be so rigidly set. They can be flexible. I’m not trying to make you embrace your inner Polyanna here. That’s not helpful. But loosening up on our certainty that we know how to feel about any set of events allows us flexibility. The path to accessing that flexibility is paying deep attention to what we often fail to notice in ourselves and others.
It’s listening.
This is the throughline that surfaces in nearly all of my interviews these days. People join me in the studio to talk about sales or discuss management strategies. This week’s guest, the author Jonathan Smith, brought us a new book on negotiation. It’s called Fight Less Win More: How Master Negotiators Influence Hearts, Minds and Deals.
I love specific instructions on how to be better at bringing others around to my wishes. I talk a big talk about negotiating, and struggle with the skills in practice! And Jonathan works with Chris Voss, who has talked hostage-takers out of banks. So I was excited to see what his brand of magic was.
A few minutes into the conversation, I realize we were once again reviewing very specific details on how to listen. Jonathan sees every conversation as a negotiation to be won, and you win by creating enough space for another person to feel seen. He has processes; he talks about labels and mirrors, about silence that stretches just long enough to feel uncomfortable. He describes restraint, and invites us to set aside the urge to assert or explain ourselves. But really wants he’s saying is just listen!
Jonathan will tell you that listening, like any other muscle, atrophies when we stop using it. We have to practice. And I’ll just tell you that as he pushed me to think about low-stakes opportunities to practice, I realized I’d heard something like this before in therapy years ago. What stayed with me most was his insistence that the goal of negotiation is the relationship you build through it Progress, in this framing, and “winning” is moving the relationship to a healthier place, even if that movement is slow.
Which brings me back to the mitten. The easy interpretation of a mitten on a fence post in winter is loss. But listen. If you take the time to focus on this minute, you may hear the vibrant colors of our humanity persisting. As 2026 serves up a stream of broader events and sends chilly temperatures and snow dumps that make everything feel emotionally and physically harder, it’s worth asking ourselves what stories we’re assuming without listening.
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I’ve spent 20+ years covering tech from the inside for BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Wired. I’m on staff as a senior editor at large at LinkedIn. My mission is to close the gap between the people building the future—and those of us living it.
