What Really Makes a Difference When We Work with People?
A conversation about quiet mind, trust, listening, and the deeper understanding behind truly helpful work.
When we care deeply about helping people, it is natural to wonder what we should do. What should I say? Should I listen to the whole story or interrupt? How do I help someone who feels stuck? What if I don't know what they need? How can I become more confident in my work?
During a conversation with George and Linda Pransky, Wyn Morgan, and Erika Bugbee, these questions kept pointing back to something much more fundamental. Perhaps the most important thing we bring into our work with people isn't a technique, a strategy, or even the right words. It is the state of mind we bring with us.
Linda described it as bringing a good level of consciousness, or a kind of resiliency of spirit. When someone comes to us frightened, overwhelmed, discouraged, or deeply caught up in a problem, we don't have to join them there. We can remain grounded and trust that their own state of mind can change. And when it does, their thinking changes with it. What looked impossible moments before can begin to look very different.
Trusting What Is Already There
Alongside grounding, Linda pointed to trust and confidence: trust in life, in our own innate health, and in the innate health of the person sitting in front of us. Underneath the thinking, personality, habits, fears, and insecurities we see on the surface is something deeper and fundamentally healthy.
That understanding changes the feeling of helping. Instead of looking at someone and thinking, How am I going to fix this?, we begin from the assumption that wisdom is already available to them. We may not know what they should do, but we can have confidence that they are capable of seeing something for themselves.
Erika illustrated this beautifully with the story of a client who desperately wanted her to tell him what to do about a major life decision. There was urgency, a deadline, and enormous pressure to choose correctly. Yet what proved useful was not Erika coming up with the answer. It was her confidence that he could begin to understand his own inner experience and find his way from there. As the conversation unfolded, he began to see that much of his distress was coming from the belief that there was one right answer and that he had to somehow find it. As that thinking loosened, the whole problem began to feel lighter.
What Gets in the Way of Listening
George brought the conversation back to something remarkably simple: clear your mind. When our heads are full of what we already know, what we think the client needs to hear, whether we are doing a good job, or what we should say next, there is very little space for anything fresh.
“If you clear your mind before you speak, it's pretty much magic that you'll know what to say.”
A clear mind doesn't give us a script. It leaves us available to the person and the moment in front of us.
Each of the practitioners described their own version of what once got in the way. Wyn remembered listening to clients while internally evaluating whether they understood the Principles correctly. Linda spoke about being preoccupied with how she was doing: Do they like me? Am I helping? Erika described the insecurity she felt early in her career when she was convinced she didn't know enough.
The thoughts were different, but the effect was the same: attention moved away from the person and back onto the practitioner.
For Erika, an unexpected doorway out of that came through genuine interest. Early in her career, after exhausting herself worrying about what she should know and do, she became too tired to keep worrying and simply started getting to know the people sitting across from her. She found herself fascinated by their lives. Her mind quieted, fresh thoughts came, and she began to see things about them she hadn't been able to see while focused on herself.
Linda described something very similar as being in service. When the focus moved away from herself and toward listening, openness, and interest in the other person, the self-consciousness fell away.
Working in the Unknown
One of the most freeing themes of the conversation was the willingness to work in the unknown. There isn't always a rule for whether to listen to every detail, interrupt a story, ask another question, say something, or wait. Sometimes a client needs to tell the whole story. Sometimes continuing the story isn't helping at all. The answer becomes apparent in the moment, not because we memorized the correct response beforehand, but because we are listening.
Wyn compared our desire for a strategy that works every time to asking whether we should always turn left at the next junction. Sometimes left will be right. Sometimes it will be right. Sometimes the road will continue straight ahead. We only know when we get there.
That may sound less secure than having a formula, but something else takes its place: trust. Trust that something can occur to us. Trust that something can occur to the client. Trust that wisdom isn't limited to the practitioner. Erika reflected that there have been many sessions when she had no idea what she was doing, only for the client to return having seen something important for themselves. Sometimes we see something; sometimes they do. Either way, we don't have to carry the entire weight of the outcome.
Taking Ourselves Off Our Minds
Near the end of the webinar, someone asked what happens if the practitioner isn't in a particularly good feeling before a session. Linda's response pointed right back to the simplicity at the heart of the whole conversation: our state of mind is fluid.
We don't have to wait for all of our own problems to disappear before we can be present with another person. Very often, becoming interested in someone else naturally takes us out of the thinking that had been weighing us down.
“You take yourself off your mind, and your spirits will go up.”
That is not just helpful for the practitioner. It is what we are helping clients see for themselves: their current experience is not fixed. Their thinking can change. Their perspective can change. Wisdom has not disappeared simply because they cannot feel it in this moment.
Perhaps becoming more effective at helping people is not primarily about accumulating enough knowledge to finally know what to do in every situation. Perhaps it is about trusting more, listening more deeply, having less on our minds, and becoming increasingly comfortable with the fact that we don't know what comes next.
There is enormous freedom in that. And, very often, much deeper listening.
Continue the Conversation
George & Linda Pransky, Wyn Morgan, and Erika Bugbee will continue exploring these ideas at our Professional Training Retreat, October 8–11, 2026, in La Conner, Washington and online.
The retreat offers four days to step away from everyday life, allow the mind to quiet, and look more deeply at both your own grounding and the work you do with others. During the webinar, the presenters reflected on how much learning often continues after a session ends, as insights emerge on the drive home, later that evening, or even weeks afterward.
