Last week, I spent a glorious day with a room full of financial leaders. As it was a Facilitation Skills class, of course we talked about listening. We did an exercise where I gave examples of listening skills and participants either took a step forward or a step back based on their own honest assessment of themselves.

The self-assessment listed habits such as turning off notifications during meetings, and resisting the urge to prepare your response while someone else is still talking. If you regularly do it, you step forward. If you don’t, you stay put.

By the end, the line had spread out across the whole room. A few had hit the back wall while others had nearly walked out the door. When I do this exercise I am always reminded that I still have plenty of work to do myself.

And here’s what’s strange about that. Not one person in that room thought of themselves as a bad listener before we started. Listening is one of those skills we assume we’ve already got, simply because we’ve been doing it our whole lives. But doing something for decades isn’t the same as doing it well.

Where would you land if you stepped into that same line?