To grab your audience’s attention, you need to keep them listening. To unblock writing you need to listen to your inner voice. To guide teams, you need to listen to leaders and colleagues well, past the organisational noise.

I’ve been blogging about better writing at work. But I keep finding (as I write), that everything comes back to listening. 

To grab your audience’s attention, you need to keep them listening. To unblock writing you need to kind of listen to yourself. To figure out what to say to guide your teams, you need to listen to leaders and colleagues well, going past the organisational noise. 

Find the ears of your audience, find your own stance, and find a way to listen deeper. None of that is simply “doing the words”, and so my old blog title, once ironic, now just feels irrelevant.

I quested for another name to cover both ends of listening: keeping our audiences listening, and hearing more ourselves. I went through many titles, trying to express that good listening (on either end) isn’t easy.

At the end of my quest I found something to do the job: Earfinders.com!

Earfinders — it’s a bit of an odd name. Does it sound more like a hearing device? Names are funny things. I thought the Nintendo “Wii” was a terrible name at first, evoking other bodily functions. But in time that stuck in my mind, a kind of branding earworm. And so did my initial throwaway name of Earfinders, because, silly though it sounded, it kept the sense of finding our own ears, and reaching the ears of others.

Also, it’s easily searchable! Put Earfinders into Google, and there it is, near the top already (though Google isn’t sure of this neologism):

I hope that for you, too, it will be the good kind of earworm.