Listen

This summer I signed up my three year old, Lev, for soccer “classes” on Sunday mornings in a park. It’s really just 30 minutes of being outside and kicking a ball for a bit.

The coach is a high school student who clearly knows a lot about soccer and almost nothing about how to talk to three year olds. He talks too fast and too quietly, he introduces structured skills and new words while the kids just kind of flop their bodies around the grass, and his main method of trying to engage his students is to just repeat himself with more urgency in his voice, as if that urgency is what has been missing for the toddlers who - bless them - don’t yet react to the world asking them to move faster.

The last activity of the class is for each kid to come up one by one to stand next to Coach and score a goal. Coach hustles each kid up one by one: “kick it in! Big kick! Kick the ball! In the goal! Go!” It’s Lev’s turn and he comes up to Coach, drops the ball, looks at the coach, points to his shoes and shouts:

“I HAVE GREY SHOES!”

Coach is startled. “Okay Lev, nice! Can you kick the ball in the goal?”

“THERE IS A LITTLE BIT OF WHITE IN THEM ALSO!”

The parents start chuckling. Coach is flummoxed.

“Um, yeah! There is some white in your grey shoes.”

“AND SOME BLUE.”

A smile from Coach. “Yes, I see some blue in your shoes. Ready to kick the ball in the goal?”

“Yeah!” And Lev turns, kicks it in, and comes running back to me.

I give him a high five. “Lev, how did it feel to kick the ball in the goal?”

With a satisfied smile, he says “Coach listened to me!”

At first I thought he misspoke, that he meant to express pride in listening to the coach.

But then I realized he meant it like he said it.

After 25 minutes of Coach seeming to not see him at all, of just asking and asking for Lev’s attention, Lev got HIS attention.

And that’s all he really wanted. Scoring the coach’s goal wasn’t HIS goal.

Headed into this new week, I’m going to try to hold onto this idea.

If someone is not doing quite what I was wanting or expecting, I’m going to ask myself:

Is this moment actually asking me to restate what I was looking for - or is this person trying to tell me about their shoes?

This week I’m launching a new business! It’s a lightweight CRM for community builders that we’re calling Welcome Back. I’m going to post a demo of it on my LinkedIn on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The core idea of this software is to make it easier to build and maintain strong relationships with the 100-200 or so people in your life who really matter. We do that through a super simple interface, almost like a notes app, and then we use some really neat AI tools to make sense of those notes.

One of the design principles we built in is the ability to quickly add “Traits” about a person, which you can format however you’d like.

And then we have a built in “contact frequency” selector - do I want to stay in touch with this person weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly? The app then has a Coach tab to help you stay on top of reaching out to people on that frequency.

So many CRMs are built around a transactional goal: closing the sale, making the donation, getting someone to register for the program. Those things matter, but as I learned from Lev this week, sometimes feeling seen and heard needs to come first - and sometimes that understanding is the goal itself when it comes to building long-term relationships. Listening - and remembering - are at the core of genuine relationship building.

Welcome Back is designed to increase a sense of “I feel seen and heard” across all the people you know. Our hope is that doing so will increase the number of times you can say “welcome back!” to those people walking in the door again and again.

If you want to be one of our pilot testers just reply to this email to let me know!