Soma
What is the body registering?
Listen for: breath, tension, energy, fatigue, dread, excitement, impulse, or steadiness.
Thought Leadership
Entrepreneurial Listening.
Entrepreneurial Listening is a Boulder Soma book project and practice framework for founders, leaders, teams, and creative builders who want to listen before action hardens.
It is a way of sensing what is actually needed before building, deciding, scaling, pivoting, persuading, or forcing change.
Central question
What are we not yet able to hear?
Under pressure, people often listen for what confirms the plan, protects the role, justifies the timeline, or relieves discomfort.
The Five Listening Fields
A working map for listening before action hardens.
The fields help founders, leaders, teams, and creative builders include more of the actual situation before choosing the next move.
Story
What story is organizing the moment?
Listen for: assumptions, identity, loyalty, fear, ambition, projection, and the meaning being made.
Other
What are others actually saying?
Listen for: customers, colleagues, partners, investors, communities, stakeholders, and the people affected by the decision.
System
What larger forces are shaping this?
Listen for: market forces, culture, incentives, technology, role dynamics, power, timing, and constraints.
Emergence
What next step brings more clarity?
Listen for: the conversation, boundary, pause, experiment, repair, decision, or next clean move that can actually be lived.
How teams use it
A framework for decisions, discovery, conflict, and change.
Entrepreneurial Listening can be brought into organizations as a workshop, offsite, leadership coaching frame, team listening process, or strategic inquiry.
- Before a decision hardens too quickly.
- When customer discovery is being filtered through the plan.
- When a team keeps looping around the same conflict.
- When speed, technology, fundraising, or growth has narrowed listening.
- When the next clean move requires more than more analysis.
Book project in progress
This is a living inquiry.
The book project is being developed through conversations with founders, leaders, artists, operators, investors, and builders who have learned to listen differently under real pressure.
Interviews
Conversations with builders.
I am interested in moments when listening changed a decision, softened a pattern, prevented harm, or revealed a clearer path.
Confidentiality
Care before extraction.
Stories may be anonymized, generalized, or composited. Direct quotes are only used with consent.
Connection
The inquiry supports the work.
Entrepreneurial Listening informs Boulder Soma’s coaching, facilitation, workshops, and organizational practice.
Bring this into the room
Listen before the next move hardens.
If your team is navigating a consequential decision, transition, conflict, discovery process, or strategic question, Organizational Discovery is the cleanest first step.