The appointments that wreck your evenings aren’t always the hardest ones clinically.
Sometimes it’s the patient who came in loaded — not with a complicated diagnosis, but with frustration that had nowhere to go. You answered all her questions. You did everything right. But she left with an edge she came in with, and you’re still carrying it at 6pm.
Sometimes it’s the encounter where you ran 20 minutes over not because of complexity, but because the conversation kept circling. You couldn’t get it to land. You couldn’t figure out why.
Sometimes it’s a colleague interaction. Something unspoken. An energy in the room nobody named.
None of this shows up anywhere. No one’s tracking “emotionally unresolved conversations” as a metric. But your body is tracking it. And by the time you walk in the door at home, you’re done — and looking for something to decompress.
That’s usually where the food comes in.
So I brought Christine Miles onto the podcast to talk about it.
Christine is the CEO of EQuipt and creator of The Listening Path and has spent 25 years teaching listening skills to organizations, healthcare teams, physicians, and leaders. She’s worked with people at every level — and her entire focus is on a skill that is shockingly undertaught: how to actually make people feel heard.
Not the polite nodding and giving them space to talk version. The version that actually changes the room.
The Myth About Listening
Most of us think listening means being quiet while someone talks.
Christine says that’s the first problem.
People are not great storytellers. A patient walks in and says “I’ve been feeling off,” or “my pain is here.” That’s not a story. That’s the middle of a story. You’re already behind. And if you wait for them to get to the relevant part on their own — you might be waiting a while, and the appointment will feel like it never quite got traction.
Her reframe: the listener is the guide. Not the passive receiver. The person in charge of where the conversation goes.
That’s a different role than most of us were ever taught to take.
Six Questions That Actually Get Patients to the Point
Christine has six questions she calls the compass. These are what negotiators, therapists, and journalists use. They help patients tell their story faster — not because you’re rushing them, but because you’re guiding their brain back to the beginning of its own narrative.
- Take me back to the beginning.
- Then what happened?
- How did that make you feel?
- Tell me more.
- Hmm. (Yes — this counts. It moves someone along without changing the subject.)
- It sounds like you felt…
That last one is what she calls “shining the flashlight.” Once you think you understand the story, reflect it back. Not just the facts — the feeling underneath too. Then ask: “Do I get you?”
She says three things happen. The patient says yes and stops talking (you got it). The patient says yes and corrects you (useful). Or the patient says yes with their mouth but their body says something different — and you know to go back.
The whole reflection takes 60 to 90 seconds. And it changes how the patient feels about the entire encounter.
The Two Words That Don’t Work
“I understand.”
Christine is pretty blunt about this. Those two words don’t communicate understanding — they claim it. And the patient is the only one who gets to decide if they feel understood.
When you say “I understand” and then move to the plan — you’ve asserted something without any evidence. The patient has no idea what you understood. She might leave thinking you were kind and efficient. She will not necessarily leave feeling heard.
When you say “Let me make sure I’ve got this — you’ve been dealing with this for three months, it’s getting worse at night, and you’re scared because you have no idea what’s causing it. Do I get you?” — now she has proof. You were actually listening. You got the facts AND the fear.
That’s the difference.
When Someone Walks In Already Angry
You’re running 35 minutes behind. Your next patient is in the room. You walk in and you can feel it the second the door opens.
Christine’s take: don’t apologize first. Name what you think she’s telling herself.
“If I were you, I’d be pretty frustrated sitting here for 35 minutes. Do I get you?”
Most of the time, she says, the patient softens. Because you said the thing they were thinking. Not to justify it — just to acknowledge it. And once it’s acknowledged, they don’t have to spend the whole appointment holding it.
She told me a story where she used this exact approach to de-escalate a situation that was getting genuinely scary — she named what she thought the other person was telling themselves, and it took about 10 seconds for things to completely change. Not because she was clever. Because she said out loud what was already in the room.
Avoidance, she said, usually leads to escalation. Not the other way around.
What This Has to Do With Your Eating
Here’s the honest version.
The evenings where food feels out of control are almost never random. There’s a day behind them. And a lot of the time, what made that day hard wasn’t the clinical complexity — it was the conversations that didn’t work.
The ones where you felt like you were spinning your wheels. Where you gave good advice and watched it not land. Where a patient left still frustrated, or a colleague made something harder, or an interaction left you with something unresolved that you had to just carry.
That kind of drain is real. And food is one of the most effective short-term ways to deal with it.
Which means: anything that makes those conversations feel more manageable — more effective, less draining — is part of this. Not the whole story. But part of it.
Learning to listen in a way that actually makes people feel heard isn’t just a professional development thing. It’s one of the levers on the stress that drives a lot of the eating.
One Thing to Try
The next time you’ve finished listening to someone — a patient, a colleague, your teenager who just walked in from school — before jumping to solving, try this:
“Let me make sure I’ve got you. It sounds like [what you heard]. And the feeling underneath that is [what you sensed]. Do I get you?”
See what happens.
You can find Christine at thelisteningpath.com, and her book is called What Does It Cost You Not to Listen.
Make sure you listen to this episode to get the full conversation — including the six compass questions, how to interrupt without creating conflict, and the specific script for a patient who walked in angry — it’s available wherever you get your podcasts.
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