--- title: "Justin Sung of iCanStudy: How Reframing Active Listening and Cognitive Processing Can Transform Personal and Professional Success" url: "https://authoritymag.co/articles/justin-sung-of-icanstudy-how-reframing-active-listening-and-cognitive-processing-can-transform-p" publisher: "Authority Magazine" author: "Doug Noll" authorUrl: "https://authoritymag.co/authors/doug-noll" interviewee: "Justin Sung" company: "iCanStudy" category: "Business" datePublished: "2023-03-05T23:13:34.150Z" dateModified: "2026-11-12T17:07:04.882Z" tags: "Business" --- # Justin Sung of iCanStudy: How Reframing Active Listening and Cognitive Processing Can Transform Personal and Professional Success *The Head of Learning at iCanStudy explains how treating listening as a trainable skill rather than an innate talent can unlock greater opportunities and deeper comprehension.* > In my view, a good listener is able to not only build a meaningful connection with the speaker, but also process the information they are receiving in a meaningful and valuable way to either learn or contribute. --- I*t’s hard to be a good listener. We are programmed to want to talk, and to share. It takes effort to stop and to listen. But anyone who has achieved great success will tell you that listening is such an important quality to have. What are some ways that influential people have learned to listen, to succeed both personally and professionally? As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Justin Sung.* *Dr Justin Sung is a learning coach and the Head of Learning at iCanStudy, an international training organization for higher-order thinking skills. He’s a former medical doctor, research author, top 1% TEDx speaker and learning consultant. For the past decade, Dr Justin has taught practical and effective learning skills to tens of thousands of learners in over 120 countries, spanning professionals across every industry.* --- **Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?** I was very fortunate to have a childhood I can think fondly about. I was born in South Korea and immigrated to New Zealand when I was two years old. We had road trips during the weekends, my parents built me a treehouse in the backyard, and we fed the ducks and rode bikes at the park in the summer. One of my favorite activities was reading. I used to get 20 books at a time from the library and just spend all day reading, every day. Always fiction. Apart from some racism and adjustment bumps that I had to deal with, I had a dream childhood. My parents sacrificed a lot for me to have that. Maybe because I read so much, I was ahead for my age in English skills. When I was 10, I started tutoring younger kids English, which felt natural since I come from a whole family of teachers. I also loved graphic design and started taking freelance commissions when I was 12. I actually only stopped designing and tutoring in my 20’s. When I was 14, our small family business was struggling, so my dad moved back to Korea for work. He ended up staying there for the next 8 years. It was a difficult time for my family, and in retrospect, I didn’t step up as I should have. Eventually, we moved to Auckland city when I entered medical school, and I’ve been living here ever since. I left clinical medicine 4 years ago and even though moving away from medicine into education and entrepreneurship isn’t typical, given my childhood, I think it isn’t surprising. **Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?** “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” By William B Sprague. In the first office space that I rented for my first business, I had this written on the window with a marker. When I first read this, I was 20 years old and debating starting my own social enterprise around education. I was in the middle of medical school and wondered if it was the right time and whether I should do it or go down the well-trodden road of focusing on medicine. This quote helped to break the inertia. Over time, the perspective of making the iron hot by striking it has meant different things to me. Now I see it as a reminder that we have control. It’s possible for us to make the iron hot if it isn’t how we want it to be. And that actions taken to strike it, no matter how small, are helping us make progress. The perspective shifts from “when will the iron be hot?” and “how do I know if it’s hot enough” to “how can I strike it?” and “what generates the most heat?”. It’s empowering and keeps me moving. **Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?** Atomic Habits by James Clear, but probably not for the same reason as most other people. When I read Atomic Habits, I was already years deep in reading the research on habit formation and behavioral science. The thing that struck me was how James Clear was able to distil and communicate those ideas in such an engaging and readable format. Most people probably don’t realize how complicated research on behavioral change and habit formation is. Reading Atomic Habits set my bar higher on how research can be converted into a practical and accessible format for the mainstream public. It’s similar to what I try and do in the learning science space, and Atomic Habits was a great push for me to continue honing my craft. **Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Let’s begin with a definition of terms so that each of us and our readers are on the same page. What exactly does being a good listener mean?** There are different ways of categorizing the quality of listening. On one hand, good listening is about actively building a connection with the other person. It helps them feel heard, acknowledged and appreciated, forming the foundation of effective two-way communication. But the human brain isn’t great at multi-tasking. If all of our attention is on trying to look like a great listener, we can actually prevent ourselves from processing the information effectively. It’s like trying to read really fast. If you focus on your “reading technique” too much or in the wrong way, it can actually reduce comprehension. In my view, a good listener is able to not only build a meaningful connection with the speaker, but also process the information they are receiving in a meaningful and valuable way to either learn or contribute. In my experience, when you know how to process the information in a good way, it’s easier to show that you’re being attentive… because you genuinely are! **Why is effective listening such an important quality? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?** I’d love to give some exciting example of a time where listening was important while I was working as a doctor. It definitely is, but my biggest realizations were while I was teaching. Even in my earliest classes and workshops, I saw that some students did not know what to do with the information they were hearing. Some write notes furiously, while others just tried to think about it deeply. When I ask the class how they feel after the lesson, most of them say that they’re feeling much more confident. Then when I ask if anyone has questions, some don’t ask because they’ve understood it. But just as many didn’t understand enough to even realize the questions they should be asking. The students who struggled to listen also found the experience less engaging, struggled with lectures, and were more restricted in ways they could learn. When I started working with professionals, I saw the exact same thing. The only difference was they weren’t learning in lectures anymore but in meetings, webinars and seminars, audiobooks, and professional development sessions. At first, I thought it was because some people simply have a greater innate ability to work with spoken information. But it turns out that this isn’t quite true. Even though people have different abilities, these abilities are rarely innate or fixed. Listening in a way that your brain likes and knows what to do with the information is a skill. It can be trained. Of course, some people are still better than others, but when the skill of listening improves, you’re less restricted than before, and more opportunities are available to you. **From your experience or perspective, what are some of the common barriers that hold someone back from being a good listener?** Aside from the tips I’m going to share below, a prerequisite to good listening is open-mindedness. Virtually every effective method of listening relies on the person being willing to modify their own opinions and pre-existing knowledge based on new information they receive. I often find that we can tie our ego and sense of pride to our knowledge. Admitting that we don’t know something, even if only silently to ourselves, attacks that ego. Even when it’s a subject we have very little knowledge about, it’s easy to feel like we have to have an opinion on it or that we’ve understood it already because of some related experience or knowledge. Relating new information to what we already know is a great mental technique, but not if the purpose is to deflect new information rather than embrace it. Listening is learning. Step 1 of learning is realizing there are gaps and misconceptions in your knowledge that you can’t perceive and are probably unaware of. Just like those students in my classroom, you might not even know enough to realize you know very little! Feeling confident should never prevent open-mindedness. A good listener and a good learner can put their confidence and ego to the side. In my experience, this is rare. **What are some practical techniques that have helped you become a more effective listener?** Here are the methods that I teach that give you the biggest bang for buck. They’re all backed by lots of research and I’ve “field-tested” them all thousands of times in every situation you can think of. If you can do just one of these, you’ll immediately see your listening ability improve. 1. Separate confidence with open-mindedness. I’m not saying to stop feeling confident in your opinions — that’s very hard to do. All we have to do is make sure our open-mindedness isn’t dictated by it. 2. Think of analogies or metaphors for what you’re hearing. This helps you to connect new information with what you already know, which is a powerful learning hack. It’s one way to forcibly activate what we called “higher-order learning” and it helps you to think more critically about the information, remember it for longer, and apply it in different contexts. The trick is to make sure the analogy is as accurate as possible. Don’t just think of “an” analogy, try and think of the “best” one. Saying the analogy back to the speaker is a great way to show you’ve been listening (if you can). 3. Group information together at a big-picture level. Constantly think about how what you’re hearing relates to the big picture and group new information together based on similarities. This is called chunking and it’s another powerful technique that forces higher-order learning. This helps your brain handle lots of information by giving it mental “anchor points” as well as checking for errors in your understanding. If you don’t know how to group something or if it makes sense to group it in a certain way, ask questions! This is a very good way to find high-yield questions to ask. I’ve seen many instances where these questions have helped the entire group shift their perspective on the topic. 4. Be more strategic with writing notes. Writing more doesn’t mean learning or listening more. The techniques above can give your brain a lot to think about, and it’s easy to get overloaded. Use your notes to offload it and track some of these thoughts and ideas on paper. Good note-taking should help your brain think, not help it avoid thinking. Especially in AI world, simply transcribing information for future reference is less valuable than writing less but of a higher quality. I can type fast, but I only scribble down a few keywords and arrows per minute when I’m seriously listening. 5. Understand their ideal outcome. Some people are looking for solutions, while others are looking for acknowledgement or emotional support. Communication can be practical as well as socioemotional. Take a moment to think about what the speaker wants from the interaction. If you misinterpret their ideal outcomes, you can “help” them take the conversation to a different endpoint than they wanted. If you catch yourself being tempted to respond in a way that takes the conversation towards a different outcome from what they want, reconsider. Like any skill, getting to an elite level with these techniques can take months or even years. But you can see the results almost immediately. Over time, you’ll be able to do these techniques more easily, for more volume of information, and for denser or more complex situations. **Here is the central question of our discussion. What are five ways that listening effectively can help someone succeed personally and professionally? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.** **1 .**Listening is learning. If you can listen well, you can learn anything, anywhere. Years ago, I worked with a senior manager at a large software company who was struggling to learn enough about some new projects they were involved in. He needed to make high-stakes decisions with very little time and information to work with. One of his barriers was that he felt he could only learn if he sat for long periods to read. He was convinced that he could not learn just by listening. After a couple of weeks of training on how to mentally process auditory information, he was able to fit an additional 2 hours of quality learning through audiobooks every day on his commute to work, something he had repeatedly tried and failed at before. **2 .**Listening well is the x-factor for teamwork. Once that manager learned how to listen effectively, he could extract more value from his meetings. The types of questions he asked were more targeted and relevant. Problems that normally take days or weeks to identify were brought up in the initial meetings. The productivity of the entire team upgraded because the leader knew how to drive the project more confidently. He also realized that his juniors often made mistakes in their tasks, not because they were incompetent but because they didn’t know how to listen and ask the right questions. **3 .**Your brain likes to focus on something. Listening with the right focus helps your brain do what it’s good at. I eventually had the chance to work with some of his juniors. One in particular was a very soft-spoken new graduate designer called Dan. From previous conversations with his manager, I knew that his performance wasn’t up to standard, and Dan knew it. In our first consultation, he told me that he often felt overwhelmed with the tasks and only realized that he should have asked more questions when he was half-way through the project. He had good perspectives and value to offer, but they didn’t have the chance to shine behind the task overwhelm. Learning to listen critically gave him the tools to demonstrate his strong attention to detail and lateral thinking from the very beginning. So much so that Dan was eventually given the responsibility to lead client scoping meetings. **4 .**Communication is about connection and listening is not half of communication; it’s most of it. We have two ears and one mouth, but we should have 10 ears instead. Listening well builds rapport, trust, and respect with the speaker. However, it also guides your own thoughts and responses. After someone speaks to you, they are now listening to see how you’ve processed their words. Even if you try and reflect and acknowledge what they’ve said, the response can still be superficial or disingenuous. Critical listening helps to absorb what they’ve said, acknowledge it, and contribute more meaningfully. **5 .**Good listening takes effort. And that can make you unique. By now, you might realize that high-quality listening takes focus and concentration. For the people that deserve it, this concentration is your gift to them. In a workshop I attended by the world-famous communication expert, Vinh Giang, he spoke of generosity as more than giving time and money but also energy. In a busy world, especially in the professional world, it is rare to interact with someone generous with their energy and attention. Willingly giving your energy is a gift that others appreciate, whether it’s your supervisor or your significant other. **You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?** I teach people to learn how their brain works to use it to its full potential. We form so many beliefs about what we’re capable of and what opportunities are in our grasp based on our perception of how well we can learn. Which is why my answer might be surprising. Because if I could, I would want people to take a step back. I work with tens of thousands of people, and some of the most common problems I see are the consequences of toxic pressure. Pressure to perform better than their friends and peers, to have a better house, to get a higher salary or go on more vacations. In many cases, the learners I work with are extremely driven individuals, but they don’t know what they’re driving so hard towards. They drive for the sake of driving, even if it means sacrificing their happiness and mental health. I want people to know that the human experience of life is more than what commercialism has marketed us to think. There are two ways I “win” in my job. First, when someone feels free, confident and unrestricted with their ability to learn. Second, when they realize that the path they’re on is not aligned with what they truly want. I hope one day I’ll be in a position where my words carry more weight and reach further. **Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!** I won’t win prizes for the most unique answer, but I’d love to connect with Gary Vaynerchuck. The work I do is fairly novel, and there are a lot of old players on the scene that don’t like how I’m shaking the status quo. Gary Vee taught the younger me how to handle the haters and push through with more compassion. It’s allowed me to operate and impact at a scale I never could have imagined when I was 21 founding my first social enterprise. **How can our readers continue to follow your work online?** I’m easy to find on most social media. I post regularly on my YouTube channel, which is a great place to start if you’re interested in learning more (Justin Sung) or my LinkedIn (also Justin Sung). On most other social media, my username is @drjustinsung **Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!** --- A*bout the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on*[this](https://podcast.dougnoll.com/podcast-guest.)*link to learn more and apply.* --- Source: https://authoritymag.co/articles/justin-sung-of-icanstudy-how-reframing-active-listening-and-cognitive-processing-can-transform-p (Authority Magazine, Business). Interviewee answers are first-person statements of the guest. Index of all pages: https://authoritymag.co/llms.txt