Leading with Care: Digital Binder
A Trauma-Informed and Equity-Centered Inclusive Leadership Course
Lesson 7 of 9
Inquiry, Curiosity, and Navigating Lived Truth
Listening for several layers at once, reflective listening, open questions, and validating without over-confirming.
Lesson Overview
Sometimes the hardest conversations are not difficult because no one is telling the truth. They are difficult because people can experience the same moment differently.
Inquiry offers another starting point. Before deciding what happened or what should happen next, a care-centered leader listens for what can be established, what the person experienced, what meaning they made from it, what remains uncertain, and what they need now. This does not mean every interpretation becomes fact or that accountability disappears—it means understanding before concluding.
Lived truth is real information about a person’s experience. It is not automatically proof of another person’s motive or of every disputed fact.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
- Distinguish fact, observation, interpretation, feeling, lived truth, and need within a complex conversation.
- Use reflective listening to demonstrate understanding before advising, correcting, or making decisions.
- Ask open-ended questions that invite context, impact, intention, and perspective.
- Validate someone’s experience precisely without confirming an interpretation that has not been established.
- Guide dialogue when accounts differ, while maintaining boundaries, accountability, and a clear next step.
In This Lesson
- ✓Lesson ReviewSix layers of information, Hear → Reflect → Check, questions that open communication, and precise validation.
- ✓Binder ActivitiesFill inPractice an inquiry response, build the Lived Truth and Inquiry Framework, and reflect on differing accounts.Build an Inquiry Response · Lived Truth and Inquiry Framework · When Their Version Is Different From Mine · Bring to Next Class: Your Lived Truth and Inquiry Example
- ✓Knowledge Check PracticePracticeFour practice questions on separating information, reflective listening, open questions, and validation.Practice · 4 questions