What Tracking Lions Taught Me about Listening

I always thought I was a good listener. Last week I learned just how deep one can really listen.

I was tracking lions with Boyd Varty, author of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, alongside Renius Mhlongo and Alex van den Heever — friends of Boyd’s and two of the best trackers in the world. We were on the trail of two male lions. At first, we moved quickly. The lions were moving too, covering ground, hunting, exploring new territory.

As the morning warmed, our pace slowed. Ren adjusted our movements to match the lions’ pace. Somehow, through a million subtle signs — wind patterns, track pressure, bird calls, temperature shifts — he could tell they were getting ready to rest. He wasn’t listening with just his ears. He was listening with his whole body.

Moving carefully now, Alex spotted them in an open area a few hundred yards ahead. Two enormous males lying in the grass, sun on their backs, totally undisturbed. We paused at a distance, admiring them, then called in the Land Rover. Slowly, we approached. There they were, resting in the light, at ease. And each of us felt that unmistakable sense of arrival — the quiet satisfaction of having “reeled in the string” that connected the faintest tracks in the sand to the lions themselves.

As we drove away, I was sitting next to Ren. He looked out the window and said casually, almost offhand:

“I was just listening to what the lions were telling me.”

That landed hard. Because he wasn’t speaking in metaphor. He meant it literally. He listened, and because he listened, we didn’t barge in. We didn’t startle them. We didn’t push them away. We approached with respect, timing, and alignment. It became a win-win because Ren was tuned into the obvious signs and the subtle, quieter cues almost no one else would notice.

In that moment, I realized there’s a deeper dimension of listening — deeper than anything I’d practiced. A fifth layer. Maybe a sixth. Maybe even more. Listening to each other. Listening to ourselves. Listening to the heart. Listening to the pace of life. Listening to the quiet pattern beneath everything — the one that’s always speaking, if we slow down enough to hear it.

“Listening isn’t just hearing. It’s sensing what exists beneath the surface.”

It’s not just about the words. It’s the pauses. The weight behind a sentence. The way someone exhales before they say the thing they’re afraid to say. The flicker in their eyes. The shift in their energy. The unseen. The whispers of the earth beneath our feet.

Most of us are moving too fast to catch any of it. We listen to fix. We listen to respond. We listen so we can get to the next thing. But when we slow down — when we really listen — the whole landscape changes. Trust deepens. Insight arrives. The next step reveals itself without forcing.

“When you truly listen, you don’t chase the track. The track begins to reveal itself.”

This is the kind of listening that changes everything. In leadership. In relationships. In nature. In the work we’re here to do. It’s available to every one of us. We just have to slow down enough to hear what’s already speaking.

“Life is always communicating. Most of us are just moving too fast to hear it.”