About Listening Matters

Designed Listening that Changes Everything

Listening Matters was founded by Julia Olsen and Stephen Kearney after over 35 years working at the intersection of personal, family, and community transformation.
Our methodology — designed listening that changes behaviour — was born on doorsteps and in community halls, working with families and young people excluded from or written off by institutions.
We discovered something fundamental: the answer was already inside people. Our job was never to solve it for them.
It was to help them hear it themselves.
That founding belief, tested across decades and continents — from challenged communities in the UK to Zambia, from boardrooms to street corners — became the Listening Matters framework.

Today, we're putting that same depth of experience into a specific focus: midlife mothers navigating identity depletion, creative loss, and family strain.

The listening process itself holds for anyone ready to hear themselves again — men included, as our own community work has always shown — but right now, this is where we've chosen to build.

Julia brings architecture training, deep group facilitation, and lived experience of resilience — twice surviving cancer, she knows what it takes to rebuild a life worth living.



Stephen brings agriculture training, performing arts, and community leadership — a skilled listener, strategist, and believer in human potential.


Both qualified sailing skippers, we practice tai chi daily - some say we are living embodiments of grounded navigation and creative flexibility!

We live aboard our sailing boat, deliberately choosing freedom of location, creative time, and the space to do work that matters to us.

Listening, making music, writing, painting, sailing - our families and good conversation.

This work reaches further than Reignition

We're building Listening Matters not just as a business, but as a platform for human reignition at scale — helping women restore capacity, reclaim creativity, and lead from strength, so their families and communities begin to change too."

Listening Matters shows up in more places than just here on this page - in radio, theatre, community - and the wider creative life we have built alongside it. It you're curious - take a look at Wider Work - it's worth a look.


© Listening Matters 2026. All rights reserved. Listening Matters is a trading name of Pear Appreciate Life Ltd, registered in England & Wales, company number 13198741.

Listening Matters - designed listening that changes behaviour