I’m so excited to share this conversation with Oscar Trimboli, author of Deep Listening, a lovely book/card deck.
We talk about the costs of not listening, the opportunities that are created when we listen and why hearing what's unsaid can transform your work and life.
In our western conception, we have speaking and listening, a basic duality.
Oscar describes our normal conception of listening as monochrome, two dimensional listening rather than multi-color, multi-sensory listening.
Oscar has worked to absorb traditional approaches to listening from Inuit cultures in North America, to Australian Aboriginal cultures, as well Polynesian and Maori cultures.
Oscar breaks down a 6-dimensional listening model that leverages a deeper understanding of the Chinese word for listening, Ting as well as an Aborginal concept for listening, Dadirri, which approaches listening from 3 dimensions - Self, Peoples and Lands.
125/900 and The Cost of Not Listening
Oscar introduces us to the 125/900 rule - the simple fact that we can speak at 125 words a minute yet we can think at 900 words a minute.
The basic math of conversation is that there will always be something unsaid.
The Impact of this fact is impossible to calculate. In our daily work this can mean a misunderstanding, an argument, lost work or a delay.
But Ocar points to two shocking examples:
+we lost three critical weeks in the fight against the Coronavirus because the Chinese authorities weren't willing to listen to a doctor. On December 30, 2019 Dr. Li, an ophthalmologist in a Wuhan hospital, alerted six of his friends on WeChat saying, "There's a SARS-like virus that has a huge impact on the mortality of aged patients.” Li was later asked to recant his statements and also later passed away from the disease.
+August 27th, 2005, Dr. Raghuram Rajan, then head of the International Monetary Fund, spoke at the Federal Reserve annual Jackson Hole conference in 2005. Rajan warned about the growing risks in the financial system and proposed policies that would reduce such risks. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called the warnings "misguided" and Rajan himself a "luddite".
How to Listen to people you disagree with
One final idea I want to highlight is how Oscar suggests to go about listening to those people we fiercely disagree with.
He suggests, rather than work to convince them, simply ask”
"when was the first time you formed that opinion?"
The immediate impact is that it gets us out of talking points and into the starting point. It’s a more human story. It’s the beginning of empathy and of understanding the data that they are working with.
Links and Resources
Start here with Oscar’s Listening Quiz
Oscar on the web: www.listeningmyths.com
More About Oscar
Oscar Trimboli is on a quest to create 100 million Deep Listeners in the world. He is an author, Host of the Apple Award winning podcast—Deep Listening and a sought-after keynote speaker. He is passionate about using the gift of listening to bring positive change in homes, workplaces and the world.
Through his work with chairs, boards of directors and executive teams in local, regional and global organisations, Oscar has experienced firsthand the transformational impact leaders and organisations can have when they listen beyond the words.
He consults to organisations including Cisco, Google, HSBC, News Corp, PayPal, Qantas, TripAdvisor helping executives and their teams listen to what’s unsaid by the customers and employees.
Oscar lives in Sydney with his wife Jennie, where he helps first-time runners and ocean swimmers conquer their fears and contributes to the cure for cancer as part of Can Too, a cancer research charity.
Full Transcription
Daniel Stillman:
Oscar Trimboli, I'm going to officially welcome you to The Conversation Factory. Thanks for making the time.
Oscar Trimboli:
Thanks for giving me the greatest gift of all, the gift of listening.
Daniel Stillman:
I thought I would try something now. How long have you been thinking about listening? How long have you been thinking about this issue? How far back does it go for you?
Oscar Trimboli:
I think for me, I've always thought about it. How long have I been conscious about trying to transmit the idea of listening is probably a different place in my world. I think as a youngster, I had this huge, protruding jaw. And if you grew up in the '80s, there was this movie called The American Werewolf in London and I spent, it felt like, every part of my teenage years with braces on. Most people have braces on their teeth for two to three years. The way I remember it, my entire teenage years were spent with braces on because I had this massive jaw.
Oscar Trimboli:
Now, the way to not get noticed, Dan, when you've got this big jaw is just to listen. And the easiest way to deflect attention from people is just to ask them questions. So I think that was the first time I was using it as my ninja move to deflect attention away from my teenage perspective on myself. That's the first time I really became conscious of it.
Daniel Stillman:
It sounds like listening is almost like a place of safety for you.
Oscar Trimboli:
And it's a place of judgment. That's where my villains and my superheros hang out. In that particular case it was creating safety, but also in that space it was creating judgment while I was listening to these conversations between aunties and uncles at post-dinner conversation or a post-dinner card game. Yeah, I got a bit judgy on people, too.
Daniel Stillman:
How so?
Oscar Trimboli:
"I can't believe you said that. She didn't actually mean that. What she meant was... Weren't you listening? You're not being fair to them. You always jump to that conclusion." And although it was the first time I was consciously dissecting other people's listening, it wasn't the first time I kind of coded listening.
Oscar Trimboli:
For me, I only notice that judgment in retrospect. I didn't notice in the moment. I think there's a unique satisfaction that comes to people when they're being judgmental because it's kind of like eating the first cherries of summer or something like that. Mmm, yes. You're wrong, I'm right and judgment wins.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, it sounds like you felt like you were hearing things. You were listening to things that other people weren't listening to.
Oscar Trimboli:
And I was listening to body language when adults were playing card games, for example. And although they were playing an Italian card game and they were speaking Italian and I couldn't understand Italian because I was only raised to understand English, I could see in people's faces their face, their finger position, their spinal position, the way they were tilting their shoulders, the way they were looking at their card playing partner was all giving signals away, even though they felt that they weren't while they were playing these card games.
Oscar Trimboli:
And that translated into school, too. Those card games were played at school. We were a school of 23 nationalities from war torn parts of South America, from Eastern Europe, from Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam war and at the beginning of the Cambodian war. So teams of two playing this card game would play in their home tongue, in their native language, which lulled them into a false sense of security because their body language gave away much more than their actual verbal language gave away.
Oscar Trimboli:
And again, Dan, I wasn't conscious of it at the time. And I wasn't good at counting cards. In fact, I have this thing called discalculous, which means I write numbers around the wrong way. So my superhero power in the card playing games was that if they were short of a player they'd always ask me to play, and I always thought because I was the only lonely person around, but I had probably had a higher winning percentage because I wasn't necessarily paying attention to what was being said because the Portuguese were speaking Portuguese to each other, and the Polish people were speaking Polish to each other, and occasionally if they wanted to trick people, they'd talk Russian to each other because they could speak both languages, so it was an interesting time to pay attention to what wasn't being said.
Daniel Stillman:
This is great. I have this diagram in front of me of all the things that I'm hoping we'll get to, and I feel like we're already starting to lay out not just the costs of not listening, but the opportunities that are created when we listen and the benefits of hearing what's unsaid. I want to see if we can peal back some layers on all of those things. Can you speak a little bit about the costs and the opportunities in deep listening or in not deep listening, more specifically?
Daniel Stillman:
And maybe, since many of us who are listening are... What you do and what I do, it's kind of this hilarious... I now have some empathy for people when they're like, "I'm talking to the conversation expert," and I'm like, "I'm not an expert, I'm just a fan of conversations." I imagine people feel that way when they're speaking, too. They're listening, "I better make sure that people are on their best behavior around you." I feel that. I feel how deeply you listen, so this is a very meta conversation. Listening exists at home, it exists at work, but I want to make sure that we take this into the context that people are going to be using this in for a lot of their waking hours, which is at work.
Oscar Trimboli:
What's quite funny to me is when I finish a conversation with a host that interviews me, whether that's on TV or on radio or on a podcast, they all say, "I started really hard to try and pay attention and listen deeply to you, Oscar, but my old habits just jumped across the table all through the middle of the interview. How do you be this deep listening expert?" And I always say, "I'm not the expert. What I am is someone who's managed to notice distraction quicker, and it's distraction that gets in our way."
Oscar Trimboli:
A lot of people say, "So what's this deep listening caper, Oscar? Why is that different from active listening?" And I always say active listening, crucial movement popularized in the '80s and the '90s and it focuses on listening to what's being said. Deep listening is focusing you on what's not being said.
Oscar Trimboli:
If you know the 125,900 rule, you speak at 125 words a minute yet you can think at 900 words a minute. It means the first thing that you say, there's a one in nine chance, or 11%, that what you say is what you mean. So the cost of not listening is just having a conversation with 11% of what both parties, or in a team, all parties, are thinking about.
Oscar Trimboli:
Now, I don't know about you, Dan. I don't gamble but I've been told you get better odds on a roulette wheel in Las Vegas than you do if you're having conversations about the 11%. And that's one of the first costs that people aren't even conscious of in making sure, "Great, I'm listening to what they're saying." So deep listening is listening to what's not said. And deep listening is a very different orientation. The active listening movement teaches you to listen to make sense and what that means for you as the listener, whereas deep listening is about helping the speaker make sense of what they're thinking rather than what you're making sense of what they're saying.
Oscar Trimboli:
And we can jump ahead to the costs of not listening, whether that's December 30, 2019 where Dr. Li, an ophthalmologist in a Wuhan hospital, alerts six of his friends on WeChat and says, "There's a SARS-like virus that has a huge impact on the mortality of aged patients. Please be careful, please keep your grandparents and parents safe right now." And within a week, the Chinese authorities come in and see Dr. Li and say to him, "You're wrong, you're speculating, you're making rumors up, and you need to recount what you said because what's happened is this has gone right across the WeChat network and it jumped over to WeBo," which is the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
Oscar Trimboli:
And he thought deeply about it for a week, and he recanted. He said he was wrong and all of that. And then he was looking after patients and he contracted the virus, and then in late February he passed away. But we lost three weeks in the fight against Coronavirus because the Chinese authorities weren't willing to listen to a doctor. And what's the cost of that?
Oscar Trimboli:
We will never be able to calculate that cost, yet for all of us in the workplace, we shouldn't be so smug to go, "Well, the Chinese authorities didn't listen to Dr. Li." In our workplaces, we don't listen to people who have a different dogma to us. They might come from a different profession, they might come from a different country, they might come from a different educational background, they might have a different set of experiences.
Oscar Trimboli:
In 2005, Daniel, there was Dr. Rajan who spoke at the World Central Banker Congress in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in August the 27th. It was a Saturday morning session just after morning tea, and he basically said, The global financial system is like a sewage pipe about to explode, and here's why." He said out all the reasons why and it was great. He published the paper. You can still read it today. And every central banker in that room laughed at him, they castigated him during question time. They said he was completely wrong, and the global financial crisis came about three years later. If people were listening to Dr. Rajan, maybe they could've taken some mediating actions.
Oscar Trimboli:
And whether that's that or the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2012 where 11 people lost their lives, $50 billion dollars of legal costs incurred by BP because of the pollution they created because the managers weren't listening to the engineers saying it was unsafe to drill at this speed.
Oscar Trimboli:
So in our workplaces, those costs aren't that big for us, Daniel. Those costs are typically projects that run over schedule, confusion, conflict, chaos in the workplace. These are all the costs of not listening, but also at home. But the body of work that I focus on is really what's the cost in not listening in the workplace? There's a few examples that immediately come to mind for me right now.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's interesting because there seems to be, underneath it all... In your book you talk about the different levels of listening, and I think when we talk about self listening, a lot of people... I feel like it's generally introduced in a negative sense. Like, "You're just focused on yourself and you should be focused on the other person."
Daniel Stillman:
And one of the things I like about your writing is that there's a necessity to listen to ourself. The doctor knew what he knew and he recanted. He chose to listen to power instead of to himself. It's a shame that he passed away. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I wish he had listened to himself more than to the power, even though that's a very hard choice to make.
Oscar Trimboli:
I think when it comes to listening to ourselves, we often get into these dualities or binaries, these conflicts of A versus B or one versus two or red versus blue. When I talk about listening to yourself, I want people to go a step even before that. Many of us have all these browser tabs opened in our mind. It's another thought, it's another thought, it's another thought. And every thought takes a part of your working memory up, and it's finite. So the likelihood we can listen to somebody else without closing down those browser tabs before we get into any kind of conversation is really low.
Oscar Trimboli:
Other people say to me, "Oscar, it's like I've got my own music playing in my head or my own TV show going on before I even get to the conversation. How do I quiet myself down? How do I still myself down?" And it's hard.
Oscar Trimboli:
86% of people in our 1,410 research database say that the language they use about their listening barriers is all before they come to the conversation. Think about that; 86% of us are distracted before we turn to a conversation. And if we continue in that state, we are distracted by the conversation, not just before the conversation. That's why there's an illusion that communication is actually taking place, which you're coding so well in your new book.
Oscar Trimboli:
For me, in the five levels of listening, the most commented on by scholars and academics and people who've spent a bit of time in the space of conversations or listening all say starting at level one, listening to yourself, is the step most literature skips over. If we're not ready for the conversation, how likely is it for it to be a productive dialogue?
Daniel Stillman:
Am I interested in what the other person is even saying? Can I-
Oscar Trimboli:
Or am I capable of being interested? It's not even am I interested? I am so distracted with what's going on for me right now I don't even know to process the thought about am I actually interested in the next dialogue? Because consciously I might say that to myself but subconsciously while I think about the fact that my mother-in-law passed away three weeks ago at 93, I have a friend in Vancouver who's week eight in ICU with C-19. All these things are showing up for me right now, too.
Oscar Trimboli:
For me, that's why the practice of drinking water and the practice of breathing is so critical and so basic. A lot of people want their fancy-pants intergalactic really sexy ninja move the triple back flip kick. And I say to people, "Drink water, breathe deeply." And they go, "No, no. What's the real tip?" And it's like, no it's the practice of those things around hydration and presencing yourself through breathing, which sends a signal to your nervous system to go it's okay. There's no threat from this conversation with Daniel right now. There's no threat from the judgment the audience is making right now, which you're doing. I know you are, and that's okay.
Daniel Stillman:
Can we highlight this? Because this is interesting. I don't think many people realize that breath is the one part of our, and maybe the only part of our biology that we can consciously control, but also don't have to consciously control. And that regulating your breathing affects so many other parts of your nervous system. You're nodding. Nobody's watching the video. I am, so say more about that. What's unsaid? What haven't you said about that?
Oscar Trimboli:
We have our mind and we have our physiology and we have our neurology as well. The nervous system, the parasynthetic, sympathetic nerve system. There is as many nerve endings in our gut... In fact, there are more nerve ending in our gut than there are in our brain. And the very act of breathing is both a conscious choice and it's subconscious. You can't survive without breathing.
Oscar Trimboli:
Most of us aren't conscious that the way we breathe is like the way we sit in a chair. Some of us sit in a chair in an erect position with our shoulders back and relaxed, and some of us hunch. And most of us who are hunched won't be breathing from the diaphragm where the most natural parts of breathing take place. But in that act of breath, it's a reset for the nervous system to go, "It's okay. We've got you. Continue on with those high level activities of thinking creatively or thinking collaboratively or being in a conversation on a complex topic."
Oscar Trimboli:
But most of us, when we're in a situation of fear or we want to flee a situation, our breath actually shortens. And for a lot of us, when we feel challenged in a dialogue, there's no difference in our mental systems if we're challenged physically or we're challenged mentally. The brain still releases cortisol, the nervous system still reacts the same way as if we're under physical threat. And yet the conscious act of three deep breaths, in through your nose, down the back of your throat, all the way down to the bottom of your lungs, back up through your diaphragm and out through your mouth three times.
Oscar Trimboli:
In the good old days, Dan, when I used to go into elevators in buildings, I had this practice, and the practice was really simple. Cross the lobby floor, switch my cellphone off, put it in my bag, and as I went into the elevator, or the lift, I would close my eyes if nobody was there, I'd put my back up against the wall of the elevator and just take three deep breaths. And the question I just posed to myself was what will be productive for them in this meeting that I'm about to have?
Oscar Trimboli:
And then when I go to reception, I'll always ask for a glass of water for me and for however many people were there. I know it's really different now, and again, Dan will say, "You can't see this right now but Oscar's got a bottle of water that he's just brought up," so Dan can see that. And you should be drinking water every thirty minutes. Most people in the west actually go through the day dehydrated.
Daniel Stillman:
It's terrible.
Oscar Trimboli:
And they say their brain hurts, but their brain doesn't hurt, they're just dehydrated.
Oscar Trimboli:
Those simple things that we want to be conscious of the fact that we can regulate our breathing, and yet the act of regulating our breathing sends many other physical signals to the body to take you to a state that reduces your distraction. And in a reduced state of distraction, you can listen not only to what's being said and what's not being said, but you're also emptying a space in your mind for the conversation to actually land.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. There's one ritual I was taught by my friend Salmon Masala. He teaches teams to take a team breath, and we just breathe together, we self-regulate together. It's an amazingly profound ritual and team practice. I know there's no magic bullet, and breathing and drinking, it's like table stakes, but are there other rituals that you teach to teams to be able to be more conscious with their listening and to set the scene so that it's more possible?
Oscar Trimboli:
In 2014, Google instituted this practice. It was an experiment, as they tend to do. Inside their organization, if there were more than six people in a meeting, they had a specific piece of music that they played for a guided mediation and it was the choice of the host whether they played that music for one minute or three minutes. It was the most commented thing on Google Geist. Google Geist is their annual employee engagement survey. And the reason it was the most commented on thing is they said the most productive meetings happened when we went through this set process of at the beginning of every meeting, we would play this music where everybody just either closed their eyes or lowered their eyes and focused on their breathing for a minute or up to three minutes.
Oscar Trimboli:
Now, in your desperate quest, Daniel, to get more things, I'm just going to keep coming back to the basics until we do those-
Daniel Stillman:
Or is this mine or the universal quest?
Oscar Trimboli:
Yeah. I guess it was posed in your question about what other techniques do you use with your team? And for me as a leader, one of the things that, if I run a workshop, it's my role modeling that sets the tone for the meeting when it comes to listening.
Oscar Trimboli:
Back in 2012, visiting Microsoft vice president where I used to work; he flew from Seattle to San Francisco and then to Sydney, effectively 24 hour door-to-door flight, and he jumped straight into a meeting on a Tuesday morning in Sydney where I was hosting in a boardroom in a CBD hotel, 20 executives from basically competing technology organizations in this part of the world. And I introduced him and I gave everyone a bit of background and I said, "Peter, over to you for some opening remarks." And he was sitting at the end of the boardroom table in that power position and he just got up and walked over to the corner. And I was like, what's going on here? He put his cellphone in his bag and he turned to the room and he said, "I'm really sorry. I just realized I've traveled 24 hours to be with you for the next 90 minutes. The most important thing I can give you right now is my complete and undivided attention."
Oscar Trimboli:
What happened next definitely stays with me for the rest of my life. What do you think happens next, Daniel, with the other 20 senior executives in the room from competing organizations?
Daniel Stillman:
I can't imagine.
Oscar Trimboli:
17 of them switched their cellphones off, put them in their bags. I'm speculating that the three who left them on left them on in silent mode because you could hear the pockets vibrating during the meeting for these people that were not switching their cellphones off.
Oscar Trimboli:
He left the meeting at about the 70 minute mark. I was debriefing the group, and what was fascinating; they said, "We get these visiting vice presidents coming out and preaching to us all the time and rarely is there a dialogue. It's just a broadcast monologue. And what we were surprised about today is how much we learned from each other." Peter just stimulated a conversation around a few themes, and the room learned more from each other than they did from him, but he created this environment.
Oscar Trimboli:
And I would say anybody who leads a meeting, whether that's a virtual meeting or a face-to-face meeting, they are setting the environment that is either fertile where a conversation can grow, or it's concrete and the [inaudible 00:26:41] for the conversation just bounce off into the drain because there's no fertile ground for the conversation to land. And in Peter's beautiful role modeling in that story, I often ask people, "Notice if you're giving attention or paying attention," because paying attention feels like taxation, whereas giving attention feels like an act of human generosity.
Oscar Trimboli:
And your orientation is very different when you give attention versus pay attention. So just that simple thing to go when I'm paying attention it feels like there's a friction created in this dialogue because I have to pay something, whereas giving feels free-flowing. It feels natural, it feels elegant, it feels organic.
Oscar Trimboli:
The question I would pose to anybody is how were you role modeling listening before the meeting, during the meeting and after the meeting? And a lot of people say to me, "How can you role model listening before the meeting?" or, "How can you role model listening after the meeting?" And in a lot of those cases, people don't realize that if a meeting has an agenda, where's the rule that says the agenda can't merely be a question? And pose the question before the meeting. Because people are going to come into that meeting with a very different orientation to budget setting meeting for fiscal year 2021 as opposed to what should be different in our budgeting process this year compared to last?
Daniel Stillman:
Or what are our priorities and how will we pay for them all?
Oscar Trimboli:
And I often say to people, "Listening is the willingness to have your mind changed." I didn't say, "Listening is changing your mind," I said it's the willingness or the openness to having your mind changed. And that's set before the meeting.
Oscar Trimboli:
And then the difference between hearing and listening is the willingness to take action. After the meeting, are you willing to take the action that you committed to to show everybody that you were listening? Or are you just going to go and do your own thing? So this is how listening before and after a conversation shows up as well.
Oscar Trimboli:
But never underestimate the role you play as a parent when it comes to listening or even as a adult child to a parent. You can set the listening tone. It reminds me of a very funny situation. In September last year, I was asked by a person who was interviewing me in Chicago. His name was James. He said, "Oscar, we all have an uncle or an aunt at Thanksgiving, and they're always ranting about something. It might be the angry grandmother." I said, "Okay. I get the scene." "How do we listen to those people we fiercely disagree with?" The question took me back, and I just simply said, "Ask that person when was the first time that they formed that opinion?" And in doing so, you actually reset this automatic story that they tell and they have to go back to that point in time.
Oscar Trimboli:
Most people don't know this story; James rings me up in December, after Thanksgiving. He's about to publish the interview and he says, "Before I do, I have to tell you about my uncle because I asked him that question. And we had a completely different conversation." And I went, "How so?" He said, "Well, he didn't get drunk, for a start." I say, "Well, that sounds like a good starting point."
Oscar Trimboli:
It was a question around politics because they both disagreed on politics, but he asked his uncle when did he first form this perspective on this political issue? And his uncle took him back to the 1960s and explained a really specific situation where that happened. And James said to me, "Wow, I was willing to have my mind changed. And in that moment, I cared enough about my uncle to listen to him and realize that that was his story, and he just carried that forward with him. And the world has changed but his story hasn't changed. But knowing that story, we now discuss that story and where it started rather than where he's at now and it's a much richer conversation for both of us. Our relationship has transformed."
Oscar Trimboli:
I said, "James, I'm completely delighted for you, but do you realize you did that? You, as a listening role model, changed the whole conversation." And in that moment, he kind of went, "Oh. I can help somebody change their own perspective on a topic just by listening to them." And I said, "Yeah. As a listener, we help the speaker make sense of what they're saying." And he said, "Can we record that again? Can we go and record this?" And I said, "Yeah, sure. We can record this." And he kind of added that onto the end of the interview.
Oscar Trimboli:
But equally, I was doing another interview with someone who was interviewing me and their recording ended up in a faith-based group. And they sent me an email and said, "Oscar, I don't know if you're religious or a Christian or anything like that, but this listener had asked me to share this situation with you." And she was a mom in a multi-faith congregation. They basically have a mother's group once a month. She said, "If you listen to this podcast interview before, it's going to be like a book club. We're going to discuss the podcast episode, not the books we normally discuss. And because this is a bit different, I'll buy you a Starbucks coffee voucher."
Oscar Trimboli:
What shocked me in the email that was forwarded on to me is there were 12 people, 12 women, and they're all at that chaotic stage in life where they have young kids and they're all under five and they're in family formation. And they showed up to the discussion, and what shocked the host was she said, "Three people pulled her aside before they sat down and said, "I need to tell you something, and I'm not sure I want to talk about it in our group today."" And all three women, wives, basically said exactly the same thing: "I haven't been listening to my husband since we've had kids. I've ignored him, our marriage is on the rocks, and for the listening to this interview for the first time, I had the courage to go and have a real conversation with my husband since the kids have been born." And I was touched. For me, I spend a lot of time in corporates talking about the cost of not listening, but the cost of not listening at home is pretty huge too, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Tremendous. The family is where it all starts and where we learn how to talk and where we learn how to listen. It's delightful.
Daniel Stillman:
I want to roll back on a whole host of things you've said, and I want to analyze the story of the man who traveled 24 hours and took a moment and-
Oscar Trimboli:
Peter. Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
Peter. And also of your friend who sat with his uncle at Thanksgiving. What I think is really interesting about your work is, from my own perspective, I am always looking for better ways to design our conversation because when we have simple framework, a simple structure, a design helps us know what to do. And I've been looking at the process of Ting and some of the ancient wisdom that you pull from. We have been trying to solve these problems for a really long time. Obviously as human beings, we've been 40,000 years as modern humans and we still stumble. And so I've been looking at these steps of presence, respect, focus, feeling, hearing, and seeing, and I see the myriad very, very strongly in what Peter did and what your friend did at Thanksgiving.
Daniel Stillman:
And I'm curious, one, how you stumbled upon this piece of wisdom and insight. And two, can you walk it through from your perspective? Because I'm new to it. It sounds like an old friend for you.
Oscar Trimboli:
Most of the problems we're trying to solve our ancient ones. You're right. I went back and researched through the book, Inuit cultures in North America, South American, jungle cultures, Australian Aboriginal cultures, Polynesian and Maori cultures through the islands of the pacific. Ting, which you talk about, here, which is six dimensional listening which is taught in the 12th century by the king's consigliere, for want of a better word, the person who's responsibility for bringing through the next generation of princes and princesses in the court.
Oscar Trimboli:
And to ensure that the dynasties continued, one of the key things the leaders always talked about is the importance of listening to their constituents, in modern language. All the people that were under their rulership. And Ting is six dimensional, and whether we listen for dadirri, which is-
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, I was hoping we'd get to that, too.
Oscar Trimboli:
... an Aboriginal word, which talks about listening as three dimensional listening but at a much meta level. Listening to yourself, your peoples and your lands.
Oscar Trimboli:
The greatest listening cultures through history are also the greatest storytelling cultures. And there is something rather unique in humans gathering around a common place and space to hear a story because stories, particularly in Aboriginal but also in the Chinese cultures, were directional tools. They were tools to help you understand how to get to a special, sacred ritual site, but there were many steps to get there. You may travel hundreds of miles to get there through rivers and over ravines and through gulleys. And stories were done. But in these ways of telling stories, you were training the youth and the pre-initiation males on how to listen because it would literally save their lives because if you turn left or right, you could have crocodiles eating you going the wrong way on a river versus turning right and then everything will be okay.
Oscar Trimboli:
Back to Ting, Daniel; most of us think about listening. I call it monochrome, two dimensional listening rather than multi-color, multi-sensory listening. Ting teaches us about six colors. Most of us are taught to listen by our hearing and our sight. Listen to the body language and all of a sudden we think we're going well on our listening. And we are. What we do is we double that 100% every time if we start to look at other layers of listening.
Oscar Trimboli:
What I love about Ting is it says that you're listening with your heart. Now, one of the things we have to pay respect to the Mandarin language is only a Westerner would deconstruct Ting into its elemental characters. No Chinese person would do to Ting what I've done. It's about seeing, it's about hearing, it's about your presence, it's about how you're staying focused in the conversation all the way through the six dimensions.
Oscar Trimboli:
There's an integrity in the way that the ancients listen that we've forgotten in modern times. And again, back to dadirri where we talk about listen to yourself first, listen to your peoples next and then listen for your lands because your lands are connecting you with your past but it's also sustaining you in our present. Again, there's a integrity, there's a connectedness in all three of those things and you can't do one well without the other being more productive.
Oscar Trimboli:
Again, when we come back to why is breathing so elemental? And why it's so part, an ingredient in this beautiful [inaudible 00:40:50] broth of listening, it is because it connects everything inside us and everything outside us. Without oxygen in the earth, trees don't grow. Trees don't grown, animals, fish, whatever; they don't happen. And then there's the element of water.
Oscar Trimboli:
Too many of us are looking for the latest fancy-pants move, just being patient and going back to our elders have wisdom. If we could learn from them in just the most simple, basic things, we'll really have a transformational impact.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. And taking the time to set the stage for good listening is time well spent.
Oscar Trimboli:
Many people in the workplace have these things called work in progress meetings, and they happen regularly. They might happen daily. They might be called stand-ups or sprints or those kinds of meetings, or they might be weekly. And I'd ask you listening right now, if you're ever been part of those meetings have you ever been frustrated with yourself or somebody else who comes to the work in progress meeting the following week and says, "My task is complete," and then people as you to explain what you've completed and you've completed something that nobody asked you for because you weren't listening. And you wasted a huge amount of time yourself and for the group because you weren't listening in that moment. So the cost of not listening, for most of us in the workplace, is wasted effort. We can't do our best work, or our work isn't valued because it's not connecting to the bigger picture or it's not delivering on something we get really excited about.
Oscar Trimboli:
Getting ready for the conversation to listen reduces the likelihood you're going to hear the wrong thing. If you wanted the modern move, Daniel, that basic modern move beyond water, beyond breathing, it's this. And some people are going to go absolutely crazy like I'm taking away drugs from a drug addict. Remove your digital devices before you start a conversation. If it's a cellphone, I'm not saying go cold turkey and switch it off immediately, but at least try and gray-scale with no notification, and then from no notification to silent mode, and from silent mode to airplane or to flight mode, and from flight mode to off mode. And if you've got a laptop or an iPad or some kind of tablet, just switch off the notifications if you're taking notes on a digital device.
Oscar Trimboli:
And you will have that very different relationship with yourself and your presence, remembering that the difference between a distracted listener and a deep listener is just noticing how often they're distracted. If you switch off the notifications on your computer or your laptop or your cell or your tablet. And now it's just one button. In the good old days, it took a long time to take off those notifications. But right now, it's a button that we can all push to put all the notifications off on those devices.
Oscar Trimboli:
Those 1,410 people I talked about earlier in our database that we've been tracking for three years, Daniel, they say they've doubled their listening productivity by just switching their devices off or switching their notifications off. I say to them, "Quantify double. What does that mean?" And they all say that they get more time in their schedule back. And on average we're finding these people get four hours a week back in their schedules because they're not going into meetings where they're repeating themselves or they delivered the wrong task or they're asking the right kind of questions. And meetings actually become shorter, not longer. When people say, "This listening stuff takes time. I haven't got time. I'm too busy being busy." And I say to-
Daniel Stillman:
It's a pretty good American imitation, though. That was good.
Oscar Trimboli:
I don't even know which State that accent was supposed to be from. And for me, those initial steps of first time going into the listening gym, you're going to get sore muscles, for sure, where you're lifting your weights. But what people notice consistently is... And they all come back to, "Yeah, there is time freeing up in my schedule." Or the opposite is the time I have available now, I'm using those things on stuff I really enjoy, or it's really creative, or it's really long-term, or I can go and move some really big rocks rather than just transactional issues in our business.
Oscar Trimboli:
So for us, the act of listening is going to get you back four hours a week, and the fastest way to do that is just switch the devices to non-notification modes. And if you really want to double, again, just switch them off because we relate to our devices very differently if they're off to whether they're on. If they're on and the notification thing is off... Tell me if this ever happened to you, Daniel: "I'm waiting for that email. Wonder if that email's coming in. I wish I could push that button. If I just push the button now but keep my eyes in front of the room, nobody will notice and the email will come in. I'm sure I'll be okay." And that moment, you're giving your attention to a device.
Oscar Trimboli:
Don't let the device use you, make sure you use the device. That's all I'm asking for. Give conscious attention to everybody around you, but don't let the device use you because the kinds of psychologists that are designing notifications are the same people who design slot machines in Las Vegas to make you continuously scroll on that slot machine and keep putting money in. And that's what happens with a lot of people while they're thumbing their cellphone, too.
Daniel Stillman:
And the truth is, our working attention is, by one measure, 120 bits per second, and one person talking is 60. That's half of our attention. And looking at the phone, looking at anything else, trying to split our attention; there's not a lot of it to go around. We think that we have infinite attention but it's really not the case.
Daniel Stillman:
Oscar, we're really coming up on our time and it's a shame. What haven't you said that ought to be said? Is there anything else that remains unsaid to make our time together complete?
Oscar Trimboli:
There's lots. We haven't spoken about the four villains of listening, we haven't talked about listening individually, collectively and at organizational and ecosystem level, so I'll just conclude by simply saying there are many things left unsaid. Remember, I think at 900 words a minute, I can speak at 125 so there's a big gap. Stick with the basics; that's the thing I keep reminding myself. Devices off, water, breathing; those three things working in harmony together are really powerful. Just practice that.
Oscar Trimboli:
If you want to learn about your listening barriers and what gets in your way, you can take the seven minute listening quiz if you visit listeningquiz.com. You can quickly assess yourself and we'll give you a tailored, 90 day program specifically designed around your specific listening barriers. And at listeningquiz.com, we can connect you with really the next set of tips beyond this. Once you get the breathing right, once you get the devices sorted, once you get your hydration going, we'll help you to explore and notice the difference between bias questions and neutral questions, which are covered so delightfully on the previous episodes.
Oscar Trimboli:
And understand that sometimes the best question that you can answer sounds like this. And if you were going to write down one thing out of today's interview, it will be what I say next. This question is the most powerful question you can ever ask somebody, so here it comes. Silence.
Daniel Stillman:
Boom. Good punchline.
Oscar Trimboli:
The word silent and the word listen have identical letters. I've just done Daniel's head in. He's trying to rearrange the letters-
Daniel Stillman:
I know, I'm not so good with-
Oscar Trimboli:
... in his head. Better you write it down than try to do it as-
Daniel Stillman:
No thank you.
Oscar Trimboli:
... a visual exercise. In the West, we have this awkward relationship with silence. We could do a whole episode on this. We call it the pregnant pause, the awkward silence, the deafening silence. Yet in the East, in Japan, in China, in Korea, in high-context cultures, silence is a sign of wisdom, it's a sign of authority, it's a sign of respect.
Oscar Trimboli:
In fact, a lot of Westerners get very confused when they go to meetings in the East and notice that the senior person in the room, it almost looks like they're asleep but they're not. And the room's waiting for they and there may be up to five minutes of silence. And in that time, the room is coming together, and this is where consensus is evolving and adapting.
Oscar Trimboli:
In jungle cultures, in the Aboriginal and ancient cultures, in the Inuit cultures it is not uncommon for the gathering of tribes to sit in silence for hours, days, weeks, and yet communication is still taking place.
Oscar Trimboli:
Though, Daniel, if there's one thing we could spend a whole other conversation talking, it's about listening to the silence.
Daniel Stillman:
I often talk about the difference between being and doing. Western cultures, we value doing. And in my book I talk about this; speaking versus listening. Speaking is doing and listening seems like non-being and non-doing, and what's that for? But the bowl is useful because of the space in it, and we need that space.
Daniel Stillman:
I really appreciate you making some space in your day, in your time with us and having a spacious conversation with me about this really, really important thing; deep listening. And obviously, yeah, if people want to get into the next step stuff, you... I was going to ask you these questions but there's places to find you on the internet. People can read your book. A whole piece of your brain, preserved posterity people can leisurely, at their own pace and time, leaf through. Are there other places on the internet that people should find you in their leisure hours?
Oscar Trimboli:
Just listeningquiz.com is the-
Daniel Stillman:
Once we turn our devices back on.
Oscar Trimboli:
Look, listeningquiz.com is the starting place, and that'll give you access to the books, to the deep listening playing cards, it will give you access to the deep listening jigsaw puzzles, it'll give you access to the Deep Listening podcast series, the online masterclass for managers and how to listen across the nine meetings that matter, it can give all the socials and things like that.
Oscar Trimboli:
And we also have a community of practice where we get together twice a month across three different timezones to listen to each other and come to a common space where between six and eight people discuss the barriers that are getting in the way of their listening every week. As you mentioned, Daniel, listening is both a skill, it's a strategy and it's a practice. Those three things are all the kinds of muscles you need to build there. So listeningquiz.com; starting point for everything.
Daniel Stillman:
Oscar, thank you so much.