 Welcome to the show Oscar Trimboli wrote the book deep listening impact beyond words executive coach speaker and author living in beautiful Sydney, Australia. It is a pleasure to welcome you to the show Oscar. Good night guys. And I have to say it is perfect timing that we have you on the show because last month we covered emotional bids in great detail and learning how to actually listen on an emotional level and we got a great number of questions in from our audience really focusing on the art of listening how to become a more effective and impactful listener. And I know that some of us listening to the show right now may have even gotten some feedback on their listening or lack thereof myself included. So I'm excited to dig into the science of listening and one of the things that really jumped out at us in the book itself was this great insight how the moment we are born and utter our first primal scream coming out of the womb. We spend the rest of our lives trying to be heard by others and we don't really spend enough time learning how to listen to others and I thought that was really insightful. You know one of the first skills we learn inside our mother's womb at 25 weeks is how to listen out for the sound of our mom and at 32 weeks we can distinguish Beethoven from Bon Jovi so being able to listen deeply is our birthright but I mean it we're born we completely forget it because we want to come into the world kicking and screaming and being noticed. In Australia we don't have teachers of school that teaches how to listen that might be different in the US we have people who teach us how to do math we have people who teach us English yet the skill we spend 55 percent of our day doing listening only 2 percent of the world has ever been trained in how to do and you know that's one of the things I'm extraordinarily passionate about is being thoughtful deliberate listeners and creating 100 million deep listeners in the world by 2030. Well as your eyes and ears here in America I can tell you that that same problem exists here as well there is no one teaching anyone how to listen and one of the a lot of the letters the emails we got last week were people who share the emotional bids episode statically with their partners and with people and only to hear well yeah because you don't listen to anybody right it was like wait I was sharing that with you to let you know that you are responding and validating any of my emotional bids so obviously there's a lot for everyone to learn from our conversation today. And what I think is so fascinating about all of this is we are graded on our ability to listen so your ability to listening you get graded in school and then when you enter the workforce if you're not listening to your boss if you're not listening to what the team needs are you're not going to fit in and you're going to fall behind and ultimately be let go so this skill set that we're going to dig into is so impactful in every relationship in our lives and it really starts with listening to ourselves I know a lot of us don't even take the time to listen to our own thoughts and in our week-long training here in Los Angeles one of the first things that we dig into is identifying what your values are and understanding who you are on a greater level so that you can actually pay closer attention to others some of us are having that struggle internally and what I love about the book was you broke listeners down into you broke unconscious listeners down into four types and could you describe them for our audience yeah I call them the villains of listening or more importantly the audiences that I worked with over the time I've developed this content started to say these are these are the villains because we have language in maths we have division we have multiplication we have subtraction we have all these syntax to use but nobody knows how to describe a listener so the listening villains are the dramatic listener the lost listener the interrupting listener and the shrewd listener and each of them have very different characteristics while you're listening to this think deeply about the person who's the most frustrating person who doesn't listen to you and see where they fit into this full villains of listening the lost listener is completely detached they seem really vague they're not even sure if they should be talking to you or if they are they're not really paying attention in the moment these people will tend to say things like sorry could you say that again I'm not sure what you mean could you say that again or they just have this very vague look on their face the the second listener is the dramatic listener they love your story because it creates a theater in which they can tell a much bigger story so I was reminded by Mary who told me the story about a dramatic listener she went in and saw her manager to complain about one of her staff members not doing a particular task and all her boss did was take that and go boy you think you got problems and then started to list 14 other problems that she had so she wasn't really interested in Mary or what Mary had to say she wasn't listening she was just creating a platform for her next drama the most obvious listener we all kind of think about is the interrupting listener their visual they are interrupting us the minute we draw breath that's their commercial break to give us their opinion and the interrupting listener I love because people can see them they're over they're transparent and that's the easiest one to work with the final one is the shrewd listener shrewd listener is disproportionately represented in the medical profession in the sales profession any kind of consulting profession and what the shrewd listener is is very careful think about somebody who's stroking their chin they're nodding sagely and all they're doing is going you think that's your problem once I solve that problem I've got three other problems you're so dumb you haven't even thought about and what they're missing while they're formulating the solution to the problem is they're not actually listening to what that other person's saying so these four villains when you were thinking about who they are one of the funny things about this exercise is listening is situational and listening is relational you listen to your boss differently than you listen to somebody you work with you listen to your parents differently do you listen to your children or you might listen to a sales rep differently to somebody you're going out on a first date with but in all those cases you are one of those four listening villains when you struggle you're going to struggle with one of those four things and the lost listener is the place that most of us need to start because we turn up to a conversation with a story already in our head either the story we haven't left behind from the last conversation we had or the story we're making up when we come into the next conversation so the difference between a good listener and a great listener the difference between somebody who's a shallow listener and a deep listener is somebody who understands the 125 400 rule the simple maths and neuroscience of the fact that we speak at roughly 125 words a minute but we can listen to up to 400 words a minute so a good listener gets distracted because they're filling in the other 300 words while we're speaking in fact it's happening to some of you right now you're driving along and you've missed the conversation some of you are cooking right now and you're thinking about Jean I hope this meal gets made in time and even for our host right now they're probably thinking about the next question so that is a full villains of listening well reading this and going over this for the show obviously the ones that I feel that I suffer from and of course then you have to look at the people around you what you suspected their type of listening is and we're right on the gate I mean the interrupting listeners spoke to me immediately and of course the shrewd listener spoke to me immediately and I was like but the best thing about this is listening and listing them as unconscious acts being able to to zero in on which one you're guilty of and then being able to see it for what it is and then as well as we venture forward today being able to put some pieces that together to help be a better listener and I think ultimately for all of us we see in color but we listen in black and white so we only really ever think about listening for content either audio or visual and the five levels of listening helping people understand that listening is so much more than nodding saying tell me more about that that's such a superficial level of listening it's a great start but most of us listen in black and white and I'm trying to teach the world how to listen in color and what's so interesting about all of this is that situational component that a lot of us don't think about we like to think we're good listeners all the time but I definitely think about the moments where I'm half listening because I don't really need to pay attention that commercial on TV or I'm fully intently listening because I want to get this value from my business coach so when we start to unpack the unconscious behaviors that we have around listening and the situationalness of that even though if that's a word the fact that it's so situational and that sometimes our listening skills are really going to be there and sometimes they're not going to be there we can actually start to work in this area to improve and our audience I know is listening along to us so they're excited to learn how to become better listeners and what you touched on earlier there the science behind listening realizing that yes we are speaking at 125 words but our mind's ability to process at 400 words a minute is pretty amazing when we think about it I thought that number was and I've seen that before but the other thing I was thinking about when he was talking about the situation that the situation listening and coming back to this podcast right we're talking about how people listen to this and I know many friends who listen to podcast on two times the speed three and I'm like how are you able to review concepts and look at things from different perspectives if you're just plowing through content it's such a rate and I think you know that's such a microcosm of how we listen to our friends and our and our loved ones emotional bids. Yeah one of the things I say to people is treat silence like it's another word listen fully and completely to silence and treat it respectfully like it is a word rather than a space to interrupt just by the way on the two times speed you can listen to up to three times speed so particularly blind people can listen at a much faster speed than sighted people because they've already figured out how to process quicker so for others that might listen to podcast at two times speed they can only do that if the accent is something that they're familiar with so you might start at one time speed then you can move to two x speed sorry one and a half speed and then two x speed but as long as you can understand the inclinations in the voice you can move your speed up so the wonderful thing about the two x speed in podcasting approves the one twenty five four hundred rule and I know a couple of blind people who who have full comprehension at three hundred words a minute so listening because we haven't been taught provides such a huge cognitive load when we go through the process of trying to understand deeply and his two really simple hacks to think about from your body's perspective and the third tip is so practical you're just going to hit your forehead so tip number one in ninety ninety three in Canada and this research has been replicated in the US Germany and the Netherlands over decades since the deeper you breathe the deeper you listen and the science is really simple because it's such a cognitive load for your mind getting more oxygen to the brain helps you to listen better there's less distraction and I know you guys teach this and have had other brilliant guests on that talk to this much better but it's a simple fact of holding your breath a little bit longer so for me it's not you taking and sitting down and moving into a yoga position before you start to listen to people for me it's a simple as from the time I step into a building lobby to the time I get to the lift I become completely conscious of my breathing and as a result that starts to block out other distracting thoughts in my head so tip number one the deeper you breathe the deeper you listen you only have to hold it for five seconds longer to help the brain create a rinse cycle that is the washing machine before listening the second tip is a hydrated brain is a more effective brain so for a lot of us we might start the morning with coffee and that's great personally I don't but if you can drink two liters of water a day your brain's going to be able to process more effectively because the fluids that transmit sugars to the brain get there quicker so tip number one breathe deeper tip number two drink water the final tip seems really obvious it's so obvious that people don't do it and now to your guest that you are switching off your phone and put it in your bag or in your waistcoat pocket or wherever it needs to be but by announcing that intention straight away they go I cannot believe that someone's going to do that for me what an act of sheer generosity to give me your complete attention now I challenge everybody is listening right now I challenge you to do that once a day for the next week and notice how different that conversation becomes because if you're really listening what will be the opportunity for you to change your thinking because you're listening completely to the other person so tip number one breathe deeply tip number two drink water and tip number three announce and switch off not vibrate mode switch off your cell phone and you'll transform the kinds of conversations you have no matter who you're having them with I love that and I cannot wait to experiment with that and I'm aromatically thinking about a particular conversation that I have to have this evening that I'm going to use that and I I think we rail on social media and technology a lot but there's obviously a reason for it and I love that you had said that that is a wonderful thing to hear and I think of a lot of people go about their day turning off their phone for important conversations we might be in a better place well I've only part about that is I've then struggled with the phantom vibrate or even your phone is off so Amy and I go on date nights on Friday night and I try to turn my phone off completely and unplug and be fully present and I'm sitting there with my phone in my pocket I know it's off and it's still feeling like it's vibrating right and it's still on the back of your mind like I got to get to this thing so the more I get out of your practice yeah the more of that practice and doing it for a week straight instead of just doing it on the oddball situation you're going to actually start to be more devotional in your practice of listening which I think is really important yeah and you're right it's a practice you need to develop listening muscles and like any other muscle the first time you use them it's going to be a struggle the first time you go into a gym it's going to be a different experience on your muscles and the same is true for listening but there's a great story from two years ago I was working with an executive in a in an organization it was really complex and sat down and explained what I did and he hired me in three meetings in he says his name was Mike and he says I got a bone to pick with you Oscar he says you nearly caused me a divorce and I said I'm confused Mike you know I was explicit and said do not try any of these techniques at home these are all for the workplace and he said you know for two weeks I put my phone down I've switched it off I've really looked deeply into my wife's eyes and you know what she said last Friday she asked me if I'm having an affair and I was completely blown away and I paused I waited for a bit of silence like you taught me and he said lovely question I'm curious what's caused you to change your perspective and she said you've never paid me this much attention you must be cheating on me and he knows from that point on not only their marriage is transformed but also the way they interact with their children has transformed because from the time they get home that both parents get home with the children to the time they finish dinner it's a completely device free zone and that's changed the dynamic in the family so sometimes teaching people how to listen has some unintended consequences as I did for Mike but a happy ending in that case it's funny how we build up these habits in our communication as well with the people around us and they come to expect certain things and all of a sudden you're working on improving your turning towards emotional bids and the other person's like well wait a second here uh you're paying too close attention to me uh something's off we got a great question here from a listener Thomas hey AJ and Johnny this is Thomas from Austria here's my problem I'm often facing when I'm in conversation every now and then my mind simply wanders off and I think about if and when I ever was in such a situation as the person I'm talking to is currently so I do listen to the other person but at the same time I'm thinking of a ton of other things any advice on how I can become more present and engaged in conversation great question Thomas from Austria not to be confused with Australia so that's terrific I think that uh we want to do two things when we go to school we're actually taught to look for similarities rather than look for differences particularly in conversation so one of the things I would encourage you to do is just give yourself over completely to the dialogue not try and form an opinion and and a simple technique to do this is to listen for patterns rather than just the words so they're always speaking in the past are they always speaking in the future are they speaking about themselves individually or they speaking about groups are they speaking about positive negative are they speaking about things in patterns if you start to listen not only for the words they're saying but the patterns that will put another hundred words for you to start to think about while you're listening and you won't become distracted so the intention you want to walk in with Thomas is not only what are they saying but what are the patterns in what they're saying and then a simple question you can pose to them sometimes don't do it all the time or you come across as a bit of a shrewd listener is I've noticed some patterns in what you've just said and just pause because a lot of times they'll say what the pattern is and that'll be different to the pattern you even notice then offer them the opportunity to say do you mind if I share the pattern I noticed and all of a sudden your dialogue takes a completely different path because it's not only about what's being said that matters it's also about exploring what's unsaid and if you can start to explore the unsaid you'll get less distracted don't forget the three tips we already talked about the deeper you breathe the deeper you listen drink some water and switch off that cell phone you know I love that one of the things that we do in program everyone who comes through has to fill out a form of why they're there and what they want to work on and what they feel that their issues and challenges are and that gives us some insight before they come in but even though we have that information we still want to hear it from their mouths when they're sitting on that couch because the language that they use in that situation tells tells us a lot about how they view the situation and where they're at and at that time yeah and really powerful leaders in commerce or really powerful listeners in politics listen to what's unsaid and you only have to look to your 2016 election to see someone who paid attention to the voices that weren't being heard and harnessing the power of that and it's so fascinating how when we have this extra 275 words to play with here how if we can put our focus on the right things looking for patterns like you said we can actually dedicate more resources to the listening instead of allowing those distractions to easily catch our you know side glance and all of a sudden we're losing control of the situation I think what we find time and time again is we're always in search of these patterns and then we're trying to trying to become more empathetic and think about ways that we can relate to people and oftentimes in that forcing of patterns and thinking about these different ways it's very easy for us to get off course and not be paying full attention to the person we're talking to yeah and that's the the thing about listening to yourself Chinese have a character to describe two words two listen so they make listening a very active action not a passive hearing and if you decompose the characters of Ting to a physical to hear and to see but then there are other components the component of focus the component of feeling and the component of heart so for them listening is a five dimensional action rather than a passive active hearing so for all of us is our heart in the conversation or just our head deep listeners are fully committed not just to who's speaking but to the dialogue again I'd say one of the distinctions between good listeners and great listeners between shallow listeners and deep listeners deep listeners listen to the dialogue not just the person talking and the distinction is is this dialogue progressing or are we just like two table tennis players ping-ponging back a ball across the table we're not really making progress but we're using a lot of energy to get our position across if you're listening to the dialogue you'll start to ask questions like compared to when we started are we making progress between now and when we need to finish what would you like to cover off and that helps to triangulate the conversation much like the gps satellites that circle the world to go where should we be where are we now where should we be where are we now a lot of time we're just stuck in this dialogic interchange that feels like a table tennis or a ping-pong bat and ball just going across the table creating a perspective where you start to go up and look at the conversation like a satellite is powerful it's transformational it's really deep I love that advice thank you for sharing that with our listeners next we have a very interesting question from Danielle in Colombia Danielle in Colombia says I wanted to ask is there something that I can do with my body language so my brain goes into listening mode and also what are some ways to show the other person that I am really listening great question what the research says way back from the 1950s even up until today is the person speaking believes that visual cues are a better indication of listening than paraphrasing as an example or summarizing so number one sit at body language if you sorry sit at body level when you're speaking to someone we saw an atrocious example of this recently when we saw Serena Williams at the US Open at Flushing Meadow now for those of you who hadn't had an opportunity to see what happened she had a chance to become the greatest of all time by winning the US Open there was an issue where she was being coached and the chair umpire called her out the chair umpire issued her warning and Serena Williams came up to the chair umpire to ask for an explanation now both are right and both are wrong but it was a really poor listening environment because the chair umpire stayed in their chair and like a parent looking down on a child looked down on Serena Williams and that body language and that body position created distrust straight away that Serena felt she wasn't being listened to so make sure your eye contact is actually at eye level sounds super basic but you'd be surprised how many people do it the second thing is keep your feet flat on the floor to create a sense of centeredness to help improve your breathing keep both hands on the table if you're in that kind of an environment or if you're in a in a mixer or you're in an environment where you might be enjoying a wine or a or a beverage um feel free to make sure that your glass is at their glass level which will help your eye contact be at their eye level and the reason eye level is really important it just aligns your ears to theirs and it makes it much easier for you to listen the same is true for children if you if you're listening to this and you've got children and you travel a lot for your work if you call your children don't call them standing up make sure you're sitting at their eye level whatever height they would be so if you're in a hotel room you might need to sit on the bed or kneel down some people might need to sit cross-legged so your body position is a really clear cue and indicator to the other person that you're listening face front on have eye contact as close to eye level for both parties as possible and that will be a huge signal based on the research about they will feel you listen better daniel it is great to see such simple things having such a large impact on something such as listening or even being able to feel for others to feel good that you're listening certain things like having closed off body language we talk about all the time in classes and how a lot of people's unconscious body language of something that they do that allows them to feel comfortable puts other people at a position where they don't feel they're being heard because the person they're speaking to is closed off has their arms folded or how that closed off body language even puts them in a position when they're in a social environment of closing themselves off to hearing the emotional content an atmosphere of the room and we've just seen a great example of this and right now we can't see each other and we are struggling because we can't make eye contact it's a primal human requirement because eye contact is the first trust indicator if i can't see anything in your hands i know you're not going to kill me and if you're not going to kill me then i probably want to have a conversation with you right now so again for people in in business one of the things i would say whenever you've got an opportunity use FaceTime or use a webinar that or zoom or any of those tools that allow you Skype to allow you to not only speak audio but also visual as our world becomes smaller it becomes more disconnected rather than more connected because these technologies are breaking down some of the more important assets that we require to listen better i think we're all learning how to communicate better through technology because we've all have found ourselves in trouble because context and and other things emotional content has been missing from a lot of these conversations and i remember i had a boss when i was a much younger man who who liked to do most of his business through email but also had gotten into a lot of trouble through email because of the nuance of lost in that communication and i remember many drama-filled evenings that were all because of technology rather than two people who live down the road from each other having a beer at the bar and discussing and having it out face to face yeah and you know whether it's doctors or salespeople or judges there's some research that's being done about all the listening research so i know that gets a bit meta-meta but basically in the university in jerusalem the hebrew university avicluga has done a study of all listening studies and the correlations are quite potent doctors on average interrupt their patient in the first 20 seconds and great doctors that listen listen for 90 seconds before interrupting their patient so it's not actually a long time but doctors who listen and up to 90 seconds have a 10 times less chance at having a malpractice suit against them salespeople who listen more deeply are 38 more productive than those that don't there's an amazing piece of research and technology allows this to be done now that analyzed 25 000 sales calls that were all recorded and a computer transcribed them and it analyzed the talk versus listen ratio and great salespeople listened in a ratio over the time of the call 54 percent listening 46 percent speaking at the beginning of the call the speak ratio was lower and at the end of the call the listening ratio was higher so on average these calls lasted up to 10 minutes but now that we have all this amazing data that tells us that the sales reps in those cases that listen closer to the ratio of 54 46 outperform the average not the whole group just the average by eight times so we can see the commercial implications of that but we can also see that in personal relationships as well there's a great story from lego and lego in 2000s was going broke they were struggling lego has theme parks they had to sell them to keep the company afloat and they decided that they would create a lego movie and most of you will know of the lego movie franchise but the very first movie was a complete disaster it was called the adventures of crash critic and it's a box office success was sixty nine thousand dollars sold a few dvds so the ceo decided that he needed a different approach he hired the directors from the blockbuster movie called 21 jump street so no oscoe award-winning directors behind this whatsoever but what lord and miller the two directors decided to do there's this cult in lego called adult fans of lego and they meet on weekends and they play with their legos and they build structures and they swap ideas lord and miller spent six months just going around europe japan and the united states listening in while these people were building lego and there's this bad character in lego land that uses glue so for the lego fishinados out there they're using glue is bad but because lord and miller were listening down at this level they created a whole subplot in the movie that the adult fans of lego went out and promoted to their friends who weren't lego fans and created a movement the point being out of that they created a billion dollar movie franchise now done six movies they created a half a billion dollar computer software game franchise and they added nearly two billion dollars to lego revenue all because they listened to the adult fans of lego and the fact that glue shouldn't be used when it comes to lego so i learned something about lego when it comes to that so listening has massive impact when it's done well listening also has massive impact when it's done poorly and again um some people my venture to say that the 2016 presidential election in the u.s was more a failure of listening than anything else that is amazing and it just brought up a point that when the next week we have an interview with michael ventura who has with his book applied empathy and all about listening to the consumer in order to to move your company forward to to find out what it exactly is that they're looking for from your company i mean if they're a fan of your brand they're going to want certain things and and you're going to need to be come a good listener in order to find out what what that is yeah when i when i spoke to the head of asia pacific research for nike and coca-cola vanessa she said most market research is something that keeps the door open it's a hundred thousand dollar dead white that gets printed out and never gets read or if it does get read it never gets actioned and her tip was really simple if you want to become empathetic and really listen to your customers go and watch them she talked about toyota and one of the things toyota did their engineers just went and watched people at the supermarkets and the malls and one of the things they noticed was both women and men struggled with putting groceries into the trunk of the car and that's because there was a lip across the boot of a toyota now you'll notice in more modern versions of toyotas it's actually flat because it makes it easier to load the groceries in but they only learned that by watching and watching is a great form of listening one of our listeners has a question when interrupting too much alex asks i'd love to ask if you have any tips on making the other person more comfortable in conversation i sometimes feel like when i'm talking to someone they already try to think of something ahead of times and i want to know that this is not a competition about the smartest comment but that it's about two people listening to each other do you have any advice on how i could do that yeah alex great question think about treating silence as you would another word give it the respect it deserves the pause will allow both minds to catch up in the conversation for a lot of us we don't treat the pause with reverence if you go to korea or japan or china you'll notice that silence is a really important part of the dialogue because it allows both parties to reflect and progress in the west it's not honored in the west listening to the silence is something we need we think we need to fill so number one be comfortable with the silence and then the other thing is just be comfortable in asking simple questions like are you getting what you need out of this conversation it doesn't matter what you're talking about doesn't matter what point the debate's at doesn't matter where you are in a relationship halfway through a conversation if you feel like it's off track for you or them simply ask them that question are you getting what you need out of this conversation i love that you mentioned that about here in the west how people tend to to feel that they need to fill that space uh we see it in our classrooms all the time uh where if there is that uncomfortable silence we see the the party freaking out a bit and and and then of course when trying to feel it digs a bigger hole for themselves and and we've always said that it's a very masculine thing it's a very uh it's a it's a it's a moving forward thing about learning how to feel comfortable in that silence and allowing that that the interaction to breathe and i know for myself when given the opportunity to relax to think about what i'm going to say i feel better the conversation moves better and it's something that all of us should learn to get more comfortable with and this idea around awkward silence yeah it's labeled as awkward so everyone wants to feel it when actually the best speakers use silence to their advantage those pauses can be very helpful to allow both parties as you said to catch up to the conversation instead of racing to interject that next item even in music when it comes to put laying your solo on the on the song in the studio everyone who wants to make the song work knows it's not about the notes that you play it's about the notes that you don't play i love that the notes that you don't play chris wants to know we'd love to hear your thoughts on how to actively listen when networking often i find it hard to focus on the conversation when i'm trying to think of talking points simultaneously sounds a bit like he's really concerned about pitching himself and looking the part in front of these people and when we get so hung up on the words that we're going to say it can be very difficult to follow along the great thing about it being at a networking event it's always organized around content you might be going to uh social media conference you might be going to the librarian conference you might be going to the mums about to have twins conference the reality is you always can use the context which is the third level of listening to help the dialogue progress really easy it's also about moving your attention away from being attention in on yourself and being attention out not just on the speaker but also on the dialogue so really simple question is hey what brought you to this event today and what are you hoping to achieve from attending that's a great question because it's going to unify both of you into the conversation as opposed to that awkward question you know what do you do on your weekend and how long have you lived in town that doesn't create a connection but the context that you're part of is so learning to ask really simple what and how based questions around the context in which you operate in at a networking event will make you sound like somebody they want to listen to as well as you wanting to listen to what their answer is and we need to realize that questions are actually impactful in this setting most of us try to prepare our perfect pitch and what we're going to say in the elevator and how we're going to prepare so that we sound amazing and we leave out the fact that everyone wants to talk everyone wants to share so if we can use questions especially as an introvert someone who struggles to feel comfortable in those settings using questions can be a really powerful way to get the audience engaged and allow them to feel great around you because they get a chance to talk about their favorite topic which is themselves I think no one ever has a shortage of stories to tell about themselves but what they worry about is are those stories selfish or serving and again if you questions can create the context for that to land in it's the difference between dropping seeds into fertile ground or dropping seeds into cement one's going to flourish and one's not so dropping seeds into a fertile ground it means the dialogue will expand equally that question that I pose what brings you to this event what do you want to achieve if you're in a group of three or four standing in a circle as we do at these events it's going to draw everybody else into the conversation as well so that question is not just designed for who you're speaking to but it's also designed to help the other people listen to the conversation rather than to tune out now when we think of listening we often hear the word active listening I need to be an active listener and in the book you break it down into five levels of listening and I'd love to unpack those for the audience because they really are powerful and as I started to make my way through them I realized that these are some of the concepts that a lot of us struggle with when we are introverted and we're so worried about the way we're perceived and what's being said about us yeah and and be careful with the the label introverts are as poor listeners as extroverts are we they just orientate their listening a little bit differently so I'm all for labels if they're productive and so let's let's use them in a productive way I think introverts have made great contributions to the world extroverts have too it's when is it appropriate is the big question so as a card carrying member of the introvert community there's nothing I like more than being by myself writing a book as opposed to reading one so the the five levels of listening are listening to yourself listening to the content listening for the context listening for the meaning and listening for what's unsaid these are the five levels of listening I've undertaken a piece of research over the last six months I've researched fourteen hundred and sixty two people and what the data tells me consistently is most people only listen to the content 86 percent of people watch and listen to a dialogue so 86 percent of people listen at the level of level two which is listening to the content that's okay but that's also my point most of us listen in black and white rather than listening in color so the first level of listening is listening to yourself and those three tips that are provided earlier are going to help you understand how to create a surface area where you can receive dialogue if you breathe deeply if you drink water and if you switch off your cell phone you'll be in a place where you can actually hear what the other person's saying unfortunately a lot of us turn up to the dialogue like we've got our iphone earbuds in and we're hearing a conversation in our own head we're not even available to the other person they don't know there's a movie going on in our head called cliffhanger or or the greatest disaster or survivor these are all things that might be going through our head from the last conversation or the next conversation so being completely present in the conversation that you're in is about your attention being out rather than being in for most people they hear these terms active listening and most literature in this space is written around level two listening how to watch for body language how to listen how to paraphrase how to summarize how to ask some questions and that's great it's a great starting point for all of us level three listening listening for the context one of the most powerful questions we can always ask is sometimes we turn up to a conversation and we feel like we've joined a movie about halfway through we don't know who the characters are how they developed we don't really know the backstory and in coming into the conversation so far down the track we're confused and we're trying to fill in the gaps which who's this character and what are they doing and are they the good guys or the bad guys a simple question would be hey could we just go back could you just take me back to the beginning of this story and where this all started there's a simple example of a what question and in doing that getting the backstory starts to create a more relevant context for the conversation one of the jobs of a great listener is to help the speaker explain what they're trying to say in a way that can be heard rather than how they think about it so level three listening for the context is also listening for patterns one of the patterns you'll notice some people will always talk about themselves or some people will always talk about their families some people will always talk about weekends or work days some people will talk about holidays or work so just simply noticing some of those patterns will help you some people talk in pictures stories metaphors and analogies and some people speak sequentially logically they talk about things that are very evidence-based so if you can listen at that level you can start to dialogue in a way that's empathetic to them the most powerful listening level I believe is level four listening for what's unsaid that's about exploring the other 300 words in the speaker's mind that they haven't said because they're blocked by the 125-400 rule they'd love to be able to speak a 400 words a minute so they can get everything out and then finally listening for meaning this brought home to me by story two years ago I was working with a company we were working with the leadership team and I asked them to explain if our company that we were working with was an animal what kind of animal would it be and the men in the room described it as an eagle or an osprey and they're all amazing flying birds of prey and then there was one person who didn't speak and before we moved on I turned to Ellen and I said Ellen I noticed you haven't spoken yet and she's a card carrying member of the introvert community and by the way for the public speakers out there whenever you ask people at an event to put their hands up the introverts are not going to put their hands up so that's the easiest way to figure out what your audience mix is like and I came back to Ellen and I said I'm curious what you're thinking right now she said our company is like a snake and you could hear a pin drop because you had everybody describing eagles and osprey and all these amazing flying elegant creatures and she described the company as a snake and I said tell me more and she said oh isn't it obvious and you could look around the room at all the men in the room and it wasn't obvious to them they're all thinking snake are we slimy are we evil are we going to come up behind and sneak up on the customer and she said no we are a snake every season we shed our skin and we evolve into something different every season because we serve our customers our ability to change is our most amazing asset don't you all see that and all of a sudden you could hear the breathing of the room and everybody just went yeah we yeah we do we we adapt we're really good at that and that's why our customers buy us and as a result their product code names are all named after snakes they have little beanie soft toy snakes that go around the office and they have snakes included in their in their sales presentations and that simple statement of listening to what was unsaid but explaining what it meant completely transformed that company they were going at a revenue growth rate of 20 percent and they knew they had more in them and for the next two years which is where we're up to today they grew 50 percent last year and they're on track to grow 80 percent this year all because we listened to somebody who wouldn't normally be heard and explain the meaning behind a snake how many times are you in conversations where you don't listen enough to understand the meaning behind someone says and ask them what does a snake mean to them and I think in all those levels of listening if understanding that they're all foundational you cannot achieve competence on the level above it until you've achieved mastery on the level below most of us are at the first two levels of listening switch off your phone drink water breathe deeply you'll start to achieve mastery in listening to yourself there's so many amazing points in that story and the one that stuck out to me most is when you are drinking water you're turning off your phone you're able to breathe then you can work through this for instance at the point where she didn't speak rather than anyone just going to be presumptuous and assuming something about how she felt or what was going on they decided to to ask her and let her articulate her full story in stance because at any point she could have been cut off first of all they even have her speak up because they could have just interjected put something there then when she said snake there was another opportunity to go with the very first thing of how they saw it and then the opportunity of her being articulate what what that meant to her as for the the shitting of the snake and all that and at how many points in that story if people weren't listening could it have gone awry yeah and i had a really simple example six months ago in a workshop a leader got up to introduce the workshop and talk about where he didn't listen in the past and he was frustrated by a lady in his team called Kim and for 12 months Kim would turn up to every birthday celebration sing happy birthday with Gusto collect money make sure everybody's birthday was recognized and he never could understand why she wouldn't tell him when he's but when her birthday was and he was really frustrated he was annoyed he was disappointed so i just said to him why don't you be elegant and pathetic and go into a one-on-one conversation and just explore it just a little bit just gently just a little bit more and what he did was he asked him you said look you sing happy birthday for everybody every time i ask you when your birthday is you change the subject or you deflect to somebody else help me understand what that's about and she said when i was born was the same day my mother died my mother died giving birth to me so my birthday reminds me of my mother's death it's not a time for me to celebrate i was raised by my grandparents but i will trust you my birthday is February 18 and now that i've told you we should decide together whether we celebrate it my birthday on on and the meaning behind birthdays changed dramatically from that point on for that person because they took the time to listen to what does birthday mean for them the last question we got here is from twitter jack griffin asks when it comes to listening in conversation i sometimes find myself trying to interject while the other person is speaking what are some tips or ways to at least remember to just let the other person speak without trying to get my opinion in as well yeah great question so create an inverted triangle from the eyebrows to the chin and keep your eyes in that zone watch their lips but watch their eyes and keep your watch in that zone and when they have finished speaking rather than jumping in just hold that triangle for three seconds longer quite often you'll find that they want to say more but because you've interrupted them they can't distracting yourself by looking at this inverted triangle between your eyebrows and your chin will keep you on track and give you a simple practical exercise to do while you're listening to them and filling in those extra 275 words i love that in order to become a better listener we have to find smarter ways to distract ourselves so that we can stay focused on the words the context and those things that are unsaid as well as the deeper meaning thank you so much for joining us today asker it was a real pleasure we had a lot of fun chatting and hopefully our audience has become a lot better listeners and we're expecting more questions next month now that our audience is listening to us more intended thanks for listening thank you