Oscar Trimboli: 

Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words.

John Corrigan:

When we seek the familiar we are forever comparing what we’re seeing against what we already know, so we’re making calls on memory and when we pull up memory our brain actually sends the signal to the ear to suppress what the ear is hearing.

Oscar Trimboli: 

Welcome to Deep Listening, Impact Beyond Words! I’m thrilled today to be working with and speaking to a world class thought leader in the field of education. Today we’re joined by John and he’s able to provide us with a perspective on listening through many dimensions. The most powerful is the dimension of listening as an educator and how they help children to learn how to listen and focus their attention, not just through their days at school but for the rest of their life.

Welcome, John!

John Corrigan:

Thank you, Oscar. Pleasure to join you today.

Oscar Trimboli: 

Where did you grow up? How many in your family? What did your folks do and what was a typical dinner table conversation like?

John Corrigan:

I grew up in the UK, in Manchester. I’ve got three brothers and sisters. I’m the fifth in line and you might find this a bit curious but my father was a headmaster of a school and he was very academically driven. Television conversations tended to be very academic and there was a great pressure for academic success within the family generally. I was good at mathematics so I read mathematics at Cambridge University. I was all set to do a PhD in theoretical physics when I thought this is not the direction I wanted to go, so I wanted to do something completely different.

I did a short service commission in the Parachute Regiment in the UK, which was three years as a platoon commander. Then I thought, “I’m not really using my brain enough. I want to use the mathematics I’ve got and convert it into something more useful.” So, I then worked as what was called a wireline logging engineer, which is taking measurements in drilled oil and gas wells. I did that work largely in South America and various places in Europe, ending up finally in Italy.

In fact, this is one of the places where my thoughts about listening began to emerge. At that school, I did everything I was told to do to learn French. I really, really wanted to learn French, but as most people will be aware, very few people come out of school, having spent, say, six years studying a language being able to speak that language, so that was my issue. I really wanted to learn French but essentially failed.

In South America, I learned Spanish but it was like banging my head against a brick wall, but there was no real alternative. I was in an environment that was purely Spanish speaking. Then I moved to Italy and then I had a real confidence in my capacity to learn a language and so I just focused intently on listening to the Italians around me as they spoke. After six months, I could speak Italian fluently. After 18 months, I could have a conversation like this and people wouldn’t know that I wasn’t Italian. I thought then, how is it that I’ve been able to learn fluently and effortlessly language when at school I did everything I was supposed to do and I failed to do it?

The only difference was the difference in the way that I was listening. At the time, I didn’t understand what the difference was but I noted that that was that difference.

Oscar Trimboli: 

What did you think the difference was, John? Because I noticed you were saying, “When I fully listened to the Italians,” so I’m curious what was different.

John Corrigan:

I’d come to the view that to be able to speak a language sufficiently fluently to get by, you probably need about 400 words, expressions, ways of speaking. What I was doing, when I was listening to the people around me, I was trying to identify what these 400 words were. As soon as I heard something that I kept hearing repeated I thought, “Yes, that must be one.” So, I’d listen intently to see how it was spoken, how it was used. I was just accumulating these things and once I had enough of them then I was good to go.

Oscar Trimboli: 

What role were facial expressions, body language, and the visual elements of listening playing as you moved from South America to Italy?

John Corrigan:

Actually, you’re probably aware,   Italian uses gestures and hand movements very significantly. I picked all of those up at the same time so I could not only speak Italian but I did all the gestures and facial expressions. I was acquiring all of that through this process of listening intently.

Oscar Trimboli: 

How does that play out for you today in the way you focus on others in your listening where you’re not in an Italian context?

John Corrigan:

The way I listen today is I allow everything that somebody’s saying to simply enter into my mind, into my unconscious, essentially. When I listen, my conscious mind is essentially quiet. There’s nothing going on. I allow everything to flow in, so everything both visually and as I’m listening. I’m paying attention to everything, but I’m allowing the processing of that to take place in my unconscious mind so there’s no conscious processing of it. My mind is quiet and my whole attention is on the other person.

Oscar Trimboli: 

For our listeners who struggle and get distracted, do you have any tips or techniques that help you stay focused? I’m sure as much as you let that stuff flow, you also get distracted. How do you pick yourself up when that happens?

John Corrigan:

Yeah.   I get less and less distracted these days but certainly in the past that was the case. One of the ways to trigger this type of listening is to look at somebody’s eyes. Whenever I found any distraction I would immediately focus my attention back onto the other person, and particularly onto their eyes or their face in general. What was happening in my mind was, “Okay, distraction, place all of my attention back onto the other person.”

Oscar Trimboli: 

The eyes definitely help and we’ve spoken to many on podcast interviews in that past that their role of being in direct visual contact with the person you’re speaking to is one of the most profound ways to improve the depth of your listening.

John Corrigan:

Actually,   looking at somebody’s mouth triggers one mode of listening and looking at their eyes triggers a different mode of listening. Quite often if we feel intimidated by somebody we find it very difficult to look into their eyes and that’s because we have these different modes of listening and they are triggered by different, I suppose, different bodily cues. Looking at the eyes is superior to looking at somebody’s mouth, for example.

Oscar Trimboli: 

We paused mid-story. We got you to Italy via Cambridge via the parachute regiment via the oil drilling. Let’s continue on.

John Corrigan:

Yeah. The oil industry went through one of its cyclical downturns and so I decided to take a year off and go to business school. I went to INSEAD, which is just outside Paris to do an MBA, with the intent of going back to the oil industry after. But as is often the case, when you go to business school you see the world as a bigger and different place. I found that I was good at understanding how organisations worked. After INSEAD I joined a strategy consulting firm and moved back to the UK, although oddly most of my work was actually based in Belgium.

Then after a few years of strategy consultancy I wanted to move back into business, so to speak. I moved into corporate planning in a large, European-based conglomerate and I became interested first in corporate planning, then business unit planning, then change management. Particularly I was interested in organisations where the relationship between the employee and the client or the customer was a large part of the value. So, service business in general. Professional services, that’s clearly the case, but there’s also a lot of other business-like freight forwarding, for example. The relationship between the employee and the customer is a large part of the value. Get that right, you make a lot of money. Get it wrong and you don’t, essentially.

I sort of decided this was the area I wanted to work in and then decided the world to find a nice place to live and to make a long story short, ended up moving to Sydney and again, working with a very large business in a change management programme based in Sydney. Then I got headhunted to run an environmental consulting organisation, to turn them around, which I did but then they got taken over and essentially, I left.

Then I decided I wanted to do something meaningful, as opposed to working for corporations. Initially I was a CEO of an environmental technology start-up company. I thought, environment, technology, that’s meaningful. But then gradually I realised you got a bigger bang for your buck in social change and so I looked around and in May 2001 I literally stumbled across education. Got invited to a day and at the end of that day I thought, “I’ve got no idea how you’d solve any of these problems but this is where I want to be.”

John Corrigan:

I sort of thought about it for a couple of weeks and then went and visited the principal of the school where I had spent this day and said, “Look, I don’t know how to solve any of the problems but I know I would approach these things differently to the way other people might, so can I work in my spare time with your school?” She said yes.

One of the very first things I did was to interview a number of teachers, and one of those teachers was subsequently what I called an outstanding teacher. That is, this was a teacher who had no discipline problems. She delivered above average academic outcomes, and importantly she had a lifelong impact on the children that she engaged with. I spoke with her for about two hours, in fact. One of the things she said to me that’s actually shaped everything I’ve done since then, and she said, “In my 30 years of teaching I’ve never had a discipline problem.” “Yet,” she said, “In this school there are two or three teachers whose sole objective on entering the classroom is to survive to the end of the lesson.”

I thought then, “What is she doing that makes her so successful and why aren’t the others doing it?” Subsequently, I realised that teachers like her represent about 5%, about one in 20 of all teachers, and that successful adults on average can remember two such teachers from their own schooling and they have had a lifelong impact on them. I set out to understand what it is that she was doing.

One of the very first things I realised was that teachers like that listen differently.

Oscar Trimboli: 

When you said they listen differently what did you notice?

John Corrigan:

Now I understand this a lot better.     They listen fully. That is, when they listen their own minds are quiet. Everything that the child is saying or doing enters into the teacher’s mind, so they listen fully to the child. Then they don’t judge or compare the child. Then whatever the child says or does they respond with kindness and compassion. In fact, the child so values that experience that they will go out of their way not to disappoint or let down the teacher, hence no discipline problems, and if the teacher proposes work to the child then the child will do their best, hence above average academic outcomes. But that this experience the child is having actually shapes the child’s … essentially shapes the child’s brain. It shapes how that child will grow into an adult and hence has a lifelong impact on the child.

Oscar Trimboli: 

Those principles are not unique to children, though. They could easily be applied to adults and I know a lot of adults who struggle when people listen to them but they don’t actually hear them. Ironically for you there was a practical implication of this for you on the home front.

John Corrigan:

Yes, yeah. Just as I was beginning this work in schools my son was six years old and he’s four years younger than his two sisters. He was having behavioural issues at school and he was at the bottom of the lowest reading group. There were issues. Then there was an event that I won’t go particularly into but it was clear that I needed to do something.   The only thing that I knew was that outstanding teachers listened and I didn’t at time understand what that meant but I thought, “Okay, I’ll do my best.”

Whenever he wanted to speak to me I’d get down to his level and pay as full attention as I could.

Oscar Trimboli: 

Just to be clear,   when you say get down to your son’s level just paint a picture for people what that means.

John Corrigan:

That meant kneeling down, squatting down, sitting down, or lifting him up onto a table or a chair so we were at the same level and I could pay full attention to him, to his face. It wasn’t very long actually. A few weeks there was a noticeable difference. I thought, whatever I’m doing this is working. I kept doing it and to cut a long story short, by the end of primary school, by the time he was 12, he won the school prize for English, he was the best English scholar in the school, and he added this amazing capacity to be able to reflect on his own behaviour and modify his behaviour in the light of that reflection. Now he’s, well he’s 23 next month and he still has that same capacity. An amazing young adult.

I would put all of that down to my beginning to listen to him fully when he was six years old.

Oscar Trimboli: 

We’ve seen the impact that teachers can have. We’ve seen the impact parents can have. Is there a listening framework that you think about when you think about attention as well as listening?

John Corrigan:

Yeah, there is. Ever since this first interview with the outstanding teacher, I’ve been striving to understand what are the underlying mechanisms here and    what I’ve come to realise is that we have two ways of attending to the world, two ways of paying attention. That paying attention includes all the senses, so listening and vision are the primary ones. Within those modes we pay attention into quite different ways. One of those is we seek the familiar. If you think about a bird hopping around on the ground, because birds have these two modes just as we do, then seeking the familiar is looking for the seed amongst the grains of dirt on the ground.

When we week the familiar we are forever comparing what we’re seeing against what we already know. We’re making calls on memory, and when we pull up memory our brain actually sends a signal to the ear to suppress what the ear is hearing. One of the downsides of listening in that way is that we don’t connect well to the other person. The other person thinks, “This person isn’t listening to me which means they don’t really care about me and therefore I don’t really care about them.” So, we don’t connect when we use that mode of listening. So, we physically stop listening when we pull up memory, so it’s a quite, quite different mode. When we seek the familiar we’re looking for something we’ve seen before. To know that we’ve seen it before we have to check it against memory, and when we check memory we stop listening. We stop seeing as well, for that matter. When we find something familiar we stop, so we stop listening, we stop looking. That’s the familiar mode and you can see how that plays out in humans. We’re listening to somebody. They say something that’s familiar to us. We pull up memory and we stop listening to the other person. That can be just a fraction of a second or it can be several seconds and we realise that we’ve stopped listening to them. We perhaps have to ask them to repeat because we haven’t been listening to them. But that’s using that mode of seeking the familiar. We do calls to memory and we stop listening to the other person.

The second mode of listening is where we seek difference. To be able to seek difference we have to let everything in. When we find difference, so again, if we think about the bird on the ground, their mode of seeking difference is they’re looking for the predator, they’re looking for the shadow in the distance that might be a hawk or other predator coming towards them. Of course, they have to do that all of the time, so when we’re using that mode there’s no cut off of listening or vision. We notice something that is new but we just note it as it comes in. It enters into our brain. We note it but we continue listening or seeing.

When as humans we listen in this way, which is what I call paying full attention to another person, the other person goes, “Wow, this person’s really listening to me. They must care about me and therefore I should care about them. I should be thoughtful in my response.” When we listen in that way the quality of the conversation, the conversation rises, and as you can see, the seeking for difference is probably the mode that we should use most of the time, and the seeking the familiar is when we’re doing detailed work or when we’re working on something that we’ve done before.

But in practise we’ve been trained at school to use the mode of seeking the familiar vastly more often than we need to. Most people use that as their default mode and it seems to them quite natural to use that mode, but in fact it isn’t. It’s what’s been trained into us at school. Most of us spend most of our lives trying to train ourselves out of it, because it’s not very helpful if you want to be creative, if you want to make connections, if you want to be able to do things which are different.

Oscar Trimboli: 

For those of us who have children at school, would we notice when teachers are helping students to understand how to listen? Is there a curriculum that teachers teach on how to listen? The data I’ve collected is, we spend 55% of our day listening yet only 2% of us are formally trained on listening. Did I miss the class at school about listening? Did I miss the piece of the curriculum about listening or is it really about the teacher’s role modelling, listening? Is that the way I should have learned how to listen at school?

John Corrigan:

You learned how to listen at school the way our schooling system is designed for you to learn how to listen. That is, for you to favour seeking the familiar mode of listening. That’s achieved in two ways. One is, that’s what teachers model. You tend to pick it up from that. But secondly, the curriculum is structured in that way and that mode of listening is associated with the left hemisphere, so the curriculum, subjects themselves, classroom management, are all packaged around using left hemisphere and using the familiar form of listening. In fact, you were trained at school to listen and you were trained in a way that was seeking the familiar.

For example, a four-year-old can learn a foreign language effortlessly and fluently. By the time they’re 18, they cannot. The reason for that is that the way to learn a language effectively is to use the seeking difference mode. In fact, that’s what I did in Italy. I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing but that’s what I did, which is what made it so effective. And why I didn’t learn French at school was because I was using the seek the familiar mode and you cannot learn a foreign language if when listening to a native speaker your ear is intermittently switching itself off. You’re simply not hearing a portion of what’s coming in. At school, you were trained to do that.

Oscar Trimboli: 

I’d love you to give us a little bit of Prussian history and help people understand how modern school systems were originally designed, because I don’t think many parents or people who operate around the education system understand that it was designed to build conformity and seeking familiar.

John Corrigan:

Let me first of all set up a simple model of education. As you’ll be aware and listeners will be aware, our brains take a long time to develop. Our brain isn’t fully developed until our mid-twenties. The brain develops in the womb through childhood into adulthood in the order in which evolution designed it. So, the more primitive parts of the brain, so the reptilian parts, are developed first and then the limbic system or mammalian brain and then the cortices or the human brain are developed last.

Once we realise the time it takes for the brain to develop, you realise that the childhood mind, up until the age of about 10, is as it is because it’s based on the more primitive parts of the brain. Children are self-centered and they’re impulsive and they’re emotional and they respond to reward and punishment and they can’t imagine a future different from today and they’re cautious in engaging with the world. They touch something hot, they’re going to touch anything that looks like that again. That’s the childhood mind and it is that way because it’s based on that part of the brain.

From the age of about 10 onwards the adult mind begins to emerge, which is based on the whole brain and so it is self-aware. It can socialise, it can manage its impulses. It can imagine a future different from today. It can plan to get there. It can see how it’s doing. When fully expressed, the adult mind is confident, collaborative, creative.

If we put these two ideas together then at its most basic, education is the dynamic of leading the child out of the childhood mind and into the adult mind. In fact our word, “Education,” comes from the Latin, “Ex-ducere,” meaning, “To lead out of.” You probably realise by now that with a simple model like that there are three possible outcomes. One is you never let the child out of the childhood mind. When the Prussians designed state compulsory schooling in the early part of the 19th Century, for 94% of their population, it created a form of schooling that essentially did that. That used harsh discipline and rote learning to create habitual and obedient adults, that is who were essentially trapped within the childhood mind. Had no adult cognitive development taking place really at all.

The second outcome of this model is that you allow the childhood mind to persist into adulthood and you develop the adult mind in parallel to that. You produce adults who’ve got two mind states: one where they’re at their best and one where they only have access to what the childhood mind had access to, so they become self-centered, impulsive, emotional, often pessimistic within that. We call that the red zone and the adult mind the blue zone. That’s the education system that we’ve all been through and when the Prussians designed their system they designed that for five-and-a-half percent of the population. To develop the administrators, the doctors, the engineers. Those who would support the state but who wouldn’t question the status quo. That is when they got to the edge of what was acceptable their red zones would trigger, they would become anxious, and they wouldn’t step over that boundary. I think most people would recognise that we have those two mind states now.

But then the third outcome of this little model is that the childhood mind fades away and a young adult emerges who is operating always in the adult mind. They are courageous, they’re team players, they’re able to innovate. Everything that’s constructive in our education system today is moving us towards that third education model, which in the original Prussian model was designed for half a percent of the population, for the elite. People who could think and act for themselves, who could lead.

Oscar Trimboli: 

With that beautiful sketch, it’s an interesting way for us to reflect on those we work with in our work environments and some who may not have developed out of the child mind. Some balancing between the two and those that are fully developed. In my consulting work it’s often helping leaders understand where others… They’re struggling with or at their journey in adult development because you listen differently and ask different questions depending on your judgement call on where they’re at on that model. Again, it’s another dimension of listening that helps to bring much more meaning to the conversation for others.

John Corrigan:

Yeah. If you take the model of the red zone-blue zone, coaching, so cognitive coaching or executive coaching, its purpose is to hold somebody in the blue zone, in the adult mind, so they can face up to challenges or difficulties without dropping into their red zone and therefore being able to generate the energy and commitment to taking action to move forward. As you’ll be aware, Oscar, that one of the keys of a good coach is to be able to listen in a way that builds a connection with the other person, that holds them in their best self, in their adult mind, in their blue zone.

Oscar Trimboli: 

Very true, very true. John, we’ve covered so much today and I feel like we could have spoken for another hour. Maybe there’s an opportunity in the future that we will, but for now I’d just like to acknowledge the extraordinary wisdom you’ve shared with the audience and taken us on an amazing journey of listening through many, many dimensions, and more importantly, bringing depth to our thinking about how we make our listening more impactful. Thank you, John.

John Corrigan:

Thank you, Oscar.

Oscar Trimboli: 

I love the way so many of John’s stories are integrated and just part of his natural journey. From his time in South America and learning Spanish to his quick jump over to Italy and learning how to speak Italian so much faster, because the language has so much gesture in it and when he paid attention to the Italian language he wasn’t looking for similarity. He was looking for difference. I love the way he brought his own practise to work with his son to listen more deeply, but it’s in his work with teachers every day that is going to make a powerful legacy not just for the work that John does today but for many generations into the future. John is living proof that listening deeply can make an impact beyond words. But in this conversation John showed us it can have an impact into many centuries into the future if we help educators understand the power of listening. Thanks for listening.

Oscar Trimboli: 

Deep Listening, Impact Beyond Words.