Podcast Episode 073: Emergency listening – 3 secrets from medics

 

Oscar Trimboli:
Deep listening, impact beyond words. Hi. I’m Oscar Trimboli, and this is the Deep Listening Podcast Series, designed to move you from an unconscious listener to a deep and productive listener. Did you know you spend 55% of your day listening yet only 2% of us have had any listening training whatsoever? Frustration, misunderstanding, wasted time and opportunity, along with creating poor relationships are just some of the costs of not listening. Each episode of the series is provide you with practical, actionable and impactful tips to move you through the five levels of listening. So I invite you to visit OscarTrimboli.com/Facebook to learn about the Five Levels of Listening and how others are making an impact beyond words.

Oscar Trimboli:
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to listen in life and death situations, especially in the emergency room in a hospital? Have you ever wondered what the doctors and the medical staff are actually listening for? I wonder who trains them? Today we speak to Associate Professor Ginger Locke who loves to immerse herself in the art and the science of how medics think and how they perform. She’s interviewed many medics and has explored the inner workings of their mind. Ginger’s capacity for empathy and curiosity struck me during this conversation, especially her consciousness to help with the intersection of what the doctors ask and what the patient’s hear. Let’s listen to Ginger.

Oscar Trimboli:
What do you think the cost of not listening is?

Ginger Locke:
I think the cost to me as a listener, if I’m not listening, I’m just missing those opportunities to connect with people when they’re reaching for something, when they’re reaching to me to meet some need of there’s, often emotional need, that it’s just a missed opportunity to connect with someone else.

Oscar Trimboli:
In your work, Ginger, listening, typically time critical, and in your work, educating these respondents to critical scenes and critical incidents, I’m curious if you could talk us through how do you listen when time’s critical.

Ginger Locke:
I think it’s not that different than you might think than the rest of communication in the rest of the world. I think a novice, the students that I’m teaching, I think they have the same perception that you do, that we’re in a rush and that we need to have really efficient communication.

Ginger Locke:
Unfortunately, as a result of that, in their training and in their first years, they end up in searching for efficiency, they end up for sure not emotionally connecting with their patients and the families of the patients. But two, by interrupting the patient or by trying to direct the flow of the information too strongly, they end up slowing down the amount of data that would be coming to them. So an example would be like an over talkative patient, when you ask them, “What’s wrong with you today?” They tell you a whole paragraph all at once, the temptation early on is that when you’re when you’re beginning in emergency medicine, the temptation is to interrupt them because you think you know what you want to know. But really, all you need to know is what they’re trying to communicate to you because that’s what is bothering them. That’s what their concern is.

Ginger Locke:
One of the things we talked about is there is research on the number of seconds, it was studied how quickly physicians would interrupt their patients in what is called the opening monologue of a patient. So if you just went and visited with your doctor, I think it was it was down to seconds how quickly these physicians were interrupting that opening monologue, when if you would just allow it to continue, it would naturally stop. Those opening monologues naturally stop within about a minute, I think. I think all of the data in that first minute is really, really important information to gather. But if you stop the patient or the family member that’s trying to communicate to you if you stop them, then you’ve just done two things, you’ve shut down them probably emotionally, they may not feel like psychologically safe with you anymore.

Ginger Locke:
Two, you may have stopped them before they got to the really important piece of information. So I try to express to the students to not, when possible, try not to interrupt. Because you think you need to be efficient, but really, you end up kind of later, you’re going to have to keep probing, and probing, and asking questions, and get this person to open back up to you if by accident, you’ve shut them down.

Oscar Trimboli:
I think there’s some great examples of that in Episode 44, where we interviewed Dr. Danielle Offeri, a general practitioner from New York City. She talked about 18 seconds being the first interruption point on there, and equally an emergency surgeon, Dr. Michael Boyce, who we interviewed in Episode 22, where he became the patient and the people were making those assumptions that you mentioned, Ginger, and almost cost him his life as his blood started to move into parts of his body that didn’t belong. All he was doing was giving symptoms of a heart attack off to the various machines, but he knew exactly what was happening. So I’d encourage everybody, go back and listen to Episode 22 with Dr. Michael Boyce and Episode 44 with Dr. Danielle Offeri.

Dr. Danielle Offeri:
Yeah, there was a patient, well, it her initiative more than mine, but a young woman, I remember she was wearing a baseball cap and she came in just complaining about a fungal rash on her scalp, very simple and easy to treat. Then she talked, she mentioned various aches and pains in different parts of her body and things that didn’t add up to any particular syndrome. It was an elbow, it was a knee, it was the side of her thigh. I examined her, she was perfectly healthy. I said, “It’s just sort of the aches and pains of life. I’ll see and next year,” kind of thing. Then we said goodbye.

Dr. Danielle Offeri:
She walked out. I went back to the computer to start writing. Then she was out in the hallway, she opened the door, was standing outside the room, but she didn’t let go the doorknob yet. She said, “Excuse me, doctor, can I ask you one more question?” I said, “Sure.” She said, “Do you that it matters that all these aches and pains are spots where my boyfriend shot me with a dart gun?”

Dr. Danielle Offeri:
I realised that, of course, there was domestic violence underneath all this, and I had missed it. I really should have. When someone has disparate aches and pains that don’t add up, you really do want to query about intimate partner violence, but I hadn’t. I was really staying with the surface. But she luckily, she held on to the doorknob. I feel was courageous enough to say holding on to push one more time to get me to hear. Luckily, I caught it because we know that these are people who become murder statistics so easily in these situations. I was so grateful that she did this and reminded me that I’ve got to always be careful to make sure nothing else is going on underneath.

Oscar Trimboli:
Deep listening is about impact beyond words, I wonder what’s getting in the way of your listening right now? Are you too busy focused on your next task, your next project, or your next patient to listen to what they haven’t said, as we just heard from Dr. Offeri? If you want to understand some of the barriers that are in your way when it comes to listening, I invite you to visit ListeningQuiz.com. That’s ListeningQuiz.com and take the seven-minute quiz. It will generate a unique report just for you with three tailored actions based on your listening barriers. It’ll help you move from a distracted listener to a deep and impactful listener.

Ginger Locke:
I the better I’ve gotten at listening, strangely, the better. I’ve gotten at listening to people’s nonverbal communication. So patients that are nonverbal, right? Sometimes like a stroke will leave somebody with the inability to communicate verbally. They are fully processing everything you’re saying to them. They’re just unable to, for whatever reason, speak. I think it’s really possible that I would have maybe 10 years ago, seeing that patient and not even looked at them closely enough, looked at their face enough to realise that they were processing what I was saying and that they were listening to me.

Ginger Locke:
Now, I think of a patient that I had recently probably in the last year, who once I acknowledged what was going on, I figured it out. You can hear me. You just can’t speak back. They started crying and I think they knew that someone was with them in that moment. Man, I mean, you can only imagine being trapped in your own mind, not being able to communicate. I can’t think of anything more scary.

Oscar Trimboli:
People say to me, can you listen without talking? The answer is absolutely yes, as you’ve kind of pointed out. With the people you train, Ginger, what are some of the really practical tips you ask them to explore, to slow down and start to look at some of those other signs when it comes to listening? Because there can be a temptation. I’m sure in your situation, the shrewd villain of listening, the person who’s formulating the answer to a problem that hasn’t even been explained because they’ve already guessed what’s going on and jumping ahead. What practical tips do you provide to the students you train?

Ginger Locke:
Our students are often thinking, as you said, while the patient’s talking or the family’s communicating information. They’re often thinking about, “What am I supposed to ask next?” The professor’s, we know when that student is kind of in that zone because they don’t have follow up questions to the patient’s response. It’s just the next question that didn’t follow the natural sequence. Part of that I think is just the natural evolution of getting comfortable in emergency medicine of realising like we actually can slow down just a little bit.

Ginger Locke:
It is emergency medicine, but the reality is very little in our work is truly that time sensitive that you can’t just be fully present. I think you asked for advice or practical tips. I’ve told them just to get curious. When we go and do a rotation at the hospital as we walk in, I beg them with the patients to just be curious about that person and not just their disease. But where do they live? What kind of job do they have? Really get to know them and be able to tell me a full story of the full person.

Ginger Locke:
So we talked about curiosity. I talked to them about inwardly focused versus externally focused. I think novices are very inwardly focused because they’re having to think hard. I mean, that’s the challenge is until you’re an expert, until you become kind of fluid in your process, you are having to think really hard about what you’re doing. So you kind of have two dialogues going on, one with the patient, but then on one also with yourself about, “What am I supposed to be doing or how do I do this?” I asked them just kind of start noticing when things start becoming more externally focused. When we’re in a patient room, there’s this one hospital we go to that on every hour, the clock chimes really loud. We’re there for about six hours. I ask them to just start noticing, “Have you heard the clock in the last couple of hours? Are you externally focused or you’re just all in your own head? Are you able to take in all this external information?”

Ginger Locke:
Another thing I tell them is that it’s okay to try to get comfortable, I call them pregnant pauses. I don’t know where that word came from. It’s long pauses. I think we’re often trying to fill in the quiet, particularly with a patient. I mean, brand new clinicians, they understand it’s a big responsibility to be there with a patient. They understand they’re kind of the leader in the room, and they’re wanting to do it right and set the tone right. I think part of what they think is right is the conversation flowing well. When it is quiet in the room, I think their initial perception is that means they’re not doing something, right? They’re not doing anything in that moment.

Ginger Locke:
So to reassure them that quiet is totally okay, kike you can sit there and you can even tell your patient, “Okay, I’m thinking about what you’ve said,” and to allow that for themselves some thinking time, instead of just all action, right? In emergency medicine, it’s just kind of act, act, act, lots of action-oriented, do this next. Let’s formulate a plan. Here we go. That ideally, we get comfortable with those, what many people perceive as awkward pauses, but really, it’s okay. They’re not as long as they feel in your own head, I don’t think.

Ginger Locke:
A student recently was surprisingly patient with, like a good listener, with a patient who had just had a seizure. So often after a seizure, you’re confused. This patient was really slow to respond. I was really impressed that they were able to just stick it out through those awkward pauses because the patient was able to communicate. It was just, I mean, a long 15, 20 seconds after the question that would finally start giving information, that was really beautiful to watch because it’s kind of rare for somebody just to be able to sit through those pauses.

Oscar Trimboli:
How do you think it felt for the patient?

Ginger Locke:
We really are just there to learn and spend as much time with patients as we want. So we kind of have a … It’s a more human experience, really. So the patients end up telling us things. We find we get info that we pass along to the nurses and doctors that work there because we’re able to sit in there longer. I’m thankful for that. I wish that existed in all of medicine, but it doesn’t. But it’s a treat to get to spend a long time with somebody, and not just do all the listening, but you’re also doing like physical exam type things. We’re just able to honestly, just we have the resources and time to just collect more data.

Ginger Locke:
Another thing about medicine is it’s a riddle where you’re all, particularly with emergency medicine where you’ve got traumatic events, trauma being like some type of fall or a motor vehicle collision, or something like that. It’s often assumed that all of the symptoms were a result of the accident itself or the event, but sometimes if you dig deep enough into the riddle, it turns out that some medical event preceded the fall or the motor vehicle collision. So people will have a heart attack and then wreck their car or they’ll have syncope, they’ll pass out and then they’ll drive off the road or drive into an oncoming traffic. Really taking the time to explore those possibilities through conversation as we start unravelling those riddles.

Oscar Trimboli:
I wonder what’s getting in the way of your listening? Are you listening for the symptoms? Are you listening for the problems or are you listening to the whole person? Are you listening for the backstory? Or if you want to discover some of these barriers, visit ListeningQuiz.com, that’s ListeningQuiz.com. You can take a seven-minute quiz, we’ll generate a tailored report just for you based on your listening barriers. We’ll give you three tailored tips to help you move from a tunnel attracted listener to a deep and impactful listener.

Oscar Trimboli:
Have you ever seen the impact of communication and what the patient hears as opposed to what the medical staff intended? So what meaning they make from what they’re told is very different to the intention that the doctor set.

Ginger Locke:
I have a really fresh example of a patient being told, the staff intended or it was intended that the patient be told that they had a mass in their brain, right, that they found on a CT scan. I guess it’s possible that someone told them there was a mass there. Everyone was kind of thinking, “This could be cancer.” That was never really communicated to the patient in those words. I think they didn’t understand kind of the gravity or the seriousness of it. We knew because we had talked with staff and we knew we were going to go in and visit with this patient and then talking to the patient was just really apparent that they weren’t fully … They didn’t understand their condition the way we understood their condition. They didn’t have the sense of gravity about it or they didn’t seem to anyways.

Ginger Locke:
I think cancer is a big one where either people are, I’m not sure if the clinicians aren’t communicating it bluntly enough, or if it’s possible the patient’s going through this period of denial that goes with grief, early grief.

Oscar Trimboli:
In Episode 28, we heard from Vanessa, a global expert in market research, she loved running, and it was a way for her to support her friend to raise money for cancer research. What you’re about to hear next is when she sits down with her doctor. I want you to listen for the difference between what the doctor says to Vanessa and what Vanessa actually heard.

Vanessa:
You know, I’m really fortunate that with my doctor in particular, so she’s on the board of directors for Run for the Cure in Japan. I’ve raised a lot of money for Run for the Cure, before I got diagnosed. She knew that I was running every day to raise money, and raise awareness, and for my frien.d I remember when I was first told when I just walked into the office, ready to get my test results. I did have my husband with me. I was expecting it to be good news. It’s just this kind of benign lump, the biopsies come back in the full. I’d convinced myself that it was going to be fine. I hadn’t actually prepared myself for anything other than “Oh, it’s a benign lump.”

Vanessa:
Bless her soul, my doctor, not the actual surgeon who ended up operating with me, but the doctor who needed to tell me my results. She just said, “So you’ve got cancer.” That was the first words out of her mouth. I just went blank. I couldn’t, it was like, the air conditioning became really loud, and it was just buzzing. I couldn’t understand and she’d gone into communication mode. So the position, where it is, this is what we need to do. You need to get your MRI, you need to do this so we can determine the size, the spread, the what, then that.

Vanessa:
She was systematically going through what she needed to communicate to me, ticking off the boxes and she saying, “Well, the earliest we can get you into surgery, given the process we have to go through is six weeks from now, that would be this date. Are you free this date?” I was still back at, what do you mean I have cancer? She just moved on into acting stuff. I was still at the, “No, I don’t have cancer.” My husband just grabbed my hand. He was taking all the notes, and he was texting my sons and communicating. I just stopped listening.

Oscar Trimboli:
Talk about listening being situational and relational. So the relationship is different between a nurse and a patient, and a doctor and a patient. Often we make the assumption that one may be better at listening than another, but that might not be true. What do you think great nurses listen to and listen for?

Ginger Locke:
They’re listening closely for those patients that are like the people I was telling you at the beginning of the conversation where I said it’s mismatched. Those are the tough ones when you see a mismatch, right? So anxiety, and pain, and grief, all of those things can be expressed in a myriad of ways. It doesn’t always look like sadness or fear. Sometimes it looks like people will laugh when they’re in pain. Right? When there’s interventions like IVs or resetting, doing something that’s painful to a patient. Some patients it’s not the common way to express pain, but it certainly occurs where people will just do different things.

Ginger Locke:
They’ll get really quiet, they’ll get extra quiet when they’re in pain. So the great nurses, I think, have enough experience that they’ve seen pain expressed in more ways than just the typical, what you would expect, the moaning and groaning, right? Pain can look like silence, pain can look like laughing, pain can look like a lot of other things. That if you’re not watching them closely, kind of miss it. If you haven’t spent time learning these patterns of communication, you’ll miss it in future patients.

Oscar Trimboli:
When I train, people always say to me, I’d like to become more comfortable and more skillful with the use of silence, I’d like to just be a little bit more patient with a pause. To do that, you need to understand what’s getting in your way first. So if you visit ListeningQuiz.com, that’s ListeningQuiz.com, you can take the seven-minute quiz. It will generate a tailored report just for you in three very practical action steps you can take to move from a distracted listener to a deep and impactful listener.

Oscar Trimboli:
How or when have you seen it time where somebody has taken the time to explore what hasn’t been said and the impacts been transformational for them and the patient?

Ginger Locke:
I think the challenge in emergency medicine is that the patients often assume that the clinicians only want to know about the current event. So what I’ve noticed is that they will answer, many patients will answer the question you’re asking, but only that one and not elaborate because they think we’re just talking about today, like what’s happening today. In reality, we’re curious about all of it. We had a patient, and my student was starting an IV. The patient just started mumbling to themselves, actually not mumbling. It was words, they were speaking to themself, and that’s not really common.

Ginger Locke:
Usually, they will talk to us about what’s going on with the IV or they’ll say they’re afraid of needles or it’s more back and forth kind of conversation. This patient was really withdrawn and just kind of talking to herself. I couldn’t make out if it was like psychiatric, kind of mumbling on and on kind of as a psychiatric condition, or if it was distress. I just asked her, I said, “I’m noticing that you’re talking. What are you saying? Are you talking to us? Are you talking to yourself?” It’s just kind of like talking about the elephant in the room. I think so many people are afraid to ask, like when someone’s doing something kind of unusual, just say, “Hey, what are you doing?”

Ginger Locke:
To be curious about that and to notice that they’re doing something. I think we often do notice they’re doing something a little unusual. It’s just hard to talk about it because we wouldn’t normally in most social settings ask about those things. But in the clinical setting, we want to know is this a symptom of something? Are you needing something? What is this you’re doing? Because she was just sitting there with her, if I remember right, her hands were kind of up by her mouth and just kind of rambling. She said, “I’m praying. I had a really hard weekend. I’m in an abusive relationship. I’m afraid.”

Ginger Locke:
She just started opening up. Prior to asking her, I really misunderstood the rambling, I thought it was psychiatric, I thought it was schizophrenia or kind of hallucinating or something like that, talking to people who weren’t there. Just asking about, just being curious about what she was doing, what she was saying, it just opened up a hole, it opened up the whole story of why she was there, what she needed, how we could reassure her, how we could be there for her in that moment while we’re doing an invasive procedure. I was really glad that I am where I am in my process as a clinician to be able to be there with her, because I think 10 years ago, I was would have been too timid to ask her about what it was she was saying.

Ginger Locke:
We started the IV, it went well. I remember her crying. There are not a lot of tissues in the emergency department, I’m sure they’re there. But we always end up using these little four by four bandages or dressings. They’re these little like square, four-inch by four-inch dressings, we always end up handing those to patients who are crying, because there’s no tissues in the room. So we gave her some of those. We made sure that she communicated what she communicated to us, she communicated it to her nurse and physician.

Ginger Locke:
I mean, I held her hand while she got her IV, and we were just present with her. We made some eye contact. Nothing monumental happened besides human connection, it felt really good to not miss her. I would have missed her. I think that’s what I was trying to explain to you at the beginning, Oscar, is like these missed opportunities. I remember her now. I didn’t just lump her in this category of psychiatric patients or patients that aren’t reachable, that are somehow different than me. She’s totally like me. I mean, not in our entire life story, but totally human like me.

Oscar Trimboli:
Yeah, I was also curious about what happened next for you, not just for her.

Ginger Locke:
I’ve been talking with somebody else about this topic is there is a balance. Experienced clinicians do find a balance between just frank, raw empathy, balancing that with what I think the term I’ve used is professional detachment. Neither in their extremes is correct. But we’re always kind of bouncing back and forth between those two things because that level of empathy and compassion that patient really deserves, sometimes if you accumulate enough of those stories and in a series of shifts, it can start to wear on you emotionally. So what happened for me after is just I had to process that. I had to process the conversation a little more than I would have had to process her.

Ginger Locke:
Right? I had to think about, spend a little more time thinking about her than I would have if I had missed her. I think I was glad that the students could see that happening, that transpiring because before I interjected, I try to let them do the whole thing. So they were also doing what I would have done 10 years ago, which is kind of ignoring this rambling on of the patient to herself. They were ignoring it and just kind of disregarding it. I was really glad for them to see that if you just get a little curious, how much information you can get by acknowledging these kind of verbal or nonverbal clues. So I was glad for them to have that experience. I hope they’ll do that someday.

Oscar Trimboli:
I’m sure that patient was glad you did too.

Ginger Locke:
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if she was or not. I don’t know how I would know. I know she freely shared. I think that’s the issue is that if you sometimes we’re afraid by asking hard questions that we’re putting someone in a spot where they feel obligated to answer and maybe they don’t feel like talking about it, and especially in a clinical setting, where we are the leaders, we’re guiding the conversation, we may be asking them things that they really don’t want to talk about.

Oscar Trimboli:
As long as we treat them as adults and give them the choice rather than making that assumption for them, I think too many workplaces today whether it’s medical setting or educational setting or commercial setting or public sector setting, everybody doesn’t ask that question because they make the assumption they can’t handle it.

Ginger Locke:
Right.

Oscar Trimboli:
But quite often, they can. If you were to give three tips, your favourite three tips as it comes to listening, what would they be? Your listening hacks, Ginger.

Ginger Locke:
I like telling people when I’m thinking. So after they’ve asked me a question, and they’re in the same room with me, I’ll feel like I have to think hard. I’ve got to process the question. I like telling them that that’s what I’m doing, that heard them and now I’m thinking about their question.

Oscar Trimboli:
How do most people respond when you do that?

Ginger Locke:
I think they feel reassured. I think they like it. They kind of smile.

Oscar Trimboli:
Yeah. Well, you’re definitely showing them respect enough to signal that the question is worth thinking about. So, I think that’s a great starting place.

Ginger Locke:
Something I’ve had to work really hard is, in the medical setting, in the clinical setting is listening to the spoken words because people particularly in emergency medicine, high emotions, sometimes bring out paradoxical emotions. I was referencing the person who laughs when they’re in pain or people don’t always communicate their emotions the conventional way. So listening closely to the words and remembering that they could be mismatched and to probably when there is a mismatch, get curious with the patient out loud about it, like, “I’m noticing you’re doing this, what does that mean for you?” We call that confrontational language because you’re confronting them about something you see as disconnected.

Oscar Trimboli:
How do most patients react in that situation

Ginger Locke:
They usually start giving you a lot of information. I think it’s because they know that now, they have you as an audience and that you really are trying to decipher what they’re communicating. It just shows that you’re reflecting on what you’re seeing and that you’re, yeah, back to curious. I found they really open up, when I call it out to them, when I say I noticed you’re doing this, what does that mean for you, getting comfortable with the silence and how you can effectively use a pause after someone talks, like validate that you heard them. But just some open-ended questions with like say more about that. Just a simple say more about that or what does that mean for you? Some of these prompts that get people to elaborate because you’ve communicated to them that you want to know more.

Ginger Locke:
We did this exercise at a conference once where we sent two people off to talk about something. I don’t remember the topic, but we required a three-second pause after someone had spoken. I think we were just introducing ourselves and practising listening. Three seconds feels like forever. But really, it’s short. But in communication, when you’re talking with someone, for some reason, I don’t know, maybe you can help. It’s almost like anthropologically, we think it’s supposed to keep ping ponging back and forth, back and forth. In emergency medicine where we think we need to be so efficient with our speech and only say what needed to be said and nothing more and only listen into what needs to be known and nothing more. But in the long run, right, if you’re going to spend an hour with this patient or six hours at a hospital, an hour, in the out of hospital setting, but the in hospital setting, hours or days, that early work upfront of not interrupting them early on I think is just so important.

Oscar Trimboli:
So it’s a reminder for all of you listening, treat silence and the pause like it’s another word, listen to it fully. Let it finish, let it leave their mouth and let it hit your ears. You’ll hear so much more if you will listen fully and treat silence like a word.

Oscar Trimboli:
If you’d like to learn more about what’s getting in the way when it comes to listening and what’s getting in the way when listening completely to the pause, visit ListeningQuiz.com, that’s ListeningQuiz.com. It’s only going to take seven minutes, awnd you’ll receive a unique report just for you based on your listening barriers, and three really practical action steps you can take to move from a distracted listener to a deep listener.

Oscar Trimboli:
So here’s what I took away from listening to Ginger. The first is no matter how busy you think you are, are you busier than somebody who’s in an emergency room? If those people can slow down just a little bit more to listen to all the person and their backstory, are you really that busy that you couldn’t do the same in your workplace? Second thing I took away from Ginger is about the power of curiosity, the curiosity to think beyond what’s presented to you, the symptom, the disease. Too many of us are busy listening to projects and problems in the workplace. We miss the opportunity because we’re not listening to the whole person and all of their backstory.

Oscar Trimboli:
So if you want to double your listening productivity, and you want to double your impact in the workplace, just take a little bit longer to understand what’s the backstory when it comes to what this person is telling you. Because it might not be the very first thing they talk about when it comes to the problem. Because remember, they speak at 125 words a minute, they can think at 900. So the likelihood that the first thing they say is what they mean is 11%. So let’s not have 11% conversations in the workplace. Let’s double it, an let’s go and explore what the next 125 words might be.

Oscar Trimboli:
The final thing I took away from Ginger was acknowledging to the speaker that you’re thinking about what they said. That is gift that Ginger gave to me. It’s something I’m going to practise immediately. It’s something that I’m going to look to incorporate in my training work as well as my speaking work because I think acknowledging to the speaker that you’ve heard them, and you’re processing that is a great listening signal to send out. I wonder what you took away from what Ginger said? Why don’t you share that in the deep listening community of practise? If you visit OscarTrimboli.com/Community, OscarTrimboli.com/Community, you can leave your thoughts about this and other episodes in there.

Oscar Trimboli:
I’d like to welcome some new members to the community who’ve joined recently to David, to Lisa, to John, to Eileen, to Karen, to Kate, to Jennifer, to Claire, Peter and Richard. Thanks for taking the time to come into the Deep Listening Community of Practise. Also I want to thank people who’ve taken the time to put a review for the Deep Listening podcast. So I thank you to Eileen who said, “This is an amazing resource for your journey to become a better listener and improve your communication. This podcast gives you such great insight into the world of deep listening. It’s an amazing tool for me to improve my communication. I’d also highly recommend that you participate in Oscar’s Deep Listening Community of practise, it’s an opportunity to improve your listening skills at work and at home. I couldn’t believe my luck when I turned up to the community of practise. The things that Oscar shared with me will stay with me for the rest of my life, helping me to become a better listener.”

Oscar Trimboli:
Thanks, Eileen. Thanks to Eva who wrote, “Insightful! Excellent, thought-provoking podcast in times of ever shortening attention spans and thumbing,” and she’s put a little asterisk there to explain that the scrolling of your fingers through social media and becoming so engrossed in your phone rather than the person who’s in front of you. “With thumbing becoming the norm, the need for deep listening has never been greater. Oscar’s guests come from a diverse range of cultures, countries and walks of life, but they’re all exceptional listeners. This is the first time I ever not regret having longer and a more frequent commute to work.” I guess he was in the middle of our lockdown situation where he is there.

Oscar Trimboli:
From Sandi, she wrote, “Invaluable insights, a must listen for everybody. Oscar’s deep dive into the importance of listening is long overdue. He gives us such tangible ways to integrate better learnings and improve our relationships and connections in every conversation.” Thanks so much. Here’s some great feedback from Karen, from Kirsten, and from Charlie about their experience with the 90-day challenge. Kirsten says, “I continue to enjoy the 90-day challenge. When I speak with friends, and colleagues, and family, I notice I’m more aware of my distractions and my self talk. I have reminders of my listening villains near me all the time. And they come along with tips that I’ve already implemented. I feel like my listening muscle is strengthening, and I’m feeling calmer in conversations. I look forward to the impact of this. Thank you, Oscar, for your programme. And thanks for the informative podcast.”

Oscar Trimboli:
Thanks to Darrell who says, “A big thank you to Oscar, I work in sales for a residential builder, Oscar’s podcast, book and feedback has given me the opportunity to quiet down the shrewd listener.” That’s great that, Darrell, you’ve embodied that. Just remember how you listen is shrewd, you’re not the shrewd listener You’re looking to master your lost listener as well, great. “Oscar has given me the tools to become a better sales consultant by deeply listening to my prospective clients.” To Susan, who says, “A big thank you to Oscar.”

Oscar Trimboli:
As Eileen mentioned, we run a very interactive series of Community of Practise events that happen twice a month for 45 minutes. Here’s some reflections from some other participants who have taken part in the deep listening community of practise.

Speaker 5:
One thing today to interpret for your own reasons what the person’s saying, but help them interpret what they’re saying, what’s coming across, looking at them from the other side of the mirror.

Speaker 6:
I’ve got a lot out of it. I think the reason why I got a lot out of it was the format. Firstly, it was nice and quick. Secondly, the people who were on the session were very different. I always think when you put diverse people together, you really get more out of things than just yourself. It’s the group piece but really, work together as a team very well because they bring that perspective.

Oscar Trimboli:
Our Deep Listening Community of Practise can be found at OscarTrimboli.com/Community. There, other people are sharing their thoughts about their journey moving from distracted to deep listeners. Ed says, “I heard people say, as I listened to deeply grinning,” sounds like a bit of a shrewd listening trait there, Ed. “There’s more free time now than ever before. I’m so grateful that I listened to the podcast some time ago where Oscar features his guests. And that’s led me to purchasing the book, subscribing to the podcast and now the Deep Listening 90-Day Challenge. I work internally and I share Oscar’s podcasts with all the leaders that I work with, and their team members, whether they’re leaders or individual contributors. More importantly, even with 25 years of practise in clinical psychology before moving into the corporate world, I can see how Oscar’s five levels of listening are so useful compared to others. Had Oscar’s work been available when I was doing individual and relationship therapy, deep listening would have been required listening. Other models continue to ignore listening to yourself, and I can see why this is really critical, at least for me.”

Oscar Trimboli:
Thanks, Ed. You make a great point. I really appreciate everybody who’s participating in the Deep Listening Community of Practise. To all of you in the community, you give me this great gif thhat’s the gift of listening. I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to make recommendations to others with the podcast, and ultimately, thank you for listening.