Podcast Episode 076: Your listening is at best, a wonderful guess

 

Mark Bowden:

When you’re listening, you have to bring in a whole context to really get closer to the meaning of things. Our brain is not a knowledge machine. It’s a best guess machine. It’s the same with our listening capacity. When we’re decoding language, we’re doing our best guess at what the decoding of it might be. It’s just, sometimes we’re so accurate at how well we’ve decoded it, that we believe that we know language. We believe that we know what they said, but we guessed what they said and we guessed right. And so we feel knowledgeable. But in fact what we did was a really accurate prediction.

Oscar Trimboli:

Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words.

Oscar Trimboli:

Good day. I’m Oscar Trimboli. And this is the Apple award-winning podcast, Deep Listening, designed to move you from a distracted listener to a deep and impactful leader. Did you know you spend 55% of your day listening? Yet only 2% of people have ever been taught how. In each episode, we explore the five levels of listening. Communication is 50% speaking, and 50% listening, yet as a leader, your taught only the importance of communication from the perspective of how to speak. It’s critical you start to build some muscles for the next phase in how to listen. The cost of not listening. It’s confusion, it’s conflict, it’s projects running over schedule. It’s lost customers. It’s great employees that leave before they want to. When you implement the strategies, the tips and tactics that you’ll hear, you’ll get four hours a week back in your schedule. I wonder what you could do with an extra four hours a week.

Oscar Trimboli:

Today, I’m listening to Tracey and Mark. The co founders of TRUTHPLANE, one of the most compelling global organisations in the field of business communication. Tracey, advises the world’s top companies and individuals on the biggest questions they have around communication and body language. Mark, has been voted the number one body language professional in the world for two years in a row. Tracey and Mark, completely changed my mind about what listening is and what listening isn’t. It’s a truly transformational conversation, and I can see why TRUTHPLANE, is such a highly sought after global communication firm. Let’s listen to Tracey and Mark.

Oscar Trimboli:

At level two, listening to the content. One of the things we talk about is you can listen to the words, but you can also listen for the nonverbal signals as well. And there’s a lot of pop culture around body language. So I’m hoping today, Mark, and Tracey, you’ll be able to demystify the fact that sometimes when somebodies arms are folded, they might be sitting under really draughty air conditioning duct rather than being defensive in the conversation. What are some of the common myths as it relates to nonverbal signals?

Mark Bowden:

So let’s just do a list of all the reasons people fold arms, and we won’t do it for too long. Because we could go for literally hours on this, but often they’re being protective of themselves. They’re trying to stay awake sometimes, they’re trying to keep their energy up. They’re trying to make a decision. They’re trying to stay warm. They’re actually close to what you said. They’re close to an idea of what you said. They’re close to an image that they’ve got in their mind of a film that they watched last night, which they’d been running through their head while listening to you. There’s just so much going on.

Mark Bowden:

There’s so many reasons why people may fold their arms, that if you jump to any one conclusion and you will jump to a conclusion and you’ll tend to jump to a negative one about it, you’ll tend to default to negatives. Ultimately your judgements about other people’s body language are a better indicator of how your thinking and feeling than how their thinking and feeling. So there’s a good myth, when you fold your arms, it means somebody closed. Yeah, it does when it does. And when it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it means something else.

Tracey Thompson:

I think the thing though, that we should say is that it reads closed body language. And so it does have that impact. So a lot of body language people will say, if you’re in an important meeting and you want to look open, then don’t cross your arms. Because the minute you cross your arms, you will look closed even if you don’t feel closed, even if you are, as you say, sitting under a draughty vent, it’s one of the big myths of body language.

Mark Bowden:

Yeah. Other ones, gosh, if their feet are turned away from you, they want to be somewhere else. That’s if people are crossing their legs away from you, they’re not interested in you. Both of those are completely, completely wrong. And until they’re not.

Tracey Thompson:

There’s the one about looking up into the left. I forget. It’s up into the left, if they’re lying. There’s a thing about if you’re-

Mark Bowden:

Up to left and they’re lying.

Tracey Thompson:

Yeah. That’s a complete myth. Actually. That’s been debunked there’ve been studies done it to… I think it’s the University of Edinburgh, debunking that myth saying, it’s an accessor, is an eye accessing cues, you’re accessing something. You might be thinking about something, you remembering something, or thinking about something that you’re going to… So it might mean that you’re even that you’re anxious or you’re thinking about something else. You’re trying to remember something, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate that you’re lying.

Mark Bowden:

Yeah. Oh, here’s one for listening. If somebody is not looking at you, then they’re not really listening to you properly, that’s a good myth. Because how’s anybody listening to this podcast? Because they’re not able to see me at the moment. Not able to see Tracey, either. I guess they’re not looking at the device that’s broadcasting this as well. Body language is so much in the eye of the perceiver. If somebody is looking at me, I feel more valued. Therefore, I feel potentially more listened to, but are they actually listening to me more? No, people could look at me and have been not listening to me in any way, shape whatsoever. So it’s more about if we look at somebody, they may feel like we’re listening to them. Rather, like if we tilt our head to one side, as we’re listening to somebody and look at them and nod our head, as they’re talking, they will feel very, very, very listened to. Now, does that mean we’re listening? No, not at all.

Oscar Trimboli:

Oh, Mark. If only you could see me right now with my head tilted slightly to one side and nodding.

Mark Bowden:

Right. I just have to kind of imagine that you’re still there listening. I just have to trust essentially. We trust that you’re still there listening and we can’t see that you’re listening, but we just have to trust that it’s happening. So you’re looking for clusters of behaviour in order to get a clearer idea of the thoughts, feelings, intentions that might be going through people’s heads. But a lot of these things can be produced by other things. Red face, flared nostrils and knitted eyebrows. That’s somebody who’s thinking about the run that they just had. Of course, they’re red in the face and their nostrils are flared and their eyebrows are knitted because they’re going, I could have done a faster time maybe.

Mark Bowden:

When you’re listening, you have to bring in a whole context to really get closer to the meaning of things. Our brain is not a knowledge machine. It’s a best guess machine. It’s the same with our listening capacity. When we’re decoding language, we’re doing our best guess at what the decoding of it might be. It’s just, sometimes we’re so accurate at how well we’ve decoded it, that we believe that we know language. We believe that we know what they said, but we guessed what they said and we guessed right. And so we feel knowledgeable. But in fact, what we did was a really accurate prediction.

Oscar Trimboli:

If we bring it to practicality. And if an anthropologist was told, walk through an organisational context, one of the common places that managers and teams participate in is the meeting room where most people are sitting around a table. If we draw down and zoom into that context, we’ve talked about the myths, help us understand if we’re in a meeting room and there’s say five to 10 people in this meeting room and somebody’s speaking or somebody not speaking. Help us decode some of those really prehistoric areas of the human mind, because just like listenings of both [inaudible 00:09:30]. You kind of learn to listen before you’re even out of your mother’s womb yet learning to listen at 20 weeks. And you can distinguish Beethoven from Bon Jovi, from Beaver at 32 weeks. What should we be looking out for? If we’re sitting in a meeting room.

Mark Bowden:

I would be looking out for who is taking up space and who isn’t. It’s very easy sonically for people to take up space. It’s very easy, I start talking and then I keep on talking and before we know it, I’ve taken up five minutes of space and I’ve been very loud with that space. I take it up with the volume and also I take it up with the time that I take up, but what you can’t see at the moment is the physical space that I’m taking up. So there may be some strong differences between how long and how big somebody talks for and how much space they actually take up. Now, the converse of that is you have somebody who takes up a small amount of space. Until therefore you don’t really listen to them because they don’t look big.

Mark Bowden:

They don’t look like their words would have any weight to them because their body doesn’t take up space. And so your most likely or more likely to start not paying so much attention to what they say. We’ll pay less attention to the smaller things in the room and more attention to the bigger things in the room. So you got somebody and he, or she they’re taking up a lot of physical space and they’re taking up a lot of sonic space. And so we pay a lot of attention to them. Now, does that mean that they have good ideas? Well, I don’t know, yes or no or something in between, but I know we pay more attention to them and then-

Tracey Thompson:

Well, because they commanded.

Mark Bowden:

Well, they command attention. Well, because they’re taking up all the room, nobody else can get in.

Tracey Thompson:

It’s the classic events seeing there’s a couple of people that are taking up all the room and a couple of people that are taking up less room and literally caving in on themselves and taking up a small amount of space as possible. Not just physically but vocally because they feel dwarfed by the people taking up more space in the room, taking it more real estate.

Mark Bowden:

We pay attention to the big buildings, not the small buildings. And it’s easy for the small buildings to get dwarfed when actually inside the smaller buildings are some real gems, some great diamonds. There’s some really important information there, which instinctually your not going to go and get hold of. So you have to think critically and think in a meeting who haven’t I heard from? Who have I ignored? Not, who didn’t speak up? But who have I ignored? Because they maybe not speaking up because other people are taking up so much real estate that you just don’t notice the other people. In fact, there’s the people who you think don’t speak up. And then there’s the people who you just don’t notice. You never even think, well they didn’t speak up. You just don’t notice that they’re there. It would be clever to bring more attention to those people, to see what’s inside and what value there probably is there.

Oscar Trimboli:

Tracey and Mark have highlighted the importance for the host, the chair of the meeting, and your role as the participant in the meeting. To explore level four, listening for their unsaid. How deliberate and consistent are you about hearing from all the perspectives in the room, rather than those who speak up first or speak the loudest? So here’s a practical tip for a host, exploring these perspectives, be conscious of the cold call. That’s going directly to somebody who hasn’t spoken during the meeting and say, Hey, Sanita, we haven’t heard from you. Or, Max, what are you thinking right now? Another way to do this is to preempt Sanita and Max and allow them to collect their thoughts. Shortly, Sanita and Max would be asking you to explore the themes we haven’t spoken about before. And I’m curious about your reflections on these themes. By providing Sanita and Max the time and the space to collect their thoughts, helps them to be additive at a thematic level.

Oscar Trimboli:

And it creates a less risk for them and their ideas. So they’ll be more open to share what’s on their mind. It also creates discussion at a group level, rather than merely the individual perspective. Going around the room and asking everybody what they think is like a table tennis ball, getting bounced off a racket. There’s a lot of energy used, but there’s no real progress. Asking people to explore perspectives and themes becomes transformational and powerful. Now the next time you’re part of a group meeting like this. Here’s a few questions you might want to practise and ask. Are there approaches we haven’t discussed? That question is neutral. It’s not biassed. And it’s only seven words long. It’s a great way to think about your questions. And if your questions are between five and seven words, they’re really in the neutral zone. Once you get beyond 10 words, 15 words, 20 words, it’s not really a question anymore.

Oscar Trimboli:

It’s your opinion hidden in a cloak of a question. Here’s a couple of other questions you might want to try. Are there approaches that we haven’t discussed yet? Now, this is the same question, but you pose it at the group level rather than posing at one individual. Are there approaches we haven’t discussed yet? Is a great question, at level four, listening for their unsaid. Another question you might want to pose is, if the media was in this room right now, what would they ask? If the shareholders were in the room right now, what would they ask? If the voters, citizens, constituents were in the room right now, what would they ask? If the regulators were in the room right now, what would they ask? These are all great, expansive questions at the team level to help them understand and listen to what they haven’t said.

Oscar Trimboli:

If we zoom even further into that room. Quite often what we notice is laptops and electronic devices. When you talk about taking up physical space and everyone’s roughly equal with some kind of electronic device and maybe some additional notes that they bring to the meeting, what will be some of the things you would say are taking up that physical space versus the sonic space?

Mark Bowden:

So you notice that people get their… What I would call their tools and resources. So they get their handheld device and they get their notes and they get their laptop and they get their coffee and their croissant, and they stick it around them. So it’s in good enough reach so that they’ve got these important things close to them. And that takes up a lot of the real estate that they should be taking up. It means that they actually constricted, they’re being minimised by their own croissant essentially.

Tracey Thompson:

Or hidden by the laptop-

Mark Bowden:

Yeah. Yeah. They’ve got this laptop and they open it up and they think, wow, this PowerPoint that I’ve produced, this will get them.

Tracey Thompson:

Or clutching to the coffee, like a crutch.

Mark Bowden:

Yeah. Yeah. They’re hanging onto their coffee for dear life. When we train people, we try and push that space out, even more, put the coffee a whole arm’s length away from you. So you have to open up your arm to its fullest extent to get it. So it’s not crowding you, you’re not being crowded by your own stuff, because that will create a perception about the words that you’re using, the language and the meaning, and that perception of the meaning will ultimately become the meaning of what you say, regardless of how people are listening, because they don’t just listen with their ears.

Mark Bowden:

They listen with their eyes as well in order to work out the words. The Broca’s area is using images as well to try and work out what were the lips doing to get best guess at the word. And then it’s using the context to go, well, given the context. What’s my best guess of the word. And then given all of that, what’s my best guess at the meaning of all of those best guesses of the words. And so we can see that crowding yourself, crowds the meaning to some extent.

Tracey Thompson:

In that context. Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli:

The other place the anthropologist would spend some time is the one on one meeting. And typically it may take place in the leader’s office, or it may take place in a separate meeting room, or it may be something that is in a public area or they might go and walk for that meeting. What would be some of the things you would say are really practical things to notice in the dialogue and in the context? And I’d love to explore the distinction between non verbal signals and the energy that the speaker may be projecting as well.

Mark Bowden:

What interests me about what you’re saying there is that these one-on-one environments. So we meet one on one and we tend to think it’s about the person and the person. So it gets very personal. I’m going to meet that person. They’re this type of person. I can expect this type of listening from the more conversation. We’ve kind of worked out beforehand, how the interaction is going to go. And we’ve done that based on the idea of the person that we have there. But what often we fail to bring into context is that person is part of a group. And so we’re not dealing with a personality. We’re dealing with a member of a society and they’re just the other ones aren’t there right now. And so the behaviours and the words and the listening that they do, it’s not that personal listening. It’s the type of listening that their group tend to do.

Mark Bowden:

And their group has a certain radar on for certain type of words, the Germans have a good word for it called, [foreign language 00:21:10] which is kind of the stuff that your brain has its radar on for. So it’s more likely to see things within its radar than not within its radar. It’s kind of tuned. It’s like a metal detector. You can tune a metal detector for iron or gold, but it doesn’t do both at the same time. If you tune it for iron, it seems to suggest that it is coming across lots of iron, but it misses all the gold. People’s listening is I would suggest very much the same. It is tuned, but we tend to make it personal. We go, well, they’re a bad listener rather than well, they and their group are tending to listen out for certain stuff, because it must be valuable for them and their group.

Mark Bowden:

And then to take it a little bit further, we forget about the context of the place. So we go, Oh, well, when I’m with them, they always behave in this way. They always listen badly to this stuff. Rather than going, why don’t we just go meet somewhere else? Because maybe it’s the environment, the environment triggers them and their group to only listen out for certain stuff. So why don’t we go to a coffee shop instead of the meeting room? Why don’t we go for a walk? And once you change the environment, you change the physical behaviours. And often when you change the physical behaviours, you get a different set of behaviours out of people and the different listening, but you yourself as an individual and the member of a group, you have a certain radar on, and you can shift your radar by shifting where you have the one on one meetings that you have.

Tracey Thompson:

I was thinking about what Mark, was saying and just casting my mind back to the beginning of this chat. Talking about when you’re listening to people and… I think your question earlier was, what’s the cost of poor listening? And I think just some of the things that you were just saying really spoke to me, because when I’m listening to somebody on the phone, for example, I’m listening as part of our company for certain words or certain things they’re after. And so I have to be super careful to try to be as open to other things. And I think when they’re listening back to my understanding of what they’ve said, they’re listening, they are listening on behalf of their organisation, for me to hit the right things that they are looking for. Mostly over the phone, I’m speaking instead of one to one, but I guess it’s a reasonable context.

Tracey Thompson:

Because a lot of people do business over the phone. It’s so important to try to be as aware as possible of the person that’s listening to you, what could be important for them? What are they responding to? That’s not about them or that is about them, sometimes. I remember I had a client a long time ago who loved going to see Pink Floyd, in concert. And every time we speak on the phone, we ended up talking about Pink Floyd, because that was his area of interest. And then we talk about the business stuff and then he’d have his engineer cap on and he’d be talking about all the things that were important for his engineering company and for that particular project. So yeah, I think that’s a really interesting distinction you make between the person, like a person one-to-one or the person who is there as a representative of a particular silo or a particular organisation.

Oscar Trimboli:

Would you like to learn a bit more about what gets in your way when it comes to listening? What are the barriers that are stopping you from completely listening to yourself and to the other person? Go and visit listeningquiz.com. That’s listeningquiz.com and take the seven minute assessment and you’ll receive a unique report with three tailored actions to help you move from a distracted listener to a deep and impactful listener.

Oscar Trimboli:

What are the non verbal kind of signals you’re listening for when you’re on the phone?

Mark Bowden:

Well, actually Tracey’s on the phone. I try to avoid the phone like the plague.

Tracey Thompson:

I spent… Do you know what?

Oscar Trimboli:

I sense a very visual Mark.

Mark Bowden:

So Tracey, should really speak to this.

Tracey Thompson:

You know what? So I can tell when someone’s interested in speaking on the phone, because generally they sound like they’re present and they’re energetic and their voice is clear. I can tell if they’re tired on the phone, I can tell if they’re sitting back in their chair and it’s mid afternoon and they’re half asleep. And I try similarly, if I’m on a call, I try to sit up or walk around the room. So that even if it is mid-afternoon and I’m slightly tired that I have some energy behind me. So my brain works better. If I’m moving, my blood is pumping and my brain’s working better. If I’m sitting in my chair on the phone and I’m making lots of calls, I try to get up in between calls and move around. It’s really, really important. And it’s funny.

Tracey Thompson:

We do a lot of work in this area of people doing phone calls and what you do with your body when you’re on a call, and even though somebody can’t see you, they can hear you. So it’s a very different sound if I’m all slumped over like that I’m tired, or if I was sitting up straight and I’m breathing better and I’m using my hands right now, while I speak. I’ve got the whole thing going on. So there’s more energy behind it. Because my brain is getting more air and energy.

Mark Bowden:

Yeah, exactly. Your full of oxygen and your mouth would just keep on moving until it runs out of oxygen. So here’s what I’ll do. I’m going to let my kind of breath exhale out of my lungs and I won’t take in another big breath of air, which means I’ve just started to starve my brain of oxygen.

Tracey Thompson:

Interestingly, while you do that, I stopped breathing. Because I’m listening to you. And my response to that is I stop breathing. So I also get like, Oh.

Mark Bowden:

Yeah. I wasn’t really listening. [inaudible 00:27:47].

Oscar Trimboli:

Now they know any three [Adelaide 00:27:53] University has a survey talking about this exact issue and the most productive conversations have reciprocal and deep breathing bypass participants.

Mark Bowden:

Well, I talk about breath being on an in breath or an out-breath. So being inspired or expired. And to inspire all you do is breathe in and you remain on the in breath. So you kind of remain inflated. That doesn’t mean you stop breathing, you die, but you remain kind of inflated. And when you do that, your back straightens out, your gestures tend to come up and you get this kind of breathing pattern that you can hear here and this kind of energy that you have. Because I’ve got plenty of oxygen to feed my neocortex, which takes 40 Watts of power. So that’s about a third of breath.

Mark Bowden:

Third of every breath that I take is running that neocortex. So if I’m doing language and listening to the language, I’m really going to need that third of each lung oxygen. But if I just go onto the expired breath, which I’ll do for you right now, which is to just let the air out and not taking a big breath, you can see that the difference in the person that you get. And there’s a lot more long fillers there with any listeners that you had have now left your podcast for something way more-

Tracey Thompson:

Energetic.

Mark Bowden:

Energetic, but it’s easy to get energetic again because I just go on to the in breath. It’s just, I do it on purpose and all the behaviours start to trigger out of that.

Tracey Thompson:

And the thing is just being on the phone and nonverbal body language on the phone is I smile when I’m on the phone. I try and keep my face up and get my… As Mark, always talks about Duchenne smile, keep that going. Because it actually the impact that it has on my mental state is it keeps me energetic and cheery and thinking and light, as opposed to, if I get my my head drooping down and my face drooping down and my eyes… It just brings me down. And then of course that’s going to translate to the way that I’m thinking, what I’m saying, how I’m saying it. So saying that sometimes, I have been guilty of just sitting there with my computer, my laptop on my lap, having a call and then getting off the call and going, Oh, that was dire. It was terrible phone call because I was just like, why didn’t I get up? Just get up, because it just makes such a difference. And then you get a much better rapport with the person you’re speaking to. Because they can hear your enthusiasm and you become more positive.

Oscar Trimboli:

One of those final artefacts that an anthropologist would spend a lot of time observing is the conference call. And it’s fine in that visual environment to explore some of the things we said, but in the conference call, people just hit the mute button. They’ve got the laptop going or whatever device they’re connecting through and off they go, what would you be listening for in these conference calls to start to notice who’s big in energy?

Tracey Thompson:

I think that’s such a good question. I just want to add to that. I cannot personally, I don’t like conference calls because I am somebody that I tend to jump in a little bit too much. And you can’t on a conference call, everybody’s interrupting each other. And I think the opposite thing that happens is then everybody is really quiet because they don’t want to interrupt. They’re being overly polite, especially here in Canada, they’re being overly polite. And so everyone’s waiting for their turn to speak and it ends up being very stilted and the call takes four times longer because everyone’s kind of long pauses between speaking.

Mark Bowden:

Here’s what I’m listening out for on a conference call is whoever has put this conference call together. I need them to take control. I need them to tell everybody what the conference call is about. What are the outcomes that we’re looking for, how we’re going to get those outcomes, how long this is going to be. And if you tell me all of that and you also say to me, so put your devices away, shut down your email, just focusing on listening to what everybody has to say and making the right decisions.

Mark Bowden:

If you do that, if you tell me it’s important and you tell me what my part is in it. I’ll probably engage, if you don’t, I’ll do something else. That it’s all there’s to it and I’ll do something else and I’ll know you can’t see me. It’s like any good digital technology, easy in, easy out. They’ll go, Oh, get on the conference call. It’s really easy access. Well, it’s really easy to get out of it then, isn’t it? If it’s easy to get in, it’s dead easy to get out. And so that’s what happens on conference calls. The relationship is never formed fully easy in, easy out.

Oscar Trimboli:

So what did you take away from today? What did Tracey and Mark do to change your mind when it comes to listening? Well, why not join our listening community? oscartrimboli.com/community. That’s oscartrimboli.com forward… Why not join our community at oscartrimboli.com/community. That’s oscartrimboli.com/community and leave your thoughts there. As a member of the Deep Listening Community, you’ll be able to access this episode and all future episodes one week before everybody else. So if you like to listen and you want to get access to these interviews earlier than everybody else, just join oscartrimboli.com/community. And you will be able to listen in first. And what I’ll be taking away from today is the concept that listening is at best I guess, or at least that’s my guess on what I was listening to today. I wonder what Tracey and Mark hoped to communicate to me. I’m guessing that’s what you wanted us to take away from today. Thanks everyone. Thanks for listening.

Mark Bowden:

It’s essential sometimes when I’m coaching people to not listen to… Or not allow them the space to talk about what isn’t going to be helpful. Listen for their language, their exact language, and then try and unpack with them the exact language that they’re using. So you can get into why they’re behaving in the way they’re behaving and how we can alter that. So I think, again, it’s the cost of listening to the right stuff and the cost of listening to the wrong stuff. You get quite good at understanding when people are telling you stories about things that you have no power over. I’ll have somebody come in, they want to get better at presenting in their business. And there might be one person on their mind they’re particularly wanting to do better with. And so they start describing that person and going, and then, he, she did this, and then they did this, and I wish they wouldn’t do that.

Mark Bowden:

And I would say this, and I wish this didn’t happen with them. And it starts to go on and I have to interrupt and say, look, I’m just going to interrupt you right now because they aren’t here. And though, we would love to change how they perform in this environment. The only people we have here is you and me. And so we really need to get on talking about you and what you’re doing with me in this room. You have to get people onto talking about themselves and their own viewpoint on the world, around them. And then listen very carefully to that.

Mark Bowden:

And specifically the metaphors they use, the ideas that they use about the world, the way they describe it, the map that they’re using for it, the thing that it is like for them. Because it’s either actually like that or not like that or something in between. But the metaphors that they’re using for the world around them will be sculpting the way they’re behaving and then their experience of how everything’s happening. I try and get people talking about themselves and then try and listen very carefully to the exact words that they use about their experience.