Podcast Episode 079: The hidden power of listening to and for emotions

 

Mona Thompson:    

One exercise that I love doing with organisations that we work with is listening three ways. Listening for facts, listening for emotions, and listening for inferences.

Oscar Trimboli:      

Deep Listening, impact beyond words. Hi, 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, you’re 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.

Mona Thompson is an improv performer, a teacher and a creative facilitator. She’s performed and taught all over the world, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and the United States. She’s also taught at Stanford, Harvard and MIT. Mona is a co-founder of Collective Capital, a change in innovation consultancy that helps organisations become more curious, more generous and more resilient using the tools from improv and design thinking. Mona is a master of listening beyond the words, beyond the facts and listening to and for emotions, as well as listening for inference. Let’s listen to Mona.

Mona Thompson:   

Sometimes it’s listening to actual words and sometimes it’s sounds, and a lot of it is this general attention to everything that’s happening in your environment having to do with body language and stuff as well. I also think improv is just a way to practise it. You talked about nobody practises listening, and I think it’s this beautiful practise for life and all the different things you think about. And then kind of also you mentioned this mindset of being really curious and going into situations hoping to changed and to learn new information, I think is something we work a lot with business leaders on.

Oscar Trimboli:

What frustrates you when other people don’t listen to you?

Mona Thompson:

I think the biggest thing that frustrates me is the loss of good ideas that come from my improv background, especially I think so much about how when people are really listening and kind of letting themselves be changed by the ideas of other people and getting excited about other people’s ideas, then you create so much. And from the work I do with business leaders, you get so many good ideas that come from that. I think the thing that most frustrates me is this feeling of just this huge missed opportunity of this kind of time sync of just two people sitting together and not using this amazing tool they have, which is just another person with their other brain and other ideas effectively.

Oscar Trimboli: 

What do you struggle with when it comes to your listening?

Mona Thompson:  

I struggle so much, I think just to think about one thing at a time. And I think especially it’s something that I can do really well on stage if I’m performing and if I’m really in this flow or in the moment, it’s very easy to erase the rest of the world and just focus on what’s happening there. I think in my daily life, it’s so easy for me to have a moment where I realise I’m running through my to do list in my head, or I’m thinking about seven other things that are happening instead of just paying attention to what’s happening in front of me.

Oscar Trimboli: 

What do you think the cost of not listening is?

Mona Thompson:

The cost of not listening is this missed opportunity of ideas, especially. And a lot of the work that I do with companies coming in and doing workshops, a lot of what we’re working on is just how you’re really present and paying attention to other people. Our philosophy is the sense that a group of people working effectively together is the most valuable tool you have, but frequently, we forget about the working effectively together part. I think so much of that is people who are just genuinely listening to each other and hearing ideas and allowing themselves to think differently because of those ideas, there’s a huge financial cost to companies, right, if they’re not using those resources they have of kind of people in a room together.

I think there’s this kind of innovation and this idea costs that comes with people either coming up with bad ideas because they haven’t listened to what other people think about them or just not understanding these opportunities and connections that would come from genuinely being curious about the perspectives other people are bringing.

I heard from one of our clients that we were working with that they had a team that was working on a certain product. There was something about one of the materials that they used on the product, was a very expensive material just because that’s what they needed to use and it was kind of the industry standard. We were working with this client specifically on a training that talked about diversity and inclusion, and the value of specifically within diversity, how do you encourage a diverse group of voices in a room to voice different opinions based on the diversity that you have in a room.

One person had come from a background where they hadn’t had a lot of money growing up and just had this very reasonable thought of being like, Oh my gosh, this material is so expensive. And it turned out there was a way that they could do it cheaper and they were able to change it and adjust it. But I love that example because I think it’s so much about each individual person bringing those genuine thoughts and questions to a room, but then also the room being this space where people can really hear that and take that and kind of wonder, Oh yeah, that is a good idea. What could we do to change that?

Oscar Trimboli:  

I grew up much like that person you’re talking about with very little money in our day and I’m dating myself here going back 40 years. For money, we used to collect aluminium cans where you would go and have them weighed at the local gas station and they’d give you a couple of cents each. We always used to eat hot chips, hot potato fries at the local shop, and that was our treat, but it took us nearly three months to save up enough money for those aluminium cans to get this. You just took me straight back to that 12-year-old version of me. Thanks.

Mona Thompson:  

There are two summer camps that I worked at. During college, I worked at a camp called Camp Kesem, which now is a national camp around the United States, and it was for kids whose parents either had or had had cancer at some point. And then a couple of years after that, I worked at a camp that had a large overlap with the counsellors who had done Camp Kesem, but it wasn’t staffed by college students anymore, and that was called the Milton Marks Family Camp, and that was a family camp, a weekend long camp for families where one of the parent had a brain tumour. In both contexts, I worked with teenagers there. There were all sorts of other jobs.

There were so many things now that you’ve mentioned it that involved listening there, and some of it was just the setting. Each of them was at a summer camp setting, and so people didn’t have cell phones that worked. I think there was this really cool sense of both of these were camps where my campers had an experience that was not an experience I’d had. I don’t have a parent with cancer or a brain tumour, but I was there as a counsellor to facilitate this experience where they were in a group of kids who had this common thread that they most of the time never been in a group of that many kids who shared something like that in common with them, even though obviously everybody’s experience is different. And so we would have various times in both of those camps that we talked about it.

At Camp Kesem, what we did was we had one night that was normally about halfway through the week that we call roots. And it was when we all got together as a big camp and some students or some of the campers shared their experiences with their parent’s cancer. The premise was you just got a week to really be a kid. But I think also those conversations were really valuable for having a space where you knew that people would listen to you, kind of share all the messiness or the complexity of whatever your experience was, and ideally, listen completely without judgement , that I think is something that’s so huge. We were really rigid at that camp about making sure that kids were being kind to each other at all times because this, having people who will listen to you without judgement .

Oscar Trimboli:

Are you present enough in your own conversations to notice when you’re in judgement , or are you completely lost in the conversation and can’t even notice that you’re in judgement ? Do you listen with judgement , yet so cleverly, you’re starting to think about the solutions without giving away the fact you’re trying to come up with the answers? Or do you just interrupt when you want to judge something? Either way, listening is about judgement , and it’s one of the barriers that gets in your way of you’re listening. Would you like to shine a light on one of your listening barriers, visit listeningquiz.com, that’s listeningquiz.com and take the seven-minute quiz to discover your primary listening villain and the three steps, the practical steps that you can take to make progress. Visit listeningquiz.com.

Speaker 3:     

Wow, this quiz is like magic. It takes just a few minutes, but the results make it feel like Oscar’s been listening to me for a lifetime. It’s hard to believe how accurately these quiz highlights the seemingly small things that I do that get in the way of me being a better listener, and already I’m starting to notice when my listening villains begin to creep into my work conversations, and I can now recognise when I’m not listening as well or as deep as I could be. Thanks, Oscar.

Oscar Trimboli: 

Mona, could you just take a moment to tell people what is improv and what’s involved?

Mona Thompson:   

It’s theatre performed without a script. It could be short scenes. It could be one really big, long story or play, but it’s anything that’s done without written lines or a script. I try to be really clear at improv that it doesn’t always have to be funny. It frequently is, and a lot of improv is specifically done for comedy reasons, but there’s also brilliant and fun improv that’s dramatic or kind of intense in different ways or just sweet and lovely. And then within the actual improv, more recently, there’s been this branch out of it called applied improv or applied improvisation, which is where people who performed improv started realising that the way you practise to perform on stage is really valuable practise for other aspects of your life, such as listening and trusting your ideas. So now it started to become more of an official field, the sense of applied improv, which is improv exercises that are done not necessarily with a goal of putting anybody on stage, but with a sense of exercises that come from that world of theatre improv to think about different leadership skills.

Oscar Trimboli:     

How do you think improv translates into the work place?

Mona Thompson:   

Yeah. In Collective Capital, which is where I do most of my work with workplace settings, the three words we have on our website now, which are ones I’m very fond of are curiosity, generosity and resilience. We think a lot about those behaviours of how are you really curious about the world around you and about the other people around you, which is a skill that improvisers cultivate all the time. How are you generous both with other people and kind of accepting and listening to their ideas and building off of them, and treating people kindly and making them look good, as well as how are you generous with yourself and knowing that you’ll make mistakes, and celebrating that and things like that. And then resilience too comes in with a sense of learning to kind of love the lessons that come from things that feel like setbacks or mistakes, which is some of the most fun stuff that happens on stage in improv.

Why does this work? Why if you do this silly activity where you’re listening to people or where you’re making mistakes and cheering for each other and stuff like that, how does that actually translate into how you might start to change your behaviour at work? A lot of this stuff I looked at was the ability of improv to create a really playful atmosphere that feels separate from your normal life, so you can test out new behaviours in ways that you wouldn’t test them out in your normal work life just because of kind of the fun and the play that comes with it, and where you can see constant examples of yourself succeeding at things, and understanding the more you practise, the better you get.

And then we pair that with structured debrief conversations, where you get to transfer that knowledge that you learned in this one context that was valuable, that it was separate from work so that you could play and experiment, but then you get to take that bridge back into work and say, okay, how does this relate to how you act at work? How does this relate to how you want to show up in your next meeting?

Oscar Trimboli:     

Thinking about a workshop where that playfulness had a transformational impact either on the individual or the group that they were working with, does a story come to mind there?

Mona Thompson:       

The workshop was one that we had quite a lot called kind of mindsets for innovation. The very first thing we talk about is listening [inaudible 00:15:46], and how do you really be present and listen to other people? And so we did this activity that I love doing that we call listening three ways, where one person tells a story for one minute, and I’ll give them a prompt, something like, what’s something that made you smile, or how did you kind of get into doing this job that you’re doing right now? They talk for a full minute and then their three other group mates all listen.

And I ask them to be the type of listener who is silent for this activity. So to just be silent and just take it in, and not ask any follow-up questions, but then each of those three listeners is given a specific lens to listen in. One person’s listening with an ear towards facts, one person is listening for emotions, and then the third person is listening to try to make some inferences about what might be important to that person based on their story and their guesses, but kind of inferences from that minute-long story. And so after the speaker talks, then all three of the listeners repeat back just a little bit of what they heard from their lens.

I love debriefing this. This is an example of one of these activities that’s kind of so interesting to debrief because people have so many things to talk about once they’ve done it. So I’ll normally ask a question just what felt easier or harder for you, or more or less natural, or kind of how does this relate to your work? One man in the debrief said, he said, Oh, I thought this was interesting, but he was like, I realised that I never listen for emotions at work, which was just a very valuable thing to learn, and there’s nothing inherently bad about that. But it’s like, boy, what an interesting discovery that there’s this whole realm of things you could be listening for that you’ve never imagined listening for in a workplace context and thinking about how you might incorporate that into the way you’re listening to people.

But I think what I love about that is even though that exercise wasn’t one of the highest energy, most playful things, I think there’s still something where your ego gets taken out of it a little, rather than kind of having a performance review and having somebody say, you never pay attention to other people’s feelings. Feels very harsh. And somebody might want to be defensive about that. But this exercise that’s just saying, Hey, I perform stories on stage that are made up. Here’s one thing we think about a lot is how do you really pay attention to other people. Here are some different ways. Let’s try it. And then ask people what they learn and have them digest it on their own from that. I think it was such a powerful realisation that this guy had, and I think about it all the time as a thing that I think a lot of people go through life without listening for emotions. And the fact that he was able to come to that on his own, I thought was really cool and kind of a valuable thing about that exercise.

Oscar Trimboli:  

Yeah. I find when people discover their own awareness, they own their change so much quicker. Listening for emotions is one of the strengths and barriers when it comes to listening. Yet in this moment with Mona, we’ve learned that listening for emotions can create amazing insights for leaders, and for some leaders, they can create new insights. Listen for nouns and verbs and adjectives when it comes to listening for emotions. When listening for emotions, it’s not as simple as somebody’s going to say that they feel this way. When listening for emotions, it’s not as easy as what they don’t say. Well, when listening for emotion, it’s not about how they describe the past event or the relationships that brought them to this point of emotion. And remember, there are lots of emotions and they’re not all bad and they’re not all good. Yet emotions, like listening, isn’t something we have been taught about. Listening for emotion is a subset of listening, but the field of emotion is vast range of scholars.

Professor Marc Brackett from Yale University has written one of the best books in this field called Permission to Feel: Unlock the Power of your Emotions to Help Yourself and your Children Thrive. Dr. Susan David has also written a great book that I recommend called Emotional Agility. In Professor Brackett’s book, he talks about this skill called the skill of the RULER, R-U-L-E-R, and it stands for recognising, understanding, labelling, expressing and regulating emotion. That’s RULER, R-U-L-E-R, recognise, understand, label. Could you name all 100 emotions, by the way, because that’s how many they are? Expressing your emotion and regulating them as well.

Some of us, we’re at the start of this journey of listening to and for emotions, and some of us are a little further down the path. Either way, listening to and for emotion is a potent way to listen beyond the words.

Mona, one of the things you do as an improv leader is create a structured debrief, and it’s a beautiful role modelling of listening. It helps you listen. It helps the person under the spotlight listen, those who are interacting with them, as well as the group listening. Zoom a scene and take us into a structured debrief.

Mona Thompson: 

I’ll start with a question that’s an easy to digest question and one that relates directly to the experience you had. I might say something like, what did you notice in that activity, especially what felt different between the different rounds? I’ll let people talk for a little while there. And then in terms of listening from a facilitator standpoint, I rarely time debriefs, like explicitly all have an eye on my watch or something, but sometimes if I’m really paying good attention, you can see there’s a little bit of an energy shift in the room where just groups, it seems like, okay, people have talked, people and gotten those first thoughts out. There’s just this tiny little lull in the conversation. And so then if I can catch them in that, I’ll get everybody’s attention for a second and I’ll say, you’re going to get to keep talking with your group, so don’t worry if you’re in the middle of something interesting.

But I want to add a second question to your conversation, which is, and it depends on the group I’m doing, I’ll either say, if it’s more of a theatre group, I’ll say, how might this exercise relate to improv based on what you know of improv. Or in a group, I might say kind of at a work group, I might say, how might this exercise relate to your daily work? And I like, if I’m doing it well, again, I like having a specific question like that, and then not too much other talking from me, one that people will kind of take a moment in their groups to be like, what? How does this relate to our work? And then they’ll come up with ideas, because people are really, really good at making connections. If I’m really paying attention, I’ll try to very subtly be walking around and getting a little sense of what people might be talking about in the group.

And then when there’s another little lol, I’ll call everybody back into a circle. And then normally I’ll go back to the first question, I’ll say, great. I want to hear your thoughts. Sometimes if they seem like a nervous group, I’ll preface it by saying, as you might understand, there’s not one correct answer to any of these questions, and I’m really just curious about your impressions and how these exercises are landing with you. And then I’ll go back to that first question normally to say kind of what about the first question? What did you notice were some of the differences between the rounds? Sometimes there it’s helpful.

If somebody says something definitive, like somebody might say, Oh, the third round was the hardest, then it can be really helpful for me to say, Oh, cool. How interesting. Did anybody feel differently? And queue up for maybe somebody who had a different experience to share that not as a debate, but just as this interesting kind of, I try to model being really curious about the different ways that people experience things. And so then somebody else might say, Oh, the first one was hard or whatever. Or occasionally, the whole group will nod and say, yeah, the third round was the hardest. But that can be helpful too, because it’ll sometimes get somebody talking who didn’t think they were going to talk in that debrief, but then realise that that type of question applies to them. The more and more I do this teaching, the less I try to put my own opinions in it as much.

Then there’s all sorts of other things that I’m thinking about as the workshop progresses, especially relating to who in the group is talking more, who is talking less. I try to balance a lot between small group conversations where people who might not feel comfortable sharing in the big group get to talk in a smaller group.

I’m working on trying to do a little more solo, quiet, reflective time, is a thing that is a goal of me to put in for people who don’t want to verbally process their ideas that much. And then sometimes if it looks like it’s starting to be the same people talking over and over the big group, and you can tell that the group is about to get complacent and think like, okay, these people always talk, so I don’t have to think about sharing my thoughts or ideas. I’ll start asking for things like, Oh, what’s something your partner said in your conversation that you want to share out, or something just to get people again, a little out of their own heads and making sure that they’re paying attention to other people and not just coming in with one idea.

Oscar Trimboli:    

For those of you listening, you’ve just heard some amazing nuanced and world-class listening, the use of what questions, the use of how questions. Notice how short Mona’s questions are. We’ve talked about this on previous episodes, five to seven words are really potent. Explore what Mona has just said about how she listens for the energy change in the room as a moment to see the next question, and not necessarily always sticking rigidly to the timeframe. And that beautiful phrase, to explore a little bit further, how interesting. What’s different for you? These amazing phrases that Mona has just used, I hope you were paying attention. And if you’ve got a chance, just do a quick rewind and go back three minutes to listen in at this glorious mastery of asking questions for individuals, for their partners and for the group. What can improv teach us about listening?

Mona Thompson: 

One thing improv can teach us about listening is the value of practise, is that in improv, you’re building muscles just like if you were an athlete or something, and the same goes for listening. The more you actively practise listening, the better at it you’re going to be.

I think another thing improv can teach us about listening is how to listen to everything in an environment. How to take in body language and the sounds of a whole room rather than just words that people are saying. I also think improv can teach us about curiosity and listening, and how do you listen really with the desire to let yourself be changed by the information you hear.

Oscar Trimboli:

What are some of the things we should be listening out for when we’re listening curiously?

Mona Thompson:            

My grad school experience last year, it was really interesting going back into this world of being a student after working for a while. One of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year was to remind myself that I was not in graduate school to prove myself to anybody. I was there to learn, and I was paying a great deal of money to learn things.

And so one of the things I set for myself a goal that had been kind of encouraged by a speaker at the beginning, one of our orientation speakers had mentioned this, was really asking people what they mean when they say things that you don’t know. And so I got much better at practising  if I was just in a conversation with somebody and they mentioned a concept, just being like, Oh, what is that? I think the same went for when I was in classes and wanted to speak in a class, try to speak with a genuine question or a genuine thing I wanted to share, not to try to prove that I was smart to everybody in the class. I think there’s a really cool humility that comes from that, and you just learn so much more when you stop pretending that you know stuff. Or when you think you might know something, but you’re not sure, allowing somebody to elaborate on that is so much more valuable than just moving forward because you want to act like you know what it is.

And so listening for information that could change you is something that I first learned in theatre, but I think about all the time in terms of when I was a graduate student, really listening to learn new information, and also with working with people and companies kind of I think there’s so much fear sometimes in companies of like, Oh, people won’t think I’m smart or they won’t think I’m confident if I ask a follow-up question, or if I say, I don’t know what that is.

Oscar Trimboli:    

Here’s something that’s piqued my curiosity during our conversation. I noticed when you were speaking about your experience going back to graduate school, your vocal range was much deeper and coming from more of your diaphragm and your lungs than when you talk about your work, which comes much higher up in your throat.

Mona Thompson:    

I wonder if some of it is a feeling of freshness about graduate school because I just graduated about a month ago. I also think I did develop very strong opinions about this topic of are you trying to prove yourself to your classmates versus are you just training there to be there to learn? I think it’s something that has, it has a little energy behind it.

Oscar Trimboli:  

I sense when you put yourself in first person, it’s coming from that more diaphragm, lungs space. And when you’re talking about yourself talking about yourself, it kind of goes to up here at the top around your neck. For me, I could infer something from it, but I’m just more curious if you even notice it.

Mona Thompson:   

I’ve thought a lot about my voice, both in the context of theatre and playing characters, but then also in the context of, especially when I started doing this work, but still a fair amount now, I’m frequently a younger person going into people’s workplaces in fields of work that I have never been in myself and trying to both lend credibility to here’s why I’m in here working with you, and that sense of humility of you’re the expert at your day-to-day, so I’m here to provide an experience for you and you’re here to digest it. But I have spent a lot of time through my improv training thinking about how do I show up in those situations so I can either be authoritative or approachable or whatever the tone is that I’m trying to hit, because it’s always slightly different for different groups.

Oscar Trimboli:    

You just went to that type of place then. When I think of accessing conviction, it comes up more.

Mona Thompson:   

I think that’s a little bit of here are the ideas, here’s the thought, and I think it definitely relates to both paying a little bit of attention to how I’m speaking and to that feeling of conviction. Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli:      

I think you bring an expertise into the workplace that’s rare. My feedback to you is step in that room with confidence. Your age has got nothing to do with your expertise.

Mona Thompson:  

Thank you. Actually, I had a good conversation with somebody a while ago who was like, Oh, it’s valuable that you’re young because that’s people who are new to these jobs, and that’s, if you’re talking to people who are bosses, that’s who their employees are, and stuff. So that helped me think about it too, because I think I did spend a long time being more self conscious about it. And then I had an improv mentor who just was like, stop pretending and start understanding what’s valuable about the point in life where you are.

Oscar Trimboli:      

I think it amplifies your curiosity radar dramatically.

Mona Thompson:   

Interesting. Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli:  

Because I think in the work spaces that you go into, there’s a lot of patents and dogma and we have always done it this way, and the world’s changing. And if that’s what you continue to do, it’s not going to work. That’s why you’re in the room. And I think that fresh eyes is a spectacular advantage that you bring into the room that maybe you’re underplaying for yourself.

Mona Thompson:  

Thank you.

Oscar Trimboli:

Listening for the facts, listening for emotion and listening for inference. What a gift Mona has given us today. What were you listening to while Mona and I were speaking? Were you listening for emotion, facts or inference? Did you notice how her voice moved around when she was talking about particular topics? What else could you be listening for? How many different facts, how many different emotions, how many different inferences? What Mona changed my mind most about is genuine curiosity and how it can change you and the other person. Mona’s elegant masterclass in what and how base questions reinforced that they are the most powerful questions, especially when they’re really short questions. The shorter the question, the better. And the shortest question of all is silence.

I’d love to hear from you. If you visit oscartrimboli.com/contact, you can leave me a voicemail so I can listen to you or you can leave me an email about what you want to apply from this episode. Here’s a message from Abu Dhabi from Dr. Demisani, and how short questions can be really helpful.

Dr. Demisani:

Hello, Oscar, greetings from Abu Dhabi. My name is Demisani. I’m a physician in Abu Dhabi, and I was recently listening to a podcast where you were getting interviewed on the coaching for leaders podcast, and got quite intrigued by your discussion around deep listening. And so I had a few takeaways from that interview. And right next the following day, actually an opportunity presented itself for me to put into use some of the insights from that interview. This was around a situation where a nurse was describing to me and seeking my assistance with the interpersonal at the same time professional difficulty that they had with one of my physician colleagues. And as she was describing what had happened to me, I noticed that already even before she had finished, I had formulated a number of questions in my head.

And indeed just before she finished telling me what she was telling me, I caught myself wanting to say, well, I have two questions to ask about that. And so I stopped myself and I began to ask myself two questions. Where did the two questions come from? When did I think about these two questions? It was an aha moment. It was a Eureka moment really, because I in that instant realised that as she was talking to me, there was this constant chatter in my head about how I was going to respond to what she was talking to me about. And so I realised that this is indeed my communication challenge, that there is the chatter in my head, that there is a composition in my head whilst another person is talking to me. This is my deep listening challenge. How do I turn that voice off? How do I listen without the agenda to know what to say next in response to what the other person is telling me, or talking to me about?

I have since ordered your book and a deck of cards, Oscar, and I can’t wait to to receive them in the mail. I’ve also signed up for the 90-day deep listening challenge and I’m excited about that. Just received the second email, and I really look forward to learning how it can turn that inner chatter off. So thank you, Oscar.

Oscar Trimboli:  

Thanks for listening to yourself, Dr. Demisani, and thanks for sharing your story. Very courageous, and I’m grateful. Turning the chatter off is an interesting question you have posed. The chatter will never go away, Dr. Demisani. We need to move our orientation from on and off to think about when do we notice that chatter in our mind? Rather than trying to silence it, noticing the noisy voice is easier and it takes less energy, rather than trying to shut it down, holding it down and using force creates an energy that takes away our mind from listening. Be open to that. Let that chatter just move away. Let it flow. I hope this tip helps.

And if you’d like to sign up like Dr. Demisani for the 90-day challenge where you’ll receive one email reminder a week to keep you on track with regard to your listening, visit oscartrimboli.com/90days, that’s 90 days, oscartrimboli.com/90days, and you’ll receive a weekly tip to keep you on track when it comes to your listening.

For me, listening is the willingness to have your mind changed. And Mona completely changed my mind about listening to emotion, how to listen and what to listen for when it comes to emotion and who else is influenced by the emotion in your own words. Thanks for listening.