G’day, it’s Oscar, and this is an update from the Deep Listening Ambassador Community Survey.

The difference between hearing and listening is taking action. I wanted to talk to you about the action I’m taking.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their perspective on the future of the Deep Listening Ambassador community. For those of you who have completed the listening survey, the paperback format of the book has already arrived in the post.

Whether you’ve received a copy of the book by completing the survey or maybe you’ve bought a copy of the book, could I ask a huge favor?

01:06

Could you take a photo of yourself with the book and email it to podcast@oscartrimboli.com  with the Subject Line “Cover”?

Just send the highest resolution version of that photo possible. I’d love to see what you look like, but more importantly, I think our community would love to see what each other looks like as well.

We’ve had some really creative examples of people taking photos with the book in unique locations and taking photos of the book itself uniquely too, and the difference between hearing and listening is action.

This is because listening happens before, during, and after a conversation. And thank you for everyone who filled in the survey, your time is valuable.

01:58
Here’s a quick summary of what was in the survey and the action I’m going to take.

1. 18 countries are represented in the survey and
2. 54% of respondents were female.
3. 91% of respondents said they’d like to participate in a community of practice event for an hour and 30 minutes once every quarter.

I’ve set up a registration page for all these events so you can register for the rest of the year if you visit https://www.oscartrimboli.com/communityofpractice/

You can register for all future events. You can pick and choose which one you want. They are on three different time zones,

03:07
I think that’s a great way for you to meet somebody else from around the world who’s a workplace professional who’s looking to improve their listening.

4. 77% of respondents said they’d like to provide input into the development of the Deep Listening online course. If you would like to provide feedback on the development of this course, you can visit https://www.oscartrimboli.com/coursefeedback It is a deep listening course. The survey that you’ll undertake will take 60 minutes. It will take one hour of your time. Please don’t jump in there and be surprised or have any mismatched expectations. This is about deep listening and we’re asking you to go a little bit deeper and think about the way you want to listen.
5. 71% of respondents said they’d like to attend a quarterly book club for 45 minutes to discuss a book about listening and communication in the workplace. If that’s you, please send an email to podcast@oscartrimboli.com with the Subject Line “Book Club”, and a recommendation for a book you would like the group to explore.

04:28

6. 68% of respondents said they would like to provide input and feedback into the development of accreditation for Deep Listening. visit www.oscartrimboli.com/coursefeedback we are looking to develop that. Remember, it’s 60 minutes long, so if you don’t want to look at an online course, but maybe for you an accreditation is more important, visit www.oscartrimboli.com/coursefeedback

05:03

I love listening to your voices. In the survey, people said they wanted to hear from other Deep Listening Ambassadors just like these.

Nomi Sharan

Hi, I’m Nomi Sharan, and I am a Deep Listening Ambassador from Tel Aviv, Israel.

Serge Costi

I’m Serge Costi, and I’m a Deep Listening Ambassador.

Sharney Crawford

Hi, I’m Sharney Crawford. I’m the head of a school in Japan, and I’m a Deep Listening Ambassador.

05:28 Oscar Trimboli

Would you like to share your voice with the Deep Listening Ambassador community?

We’d love you to record your voice and send it to us so we can share it, not just so I can hear it, but more importantly for other Deep Listening Ambassadors. If you’d like to record your name, use the local greeting and in Australia that would be G’day, in New Zealand that would be Kia ora.

G’day. My name’s Oscar. I’m from Sydney, Australia and I’m a Deeper Listening Ambassador.

06:03

We’d love to hear your voices. We’ve heard voices from around the world. We’d love to add yours, send to podcast@oscartrimboli.com with the Subject Line “Hello World”.

By the way, if you’d like to be interviewed for the podcast, we’ve started the process of interviewing some of the Deep Listening Ambassadors already. We’ve gone through four Deep Listening Ambassador recordings, and soon you’ll be hearing some interesting compilations and individual episodes about the Deep Listening Ambassadors out there.

Send an email to podcast@oscartrimboli.com and put in the Subject Line “Interview” if you’d like to be interviewed for the Deep Listening Podcast from the perspective of the Deep Listening Ambassador.

Now, when it comes to the paperback format of the book, I want to share a story about Winston, my favorite at the local Marsfield post office. When I dropped off boxes of books for those 18 countries, I mentioned Barbados, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Nigeria, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland.

07:18

Winston, said to me, “Wow, Oscar, what’s going on? Today’s a big order”, and I explained that these were all thank-you gifts for the Deep Listening Ambassador communities from all around the world.

I love the way Winston listens, he could just be really transactional and say, “Next customer?”, but he asked me, “Oscar, what’s a Deep Listening Ambassador?”

What you don’t know about Winston is his heritage is Chinese, and I took about three minutes to explain what a Deep Listening Ambassador is while I was occasionally looking over the back of my shoulder as the queue was building up behind me. I see Winston at least once a week, whether that’s taking books out for around the world or helping my stepdaughter out with some of her postal deliveries.

I just want to say thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain what a Deep Listening Ambassador is to Winston at our local post office.

Since then, he’s become curious enough to ask for the book and he started reading it. In your own way, you are having a ripple effect around the world when it comes to listening.

08:24

A note of congratulations because we promised that one person who completed the survey would get 10 copies of the book and a 45-minute online workshop around Deep Listening for 20 people in their workplace.

Congratulations to Ellen from Vancouver who won the bonus prize.

She was very excited when she got the message and a quick shout out to Jeff in the Deep Listening Ambassador community. Jeff, you introduced Ellen to the Deep Listening Podcast about a year and a half ago, and she’s been listening in the background and I’m really grateful that you shared the impact of Deep Listening around the world.

09:12

I’m going to try a little experiment and this experiment is because, well, I actually got comments in the survey that I should think about exclusive really deep dive content for the Deep Listening Ambassador community. I kind of scratched my head and thought, “wonder what that would be?”

Look, if you’re interested in going deeper, then send me an email podcast@oscartrimboli.com with the Subject Line “Deeper” and what you took away from this next conversation.

This is an example of the content that I may choose to use to go deeper with this experiment. This is a reflection of a conversation I had with Avi this week.

10:04

Avi and I were in a discussion about the definition of listening and the adjective problem. Now, the adjective problem that Avi was referencing was the adjective that everybody seems to want to put in front of the word listening and is the reason they’re putting an adjective at the front of the word listening, not because they’re trying to find another way to describe listening, but there isn’t a good definition of what listening is.

Avi and I had a very deep intense conversation about the adjective versus whether listening is a noun or a verb.

This was fascinating.

As we went a little bit further, he went and said, “Look, Oscar, there’s words like active listening, deep listening, empathetic listening, mindful listening, intense listening, reflective listening.” Anyway, you get the point.

Avi had up to 15 distinct adjectives that he was thinking about, and each adjective had a slightly more nuanced perspective.

11:08

He asked me for what I thought about it, and I said, “Look, the adjectives are implying that listening is fixed through the lens of active, deep, empathetic. I don’t think that’s the case, Avi”, and he had a very quizzical look on his face in the video.

I explained to Avi my hypothesis about listening is this, listening is an organic system. It’s defined by relationship, situations, and context.

Now, you’ve heard me say before that listening is relational, it’s situational and it’s contextual, and I’m very comfortable that my hypothesis could be completely wrong about listening to which Avi had a huge smile on his face while he was listening to me.

Now, when I say listening is relational, situational, and contextual

12:01

Relationships, mean you’ll listen to a school principal differently to a police officer, your mother compared to a child and a manager compared to a peer.

Situational might be as situational as the time of day. It might be because we’re at the beginning of a relationship, or it could be about a conversation that’s about progress versus conflict.

Contextually, we might have to think about the past, present, or the future. We might have to think about group or individual context. We may need to think about face-to-face versus video. We may need to think about business conversations versus personal conversations, and we might have to think about transversing cultures in the conversation.

Implied in the intersection of relationship context and conversation is it moves. It’s not the same.

The intersection of these three elements and each of the participants means that the gathering of people makes it more like an organic system than one that’s defined by rules or a sequence of steps.

13:17

I invited Avi along with me to explore the relationship inorganic systems like cheese, curry, whisky, and wine.

Now, we picked those because Avi likes wine, Avi likes whiskey, Avi likes cheese. I like cheese and I like curry. I don’t drink alcohol.

When you think about how these final products are created, cheese, curry, whiskey and wine each have inputs, processes, and outputs.

The result will be completely different depending on the soil, the water, the season, how it was collected, how it’s combined together, how you even store it.

Yet even with identical ingredients and the identical recipe in the identical location, each participant has different taste buds and maturity of the palate, so they will taste things completely differently in the identical cheese, curry, whiskey, or wine that you would, because our backs stories are very different.

We will experience identical food in a very different and nuanced way because of our lived experience, and for me, listening is no different.

Each participant brings their own ingredients along, their ingredients or their backstory, their lived experience, their education, their family situation, whether they’re in the conversation in their first language, in their home language, in their native tongue, or maybe they’re speaking a second or third language in that discussion.

15:07
When you intersect a discussion with one or a group of people, the ingredients they’re always going to be combined together and expressed completely differently, situationally, relationally, and contextually.

It got me thinking what I learned from the conversation with Avi, like a cheese maker or a winemaker, a vintner, they focus on the process and they adjust what they can. Can they control the weather? Can they control the soil? Can they control the weather at harvest?

They can’t really control any of that.

They can’t control the soil composition over the long term.

They can focus on harvesting effectively based on the conditions in that moment. They can focus on getting better every season than rather than a focusing off on a one-off vintage.

16:16

Listening, I speculated with Avi, has probably more in common with organic combinations like curry than it does with engineering systems that are sequential and rational and defined and have rules and steps and processes, and yet they do.

Listening does have some rules and steps and processes also. I’d invite you to think about what they are for you.

Some people say curry tastes better the following day. I believe that, and I speculate that when the ingredients have more time to combine, the combination creates unique aromas and flavors that weren’t there the previous day.

17:08

And just like human relationships, they need time too. They need time to come together. They need time to combine, and they need time to create their unique flavors and aromas.

Avi and I then had a big debate about, “Oh, that’s all good, Oscar, but how do you teach it? I want to know how to teach it.” I said, “Avi, I don’t know.”

The only thing I have come to learn, as I said to Avi, was “I think it’s better for me to be listening rather than do listening.”

What do I mean by doing listening? To me, doing implies a series of sequential organized steps. To me, doing listening, it feels mechanical and it feels defined.

Yet I said to Avi, “When I am listening, when I’m just being in the moment, when I am being listening, not doing listening, in that moment, what I’ve come to realize is that the other person and my presence changes the way we come into a conversation and combine in the conversation, and then finally how we leave the conversation as well.”

Now, I’m not saying that’s true for you as I pointed out to Avi. It’s not my idea, it’s just an idea that’s coming through me at the moment, and I’m not so arrogant to think I know the answers.

How did we leave the discussion?

Well, as Avi says, “Oscar, I love you enough to tell you that I’m a little bit frustrated as I leave this conversation because as I came in, I was thinking one way, and now as I go out, I think another”.

19:02
And I think for me that was true too, I didn’t have any fixed position about what Avi and I were to discuss on that day that I left the conversation realizing that being in Avi’s presence, he bought something out of me that I didn’t realize was there like curry, wine, whisky, and cheese, and I haven’t even drunk two of those, so what would I know?

So think about how do organic systems show up in your listening? How could you just be in the moment to make a difference for you and for the other person?

And whether you’re a cheese maker, a curry maker, a wine maker, or a whiskey maker, or someone who’s trying to improve their listening, just focus on the next conversation and that will create a great vintage, a great curry, a great cheese, a great conversation no matter what.

20:03

If you’d like to access more of this exclusive content, just send me an email podcast@oscartrimboli.com and put the Subject Line “Deeper”, and what did you take away from the conversation with me and Avi, and would you like deeper content like that where we take the listening to a much deeper level?

I’m Oscar Trimboli, and along with the Deep Listening Ambassador community, we’re on a quest to create a hundred million Deep Listeners in the world.

You’ve given us the greatest gift of all. You’ve listened to us.

Thanks for listening.