00:00 Matt Abrahams

One of my favorite structures in the whole world is three simple questions.

 

1. What?
2. So what?
3. Now what?

 

If you answer those three questions, what, so what, and now what, you can package up information in a way that’s very relevant and important for your audience.

 

00:44 Oscar Trimboli

Matt Abrahams is a leading expert in the field of communications. He’s a lecturer in organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

 

He teaches a very popular class in strategic communication and effective virtual presenting.

 

He’s so good, he’s even won the school’s alumni teaching award. Matt also co-teaches improvisational speaking in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program.

 

To relax and rejuvenate, Matt enjoys hiking with his wife, watching sport with his kids, hang out with his friends, and continually being humbled in the Karate Dojo.

 

In Matt’s new book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, an important contribution to the field of communication in the workplace, he takes the time to unpack the role of listening in communication.

He highlights this in one chapter, yet there’s a thread throughout the entire book about the importance of listening to the audience. The book provides really tangible and actionable tips and techniques to help you as the speaker succeed for the majority of times speaking spontaneously.

Matt provides science-based strategies for managing your anxiety, responding to the mood of the room, making content concise, relevant, compelling and memorable. He draws on his own stories, he draws on stories from his clients and his students. He offers ways to navigate Q&A sessions, successful job interviews, providing feedback, even making small talk and persuading others while handling those impromptu moments at work.

I’ve read his book a few times and Matt’s punchy 20-minute podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart, has been in my podcast feed since 2020.

I strongly recommend Think Faster, Talk Smarter because Matt deals with the issues about communication in the workplace that I think are the crucial ones, not the planned presentation, the spontaneous speaking moments. I’m listening to you.

If you’d like to be one of the first five people to receive a copy of Matt’s book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, send an email podcast at oscar trimboli dot com with the Subject, Smarter, and answer these three questions.

 

1. What did you learn from Matt?
2. What did you learn from our conversation?
3. And what will you do differently as a result of listening to today’s episode?

 

Listen to how well Matt listens and spontaneously answers when I throw him a curveball question at the end of our discussion.

Matt, what’s the cost of not listening?

 

04:03 Matt Abrahams

We miss out on nuance. We miss out on connection. We miss out on potential when we don’t listen. We have a fundamental obligation to listen. It is the way in which we connect.

The word communication means to make common, to commune with, and that requires both somebody putting something out there and somebody receiving that. And listening to me is a very powerful skill.

I was coming out of a meeting, it was a very intense meeting with a colleague, and as we were leaving the meeting, my colleague turned to me and said, “What did you think?” And I immediately went into constructive feedback. It was, “Oh, we blew it here.” Or, “Hey, it was really good. We got our point across here. We need to do this a little bit more.”

 

And I looked over and he looked dejected and it hit me at that moment that what he really wanted was not feedback or constructive feedback. What he wanted was support. He wanted me to listen. He wanted me to be present with him because he felt he didn’t do a good job. He felt beaten up by some of the things that had happened.

 

And for me, that was a transformational moment and it really helped me to see that I need to slow down. I need to look and listen for nuance and not just immediately jump into my, “I heard a request for feedback. I’m going to give feedback. I’m good at giving feedback. Here’s my feedback.” And really see that in that moment I should have perhaps at the very least said, “What kind of feedback are you looking for?” And he might’ve said, “I just need some support,” and I would’ve changed my demeanor completely. For me that was a very transformational moment and it’s one that I try to remind myself of often as I get busy and I’m in lots of circumstances where I could probably slow down and make sure I’m listening appropriately.

 

05:51 Oscar Trimboli

If we zoom back in there and you had your time again when your colleague asked what did you think, what else besides asking a question might you have noticed in that moment?

 

06:04 Matt Abrahams

I would’ve noticed his nonverbal presence. I can still see it very vividly. He was looking down, he was in that moment of reflection and perhaps even rumination.

 

I’m pretty good at recognizing that when I take a moment to recognize it and I didn’t. It was his body posture, the rate with which he was speaking. He’s normally a very energetic person and he wasn’t as energetic in how he was saying things.

 

All of the signs and signals were in front of me. I was just choosing not to be present and connect with them. I was immediately going into my heuristic approach to answering that. I was probably thinking about what was next or what the ramifications were and that took me away from that moment.

 

06:47 Oscar Trimboli

What I love about your story is it talks to all three elements of your three Ps from your book.

 

06:53 Matt Abrahams

I’ll first articulate the three Ps. The notion that there are barriers to listening. There are things that distract us and they each start with the letter P. The three Ps are

 

• physical
• physiological
• and psychological.

 

(07:05)

There’s physical noise. If things are loud or distracting because of noise, it’s hard to listen, it’s hard to focus in that circumstance.

There’s also physiological noise. That’s what’s happening within your body if you’re tired, if you’re hungry, if you’re nervous. That’s what I work a lot on with people I teach is anxiety looms large in a lot of high stakes communication and that gets in the way of listening.

The final P is psychological. Everybody listening knows that we’re not as effective as listeners as we can be, and part of that is because we are judging, evaluating, rehearsing what we’re hearing as we’re hearing it.

 

So we’re not really listening deeply, we’re simply getting enough of the information to begin to think about what we’re going to say next or evaluate and judge.

 

The three Ps again are physical, physiological, and psychological.

 

And in that moment it was a very quiet space, actually eerily quiet. It was too quiet and that should have been a clue to pay attention. This conference room we were coming out of had two doors and we went out one door and everybody else exited out of the other door, which was strange now that I think about it.

 

This was a long meeting. It was a meeting that… I don’t recall the actual timing of it, but I’m certain that I had some biological needs. Either I was hungry, had to use the restroom, something. I am sure that the physiological played a role.

 

And then psychologically, my head was swirling about what’s next steps, how do we recover from some of the things that went on in the meeting? I wasn’t really present or listening for his requests and my psychological and physiological barriers were certainly influencing how I responded. That said, I take full responsibility. I know about these things and I should have been better in that moment.

 

08:50 Oscar Trimboli

One of the things the Deep Listening Ambassadors talk about is their listening batteries. Sometimes it’s green, sometimes it’s yellow, sometimes it’s red, sometimes it’s touching on black and about to shut down.

 

If you think back to that time map, where was your listening battery at?

 

09:07 Matt Abrahams

Oh, I was certainly depleted. It was quite an intense meeting and I have heard you talk about the battery model or approach.

 

I could have done a couple things to just get a quick recharge. And I think in that moment, by asking a question, taking a pause, I could have done a little bit of a supercharge to get my listening a little bit better, but no, I was depleted for sure in that moment.

 

09:29 Oscar Trimboli

Most conversations are spontaneous.

There’s a lot of things written in literature about plan this and do that in advance, and the reality is that it’s a beautiful example of the spontaneous conversation.

Knowing what you know now about the three Ps and thinking about a question that you’d love to ask again, what’s the question you might ask now to that colleague since your listing batteries are a lot more charged?

 

09:58 Matt Abrahams

It certainly is now with you. I am as present as I can be now. The question I would’ve asked is to my colleague,

I would’ve said, “What type of feedback are you looking for? What’s the best way I can serve you in this moment with the feedback you’re asking?” And I think he would’ve said, “I’m feeling a little beat up.” And I think we would’ve had a very different conversation. So that’s where I would’ve approached it.

 

This very instant that we’re talking about, this example, it was one of the big drivers for the new book I wrote, which is all about that spontaneous communication and in it I borrow a framework from a colleague of mine at Stanford’s Business School.

 

His name is Collins Dobbs. He teaches this three-step approach and he calls it

• pace,
• space,
• and grace.

 

And it’s something I try to apply with my children, with my friends, my wife, my coworkers or my students. I’ll delineate the different pieces of this because for me it’s been very powerful.

First is this notion of pace is all about slowing down. In order to do some of the most difficult conversational communication work, we need to do it thoughtfully with mindfulness and we have to slow down to do that. This notion of pace, slow the pace down. That could be taking a deep breath or two, could be physically stepping back and just observing what’s going on, but we have to slow the pace down.

 

I am somebody whose brain works very quickly. That serves me very well in some circumstances, but it also can get me in a lot of trouble. I have trained in the martial arts for decades and pace is one of the biggest challenges that I have. I move so quickly that I actually move faster than the circumstances in my martial arts training and I actually get myself in trouble.

 

You would think moving quickly will get you out of trouble, but actually I move before I should and it gets me in trouble. And that’s what happened in this conversation. I moved sooner than I should have.

 

Taking time to slow down the pace by doing something physical, physiological can really help. You can also slow down the pace mentally. You can say, “In this moment, I’m here to serve this person,” and that can slow you down.

 

Now, space is important as well. Sometimes in conversation things get really heated and you get really immersed in it, brings us in, we’re close to it. We’re sometimes too close to it. So giving ourselves a little space and sometimes this is broadening it out and asking yourself how important is this in the short term versus the long term?

 

 

So its perspective shifting.

 

 

Giving yourself space to see the issue in a broader perspective. My wife is very good at this when she’s dealing with our kids. I am less good at this and I’m trying to learn from her. I can get very fixated on the moment and what’s going on in the moment and she will constantly remind me that in the grand scheme of things, number one, this is not that critical and we are working towards a long-term relationship with our children, not necessarily just this in-the-moment relationship.

So giving yourself space is about giving yourself perspective. Sometimes it’s literally physical space. If you’re in a noisy space, physically move. In this particular instance with this situation I’m discussing, I’m not sure how important space was in this moment because the physical environment was very conducive to having a conversation. I think we were at the right level of interaction. I don’t think this is where I needed to extend my perception.

Grace is all about internal reflection.

That is giving yourself some grace and acceptance and that’s where I’m at with this particular event. This event did not go the way I would like it to. I feel badly about it, and so I’m giving myself some grace to learn from it to say the next time I’ll do better. And so grace is important.

 

A lot of us judge and evaluate and we really beat up on ourselves when we ruminate and that can be an issue. Giving yourself a little slowing down, addressing the pace, giving yourself perspective and space, and then giving yourself some room to grow and room to learn from your behaviors or lack thereof.

 

14:02 Oscar Trimboli

One of the things that Deep Listening Ambassadors tell us they consistently struggle with is different modalities.

You had the joy of having a face-to-face conversation. I’m curious if that conversation took place via Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, WebEx, and your colleague then sent you a text message or a WhatsApp message immediately afterwards and asked the same question.

What perspective would you create for us listening about how to do this in a video conference environment?

 

14:38 Matt Abrahams

So it certainly can be challenging. It certainly can be challenging when you are not face-to-face and you lack some of the cues and clues that you normally get when you’re in person.

 

However, I do think being virtual affords you some new clues and cues that you can leverage. In a virtual environment, you have a concurrent chat that you can use. If you and I were in conversation in person and all of a sudden I’m chatting simultaneously with you, that would be incredibly rude.

 

But imagine being in a meeting and something’s not going well and somebody texts you and says, “Hey, pay attention to this.” Or what I’m really feeling in this moment is that. Now clearly you’re pulling yourself out of that moment and there are issues with listening when you’re not fully present, but you’re also getting really valuable real-time input that can be important.

Similarly, and I’ve had a conversion on this Oscar over the years, emojis can help. Emojis can actually be really helpful. There’s a way of saying something without saying something very immediately that I can then address that could be really useful. Technology is not all bad. There are some things that you can do through technology that I think better our connection and listening.

Now what kind of advice do I give people?

 

I think as best you can, the more input you give the better. So if you can turn on your video and both of you can agree video, good. If you can quiet the noise around you, great. So these are things that can help us focus. It is incumbent on us as communicators when we’re trying to help others listen to us. In other words, engage them so they pay attention. We have to do lots of things. To me, engagement is nothing more than sustained attention. And there are things we can do to get physical engagement.

 

So I can ask you, “Hey, type into the chat, raise your hand.” There’s mental engagement. I can ask you questions and your responses to my questions give me input. I can use analogies, comparisons to things to get you thinking about it. So we’ve got physical, we’ve got mental, and then we’ve got linguistic input. Using people’s names.

I like to talk about what I call time, traveling language. I can get you engaged and paying attention by saying, “What if you could.” Or, “Picture this.” And what happens is in your mind you actually start seeing those things. So you are paying attention in a very different way than if I just itemize things. There are things that we can do as communicators to invite better listening through the engagement techniques we use. Physical, mental, and linguistic.

 

17:06 Oscar Trimboli

We’re doing this via video conference. What are you noticing about how I’m listening?

 

17:11 Matt Abrahams

You are a very good listener. One, you show nonverbal signs of listening. So you nod, your face responds, your eyebrows will raise a little bit sometimes if I say something that’s funny and thank you for at least smirking when I say something. I’m trying to be funny. So you’re giving me positive reinforcement cues and they are in line with what I’m expecting. So I am making in-the-moment assessments that you are actually listening and paying attention. So I find that to be very valuable.

 

The other thing you do is you do a nice job of following up.

You pause nicely,

 

I need to work on this. I get so excited about what somebody says, I jump in a little too quickly once they’re done. And I like how you let it sit and that’s a sign of respect and it allows yourself, I think, but also others to process. And you do that nicely.

 

You do very subtle paraphrasing and connecting of what I say. So those are all signals that you’re tracking and that you are at least understanding what I’m saying. It doesn’t mean you’re agreeing, but it means that you’re tracking and understanding and I appreciate that and you do those things very well.

 

18:15 Oscar Trimboli

Good day. It’s Oscar. I just wanted to take you behind the scenes and share part of the process that you can steal and use as a Deep Listening Ambassador in a conversation with somebody you’ve built some level of trust with in the workplace.

 

This works in one-on-ones and it works in group settings as well. It’s a process check.

 

My intention for doing this is to notice how we’re interacting as two participants in the dialogue and is it helpful for them? And you listening as a result of what I hear and listen to, I’ll make adjustments in the next part of our conversation and you’ll notice a little change in Matt’s tempo. Let’s listen to the process check.

 

Little process check. We’ve got about 20 minutes to go. How are we going?

 

19:19 Matt Abrahams

Thank you for checking in. I think it’s lovely that you do this. I have enjoyed it. I am a little worried that I’m talking too much. I’m going to try to be a little more concise in what I say. You are striking some very important passions for me and I need to make sure that I am more concise.

 

19:38 Oscar Trimboli

Which passions?

 

19:40 Matt Abrahams

The notion of really focusing on listening as an important part of communication and allowing me the permission to demonstrate my vulnerability and talk about the reflection I do to improve my communication.

And I’m very passionate about a lot of that. I think a lot of us carry around this burden that we have to do it right and I’m on a mission to say there is no right way to communicate, just better and worse ways. So let’s all take a moment to reflect so we can get better.

I guess I would ask how are you feeling with this first half front? Anything that you would do differently or ask that I do differently?

 

20:16 Oscar Trimboli

Whenever I read books on communication, there’s always the obligatory hat tip for one chapter to listening and I’m passionate.

The other way that… I value the way you integrated Collins’ framework in and acknowledge that not only in the conversation but also in the book.

And for me, the grace part of that is my work.

When you’re on a quest to create a hundred million Deep Listeners in the world and everybody tells you are an expert, it’s like you are stuck in your metamodel.

So if you are not being listening or you are not being a world-class communicator, people are going to call you out.

They won’t literally call you out, but they’ll go, “Oh yeah, they say one thing, but they do… So they’re not really good at that.” So the grace part of that model, you brought it a little bit more to life for me, so that was very elegant.

 

21:15 Matt Abrahams

I have a chapter dedicated to listening, but I know you’ve read the book and I hope you see that some of the fundamental tenets of listening exist throughout all the chapters.

 

It is a fundamental concept. Being present, being in service of… All the things you talk about, but there is a chapter that is dedicated solely to listening. So I hope you’ll give me a pass or at least a yellow light on that.

 

21:38 Oscar Trimboli

Absolutely.

What did you take away from the process check?

 

The joy for me was Matt asking me the opposite question when I do a process check and say, “How’s it going?” Typically, people will respond. They won’t do what Matt did though. How’s it going for you? We can both make adjustments there.

I wonder what you’ll take away from the process check. I wonder what you’ll pirate and steal and integrate into your communication practice. A check-in is about how you communicate, not what you’re communicating about.

Check-ins help groups make huge leaps in their communication performance and as a result, their output, the tasks they’re working on become more effective in shorter time.

I’ll be curious what you take away as a Deep Listening Ambassador. Maybe it’s something you’re going to integrate into your reflection.

 

Send an email podcast at oscar trimboli dot com with the Subject, Smarter, and maybe the smarter part of this isn’t what Matt and I discussed. Maybe it’s the process check that we used in the middle and adjust to create a better conversation for you for the balance of our discussion.

Matt, the best listening cultures are the best storytelling cultures. The indigenous cultures of my country in Australia, the Aborigines and the Torres Strait Islanders, Polynesian cultures, Maori cultures and the Inuit, the Eskimo of North America are renowned storytellers. Yet in doing so, they’re teaching their next generation how to listen and it’s why it’s so crucial that you read stories to your children.

In the book, you bring a wonderful story to life. Fred Dust from IDEO and working with the Greek government.

 

24:00 Matt Abrahams

A big lesson from the story that I’m about to share is that you have to listen to yourself, not just listen to what’s happening around you. You also have to listen to what’s happening within you and then have the courage to speak up.

 

Fred Dust is a super energetic, smart, bright person.

 

He was at IDEO for a number of years. He now does communication work and communication consulting, and he is in very important rooms with very important people.

And a number of years ago, he was brought in among other consultants to advise the Greek government in selling some of their land. Many will remember many years ago Greek was in trouble financially. They had lots of austerity measures and other things going on, and one of the things that they were looking to do to help recoup some money is they were going to sell some property that wasn’t being used throughout the country.

 

And there was this one piece of property, used to be an old airport, and it sat right on the sea in Athens. And the Greek government essentially brought in a bunch of these outside consultants with the idea being, although nobody ever said this explicitly, that we’re going to sell it and we want to make it look like we consulted lots of people to justify our selling it. I’m not going to say politicians always want to make sure they hedge their bets, but I think there was some of that going on.

 

That’s my opinion. Nobody else said that.

 

And as part of this, they had a big formal meeting where dignitaries are sitting, leaders are sitting, and each consultant was supposed to get up and explain the rationale, justification, reason that it was appropriate to sell this land. And this land again was right on the sea.

 

 

This is Athens, a very sea-connected culture and letting go of this land was a big deal because of its connection to the sea.

 

 

Fred was among the many consultants. He did not go first. As the different consultants are going through the geological and the environmental and all these impacts, he begins noticing something. He begins noticing that these leaders are not seeming comfortable with what they’re saying in terms of their nonverbal presence, their demeanor, the way they’re looking, the tone of their questions, their voices. And he begins to sense that maybe this isn’t okay, maybe this isn’t perfunctory. Maybe there is a connection to this land that hasn’t been articulated.

 

And when it’s his turn to get up and speak, he says so. He says, “I’m actually opposed to selling this land.” And that was contrary to what everybody else had said and essentially the script. The script was you’re all going to say why, and he was prepared to do that until in that moment he got that feeling. And he said this, and then as he told me the story, when it’s all done, he’s turning to leave, he’s collecting his stuff and all of a sudden these two very big burly security people come up to him and he thinks, “Oh my goodness, I’ve offended everybody. They’re going to kick me out of the country.” And it turns out behind these two big burly men was the Prime Minister. And the prime minister came to thank him for saying what he had felt and what he knew or thought others of the dignitaries had felt. And Fred was invited to dinner.

 

The moral of this story is that you have to in the moment be observant. Fred was noticing things that perhaps others were or weren’t, and he was listening to himself and what was going on and he was saying, “There’s a juxtaposition here. Something doesn’t sit right, this is not…” And then he dove into it even more and then he had the courage to actually speak what he felt and what he saw. It’s a great story about listening. It’s how I open that chapter about listening because it identifies the aspects you and I have talked about, and I know many of these aspects your listeners have come to hear from you.

 

27:43 Oscar Trimboli

One of the things you make a point of throughout the book, you can be as planned as you want for set piece conversation. Most of us in the workplace, the majority of our conversations are spontaneous.

They are that moment where the colleague says, “What are you thinking?” What tips beyond listening would you share with our audience about the importance, the power and impact of when you’re present to yourself in those spontaneous moments? Help us to maximize those opportunities through the amazing work in your book.

 

28:24 Matt Abrahams

Well, thank you and I appreciate that.

 

I’m going to boil this down to two. It’s about mindset and messaging and there’s a lot more in the book, but let me highlight these two.

 

Many of us in these moments of spontaneity are fearful of them and see them as hurdles and obstacles and challenges, gauntlets that we have to get through.

 

So imagine in a meeting you’ve made some kind of proposal and people start asking questions. Most of us do not say, “Oh great, here come questions.”

 

Most of us are like, “Oh my goodness, here come questions. I have to defend my position. I have to protect myself, my honor,” if you will. “What I’ve put forth.” And it is that mindset that actually gets in the way of connecting, of being in a place to really listen and to respond appropriately.

 

One of the very first steps in this methodology that I document in the book is to change your mindset. Look at spontaneous situations as opportunities, as gifts, as a place where you can connect, collaborate, expand. It doesn’t mean you have to agree, it doesn’t mean that you’re always right or the other person’s right. What it means is that there are opportunities here.

 

I always share this example about Q&A. Many of us get really bent out of shape when somebody opposes us through the questions they ask. And I actually say embrace them because they actually care in the same way you care. You just don’t agree on the approach, but you at least care.

I think it is much more challenging to deal with somebody who’s apathetic than somebody who’s diametrically opposed to my point of view because at least they care, we have something in common. There’s caring and we can build off of that. An apathetic person, much harder to do.

And then messaging. We can do a lot to help ourselves and our listeners if we package information up well. I am a huge proponent of structure.

 

Structure does not mean scripting. Structure does not mean a list. Structure means a logical connection of ideas. Our brains are wired for structure. A lot of us call that story, but story is nothing but a structure. And there are lots of different story structures.

 

In the book, the latter half of the book, I provide us several different structures for different types of situations like making small talk, apologizing, giving feedback.

 

One of my favorite structures in the whole world is three simple questions:

 

1. What?
2. So what?
3. Now what?

 

If you answer those three questions, what, so what, and now what, you can package up information in a way that’s very relevant and important for your audience. So if you have a product you’re trying to pitch or you have an idea you’re trying to get across, or if you have a bit of feedback you want to relay, what, so what, now what works.

 

What is your product, your idea, your feedback?

 

So what is why is it important to the person you’re talking to? We know from a lot of research that if you can make something relevant and salient to your audience, they’re going to pay attention, they’re going to listen. They’re more likely to remember and act on what you’re saying. So, so what is really important.

 

And then now what is what comes next. Maybe it’s let me do a demonstration or please set up a different meeting. Or I’m curious to know your opinion. So it has momentum built into it. If I’m giving feedback, the now what is my suggested action. It’s my suggested behavior that you follow. So having structure paired with a mindset of collaboration can make these situations much easier to handle and, I believe, more connective and collaborative.

 

31:56 Oscar Trimboli

It’s interesting to notice that your cadence probably went up about 20% when you’re talking in this frame than we were at the beginning, which is awesome.

 

32:08 Matt Abrahams

Well, I also think I was very reflective early.

You did a really nice job of asking me reflective questions. Now you’re asking me prospective, what can we do? And that requires a different energy, and for myself a different passion.

When I’m reflective, I need to slow down… The pace, space, grace. I need to slow down, give myself some space. When I’m teaching, I like to bring energy to get people excited about it.

 

32:28 Oscar Trimboli

You are an academic and a practitioner and you feel the pain of the leaders in workplaces, particularly in mediated environments, video conferencing.

How does structure play out when you’re working across video conferencing?

 

32:47 Matt Abrahams

It is absolutely critical.

 

There is research that suggests you have to be more concise and clear when you’re virtual. And that can be video conferencing, that can be a phone call. You just don’t have the same bandwidth and partly because people are distracted.

 

If you think about these virtual tools, I’m talking to you via a computer on which I have a whole bunch of other things that are calling for my attention. So I have to package things up in an engaging, clear, concise way. So I believe the need for structure is even more important when you’re virtual, just so you tie things up.

 

And you do a very good job of this, and I’m trying to do a good job of this too, where I repeat myself. So at the end of an answer, I try to come back and highlight the key point of what I said. That’s a form of repetition that’s in service of this being concise and clear.

 

Because if you glanced away at some kind of distraction, my coming back and my speaking should help bring you back to what I’m saying. This notion of having to be more concise and using repetition are critical when you’re virtual.

 

33:51 Oscar Trimboli

And be careful, repetition does not mean using the identical words over and over and over again. An elegant, sophisticated communicator will be able to repeat with distinction. And you’ll often heard me say, good listeners listen to what’s said and great listeners notice what’s not said.

 

One of the things that that brings the concision that Matt talks about. It’s really tight, it’s really short, but it’s also contrasting.

So Matt, as a final point, if I’m a leader communicating change, what’s your one tip from a communication point of view to really punch through to really make an impact when it comes to the linguistic techniques that make a difference in communication?

34:39 Matt Abrahams

Oh, you threw me a curveball at the end. So I’m going to answer what I thought your question was and then I’ll answer the question that you actually asked. I thought your question was, what’s one thing a leader should do to have impact?

 

And my default answer is always know your audience. You have to target your message to your audience. We as communicators make a fundamental mistake and say what we want to say rather than what our audience needs to hear. And that’s a big difference. So I thought that’s where we were going with this, but then you tied at the end, you said linguistics.

And so there are lots of things that we can do to make our message resonate and be more memorable. Using analogies is one. So if I can compare what I’m advocating for to something we’ve done before, we all know helps it sink in.

Using alliteration. I am a huge fan of alliteration, words that sound similar. The pace, space, grace is an example of that. It’s just something that’s easy to remember.

And then one of my academic colleagues who I sometimes co-teach with taught me this notion of chunking.

Chunking is where you take a lot of information and you break it down into smaller packages of information. And here’s why this can be so helpful. Not only is it easier for us to remember, we tend to remember what we hear first and last more than anything else when we’re listening to something. When you chunk something, you actually create more beginnings and endings, so you actually get more information in.

Rather than giving you five minutes on something, maybe I give you three, two minute blocks of that. You’re more likely to remember it because there were more beginnings and endings. So we can use analogies, we can use alliteration, we can use chunking, and that can make our messages more powerful.

 

36:20 Oscar Trimboli

It’s easy to see why Matt is a world-class communicator in the classroom at Stanford Business School and beyond. I took away today the importance of space, pace, and grace and to give that to myself and to allow it for others. Increasing the distance between my pauses is something that’s helpful for me and for others. I wonder what you’ll take away from today.

 

The other thing I took away from today was the story of Fred Dust from IDEO and his ability to listen not only to the nonverbal signals in the room, to listen to the quality of the discussion, yet to notice what’s unsaid. And creating a long-lasting legacy for the people of Athens and Greece, something that will be felt in the generations to come.

 

Without listening, the default approach would’ve played out.

Everybody would’ve gone through the motions.

 

Listening takes courage. It’s not just the act of hearing, it’s the courage to speak up when you notice what’s happening in the group that others aren’t.

 

I’d like to hear from you.

1. What did you take away from today?
2. What did you hear from Matt?
3. What did you notice in the discussion and what will you do differently as a result?

 

Send an email podcast at oscar trimboli dot com with the Subject, Smarter,

And if you are one of the first five people to send that email, you’ll receive a copy of Matt’s book.

 

Reflective practice is important, and at the end of every conversation, if time allows, not only do I do the process check during the conversation, I’ll also do the debrief.

 

 

The debrief with Matt was incredibly insightful. If you have a moment longer, I’d strongly encourage you to listen to how Matt debriefs with me so I can make this a better conversation for the Deep Listening Ambassador community when I create the next conversation.

 

I’m Oscar Trimboli, and along with you, the Deep Listening Ambassador community, we’re on a quest to create a hundred million Deep Listeners in the world. Today, you’ve given me the greatest gift of all, you’ve listened to me. Thanks for listening.

 

How did you go?

 

39:20 Matt Abrahams

You are truly gifted at what you do. It’s fun to have these conversations. To talk to somebody who’s so present in a podcast… I can’t tell you the number of these things I do where people are… It’s clear they’re reading, they’re all over the place, but I like your presence. Thank you.

 

 

And I appreciate the opportunity to share my own stories and reflections. A lot of people don’t go down that path, and I think that’s important for people to hear. I try to be an open book when it comes to my journey to get better at communication, and I appreciate the opportunity to do that. So this was great. This was fun, and I look forward to hearing how you piece this all together.

 

39:56 Oscar Trimboli

Thank you very much. And thinking about anything in my process or approach or dialogue or time management? Anything you’d give me as a kind of, “Hey, think about this.”

 

40:10 Matt Abrahams

You do so many things well that I am intending to borrow. The preparation information that you sent. We do a very poor job of helping prepare our guests. I’ll send them some ideas of questions, but I really like what you did there in terms of here’s the question, here’s the tone, here’s some advice on how to be a good guest, all of that. Really nice. I like the break you took in the midway through. I think that is great. I should definitely do that.

 

We’re already editing these things. We record for 45 minutes and come out with a 20-minute… We’re already editing, so I might as well put a break in. I think that would be good for people.

 

I’m trying to think, is there anything you could have done differently?

 

The only thing I might suggest, and I’m really grasping at straws here, Oscar, is… I am not saying what you do is not good, it’s just not what I’m used to.

 

There’s usually a longer lead-in before I first start talking and I jumped right in. I mean, you essentially question, boom, go, even though we had our nice chitchat beforehand.

 

And what I noticed is I actually use that time where somebody’s reading my bio or explaining their connection to my material. I’m actually using that time to center myself, and I didn’t feel like I got as much of that time the way you started. I don’t know that that’s bad. I’m just saying that that’s a difference.