Oscar Trimboli:
G’day. This is Oscar and this is a continuation of the three-part experiment between Claire Pedrick, Shaney Crawford, and myself. In the previous episode, episode 127, you heard Claire and I discuss listening through many dimensions, including the role of pause and silence, the influence of the backstory and its impact on workplace change. How do you audit and code listening, speaking and silence in group meetings? Why the listening at work is very different from listening in a therapeutic sense. The bias in our self-assessment and why we think we’re more effective listeners than the speaker does. The role of many native languages and many different languages, how they create and embed a context or a shape into a discussion that you may not be aware of. When we think about multiple languages, do we think about them as maths or music, chemistry, chess or checkers and many other languages that we use to provide coding to provide structure in the way you understand the domain in which you operate.

Claire spent some time talking about the sounds and musicality of a conversation and the difference between an okay and an and. Are you conscious of invitation sounds versus stopping sounds? We explored the role of culture in communications, which is very distinct from language. We noticed the connection between what was said and how it’s said and the physical state of the speaker or the group, whether that’s face-to-face or in virtual environments and touched on what’s not said. We also explored the impact that your surroundings have on any conversation and how it influences how things are said, what things are said when they’re said, and how that influence the pace of the conversation. We also explored what emerges when participants are open to co-creating, to back and forth, to speaking and listening with pauses in between. And then finally, we explored the role of negative and positive language, especially when it comes to providing instruction.

Wow, we definitely covered off a lot in only 35 minutes. Now we’re at part two of three, in this part of the experiment, which is what you’re about to hear next is feedback from 16 different listeners who initially emailed Claire with their feedback and they were open enough to agree to record their feedback. Some did it on audio, some did it on video. Either way, it was interesting to see the information that they share. I invite you to notice what these 16 listeners heard that was maybe similar to you and what did they hear that was different to what made sense for you. What I loved exploring was listening to the wide variety of adjectives and verbs they used to describe their insights, how they explained what they saw, and the thoughtful reflections about how it was said, as well as what was said.

Claire Pedrick:
What you’re going to hear next is us recognizing the importance of you being able to hear all the responses. This is about us acknowledging the part others have played and also role modeling that we are listening and always stuff to learn. So thank you to Agnes, to Áine, Joanne, Josephine, Julian, Lizzie, Manjit, Naomi, Nathan, Penny, Sarah, Shankar, Sue, Vardeep, and Wendy and everyone else who thought about responding and didn’t.

This section is 45 minutes long and we invite you to note and notice what’s similar and what’s different from these listeners’ reflections to yours or indeed to something else. Make it your own and let us know what you’re learning. Thank you.

Áine O’Keeffe:
Hello, Claire. Hello Oscar. Thank you for the opportunity to eavesdrop on your conversation at The Coaching Inn on how to listen, and thank you for the opportunity to respond. I feel a bit fan girl doing this, but there was something, in fact a number of things in your conversation that really drew me in, so thank you for that. I suppose I was drawn to the topic in the first place because the strapline of my coaching practice, The Sounding Board – Northern Ireland is I listen so you can hear yourself think, and there were so many different levels of that listening that you got into that I have a much better understanding of how I’m trying and why I am trying to put listening at the very center of my practice as a coach.

The first thread that really grabbed me was a comment about people who have a second language listen with a perhaps different granularity. I studied French at university, lived in France for a couple of years. I was really immersed in a completely different language and I’m really conscious that having a second language and learning a second language has stretched me both in terms of my own meaning making, but also in terms of appreciation of the kind of assumptions we bring to words, how those can get lost in translation. So holding my own assumptions about meaning of a word is something that I’ve learned to a certain extent through that formation.

You had a lovely exchange around listening across cultures and across generations, and it’s an aspect which I’m really looking forward to mulling on further because it chimed with some training I did in group and systemic mediation. Thank you for planting some new seeds in that field for me. But one thing that’s emerging for me is something about the power of language rooted in place and that came home to me recently in a chemistry call where I used a particular word from the Ulster-Scots dialect that we have in Northern Ireland, and there was a real palpable connection the person I was speaking with who perhaps felt seen or heard more likely a connection in that of a shared hinterland. So there’s something interesting to start unpicking around that as well. One aspect that kind of got revealed a little more was how my experience as a musician has underpinned my listening in ways I hadn’t appreciated.

So I studied music at school and then played in a couple of bands, an indie thrash band and a riot grrrl band, and there is something about being in bands apart from that active listening live to each other and the kind of communication that goes on in that space, but also the process of recording in a studio. So you end up listening over and over and over again to the same phrase of music, picking out the nuances, listening to what needs to be tweaked. So this has perhaps given me an ear tuned more acutely to the cadences and the rhythms of speech. And there was a lovely personal connection when Oscar, you mentioned a reflection on Dame Evelyn Glennie and I was transported back to being a young cellist in a Pro-Am workshop with the Ulster Orchestra, which she was leading. So it was a particular delight, reconnect with that memory, and it was lovely then to pick up on some of the threads of the thinking around the place of music in your subsequent podcast with Iris.

I kind of wish that I’d listened to how to listen before I’d submitted my accreditation application to the association for coaching because now I feel much more able to articulate some of what I’m doing in the way that I make noises in the recordings that I listen back to of the coaching session. So how I am shaping the environment in which my thinker is doing what they need to do, and there are a couple of phrases which now I have a better understanding around leaving the sign with the other person, which is now kind of an ellipsis and I have a way of articulating what’s going on in that space. So there was something about this episode and particularly the silences between you, which it was lovely to just experience, but that’s helped me to join dots from the past and the present and create new ones for the future and where I could see glimmers of myself unexpectedly.

Agnes:
What I took away from the conversation between Oscar and Claire, one of the first thing that intrigued me was the annotation around the conversations and writing down what listening looks like. I’ve been thinking around listening audits. I’m working as part of an organization and it’s an opportunity for me sometimes to be a bit of a team coach. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m a team observer and sharer of feedback. And I think the way Oscar shared how he started doing the audits and using the little marks on how the exchange would unfold, that is something that I want to try to practice and maybe find some discrete signs of my own so that I can evidence the feedback a little bit more. Those listening audits and the idea of finding a way to code listening, that’s also something that resonated for me.

Parts of the people I work with are technical people. They might be reluctant to open up to listening skills and coaching and more generally interpersonal skills. I’ve used Oscar as the person who coded listening as my hook for them to get interested. So that’s already something that I’ve put in practice and it’s worked and people who thought they were terrible at listening and it was too human for them, realize that other people had looked at it in a very analytical way and found a way to then open up to that. Another reflection that came to me was around the use of silence and what silence may feel like, especially in western cultures. And then there was this expression of the pregnant pause, and when Oscar mentioned it felt like there was a negative connotation to it, and actually for me it stood out as an expression that contained a lot of positivity. I have gone through two pregnancies and I was lucky that they were good moments and that I have now got two beautiful children.

And so for me, the silence of the pregnant pause is a creative silence. It’s a generative deep silence where there is actually a lot going on and for a period of time we don’t even see it in the surface and then maybe we’ll start seeing a shape and we can’t really guess what’s coming and then eventually something comes and it was all worth the wait. So a pregnant pause for me is something that I will listen to in a patient and positively curious way, and I think it can’t be rushed and I am welcoming this this time and letting people process and create internally what then they might decide to share.

And finally, another reflection around silence and how it may feel like in different cultures. As I’ve met with more coaches, especially coaches in the UK, I’ve realized that a few of them got interested or joined Quakerism, which was something with, for me as a French background, it was something quite new that I discovered when I came to the UK. And the way silence is experienced and valued in this particular form of religion and for this type of spirituality I think is very interesting and I’m not surprised to find that a lot of coaches are drawn to this. And so in the insights that were shared around cultures in Australia, cultures around the world, Ubuntu was mentioned. For me, we shouldn’t think that we’re always the Westerners who are partly proud, partly found to have this culture of industry and of action then loud and noise because I think it’s stopping at our prejudice and we should be more curious and there might be places, times, school of thoughts where we can open up to realize that we can do things and it’s not that foreign, it’s just human.

So it’s in all of us and it’s been done before and that might give us the patience and the courage and the wisdom to realize, yeah, it is doable and also the kick that we need sometimes to just dig that little bit deeper and do it because it is part of our human nature not attached or detached from any culture in particular. So yes, there were a lot of thoughts that followed this fantastic dialogue and revisiting it, also now with my interest in storytelling, listening as an observer of Oscar’s craftsmanship with storytelling and how he got all of us hooked into his initial story. How we could all relate to it and he didn’t jump to the end of the story. Obviously he knew it, but he replayed it with us as if he didn’t know how it would end so that we could really be in each moment of his story.

This is something that on the second lesson really was a lot clearer for me and maybe with my current interest in how people use storytelling, this is something that I found was very fabulous to listen to and it’s got me to reflect that through this great storytelling, through this great connection that was then made with him as a speaker as part of the conversation with Claire. I was so much more receptive and so much more, it was so much easier to be part of the conversation as a quiet party to it and maybe an asynchronous party to it that could still get a lot of connection, a lot of great listening because I had been prepared by this beautiful entry.

Anon:
One thing that I know now and that I did not know before listening to the latest podcast is that listening is much more than paying attention to the words being said. It’s about co-creating the space so that deep listening can take play. To listen is to truly honour and respect the person in front of you, so the new insights and perspectives can be created.

Joanne Appleton:
Hi Claire. My name’s Joanne Appleton and I’m sending this video about the How to Listen podcast. In the mentioned podcast about the value of culture and understanding culture within a conversation and particularly how I facilitate within organizations. So being aware of the organizational history and culture as I’ve reflected on that further and as I’ve listened again to the podcast and reflected on that, I think I can build on that whenever you’re facilitating or a coaching a group, it’s not just a one way conversation between two people where the speaking and the listening sort of happens turn by turn. As a facilitator going in and working with a group of people, part of my role is to help people to feel heard and understood within that group setting. And so part of my role is to be listening to all the different voices who are speaking and not just me seeking to understand what they are actually saying, but also enabling other people to understand what that person is saying.

Creating a safe space for sometimes quite difficult conversations can happen or sometimes, and this is where I get really excited, someone will say something and you’ll unpack it a bit and someone else will go, “Oh, so by that you’re meaning this.” And what emerges can be quite beautiful, is a great word, can be quite beautiful and it can really change the dynamic, change the relationship, or even change the course of something that’s going to happen. A lot of my work is within GP practices and it’s working on access and how people access appointments. Actually getting the GP and the receptionist and the practice manager and someone in the back office who deals with all the paperwork together to listen to each other about what is really going on and creating the space for those conversations. And if you’re really brave, getting a patient involved as well, listen to them and creating that safe space for people to be able to listen to each other. That’s great.

I think what you talked about as well about the difference with culture and language and if you’re working with multicultural teams, that’s even more so where you’re just making sure that people are picking up what other people are saying and just because a phrase is in a particular way, it’s picked up differently. One-to-one coaching just briefly, I have started in that coaching journey last year. Silence and holding silence and not interrupting is huge for me. I’m from Northern Ireland and you’ve talked about the musicality of conversation and how people talk. I think if you recorded the sound of a conversation of people from Northern Ireland particularly where there’s banter and crack and it’s energized compared to English conversation, there’d be a lot more interrupting, a lot more talking over each other. And so for me, having lived as an exile in England for the last 30 years by choice, it is a challenge not to interrupt, not to talk over people. I find that particularly meetings.

In coaching, I’m much more conscious of it and so consciously try to hold that silence and hold it a little bit longer and not interrupt. And I’m very aware of when I do interrupt and I try very hard not to and try to always do better, if I do. I’m always disappointed with myself because it’s, well, what’s emerged if, what’s that insight that’s been lost because I interrupted that I’m not going to get back? But also I’m thinking about that then how do I use silence as a tool within those bigger group settings and make sure that I’m holding silence, not just jumping in the next thing, not just trying to move on the group, but letting that extra bit and also for people who aren’t used to that, making sure that they are warned by that.

So the work that I’m going to be doing going forward, I think I’m going to incorporate that within my scene setting is there might be times whenever the conversation stops and I don’t say anything either. Let’s see what emerges, let’s see what comes out of that. So thank you. Thank you for all that you’re doing with the coaching and I love the podcast and I find it incredibly informative and inspiring for my practice as well. So thank you.

Josephine Knowles:
Hi, this is Josephine. My reflections on the interview with Oscar and Claire. Awareness that it’s about being listening and not doing listening. It sounds so simple. I realized I think I was doing a method or thinking about a method and was still very much in my head thinking about that method rather than being in the flow of the conversation and it’s dropped from my head down into my being. And this episode particularly helped me realize that in the moment and to relax and it feels that it’s just a lot simpler now.

Julian Mack:
Hi Claire. Hi Oscar. I’m here with the book. You can see all the post-its on the useful insights and chapters, fantastic book. I think what it’s done for me is helped me to worry much less about the performance in coaching and focus on those pivotal moments in a session. It’s typically a look, a gesture. I think it highlights how if you really listen hard, you see that moment when someone finds their meaning. And as Oscar points out, there are certain trigger words for that. Actually now I think about it also, so listening out for those moments, looking for those moments and then instead of making the meaning for the person, which is always the temptation, giving them the space to make the meaning themselves and generate the insight.

I think the other thing that this book has done for me is a really useful pre-coaching ritual. So just breathing for four seconds in, holding it, breathing out for four, the routine is in the book. It helps you go into a session grounded feet firmly on the floor and ready to be in service. So thank you very much. Can’t wait to be part of what Oscar does next.

Lizzie Rhodes James:
Hi, Oscar and Claire. My name is Lizzie. I’m an individual and team coach and focusing on leadership transition and the stuff that gets in the way. I also do facilitation, support all areas including cognitive change. I’m here to provide some insight from what I got from listening podcasts. I’ve also read Oscar’s book and I’ve taken a while to really reflect on what that might be. The first thing is around connection. You can really feel the connection from a heartfelt perspective and I’ve never really felt that before through all the time in coaching and other things. So I think that’s really profound and I think for those who are really starting out or anybody who’s coach even for years, I think just listening, understanding that is really profound.

The other thing is around perspective, and I picked up what Oscar said around change the fact that the changes might give, many have perspective in change, but also it’s our perspective as well. And I really try to take that on board. The other thing is being seen, heard and valued, and it’s that last piece that’s really struck with me. Often hear Claire saying coaching, good coaching is about how people feel heard and making a little bit of progress, but I think it’s that valued piece as well. People really want to feel they’re valued.

So yeah, I’m really touched by that. The final piece which really struck me right at the end of the podcast was around what Oscar said by being at present. He changed me, oh my god, that pulls up heart strings. And I just as coaches or perhaps it’s just me, you really forget some of these really human things. And it’s actually bring human behind the coach, funnily enough, Claire, and ensuring that this actually, it’s the human thing. It’s the things that I see, heard and felt are the fundamental to what makes our listening the best it can be. And I really noticed that even in the period since May when the initial podcast went out. So I really want to thank you for that.

I think one of the things, Claire, you shared on the supervision recently was what came away from that conversation and Kathleen Maggs’ conversation was around the fact you felt like you were best friends, obviously you weren’t. I think that’s really key in that kind of sense of trust and true, really present listening. Amazing. And I still go back to it and I’m still looking over it just in a little way so I can listen a little better to my children in particular here, my most valuable people in my world. Thank you for taking the time for recording the podcast and I very much look forward to the next one.

Manjit Obhrai:
What outstanding podcast, the lightbulb moment for me was to recognize the importance of language in listening and how that influences the transformation in a coaching conversation. I have just to myself asked why some of my previous coaching conversations may not have been as expected, language and listening with the body. Just amazing. Thank you very much.

Nathan Whitbread:
Hi Oscar. Hi Claire. My thoughts on your wonderful podcast on listening. So my initial response was really to say I was struck hugely by this idea that I’m in fact multilingual when I can only speak one language. But the languages that I can use to communicate in conversation are around things like mathematics, engineering and sport. And they are great spaces to understand the world and communicate with the world and often connect with people in quite different ways and that is amazing. So thank you both for helping me to understand that and get my head around it.

You also asked me, well, what else has been going on since that conversation happened? Well, I’ve had a conversation with Oscar as well, which has been really thought-provoking. And what I wanted to explore with him was, well, what does that mean and where does that go? And what has struck me is the importance around the preparation for conversation and the importance around creating the rules of engagement or I guess the deciding how we’re going to do conversation so that it serves our purposes and we all know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Because if we can do that well, we can have far better and more powerful conversations.

I was also struck by that thing about listening with real intention that Oscar touched on, that kind of listening mapping of understanding who is speaking, how often are they speaking, what are the types of questions that are being asked? Are they questions that actually support us to understand more deeply what on earth is we want to communicate or not? And all this stuff really feels like it’s supporting my own journey on being a better listener. And I’ve really enjoyed starting to think about this more. So that’s where I got to, I suspect more will come, but that’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it, when we’re thinking about iterative work. So hopefully that gives you something to move forwards with. Take care.

Naomi Ward:
Hello, this is Naomi with some reflections about the podcast and firstly in relationship to making agreements, the idea of ground rules. And there’s a poem I came across a while ago called Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by the former poet laureate, Joy Harjo, who is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nations. It’s, “Set Conflict Resolution Ground Rules. Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand. Ask the deer, turtle and the crane. Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill. The land is a being who remembers everything.” This reframed this idea of ground rules that we can skim over at the beginning of a piece of work. And here is some responsibility to the land, the past, the history and the ecologies that we are but a small part of.

Another reflection I had from the podcast was about how knowing another language is a context for listening differently, working with lots of international people learning coaching, it’s pretty important to be curious about this. And I had a chat with a friend yesterday actually who is Greek and she’s now fluent in English, but she was sharing that it feels very different that context. Greek for her is embodied, so if she needs to think about something that needs that weight of knowing or remembering, she’ll think in Greek. And if it’s something that’s more surface, she will think in English. And if it’s something that happened in England, she might think in English. So it’s much to learn about this. It’d be great to have a bigger conversation about it on the podcast.

Penny van den Berg:
The first time that I listened to a podcast, what I came away with was that listening is so much deeper than the elements of speech and that silence requires quality and reverence. The other thing that I came away with that I needed to implement something in my pre-sessions, which I’ve since done, and that is having to do with what an individual might need when they’re getting ready to have a coaching session. So I wrote in my email, my pre-session email, what might you need to do to prepare for the coaching session. And this might be something that either you need to do on your own prior to the session or together that we do in a coaching space.

Having listened to the podcast a second time, some additional insights that came to light, it was further interesting that listen and silence are an anagram, which I thought was kind of cool. And I had read a recent article called Presence, Listening, Awareness and Growth, which that was written by Susan Britton and Jessica Burdette. And this led me to reading another article, it’s called Silence and its Effects on the Autonomic Nervous System, A Systematic Review. And in reading this, I hadn’t really thought about it too deeply about silence, is that they had listed six different types of silence. There was outer silence, inner silence, social silence, emotional silence, ritualistic silence and reflective silence. And that had me thinking about silence as being something that can be in service to self and in service to others. So I was thinking then can silence then be the gift of giving and listening can be a gift of receiving.

And the other element about listening is that it requires doubt, as Claire had mentioned, the hearing, the scene, the sensing. And it also requires the breath, like Oscar had said, the past, the present in the future. So he was reflecting on can listening then be an active of co-active in that people are acting together, co-creation, where they’re creating something together. Co-regulation, which came to reading that earlier article, it indicated that there’s a psychological state of one individual can influence that of another. And lastly about co-inquiry, that being a collaborative way to clarify ideas and experiences and sharing those ideas and understandings. So that’s what I came away with from listening to the podcast. Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts.

Sarah Jane Marriott:
Thank you for the invitation to be part of the follow-up podcast that you do with Oscar Trimboli on How to Listen. The insight that I shared in an email after listening to the podcast the first time was that my biggest takeaway was this idea of listening with one’s whole body and how that had sparked in me a memory of an interaction. I had initiated the conversation with my coaching supervisor, telling her a little anecdote about something that had happened earlier that week that had made me feel warm and fuzzy. And the anecdote was that my 16-year-old daughter had come home from school and told me all sorts of things that were going on in her head about her thoughts and plans and hopes for the future beyond school. And I had said to my supervisor, it’s so unusual for her to share so much with me.

And my supervisor asked me, what it turns out was an ingenious question. She said, “What was different about you that day?” And my initial thought was, well, it’s not me that was different. I’m always there when my daughter comes home from school or almost always, and I always ask her how her day was, so it must’ve been her that was different. But she sat in silence while I thought about that a bit more and I had to think back to the moment and think what was really going on. And I realized that usually when my daughter comes home from school, I will be in my office and although my door will be open and I probably will, if I’m not on a call, will stand up and walk to the kitchen with her and ask her how her day was, probably my body language tells her that I’m still in work mode.

And I think that day I was already in the kitchen when she came home, I think I had my laptop with me, but I think I closed it as she walked into the room. And then the biggest insight that I had was that I think perhaps I didn’t initiate the conversation with a question. I think I didn’t ask her anything with words. That perhaps I just looked at her in a way that said, tell me. And so she did. That was the insight I shared the first time. The insights I’ve had or additional reminders of the things that I really enjoyed about the conversation that the two of you had the first time, because there’s so much in there. One of them was about the people speaking their native languages and Oscar’s observation that perhaps people who speak more than one native language listen with greater granularity than those who only have one.

And then Claire’s building on that of saying that, yeah, we don’t need to be able to understand necessarily what people are saying and the two of them then recognizing that it’s about how you witness how things are said, not what’s said. And it’s provided, it’s encouraged me once again to offer to the clients I have that speak French or Spanish as a native language, to offer for them to speak their native language when we are working together because although their English is usually better than my French or Spanish, I do speak those languages well enough to understand everything they say or almost everything they say. And knowing that I don’t need to follow the whole story and knowing that they would likely think differently in their native language is encouraging me to offer that. Hopefully in a way that doesn’t make them feel that I don’t believe their English is good enough. So I think I need to find a way of doing that.

And the other thing that really sparked my interest is about the different in which different cultures, particularly collectivist cultures or indigenous peoples, listen to the lands and themselves and each other in a very different way. And it’s building on an episode of more or less than I listened to last week about how many languages we’re losing on a regular basis. And I feel that seems such a travesty because different languages all have such a different richness to give us in terms of worldview philosophy, ways of being. And so that part’s about my interest too. Thank you very much.

Shankar Venkatraman:
What I am learning about listening since the last forecast is that exploring listening with the presence in a way that I’m not anxious about what to do or say and the thinker finishes, but basically expect that whatever needs to show will show up after the thinker has spoken and I have listened. And to me this requires kind of a courage that I don’t have to prepare. I’m also thinking about how can I listen with my whole body, what is happening for me as I hear the thinker speaking and how to share it with our thinker. And I know I’m becoming a bit more aware that probably the act of listening intently can change the person’s thinking without me having to do anything specifically. I don’t know. But that’s just what I am thinking. And maybe now given Nike’s quote, “Just do it.” I think we need to have more of just listen as a tagline in today’s world where the deep listening is so rare. Thank you.

Sue Finch:
Listening to the Oscar Trimboli episode about listening and silence, I just wanted to say that I was transported to loggerheads three o’clock in the morning, like the time when I went for listening to dawn chorus, and it reminded me of the silence of that waiting for the first blackbird to sing and silence then appeared to me like a space with complete wit, but a darkness where something will come into decorate it. And as a poet and a coach, I think I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about silence and different guises and this it all together in one thing. That when silence for me is that width and depth and something comes forward into it to light it up. That was the image that was in my head and there’s something there for me to explore. So I’m just saying thank you for the episode and the thinking time.

Vardeep Deogan:
I wanted to share my insight following listening to the podcast. I’ve grown up with parents speaking a mixture of many different languages, including English, Hindi, Punjabi, Swahili, Gujarati, and a few others. And even though I can only speak English, it is not uncommon for my parents and particularly my mum to switch language in a conversation. I notice it’s mainly when she needs to express a feeling and English just doesn’t do that feeling justice, and this is quite normal for me. I’m also aware how odd this might sound if someone was listening in. It was asked to listen to this podcast and hearing Oscar talk about this, that firstly made me really grateful for my upbringing. And secondly, it helped me understand how I can get what people from other cultures are trying to say when English words fail them. I work in a business where I do come across many people from different cultures.

What I’ve reflected on is that I’m able to pick up signals beyond the words such as tone, expression, body movement, and I’m able to connect with the essence of what that other person might be trying to say. The actual words doesn’t really matter. In these situations, notice that I don’t make assumptions unlike perhaps when I am communicating with someone else in English and there are plenty of assumptions being made. I’m just reflecting that my listening or levels of listening are different when speaking and listening to other people who speak other languages. This has been a really nice insight for myself and I’ll definitely be reading Oscar’s book and listening to others on this topic. It was a really, really great listen and I’m actually now going to go and re-listen to the podcast.

Wendy Bedborough:
Initially what I took from the conversation on the podcast was linking the importance of past, present, and future. The acknowledgement of what came before, to how important it is to pay attention to how we begin and how we end, whether that’s in individual sessions, training programs, change programs. If we don’t pay attention to the beginning, how can we end well and vice versa. If we don’t end well, how can we begin something else well? And that was my sense making. And then of course I listened again and whilst I could still make sense in the same way I realized that the shape of my listening changed the second time around. Who I am being, to use Oscar’s phrase, who I’m being listening is different depending on when I’m listening and what else has happened during that particular time. The context being so important because it shifted and changed again. That shape of listening keeps changing.

Claire Pedrick:
Honestly, when I heard that, I cried because I’m so moved by the experience of this kind of co-learning space and hearing what you are building and what we’re all building together out of simply a conversation. It’s absolutely extraordinary.

Oscar Trimboli:
Amazing and welcome back. What emerged for you while listening to these people’s reflections as they noticed what and how Claire and I were in a discussion, I always mention to the host if they’re okay with me asking them questions. Most say yes, yet they’re shocked when I actually ask the question or invite a reflection during our conversation. When I mentioned this to Claire, she said, “Of course.” That was her reply, and I’m delighted about how and what emerged in the space in between. As I heard the listeners’ reflections, these are the themes that appeared from my perspective. Maybe you have a different perspective. Email podcast@oscartrimboli.com. That’s podcast@oscartrimboli.com with the subject line, listen. Send us your reflections. What did you take away from the 16 other listeners?

Here are mine. There’s 16 of them, a second language and listening with very different granularity. I love that word, and how people interpret others language in a variety of ways. How musicians listen in a more connected way. How coding listening impacts rational and technical workplaces. The details, the speed and the length of stories, and how they influence the way the listener thinks. The impact of the processes and outcomes when participants from outside and inside the system or the ecosystem are either not included or included in the conversation. Being listening versus doing listening, bringing your presence before you Listen. How are you being as a listener? And do you realize it influences the way the speaker communicates? Be careful and thoughtful in the integration of the past and the future. How well do you balance this tension? Embodied languages influences the way the speaker communicates. I love the reflection on how memories in Greek were very different for that participant compared to memories in a second language.

I was fascinated how people heard different things based on the number of times they listened to the recording. Penny’s depth of reflection on silence. And we had a subsequent email conversation with her where she included her husband and he asked, “Oscar, have you ever coded silence or the prelude to silence?” The number of listeners who decided that they’re going to re-listen to the discussion again, either audio and video or both. I love the description of the shape of my listening changed. Exploring how native languages and using words in the language that you experience that feeling or memory in is more effective way to communicate. And then finally, the comparison of the discussion with a dawn chorus at sunrise and how that emerges from the silence.

These voices all remind me that people hear you from their perspective, not yours. As a speaker, we think what and how we say something is exactly what they heard and understood. The evidence from this discussion is that people hear what you say through their own filters. These filters may include their family upbringing, their culture, their education, their life experience, and many other dimensions of how they remember, feel, reflect, and understand something. In the next episode, Claire, Shaney and I process what we heard and how it will change our thinking about communication. 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 workplace, and you’ve given us the greatest gift of all, you’ve listened to us. Thanks for listening.