Oscar Trimboli:
Good day, it’s Oscar, and this is the continuation of a three-part experiment between Claire Pedrick, Shaney Crawford, and myself. This is part three of three. In episode 127, Claire and I discussed listening through many dimensions, and then in episode 128, you had the opportunity to listen to what others heard, saw, sensed, and made sense of during that first discussion in that episode 127. What will you hear next? Next is a discussion between Shaney, Claire and I, and what emerges after hearing what the listeners sensed, heard and saw in our discussion. In previous episodes of deep listening, I’ve been the host where I’ve interviewed two other guests. It’s happened a couple of times, yet this conversation between three of us felt really, really different. In episode 127, I was in the role of the guest and Claire, the host.

In this discussion, I was the host, and yet I sensed that this role wasn’t as helpful as it could have been for you to listen. As a result, something changes. It highlights the importance of the midpoint process check. Behind the scenes, whether I’m having a conversation, a meeting, a workshop, the midpoint process check is critical for me, for them and for us. It helps to notice what’s been useful so far, what they heard rather than what I said, and what they said they heard rather than what I thought they heard. What do we need to adjust in our remaining time, both what we’ll discuss and how we’ll discuss it? And then how do we prioritize what we’ve decided to focus on for the balance of our time?

Occasionally, if it’s early in the relationship or the conversation feels like it’s not progressing, I’ll also do a two-thirds check-in and I always make a check-in the last 25% of time as well. This helps me and them avoid the conversation, have you got any feedback? This way of doing the process check, we can actually control something. We can look forward and it’s productive. Feedback tells you about where you’ve been, the process check tells you about where you’re going. What else will you discover during this conversation? Well, you’ll discover how Claire gets a pencil to speak, and the impact and musicality of first and second languages. What do they look like? What do they sound like? What’s their tempo and what’s their rhythm?

Claire Pedrick:
Here comes the new recording. So we invited Shaney into the recording because it was Shaney Crawford who first introduced me and Oscar, or Oscar and I. And I got an email from Oscar and I came back from holiday saying, “Let’s experiment. Let’s have another conversation and see what happens.” So here it is and let’s see what happens.

Oscar Trimboli:
I have no idea how we’re going to do this.

Claire Pedrick:
My style is, just kick off and see how we go. I thought the data was fascinating. I think what’s more fascinating about the data is the episodes that people keep talking about and the episodes that they forget. Shared it with these people on this deepening partnership course and another one by Kathryn Mannix, how much they were more interested in how we talked than what we talked about. I thought that was fascinating.

Oscar Trimboli:
I think the process bit gets people super curious, the how versus the what. Oh, as we hear Claire say that, what’s going through your mind?

Shaney Crawford:
I listened to the podcast as a podcast and then I watched it as a video, and that was very interesting, and I feel like the two of you are like Jedi Masters in listening, and so it was like a Jedi face-off, like who’s going to talk first? Because that’s the amazing thing about the way that you both listen is that you create so much space for the other person. So the two of you, creating so much space for each other, was for me, fascinating to watch and to listen to. But more to watch. I didn’t catch it as much listening as I… Or, I did, there’s bigger pauses, but watching as well, there was a lot to see there too.

Oscar Trimboli:
And having done the same thing, meaning listen to it and then watch it. I was there live, but watching the recording on YouTube, there’s nothing that Claire disguises in her face. You can see it’s signaling things, whether that’s go and be curious about that or that’s had a big impact. There’s no secrets with Claire’s face.

Claire Pedrick:
I listened to it on the train on Friday and I was really proud of how much space we left after each… The pauses, I just thought the pauses were really interesting.

Oscar Trimboli:
What else surprised you about the audience reaction, Claire?

Claire Pedrick:
I know we asked them to respond, but people kept on responding and when I’m in supervision groups, people talk about it. It’s the episode that keeps on giving, and I think partly that is that they met both of us, and I think there isn’t that much around. There are books to read on listening, but listening to something about listening is a different thing. Or as you say, Shaney, watching.

Oscar Trimboli:
I was just saying to Shaney earlier on, Claire, that I threw the episode into an AI tool and asked to pull out the highlights, and it pulled out five highlights. Two of them was being the listening versus doing the listening, and the other one was second language, whatever that means, when we were talking about second language.

So I think the other three that the AI picked out was co-creation, flexibility and the actual origin story, so the backstory in the conversation, yet when I read the feedback from the audience, the one thing that’s consistent in the feedback from the audience is the, beyond be listening and second language, was acknowledging the past. And it got me thinking, AI will listen in a particular way and this audience will listen in a particular way. And when looked at the data that we had, so we had folks emailing us as well as sending us videos, this group was listening at a much different level from other groups that’ll typically be at level one and level two. The feedback, and the language, and the syntax that people were using was more about context, backstory, noticing the state of the speaker, which is level two, but there was a maturity in this group that isn’t present in generic audiences and-

Claire Pedrick:
And they’re more likely to be interest in, as you said, Oscar, how we listen, so the looking. So I just caught myself as you were talking, entirely taking my timing from what I saw and as well as from what I heard, but from what I saw. And I think that’s underplayed in lots of spaces about listening, the looking, whether that’s a visual looking or a on the phone and you can’t see them looking, but a deeper looking I think is missing often. I had a hysterical thing last week. I was doing a train the trainer in an organization for coaches, and I said, “We’ll have a coaching conversation. I’ll do it with somebody and then we’ll talk about how we give feedback to people.” I said to her, “What do you want to think about?” And she picked up her pen and she went, “This.” And then, probably for the next five minutes, she wasn’t looking at me.

So I wasn’t saying anything because she was busy. And in the feedback, one of them said, “I hated the silence.” At which point this lady had a real opinion. The lady who’d been using the silence well, had a very strong opinion, but the thing that was really interesting was at the end of the conversation, and if you’re on audio, I’m just waving my pencil in the air. She’s holding her pencil in her hand and waving it about, and I said, “What does your pencil need to say?” And off she went. And somebody said, “Why did you say that?” And I thought that was really interesting because I saw her pencil going, “I’ve still got something to say,” but clearly that’s a formed insight or a natural instinct. I don’t know. It’s very interesting.

Oscar Trimboli:
And I think it comes back to the point that was made by multiple listeners who came back and talked about how we were role modeling rather than teaching, and that it was more impactful for them to see how, be how. And I think it was Julian that said it, “I realized I stopped needed to perform and just be present.” And to me that was profound because it’s not a way I would explain it. So this is the lovely thing about having the ability to be reflective and reflexive about what the audience said, which is not an opportunity we often get. And I’m curious, Claire, when I sent out this email saying, “Would you like to experiment?”

Claire Pedrick:
I’m going to say something else first, if I may. As you were talking then, I recognized that I was only listening, that I wasn’t thinking about anything else, and I was certainly not thinking about what I was going to say. Well, I was obviously thinking something, I was thinking that, but I wasn’t thinking anything else. So that was interesting. So what was my response? My response now is, what an exciting thing to do another step in the experiment. My response then was, I so loved that conversation, of course we could have another one.

Oscar Trimboli:
There’s a document where we’ve collected all the feedback in. I’m just curious, as you read through all of that, what are the big themes that are coming across for each of you?

Shaney Crawford:
I live in Japan and I’m bilingual, Japanese and English, and so the theme of the second language really came out for me. And that’s a topic that I’m just fascinated with and always interested in having conversations about, because I know that I learned French in school. Because I’m Canadian, we have to learn French in school up until a certain grade. Did it because I loved languages and I love learning French, but the way that I learned French was from a textbook and I didn’t have a lot of exposure. This is before the internet, so I didn’t have a lot of exposure to French TV shows, or music, or things like that. Whereas in Japan, I was plopped into the middle of a town of 13,000 people, and I was the only person who spoke English.

So it’s very, very different learning a language in these two different ways. And what I found was Japanese very quickly crowded out French in my brain. It took over and to the point that I couldn’t even have a basic conversation with someone in French after having studied it for more than 10 years to the university level. And so I’m just fascinated with how languages work, how it’s in the brain. That is just fascinating because how can that happen? How can one language crowd out another, what’s going on there? And so the connections between listening, coaching, languages and speaking of course is… And my background is in linguistics. My undergraduate degree is in linguistics, so I just love this topic. So that’s the one that jumped out at me the most.

Claire Pedrick:
And build on what Shaney said, so I also learned French for more than 10 years. And at the peak of my French, French people thought I was Belgian, which I thought was great feedback. If they think you’re not English, that’s a really great thing, so… And then two years ago when I walked the Camino, I heard Spanish, I heard the sound of Spanish. And this year we spent a month in Spain, and I’ve been learning Spanish for two years. And people would say, “Your pace is, you sound like a Spanish person.” I didn’t have very many words, but there’s something about the way it…

It goes back to how we communicate, doesn’t it? And what was really interesting is we then went through France for five days coming home in our van where I’d been comfortable, and fluent, and able to communicate, and I had no vocabulary. It had gone, but the sound was still there. And so in dialogue, in listening and having conversations with people, there was a fluency in the way of having conversations even though some of the word bits were missing. And a lady at a restaurant said to me, she said,

“You sound French, so we can have a conversation that we understand because you sound..French

I find that fascinating.

So going back to your question, Oscar, well, number one, I just love the fact that people responded to the invitation and there was a generosity in your offer in that dialogue that we had, that went, we’ve got some books for you and we’d love to hear what you’ve got to say. And it felt to me as though there was a responding to your generosity in the way that people responded back to us. And what I really loved and I knew most, but not all of the listeners I know personally, but some of them I don’t. It felt like they were thinking. It felt, in their responses, it actually felt like they were processing, and that was so exciting because it wasn’t the answer to the quiz question is A. You said, “And,” 460 times in this podcast. There was just a… Yeah, that goes back to the how again, doesn’t it? The way they’ve constructed their responses was just the most beautiful thing. What about you?

Oscar Trimboli:
One of the questions I wanted to ask you about French and Spanish, you talked about the musicality of language and you were working with a composer. As a complete novice, the tempos would be different. I don’t know how different, but that would be different. And how would you describe the musicality of those two contrasting languages?

Claire Pedrick:
I don’t think it matters as long as you’re in the same space as the person that you are talking to. We run an online improvisation course now, to support people to improve their presence. And our improv teacher, Andy, gave us this exercise, the last course, where we had to speak in Gibberish. So we had to just go, “…” And what he did was he had two people having a conversation like that… And then somebody else had to watch and they had to decide what the conversation was about.

And it was all fun, but what was really interesting was how actually you could do that. You could get a sense of what the conversation was about simply by the… And also you respond, the way you respond to somebody when that’s the only… You can see and then you can hear the sound, but there’s no meaning in it. But the way that you respond to somebody when you dance it together creates its own meaning, which didn’t answer your question at all, but I think it’s really interesting.

Oscar Trimboli:
It gave me a little insight there about if we use Gibberish as a proxy there, meaning happens when it’s heard rather than meaning happens in its expression. Now, for those of you who aren’t watching, there’s a big light bulb that’s going on over Claire’s head right now.

Claire Pedrick:
Go back to the light bulb. I love that.

Oscar Trimboli:
I have a sense that meaning only exist in a shared space. And the way I often visualize it is clothes washing machine. When the lid is down, and it’s agitated, and it’s sudsy, and it’s dirty, and it’s moving, it’s doing a lot of work, but nothing actually happens till the rinse cycle. And it’s a completely different movement. And for me, when people are talking to themselves, their mind is like a washing machine. They’re using up all this energy and intensity, and it’s dirty, and it’s sudsy, and they’re agitated, and the rinse cycle is when they speak and share that. And at that point, a meaning emerges, yet it has to exist in a shared space.

You can make all the meaning of a story you want, but once you express that, it takes on a completely different meaning because you’ve been brave enough to share it. You’ve given it a presence in the world outside of your mind. This is the privilege of when you are present to listen, and you are present and you be listening rather than do listening. That person feels that you’ve created the container in which it’s safe enough to express something that’s dirty, it has agitated them, it’s sudsy, it’s murky, it’s not clear. And back to your specific question, no, I did not, that emerged now in this shared space and emerged because of your response to how I said it, or because we’re curious about the musicality of language. So Shaney is watching. Oh-

Shaney Crawford:
I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m thinking. It’s so many things.

Oscar Trimboli:
I’m just curious about what you notice.

Shaney Crawford:
I feel, well, possibly because you know each other a little bit more now and maybe you trust each other a little bit more now, you’re volleying things back and forth, and both of you are using your superpowers to build, and then build, and then build, possibly more than in the first one. I feel like this exchange that you’ve just had right here has been quite remarkable. And it has made me go off thinking several times as well. I’m an addict, I’m a food addict, and I’ve lost about a hundred pounds through being in a program for food addiction, and part of that is having a sponsor. And part of that is then becoming the sponsor once you’ve been in the program long enough.

I can’t remember where I was going with this. Oh, yes, I do. As a sponsor, I need to listen to the other person speak to me for 15 minutes. And I also speak to somebody for 15 minutes. And I’ve noticed in myself and in my sponsees that this happens all the time where there’s a great jumble of messy clothes up in somebody’s head, and they’re pulling one out, and they’re moving them around and jumbling them up, but nothing is happening. Action can’t happen because it is too much of a jumble, and then once they start talking, and if I listen instead of try to interrupt, or give advice, or direct the conversation in any way, then they can pull out one piece of clothing at a time and decide what to do with it rather than it all just being… Jumbled up in there.

So that’s the image that I was having in my head of this line that comes out, and maybe you need to put some back and take it out again, but just it’s the taking out. It’s the speaking, it’s the getting it out of you that does make the meaning, I think, helps you know what you really actually think and gets you towards action.

Oscar Trimboli:
So I’m going to invite the three of us into a space called time out process check. How we going? We’re about halfway through. Given the balance of our time together, how would we like to shape it?

Claire Pedrick:
I’m loving it.

Oscar Trimboli:
I’m going to go first because I’m in this host role and I don’t think it’s serving the audience if I stay there the whole time.

Claire Pedrick:
I love that we co-created something.

Shaney Crawford:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oscar, do you do coaching as well as everything that you do in the listening forum? Because I know that Claire does listening and that’s a part of her coaching. So…

Oscar Trimboli:
Yes. That’s probably the opposite. I’ll pick clients who say to me, “Hey, do you coach?” If I want to work with them, I’ll say, “Yes.” If I don’t, I’ll refer them to somebody else. I get to pick too.

Claire Pedrick:
I think that’s amazing.

Shaney Crawford:
That’s fair. That’s fair.

Oscar Trimboli:
The reason I do that is a monk told me once, we were chatting about, I was starting off in business and I said to them, “I just seem to want more.” And they said, “When is it enough? What’s the difference between more and enough?” And that was the perfect invitation at that time because I was just saying, “Yes,” to everybody. I’ll say, “Yes,” to that and say, “Yes,” to that, and I’ll just make the calendar work. And I’m sure the likelihood of me meeting and hearing that monk, and having a one-on-one conversation with them at that time, was no coincidence. And that simple statement stayed with me forever. What’s the difference between more and enough? And then once my dad got sick, more and enough was a completely different formula for me.

Now, a lot of people say, “Oh, I want to work a four-day week.” And I was like, “I will be careful what you wish for. I have to work a three and a half day week.”

And they look at me crazy. It’s like, “Yeah, well, the other time is care time for my father.” And they go, “Oh, okay,” and all of a sudden their perception of a three and a half day week is very different.

Claire Pedrick:
I just had an insight as you were talking about how to move the boundary of what’s life giving. So thank you for that. It was insight about what to say, “No,” to, actually.

Shaney Crawford:
I never was able to have enough food, and enough… And since I’ve put down food and got that regulated, then something else comes up. I need to go shopping, or I need to be on my phone, or I think this is something that all humans, I don’t know about all humans, but all humans who have tendencies to be addicts, don’t know what’s enough, can’t get enough until that hole gets filled. There’s a hole inside you that gets filled at some point, hopefully. And I think that’s the thing that, once you feel like you’re enough, then everything else can be enough.

Oscar Trimboli:
Beautiful. Well said. So we’ve got a hole to fill for 45 minutes or not. We don’t have to go for 45 minutes. It’s like, we could stop right now. What would they want us to chat about in our remaining time?

Claire Pedrick:
I know one other question they would… Do you want me to host this bit now? I’m really curious about what do each of us know now, or feel now, or understand now, that we didn’t have at the beginning of this conversation?

Oscar Trimboli:
Before I answer, I want everyone to notice that Claire’s tempo, word choices, were completely different to previous conversations we had the minute she moved into host mode. So I’m just curious if you’ve all heard that in her voice.

Claire Pedrick:
Nice process thing, Oscar.

Shaney Crawford:
What do we know now that we didn’t know before? Coming into today’s conversation, I was thinking, I need to have the notes in front of me, and I need to have the pen, and the paper and the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and I need to prepare. And I was nervous, but I also know that both of you say, “You need to be present. You need to listen, and you need to listen and build rather than listen to respond.”

Claire Pedrick:
Wow.

Shaney Crawford:
And so through this conversation, I have been trying to quieten my own insecurities and also my own voice inside my head saying, “Oh, tell them the story about…

And then this happened, and then that happened, and, oh and ……”

Just quieten that down, and just actually listen, and trust that there will be something to say when it gets to you, and that’s been a really good… It’s a crazy time to test this out, very public way to test it out. I’ve been trying to do that and I’ve been learning, therefore, to trust myself a little bit more and to trust the process, trust the listening process.

Claire Pedrick:
Loving your honesty. How does that feel, Shaney, to have trusted the process in front of others?

Shaney Crawford:
It was scary. It’s scary because I am used to, we’re all used to, the way that we normally listen, and the way that we normally communicate, which is, a person says “A, B, C,” and the other person says, “Oh, yeah, I also A, B, C, but doesn’t actually connect with…” Yeah, but I’m saying this is my A, B, C, not your A, B, C. And so, yes, it’s hard, but it’s so important, and I think that this is the safe place to do that, even though it’s in front of however many, I don’t know how many people will see this in the future. This is what the two of you, I think, the two of you are all about, is being present and making that space for other people to think and for yourself to think.

Oscar Trimboli:
And just to build on the A, B, C, yours and the A, B, C, theirs, this is where people are listening at level two, at the content. That’s your A, B, C, my A, B, C. And when you move up to three, it’s a shared context. What is shared in A, what is shared in B, what is shared in C, rather than your A, B, C is different to my A, B, C. Or, well, maybe we can do a bit of deconstruction and see what’s shared in the A, the B, and C, or we can see what’s shared across all of those. And I think one of the things that people often ask me is, “How can you listen to the dialogue rather than the participants?” And too many of us get stuck in listening to the participants rather than is the dialogue progressing, based on the original intent of what the participants have arrived at?

The insight is when you hear the A, B, C and my A, B, C and your A, B, C, you’re in a place where you are still telling yourself a story as the listener, why their A, B, C is wrong, or incorrect, or whatever value judgment. But if you can find shared elements in that, you may find also a way to progress. Back to Claire’s question in the East, and Shaney, you can talk to this, but I’ve had it shown to me more explicitly in Chinese art. It may be present in Japanese art, but I don’t know it well enough. There is a very famous diagram painting and, Shaney, you’ll know the one I’m referring to. It’s a fisherman on a very small boat with huge waves, and it’s an iconic-

Shaney Crawford:
Mm-hmm. Hokusai.

Oscar Trimboli:
Hokusai, thank you. And what it is about is using negative space versus positive space. So how can you highlight something very small by making everything around it very large? And the way my brain works, when Claire says, “What do we know now that we didn’t before?” I always move into this mindset is, what’s the opposite of that, and why haven’t they asked that? So Claire asked, “What do we know that we didn’t know before?” And my mind went to, I wonder what we don’t know. And I play with this duality and go, “I wonder if it’s helpful for the shared meaning, the group, the dialogue to bring that up or not.” And that’s why in communication, our choice of words shapes the container we’re going to dialogue through.

So Claire’s asked and made the invitation, “What do we know that we didn’t know before?” So for me, what I know now is that meaning can only exist when it’s shared, is ironic because I had to share it to understand its value.

What it’s got me speculating on right now is I wonder if my mind is open enough to understand what I don’t know because of this amazing interaction right now. And is that just the simple example of more versus enough? Is enough just being happy with what I know, and is more the relentless pursuit of what I don’t still know? So that’s what I’m juggling with right now, and Claire’s got a wonderful smile on her face.

Claire Pedrick:
I’ve noticed two things and I don’t have a clue, I’m just going to offer the words. There’s something about soul, there’s something about a willingness to have some level of soul connection, and there’s also something about slowing right down. Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli:
I’m sensing right now is that a meeting that’s scheduled for 45 minutes, or an hour, or 90 minutes, or whatever, often the counterpart, the person you’re working with can have their breakthrough in 15 minutes. So stop and check. Is that enough for them in this conversation? Because the remaining time, you may overwhelm them, and they need to process that fully, whether that’s embodying it in action or anything else, but that can only exist if you’re present to everything that’s happening around them. And I think to Claire and Shaney, thank you because the other thing I said to you at the beginning, I have no idea where this is going. Part of my brain’s going, how do I construct this into a valuable artifact for everybody, and sharing all the amazing recordings, and trusting myself enough to do that? There’s a openness I can feel of a opera singer. I feel my diaphragm’s fuller, and yet my head is emptier, if that makes sense.

Claire Pedrick:
I love that, and you can see it, can’t you, Shaney? You could see it his face. Shaney, anything you want to build on there?

Shaney Crawford:
My past pattern of listening has been mainly speaking. Before I met Oscar and before I met you, Claire, and listened to all of your podcasts and read your books, I realized that my main way of communicating was speaking over people instead of listening to them. And so this has been a very, very incredible opportunity for me just to listen and not try construct, actively try not to think at the same time as listening, because you can’t do them both at the same time properly.

Claire Pedrick:
Ah, what a beautiful line.

Oscar Trimboli:
And this is where people say to me that listening is hard. Listening is difficult, it’s draining. And if you’re just present, the listening will happen as the byproduct. You don’t have to try to listen. If you’re present first, you’ve got the foundation there. I visualize a sumo before they move into the wrestle, they put one foot down, and one foot down, and they’ve got their presence. That that is very practiced and everything after that is built on top of that, but if you haven’t got that solid foundation, you can’t help them expand and move the dialogue forward. So for a lot of us, when we find listening is hard, it’s just a signal to you that you are not present. It’s not a signal that you’re a bad listener.

Claire Pedrick:
Ah.

Oscar Trimboli:
Be in your body and feel what is not present for you first, because a lot of people think it’s all about how do I listen to… It’s like what are you not listening to in yourself? And then once you’ve got that foundation, building on the rest is much easier.

Shaney Crawford:
Can I build on that? As you were talking, I was thinking about judo actually. I know more about judo than karate, although I don’t know a lot about judo, but the idea in judo that it’s not that you get yourself on solid feet and then try to pull the other person or push the other person, but that the first character in judo is [foreign language 00:42:08], which means soft and flexible, because you need to use that flexibility or you need to be flexible and sense what the other person is going to do or say, or not say in judo, but what they’re going to do. You use that against them to pull them down, but just this interplay between the two people has to be built on flexibility rather than this idea of like, I’m listening now. It shouldn’t be that hard.

Oscar Trimboli:
And again, with judo or karate, it’s all happens in a shared space. You can practice all you want by yourself, but the minute the two come into contact, whatever you thought you have to… And when people say to me, what does the research say about great listeners? They’re flexible and they’re curious. They’re the two things in my research that separates people who can dialogue and explain at level three, four, and five, versus those at one and two, is flexibility and curiosity. They don’t hold a position. They’re flexible and they’re flexible because they’re curious. So those two work together.

Shaney Crawford:
Hmm.

Claire Pedrick:
Softer listening, not harder listening. I’m just wondering whether that’s enough.

Oscar Trimboli:
Listening is the willingness to have your mind changed. Originally, this discussion between Shaney, Claire and I were scheduled for 90 minutes and it concluded around the 75-minute mark. That’s including all the arrival chit-chat and departure discussions we chose not to record. I’m glad that Shaney and Claire changed my mind about listening.

What are you taking away from this discussion? Email, podcast@oscartrimboli.com with the subject line, LISTEN. Let us know what’s changed in your mind about listening as a result of this. That’s podcast@oscartrimboli.com.

Let’s listen now to the checkout process and I invite you to notice what we would’ve missed if we stopped the conversation without this final checkout process. Thanks for listening.

So as we have a process check in the middle, let’s do a debrief at the end.

Claire Pedrick:
You start.

Oscar Trimboli:
I’m going to throw it right out there and say this episode is more powerful.

Claire Pedrick:
I agree.

Shaney Crawford:
I agree.

Oscar Trimboli:
And we say listening’s situational, relational, contextual. We think about all those three things, we shared a space through the documents and all of that, but the trust, I’ve taken risks here, I don’t take anywhere else.

Claire Pedrick:
Oh, I think I agree with you. I think there was something about an agreement here to co-create, which felt like it was an agreement to go where we haven’t gone before, and what a beautiful thing that is.

Shaney Crawford:
I want more. Make it happen again, please. I will accept enough for today as long as you can talk again, because I really think this is world-class learning, deep thinking and learning that’s happening here and I hope it can happen again.

Claire Pedrick:
The other day I was trying to explain to somebody what this experiment was about and they said to me, “So you were trying to share everything that you know about listening.” And I said, “No, we weren’t trying to share what we already know about listening. We were trying to learn, as Oscar said, about what we didn’t know about listening.” I have to say that this episode was extraordinary. It was most wonderful and also most edgy. Yeah, there was a lot of emotion around it, and so much learning about what we call the space between, but the space between is a very intangible thing. And I think the thing that I absolutely loved, listening back to that episode, is to recognize that you can hear the space between, and you can sense what it feels like, and what a beautiful thing that is.

There’s another episode, series three, episode six, on listening with Kathryn Mannix, where there’s a similar experience I think, of how somebody is having a conversation. If you want learn how to do this more, we’ve got a number of courses about deeper stuff. We’re running a Deeper Noticing program with somebody who takes photographs using mindful photography. And we’re not teaching people to be mindful photographers, but we’re teaching us to look, and to look again, and to see. And I think that’s one of the things that coaches are weaker at, is listening through seeing.

It’s so interesting, and we’ve also got a Deeper Partnership course, and this is going to be part of the pre-work for that. Certainly their first episode with Oscar was, and this will be as well, because it’s about what does deeper partnership sound like, really sound like, as in the music? What does it look like? Who knows where this will lead. I am deeply grateful to Shaney for the introduction, and to Oscar for being willing to try out stuff in public, and the invitation from him to me to do a second try out of stuff together. And I just think that’s a beautiful model of learning, and I’m really proud to have been part of this with you. Thank you. Bye-bye.