Oscar Trimboli

Listening happens in the space in between. In between two people, in between two ideas, in between two teams, in between two organizations, in between two generations, in between opposing ideas. This is an experiment to explore what can happen in between.

G’day, it’s Oscar and what you’re about to hear next, I’ll call an experiment. In March, one of the Deep Listening Ambassadors, Shaney Crawford from Japan. Shaney suggested to Claire Pedrick. Now, Claire leads an organization called 3D Coaching in England. And Shaney said to Claire, “I think it’d be worthwhile to get Oscar as a guest on your podcast, Claire.” The podcast, it’s called The Coaching Inn. And this is a reason I call it an experiment. I call it an experiment for a couple of reasons. The first reason you’ll get to hear, see and sense how somebody else listens to me for a change rather than me being in the traditional role of being the host. The next reason that I call this an experiment is because Claire and I offered some copies of “how to listen” in exchange for the perspective and the thinking that changed as a result of people listening to our conversation.

02:05 Now, what happened next is Claire received a series of reflections from her listeners and she was touched by how many and the depth of the reflections that happened. Now, the episode you are about to hear was published in May. Claire took some time off for a vacation around Europe.

And then in July, I sent Claire an email with the subject line, “I have an idea to honor their feedback.” As the emails moved back and forth, we decided let’s record our reflections of what the listeners noticed, how they made sense of our conversation, how could we honor what they had sent us? How could we honor what they heard, what they saw and what they sensed in our discussion?

And to close the loop off, we invited Shaney Crawford, the person who introduced us originally to be part of this recording. In September, we recorded a conversation with Shaney, Claire and myself, and we recorded what changed for us as we listened to those who’d heard us in the original interview.

03:29 The experiment continues. Claire is publishing the entire three parts of the conversation. Part one, the initial discussion between Claire and Oscar, part two, the listener’s reflection. And then part three, what changed for us as a result of listening to those who heard us? Claire’s built that into what she calls a masterclass. What you’re about to hear next is what I think of as part one of this experiment. In the show notes, there’s links to the original interview on 3D Coaching’s podcast as well as the video.

04:16 If you’d like to improve your listening in the workplace, maybe consider applying for our next online group training course. You can visit, that’s oscartrimboli.com/fundamentals. And there you can apply to be part of the next quarter’s cohort. The cohort is limited in size, a minimum of eight and a maximum of 12 participants. We do this because listening is a contact sport and it is improved faster by playing well together. In this course, you’ll learn the art and science of listening in the workplace. So if you’d like to apply, visit oscartrimboli.com/fundamentals.

For now, it’s time to explore part one of this listening experiment with Claire and I.

Announcer 05:20 You are at The Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching’s virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engaged in the world of coaching.

Claire Pedrick 05:33 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the Coaching Inn. I’m your host, Claire Pedrick. Today I’m in conversation with Oscar Trimboli in Australia. I was introduced to Oscar by Shaney Crawford who sent me a message on LinkedIn and went, “You have to meet this man. He has to come to The Coaching Inn.” So welcome Oscar.

Oscar Trimboli 05:55 Thank you Shaney, and thank you Claire. I’m looking forward to listening to your questions today.

Claire Pedrick 06:02 Well, and thank you for the copies of the book that you’ve sent to me, which we’ll be sharing with listeners who… You and I can work out together how we’re going to share them with our listeners, but really great to have a look at your book. So I love it. Oscar’s book’s called “how to listen” and there are sound bites in it that sound like they’ve come from me, which I love because I always like it when I agree with somebody’s book. I love the bit about seeing and hearing and sensing, but my question to you is what started you out in the journey to listening?

I have to kind of go to April 2008. I’m in a boardroom at Microsoft. We were on a video conference, 18 people across Sydney, Seattle and Singapore. And there’s a lot of people in the room, lots of people with laptops furiously doing unnatural things to Excel to try and bend budgets into political context, growth context, mark context, and a meeting’s supposed to go for 90 minutes. And at the 20-minute market, my Vice President, my boss, Tracy, looks me straight in the eye across the boardroom table and says, “Oscar, we need to talk immediately after this meeting.” So Claire, from that moment on, I did not listen to another word in what happened in the budget meeting because the only thing that was going through my head was, “I’m about to get fired. How many weeks of salary have I got left and who are the five people I need to call to find paid employment?”

I think the answer was eight weeks salary. And by some miracle of nature, the meeting finished at the 70-minute mark, not 90. And everybody kind of packed up their equipment and started to head out of the room and Tracy said, “Oscar, make sure you close the door because what I have to say to you is very important.”

08:08 And I went, oh, great. And as I stepped back only half way towards the boardroom table, Tracy said to me, “You have no idea what you did at the 20-minute mark, do you?”

And I thought, I’m getting fired and I don’t even know why. And I sat down and Tracy said to me, “Oscar, if you could code how you listen, you could change the world.”

What I heard was, woo-hoo.I hadn’t been fired.

And honestly, I didn’t think anything of this listening stuff for about three weeks because I’d got this huge uplift in my budget because I didn’t pay attention. And then the chief financial officer asked me to come and audit his listening in his team meeting, to which I agreed. And I started to take notes and I realized, oh, I’m coding how to listen.

09:02 The difference between hearing and listening is action. I hope I’ve honored Tracy. And we’ve got 32,000 people who’ve participated in our research study about what gets in their way when it comes to listening. We’ve coded it into jigsaw puzzle games and we’ve coded it into a hundred-odd episodes of podcasts.

We’ve coded it into three books. Tracy did want me to code it into software, and that’ll be the next step in the journey. So that’s how it got started, Claire. I thought I was getting fired. And for leaders out there who might be listening or coaches, what you say and what they hear are two completely different things as I proved.

Claire Pedrick 09:50 Yes. I love that story on many levels.

Oscar Trimboli 09:54 Oh, which level should we chat about? There are other backstories in my heritage. There are backstories in growing up and going to a school with 23 nationalities, there are stories about how I would have team meetings in our contact center at Microsoft and everybody had to listen to customer calls for an hour before we came in.

There’s many stories, but I think that’s the moment where I went, oh, okay, there’s something I can go towards rather than go away from.

Claire Pedrick 10:31 It’s the irony that makes me smile, that your breakthrough in listening came through when you didn’t listen.

Nice.

Oscar Trimboli 10:42 Life has a way of teaching us things in ways we don’t anticipate. And I think if you have…

I think my lesson was the curiosity when Brian,

the CFO asked me, “Hey, can you come and listen to my team meeting?”

And there’s a whole backstory there where I fought him for about three times in our communication, but he said to me,

11:04 “Hey, Oscar, I can’t fix the top line of your budget, but we can invest for growth.”

And he was speaking my language then and I went, well, okay, if he’s going to invest for growth, the least I can do is go and audit. He’s listening. So yeah, that’s where the journey started and where we at 2008, we’re a good nearly 15 years down the track now.

Claire Pedrick 11:26 So what did audit listening look like, sound like, feel like?

Oscar Trimboli 11:32

It was an A4 piece of paper.

(11:37):

And when I started off, what I was always doing in group context is I map the room, literally where is everybody sitting on a piece of paper? If you speak, you get a dot. If you ask a question, you get a question mark. And if you ask a clarifying question, you get an upside down question mark.

(12:01):

And what I notice is where’s the gravity? So that map will really quickly show you that who’s not being listened to, who’s not speaking up in that map that we draw.

(12:17):

And what I also map is each third or quarter of the meeting. So if it’s a half an hour meeting, we’ll map each 10 minutes. And if it’s a one-hour meeting, we will map each 15 minutes.

(12:30):

And what I map is how many people haven’t spoken at each of those time sequences and see if that number’s static or increases or is complete by the time the conversation completes.

(12:46):

The other thing I was auditing back then was how long or short the question is, meaning sometimes they ask double barrel, triple barrel questions and you just kind of like, I’m not even sure what the question is, let alone the answer. So I was always curious who attempted to answer it versus who wanted to clarify.

(13:08):

Did you mean the first bit, the second bit, the third bit, how’s A, B and C connected and those kinds of things.

(13:19):

That is how in a very rudimentary way, we noticed or I noticed, because Tracy said to me, if you could code how I listen.

(13:29):

And what I did very quickly was, okay, so what does the literature say, whether that’s academic or practitioner literature about how people listen or if I get into a topic, I go pretty deep pretty quick.

(13:40):

And there didn’t seem to be a deep overlap between practitioner orientations and academic orientations.

(13:49):

Academic orientations tend to come from a therapeutic psychology, psychiatry, some modality that was from a therapy rather than necessarily a commercial organizational outcome.

(14:05):

And I speculate, my hypothesis is that that listening needs to progress rather than just being what people might see in a Netflix video of what a psychologist or a psychiatrist get.

(14:21):

Because I always joke to people listening in the workplace is not therapy. And if you’re trying to do therapy, you’re not serving yourself or them, unless you’re certified.

(14:32):

And if you’re certified in therapy, then you’ll be choiceful in whether that’s useful or not. But in exploring all the literature, there’s talk about listening, being situational, relational, contextual.

(14:47):

It’s such a dynamic orientation. You have to be about listening. And in the book we talk about what distinguishes good listeners from great listeners is their situational and relational flexibility and orientation to notice what’s going to be useful not just for the other, but for the system or the group that they’re operating in.

(15:12):

And for me, my nerdy parts, that was the fun in doing nearly a thousand qualitative surveys and reviewing them line by line in spreadsheets and the quantitative.

(15:25):

And my favorite statistic is three quarters of people think they’re well above or above average listeners. But if you ask the question the other way, as a speaker, how would you rate the other people’s listening?

(15:37):

Only 12% of them rate somebody above or well above average when it comes to listening.

(15:45):

So there’s a very different self-awareness because we don’t have… As we do in math, we have four operators, add, divide, subtract, and multiply. It’s really clear.

(15:59):

And in language context, whether that’s English or other languages, we have syntax that helps us. In music, there’s sheet music and the way notes work together. In chemistry, we have the periodic table of elements. In communication, there’s nothing as concrete as that. So it’s little wonder where we’re not great at listening.

Claire Pedrick (16:21):

How long have you got?

Oscar Trimboli (16:32):

As my wife says, “Oscar, you could talk about listening for the rest of your life.”

(16:35):

I said, “well, that’s the plan.”

Claire Pedrick (16:39):

Yes. I’ve been doing some work around the sound of conversations and the sound of how people pass from one to the other. And I’m definitely going to go away and think about your dots and your upside down question marks.

Oscar Trimboli (16:56):

Yeah, I’ve got a little video that I talk over. I’ll share that with you. That’s got an example of that happening over time where I’m coding a theoretical conversation.

Claire Pedrick (17:07):

Oh, amazing.

Oscar Trimboli (17:07):

Tell me more about the sound of conversation. I’m fascinated.

Claire Pedrick (17:12):

It connects to what you’ve said in your book.

(17:15):

So for me, there’s something about the offer about the handing over the conversation from the listener.

(17:25):

The facilitation of the conversation hands the conversation over to the other person as they listen and then only takes it back when that’s appropriate. So you’ve got a bit in your book about okay, not being a great way of responding.

(17:43):

And okay isn’t a great way of responding for a lot of reasons. And one of the reasons I noticed from watching lots and lots of recordings of dialogues in gallery view, so you can see the eyes of both people.

(17:58):

And so you can watch the toing and froing, offering sounds, sound like a comma.

(18:10):

And so

(18:12):

they leave the sound with the other person,

(18:15):

whereas okay, is a stopping sound.

(18:19):

So if I say, okay, you’re going to go, she’s waiting to say something else.

(18:30):

And there’s some really simple and very interesting stuff about the music of coaching and I’m just about to engage in dialogue with a musician who takes notes about conversations like you do and completely differently from how you do, I’m sure to see what that can teach us.

Oscar Trimboli (18:52):

Can we kind of play with something together?

Claire Pedrick (18:56):

Please.

Oscar Trimboli (18:58):

I have a sense. And if I won a lottery and had the opportunity to do a PhD, this is what I’d do it in. I sense that people who have a second language listen with a different granularity to people who are only dialoguing in one language and they’ve only ever had one language.

(19:20):

And I want to be careful about how I explain a language.

(19:24):

So a language may be music, a language may be math, a language may be chemistry, and our language may be your native tongue as well.

(19:33):

And because of where I’m located and no doubt where you are located as well, we operate across multiple cultures, we operate across multiple contexts and people who may not have the same home language that we speak in a dialogue. And often I’m in situations, particularly in group work where the person is struggling to find the words in the system language.

(19:59):

Typically, it’s English, but it may not be, may be French. Particularly in global NGOs and sporting systems and all of that French and Spanish and other languages.

(20:12):

And when I’m in that situation and a person is struggling, I ask them to pause, collect their thoughts and then say it in their home language. Because once they do, they sense it very differently.

(20:28):

And I find the spoken language system words really quickly because they go and connect with a feeling of when they said that before. But I also believe sedimentary rock in an archaeology dig because you’ve got these extra layers through other language context, you listen in a completely different way. That’s my speculation.

(20:51):

What do you hear? What do you see? What do you feel when I say that?

Claire Pedrick (21:02):

I think that’s so interesting.

(21:05):

I’m just thinking about watching people listening in languages I don’t understand. I’m also thinking as you’re talking about if we listen so that the other person understands, which is often the purpose of listening, that’s a beautiful description.

(21:32):

Well, they don’t need to be speaking the same language as us to understand it. So that makes me think about that. And the other thing it makes me think about is if really deep listening is about what we see and hear and sense, we can see and hear and sense when we don’t understand what they’re saying anyway. That’s what I was thinking.

Oscar Trimboli (21:58):

Yeah. And in the book there’s an example where somebody says to me,

(22:03):

“Be prepared, I’m just going to vomit on you.”

(22:06):

And they did. And it went for about 25 minutes where I was literally present, but halfway through, there was a shift in their body state and I could have missed it if I was just fixated on the words. But there was a shift and when they complete, they go, “wow, glad I got that out.”

(22:29):

And I said, “Oh, I just noticed something about halfway through.”

(22:34):

And they go, “Oh, what did you notice?”

(22:35):

I said, “Oh, your body shifted and you did this.”

(22:39):

And they go, “Yeah, that’s when I decided I’m sick of my own excuses.”

(22:42):

And I actually made a decision and I thought, WoW, if they didn’t have that reflected back to them, how more convicted they were about that decision with somebody else noticing.

(22:57):

Meaning that as we work with people, when they feel seen, heard and valued, it’s because you’ve listened to what they think and what they mean, not what they’ve said.

(23:12):

What they’ve said is a series of ingredients.

(23:15):

What matters is the recipe and the menu that ultimately that places. And that’s why I think for people who have multiple languages, they just have this incredible richness that someone like me who has a monolingual approach can never seek to understand.

(23:37):

Although both my stepchildren went on exchange and had to learn German and French and later Hindi.

And I see how they process the world differently. But they process the world differently because they learned music first and that gave them a way to think about learning a language that wasn’t something that they grew up with and their parents and their extended family taught them.

24:09  The Sedimentary rock matters to me. I often want to go a lot further down into the layers that people maybe staying at the surface on.

Claire Pedrick 24:21 What a beautiful story, the vomiting for 20 minute person.

Oscar Trimboli 24:28 That was their words, not mine. And they said, put your hazmat suit on, which was pre-COVID days too. So it always sticks in my head. And the example I was thinking about the person in the most recent example was speaking in Hebrew and their language flow in a written format goes from right to left, not left to right. And often wonder with Sanskrit and with Japanese and other languages where the orientation is very different, how much nuance we miss because we have a language orientation from an individual perspective rather than a collective perspective.

25:20

As an example, when you look at multi-layered cultures that are high context cultures like the Japanese or the Korean or the Chinese or the indigenous Aboriginal communities of Australia as an example as well.

I have lots that the aunties and uncles have taught me about their ways of Dadirri, which means listen to your lands, listen to your people and listen to yourself.

The thing they talk about is Oscar, it’s not those separate parts, it’s all completely integrated. You can’t think of one without the other two.

And again, in my way of thinking, I value the deconstruction then it makes sense to me. But in collective cultures, it’s the integrity and the integration of all of those things that we necessarily aren’t conscious of when we are listening across cultures that we need to be much more conscious of, particularly to check in for what they heard rather than what we said.

Claire Pedrick 26:28 Just made sense of something. Thank you.

Oscar Trimboli 26:30 Say more.

Claire Pedrick 26:34 So we have run some of our training in Australia.

So we have Australians on lots of our training, but some of our training we’ve run in Australian time.

And working with a colleague who is in Australia, we felt that we should respect that it was an Australian course even though people were on it globally because it was in Australian time.

So we use the acknowledgement of the lands and the context that is used in Australia respecting those who’ve come before.

And it made something different for delegates from other places. So we still do that. So I’m running a course at the moment, doesn’t have any Australians on it.

27:30

It’s slightly different because we’ve taken out especially the peoples of which was in the acknowledgement that we used when we were running it in Australia. But I think there’s been something different about those courses because I’m just thinking…

27:51

You’re a very good listener by the way.

We’re encouraging everybody to acknowledge conversations and systems and everything that have come before in a very human way. Because you can get very organizational development about systems, can’t you? But there’s a humanity.

Oscar Trimboli 28:19

The north system, the south system, the west system, and all those other kind of mechanical overlays.

And yet our organizational systems are nothing more than the oral traditions that we pass on through the culture, which is no different from 60,000 years of dreaming.

And the wonderful gift that my indigenous brothers and sisters give us to go, the story helps you make sense of your past, your present and your future and how you and those around you fit into that. And the best storytelling cultures are the best listening cultures because they’re training multiple generations on how to be present to listen to their elders.

29:09

And in the context that I’m talking about our indigenous communities in Australia and our Māori cousins and our Polynesian cousins, there is a tuning that the elders do to bring silence to the circle before it commences. And it’s much longer than what you would at the commencement of any meeting in an organizational system because they’re bringing the presence of history and the stories they’re going to tell from the past, which have all been handed down.

29:42

And in organizational systems, I think we get overly sophisticated where we’re trying to map it and put it into software and create hierarchies or diagrams. And the only way you make sense of all of that is the tradition of telling stories and the tradition in a workplace is how do things get done here?

30:05

Why do people get promoted?

Why do people get fired?

They’re all stories. You can put all the organizational values you want on the wall, yet a story brings them to life and helps people understand how it makes sense. So I’m very grateful. I’m on Wallumedegal country and it’s a river system. And there’s an additional element of the lands that the aunties and uncles have taught me about the traditions of the fish and how they keep the lands for the next generation. And I think in organizational systems, we orientate closely to the present and we forget our past and our future and we miss a big opportunity.

The flip side is if you look at the really high performing systems in terms of financial ROI, they always have longevity in the leadership team that they’re not swapping them out all the time.

31:05

And it’s those ones that swap it out all the time because they’re only in the present. They’re not acknowledging past and future. There’s a sense, a tradition that they’re not listening to in the past or for in the future.

So yeah, I’m delighted that it’s helped you make sense of what’s really powerful. The Inuit communities in North America, the Eskimo communities have these traditions as well.

The tribal elders in the Amazon and in the first tribes particularly that I’m aware of in Tanzania and the communities around that, they have great traditions where silence is a sign of wisdom, respect, and authority.

31:59

Whereas in The West, silence is a cue to lack of understanding, insight, quality, speed, whatever they may overlay on that. But it’s a false overlay.

We have all this negative language around silence that’s called the awkward silence, the pregnant pause, the deafening silence. There’s no language in an English context that showcases and gives honor to the power of silence. It’s continuously viewed in a context that’s not productive.

Claire Pedrick 32:44 I agree. And when I was writing… I’ve just got another book out called The Human Behind the Coach, which I co-wrote with Lucia Baldelli.

And we’ve got a chapter in there about silence.

And one of the things that I felt really strongly needed to be in the chapter on silence was that just because you’re not talking doesn’t mean its silence.

33:11

And you’ve just described cultures who in their tradition have got a deep silence, not just an, I’m not talking silence.

Oscar Trimboli 33:33 And I’ll bring in the Meta point. So I’ll give you a really simple example. I’m part of a process where I’m handing over some work to other people and tomorrow they will be presenting. I’ve set them up for success. I’m very comfortable that they’re going to do an amazing job.

And on Friday, I just sent both of them a text and said, “do you want me to be present?”

34:05

And the reply back from both of them near instantaneously was, “No, we don’t want you to present. We are presenting.”

And I went back and I said, “Okay.”

We had a phone call today.

And I said, “Is there anything else I can do to set you up to be successful tomorrow?”

And they said, “No, no, we’re great. We’re all good.”

I said, “Just last Friday I sent you a text that said, do you want me to be present?”

34:43

And you came back and said, “No, I’m okay to present.”

I said, “My only invitation for you and my wish is that tomorrow when you present, you are present.” And we had a very long laugh about that.

Claire Pedrick 34:59 That’s going to make it into a book, isn’t it?

Oscar Trimboli 35:04 Maybe, maybe not. Earlier on you said, “Oh, you’re a good listener.” What am I doing that’s signaling that to you? Because not everyone can see us.

Claire Pedrick 35:25 We are co-creating this conversation. So I’m listening to you and you are listening to me, and some things are emerging from that space. And can I be really honest?

Not everybody engages in podcasts like that when they’re a guest.

Oscar Trimboli 35:51 Meaning a two-way dialogue?

Claire Pedrick 35:54 Yeah, meaning-

Oscar Trimboli 35:55 Or something else.

Claire Pedrick 35:56 Yeah, because if you’ve come to promote your, whatever, the quality that comes out of the co-creation that comes out of the silence isn’t always present.

Oscar Trimboli  36:15 And if you imagine a couple of people you know who listen, what do you think they’re taking away from our conversation? If they were kind of going to summarize it in a sentence or…

Claire Pedrick 36:27 I could answer that or I could respond to what I’ve just noticed.

I’m going to answer your question, but I am going to just make an observation.

I don’t think you know what you’re going to say next.

I think that the listening is demonstrated in the responding to what’s emerging.

If there’s a tiny little answer to your question. What do we think-

Oscar Trimboli 37:06 And I think it answers both questions to some extent too, doesn’t it?

Claire Pedrick 37:11 Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli 37:13 But you’re going to build, so let me not interrupt.

Claire Pedrick  37:16 Well, my build is to encourage the listeners to build actually. And to join in the conversation, because-

Oscar Trimboli 37:29 What should they email to you? And we’ve got some books to give away.

Claire Pedrick 37:33 We have got some books to give away. I think I would love to hear listeners, what’s your biggest insight from this?

Not from what we’ve said, but from what you’ve built out of what we’ve said.

So no books if you say, “Oscar said this.”

So that’s the task. Are we in agreement, Oscar?

Oscar Trimboli 38:03 Kind of.

Claire Pedrick 38:04 Kind of? Build, build.

Oscar Trimboli 38:07 No, clarification.

Claire Pedrick 38:08 Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli 38:11 If you were to say that again for the audience, what is your expectation that they would email you? You’ve been very clear on what not to say.

Claire Pedrick 38:24 Email us info@3dcoaching.com with the heading, listening. And we would love to hear one thing that you know now that you didn’t know before as a result of something that you’ve built out of this conversation.

Oscar Trimboli 38:46 Thank you.

Claire Pedrick 38:47 Well, thank you-

Oscar Trimboli 38:48 For me.

Claire Pedrick 38:51 And I’ve got some lovely copies. The send out-

Oscar Trimboli 38:57 As you can see, Claire, I could talk about this for the rest of my life.

And my wish for all of these conversations is that hosts notice that I’m just present to the dialogue.

39:08

And thanks to Dame Evelyn Glennie, somebody from the north of England who I interviewed profoundly deaf. She taught me how to listen with my whole body. It took a while, but when I listen even through a mediated environment like the video that we’re on right now, when I bring my presence and I connect my whole being to the conversation…

39:33 Yes, listening is a skill.

Yes, listening is a strategy.

Yes, listening is a practice,

but for me, when I’m being listening, I can change many perspectives. And the most important one is to change my own.

So when I always leave these conversations with my perspective changed. And the perspective you changed for me is to reinforce and continue this curiosity about the role of language as a way to unlock more potent ways of listening when by being present to you, Claire, you change me. I know it’s a great conversation. So thanks for listening.

Claire Pedrick 40:22  Well, thank you for coming and thank you everyone for listening. And Oscar’s book is ‘how to listen: discover the hidden key to better communication’.

So get those emails coming in. Thank you, Oscar. Thank you everybody.

Bye-Bye.

Announcer 40:39 If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard today, we’d love you to share the podcast with a friend or leave a comment on social media. And if you’d like to become a regular at The Coaching Inn, you can subscribe on Podbean and all major podcast channels. We look forward to welcoming you next time. You’ve been listening to The coaching Inn, 3D Coaching’s Virtual Pub. For more information, check out 3dcoaching.com.

Oscar Trimboli 41:12 Well, what did you make of that?

What did you hear?

What did you see?

What did you sense?

41:20

During the discussion with Claire, around the 11-minute mark, you heard Claire and I discuss the process of what I call group listening audits. If you’d like to learn more about process, I have a seven-minute video that takes you through the process. You can visit oscatrimboli.com/grouplisteningaudit

That’s all one word, oscatrimboli.com/grouplisteningaudit

And you can hear and see how I code listening in a group setting for face-to-face meetings.

So what’s my takeaway?

What did I love about the discussion with Claire?

Well, for me, it’s fascinating to be there live in the original recording, then listening to the recording, then watching the recording, then hearing listener feedback about the recording, and ultimately reflecting again with Claire about what we heard and what’s progressed since then.

What I love about the conversation with Claire, it was two-way. Something emerged in between.

42:31

Other hosts that I get interviewed by, sometimes it feels like an interrogation. The questions are just one way, despite asking them for their perspective, and for me, it creates a really limited connection with the host and their audience as a result. This discussion with Claire was quite the opposite. There was lots of opportunity for back and forth between the two of us.

And as Shaney reflects on much later on, she says there was a volleying happening between the two of us, like a tennis match where we were happy to hit back and forth. And it was a very much a shared back and forth.

43:15

Did you notice the length of our pauses?

Claire was quite proud of the space created and the pauses there. I think these pauses for me during the conversation, gave me time to process, gave me time to think, gave me time to reflect, and ultimately to respect what we were creating together.

This definitely created higher quality conversation between Claire and I. As a result, I felt trusted enough to take risks and discuss issues that I rarely bring up in other conversations.

So thanks, Claire for creating that space.

44:01

One of my most curious, knowing and non-knowing if that’s a word, was when Claire describes the difference between offering sounds and words. And words that sound like commas, like and, versus words that sound like full stops,

I’m curious how Claire will play with this idea.

Hearing, seeing, sensing.

Based on the listener’s reflections and their feedback, some of them watched the original part one video. Some listened to the audio, some listened and watched, and some of the listeners listened to the audio, watched the video more than once. And what they all commented on is, depending on the number of times they watched or listened, they took something completely different away from the conversation.

Although it was there live during the recording, I made a point to listen to the recording first.

Then I watched the video, and each time I heard, I saw, and I sensed very different elements of the conversation that wasn’t conscious to me during the live discussion.

45:36 Watching is a really underestimated part of listening, and this is something Claire is very passionate about.

Claire’s face, if you watch the video, amplifies what she’s sensing and processing and thinking, which is highlighted only when you’re engaging your ears and your eyes as well as your heart in the conversation.

I’m providing a link to the video in the show notes on the website, as well as the podcast app you’re probably listening on now. So if you want to, you can scroll down and you can watch the YouTube video at your leisure as well. Now, if you’d like to email Claire with your reflections, that’s great, no doubt she’ll share them with me. But if you want to share your reflections with me, you can email podcast@oscartrimboli.com with the subject line, ‘listen’.

46:32

And for 10 people, you’ll receive 20% off your enrollment into the fundamentals course where we spend eight weeks learning, practicing, reflecting, and improving on our workplace, listening with the very techniques we discussed during this episode.

We’ll give you two weeks to digest and provide your feedback, what’s changed in your thinking, not what we said, as Claire says. Before we publish to you what the listeners said, based on the original episode, I’d love to share your thoughts in there as well.

Email podcast@oscartrimboli.com with the subject, ‘listen,’ and 10 people will receive 20% off their first enrollment in the fundamentals of listening course.

47:28

I hope this experiment of hearing me in a different role from the host creates a different perspective for you on listening. I know it did for me. Because of the way Claire created the space, she changed my mind about the role of seeing, about the role of sensing, and she allowed me to take risks I don’t normally take in conversations. And for that, I’m really grateful. I’m Oscar Trimboli, and along with a Deep Listening Ambassador Community, including Shaney Crawford, we’re on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the workplace, and you’ve given us the greatest gift of all. You’ve listened to us.

Thanks for listening.