To celebrate the first anniversary of how to listen: discover the hidden key to better communication, the most comprehensive and awarded book about listening in the workplace, we have created a visual summary of the book. Each of the eight chapters is distilled into an illustration from each key concept within that chapter. This video is an interview with Rebecca Lazenby, the illustrator of visual summary. We discuss the process of listening before, during and after the project of creating the visual summary. If you would like to watch - visit https://youtu.be/iKYMwnK8VNk?si=W_znu7YGNDirENFT

Dr. Krishna Naineni works as a general practitioner in England. He's a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners and is a faculty at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. He's passionate about listening education, research, and practice. He's delivered structured and evidence-based listening education programs in the UK and in India to hundreds of healthcare professionals with practical strategies and the knowledge needed to enhance the way they engage with their patients through their listening practice.

He has co-founded Glocal Academy, which has been instrumental in delivering custom-made clinical communication skills training programs to healthcare professionals and organizations across India and the United Kingdom. The academy delivered its first ever clinical communication skills training program in 2015 to healthcare professionals in India. He enjoys a long distance running and he hates cooking, but he loves eating food. During this discussion, Dr. Naineni change my mind about the impact of the environment in which you listen , education and your mindset, particularly in healthcare, but equally in workplaces all around the world.

While you're listening today, reflect on the question about what does your physical or virtual environment contribute or detract from the effectiveness of your listening?

I'd love to hear your answers, and for the first five people who send an email to [email protected] with a subject line Environment with an answer to these questions:

1. How does this conversation increase your awareness about the impact of your environment?

2. How does this play out in face-to-face environments?

3. How does it play out in virtual environments,

4. and what change will you make as a result of listening to this conversation?

We'll send you a paperback copy of the award-winning book, how to Listen: discover the hidden key to better communication, the most comprehensive book about listening in the workplace, and we'll send it in the post for you.

What's the cost of not listening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt, what's the cost of not listening?

 

Chapter 02 - Listening starts before the conversation commences

It’s a beautiful autumn day, and Tina, a busy working mom, is in her car on the way to pick up her three-year old daughter from daycare. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive from Tina’s work to the daycare center, and Tina is finalizing a work call with Fatima while driving.

Tina had expected the call to take ten minutes. Unfortunately, the conversation is longer than expected and ends up taking the entire distance. She parks her car and continues the discussion with Fatima while she walks.

When she reaches the front gate of the daycare center, she takes another ten minutes to finish the call. Eventually, she hangs up and goes through the doorway to collect her daughter.

Although Tina has disconnected the phone call, she still hasn’t disconnected her mind from the issues and actions covered in the discussion—so much so that even at the door to the center she is still ruminating on Fatima’s questions.

Tina’s daughter is excited to see her mom; she runs and gives her a hug, bursting to tell her about her day. Her daughter launches into a wonderful story about adventures, friends, and the most specific details about castles, bridges, and rivers.

Showing her daughter how interested she is, Tina asks her lots of questions.

“Who was that?”

“What did you do next?”

“What did you like about that?”

As Tina puts her daughter into the car seat, her daughter announces,

 

“Mummy, why are you bumping my words?”

 

If her daughter was an adult, she would have said,

 

“Stop interrupting, please!”

 

Tina’s enthusiasm for her daughter’s story is what everyone wants to experience when they are talking, right?

Show interest, ask relevant questions, and pay attention.

Yet her daughter experienced someone who was constantly interrupting her.

 

Tina’s daughter wanted to tell her story—entirely, completely, and without interruption. She tried to tell the story from start to finish without questions, reactions, or solutions.

 

Tina’s questions created a disjointed conversation.

 

Perhaps you’ve had this experience on either side of the conversation. Many people think that listening is about questioning. When your mind is absent or wandering, these questions appear random to the speaker rather than something that expands the conversation.

 

Aimless and arbitrary questions waste the speaker’s time and diminish the relationship.

 

Tina thought she was listening. As they drive off, her mind divides very quickly as more issues from Fatima’s call come to mind. The monkey in her mind is winging from branch to branch, between the present, past, and future.

 

Her discussion with her daughter is interrupted by the phone ringing—it is Fatima again, and Tina has a decision to make about whether to answer the call or focus on her daughter.

 

Whether it’s a phone call or our next meeting, our divided attention is one of the first barriers to listening. No matter how strongly you intend to bring your attention and focus to a conversation, listening commences before you arrive at the discussion.

 

Do you relate most to Tina or her daughter?

Listening commences before the conversation, what routines and rituals do you use to bring your attention and presence to the upcoming discussion?

If you would like to more, I invite you to explore you can find the book via this link

Kathryn Mannix has spent her medical career working with people who have incurable advanced illnesses.

Starting in cancer care and changing career to become a pioneer of the new discipline of palliative medicine, she's worked with teams in hospices, hospitals, and in patients' own homes to deliver palliative care, optimizing quality of life even as death is approaching.

Kathryn has worked with many thousands of dying people and has found their ability to deal with illness and death both fascinating and inspirational.

She believes that a better public awareness about what happens as we die would reduce fear and enable people to discuss their hopes and plans with the people that matter to them.

Her account of how people live while they're dying, in her book, With the End in Mind, was published to Universal acclaim and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize.

Kathryn's next book, Listen: How to Find the Words for Tender Conversations, starts with a potent story about her early career encounter with Mrs. de Souza.

I encourage you to listen to this discussion more than once.

Kathryn's listening, it's well class and the way she explains listening is compelling. I have five copies of Kathryn's book to share.

If you email [email protected] with the subject "Tender" and your reflections of this conversation.

You could reflect on the story of Mrs. de Souza.

You might reflect on Dorothy and her listening, or how you think about dancing and listening, the difference between doing and being listening, the impact of listening via video versus face-to-face. This is such a rich and nuanced experience.

Kathryn completely changed the way I think about listening.

G'day, it's Oscar. This is an excerpt from How To Listen, the most comprehensive book about listening in the workplace. It's from Chapter One of the audiobook. The audiobook format is fascinating, it's different, it's distinct and I hope that I've honored Trena's request to make it an impactful audiobook.

In this episode, MathPath Aubrey Blanche helps people, teams, and organizations notice the edge of their mental, and systems models.

Listen for free

Imagine the cost of not listening in your workplace is someone's life, improving the quality of their life, extending their life.

This is the life-changing work that is the focus of B Corp certified life sciences recruitment and search consultancy - RBW Consulting spanning Boston, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, North Carolina, and San Diego.

Their work covers everything from computational biology, product development, engineering, regulatory affairs, and everything in between, across pharmaceutical and life sciences industries.

Continuing with our behind-the-scenes season of speaking to people who are using Deep Listening, we listen to Emma and Michelle about their focus on Human Intelligence.

First, a little backstory and a shout-out to Stuart from Stirred Health who reached out to me in September of 2021 with this message.

"Hi, Oscar. I'm interested in discussing a collaboration/partnership on behalf of our client. We are keen to hear more about how Deep Listening could help us out and our client. I'm based in the UK."

I was then introduced to their chief commercial officer, Emma and their learning and development director Michelle.

What I love about working with RBW is the ripple effect of doing one thing consistently well.

We discussed this very thoroughly in the co-design process, which was ultimately foundational into integrating Deep Listening into their Human Intelligence strategy.

What you'll hear next is a discussion between Emma, Michelle, and myself about the impact of listening in the life sciences.

Listen out for the story about

• how to consistently shorten meetings and build rapport
• how to listen beyond the CV
• the importance of the productive question rather than any question
• the question every candidate should be asking during an interview

Listen for free

Today I'll explore before, during, and after a workshop.

This is a workshop I had with Sophie, who you'll hear from shortly and her peers. Then we did the same workshop with Sophie's team.

People regularly say, "Oscar, how can you listen after the conversation?"

This can take many forms.

It could be right at the end of a workshop where you ask a question or a poll roughly in the last 15% of the workshop.

You want to catch it in enough time that you can discuss it so you can hear what's being heard by the participants. So if the workshop's one hour, you should be asking this question between the 45-minute mark and the 50-minute mark.

Here's some of the questions I ask,

• what's one thing that changed your mind about listening today?
• what's one thing you'll implement based on what you heard today?

The first question is typically in shorter workshops, and the second question is typically in longer workshops.

Post-workshop, you can also run a survey or you can deconstruct the magical impact that a workshop has in a 25-minute debrief.

I do this within 14 days of the workshop.

What you don't know about me is I'm really disciplined and rigorous about post-workshop debriefs.

In fact, I'm talking about that before people even book in a workshop. I'm signaling to them that there will be a debrief. I signal to them in the workshop, that is something we'll discuss in the debrief. And this is crucial to create a space and place, to create a container where the host of the meeting, or a significant executive sponsor can unpack the learning that they had, that the group had.

I want to ensure that the host reflects on their own experience in the workshop and not just the workshop itself.

What you'll hear from Sophie shortly is her post-workshop experience and how ideas landed so powerfully because the workshop was so experiential, it was very hands-on.

I want hosts also to reflect on the participant experience, individuals, as well as a group.

I want to listen to what participants actually heard, rather than what I said.

I want to listen to what participants didn't hear, couldn't hear, or I didn't communicate effectively enough that it was useful for them.

Finally, I want to understand what was productive for the audience so I can distill that and crisp that up for next time to ensure that if it's landed with one group, it's highly likely to land with another group.

This is part of the craft of facilitating a workshop from a listening orientation, you want to hear what the group heard, what's landing, and what's not.

When you pick that up and use it next time, it's like somebody who's a woodworker, who's moving from chisel to sandpaper to varnish.

Sophie's been very gracious, she's allowed me to record this conversation to help you listen to what a debrief sounds like. Here are some of the excerpts from the discussion with Sophie.

Could you take a photo of yourself with the book and email it to [email protected] with the Subject Line "Cover"?

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

If you would like to provide feedback on the development of this course, you can visit https://www.oscartrimboli.com/coursefeedback

Please send an email to [email protected] with the Subject Line "Book Club", and a recommendation for a book you would like the group to explore.

We'd love to add yours, send to [email protected] with the Subject Line "Hello World"

Send an email to [email protected] and put in the Subject Line "Interview" if you'd like to be interviewed for the Deep Listening Podcast from the perspective of the Deep Listening Ambassador.

If you're interested in going deeper, then send me an email [email protected] with the Subject Line "Deeper" and what you took away from this next conversation.