287 How to Listen: Discovering the Hidden Key to Better Communication with Oscar Trimboli | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

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Mahan Tavakoli: Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm really excited this week to be welcoming Oscar Trimboli. Oscar is an author, keynote speaker, and host of the award-winning podcast, deep Listening. He has over 30 years of experience consulting with major companies on leadership communication. In this conversation, we focus on his book, how to Listen, discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication.

He makes the case that listening skills are the missing half of effective workplace communication, which is why I love the conversation and learned so much from him.

I am sure you will as well. I also love hearing from you. Keep your comments coming, mohamed mohan tav.com. There's a microphone icon on partnering leadership.com. Really enjoy getting those voice messages. Don't forget to follow the podcast on your favorite platform, and when you get a chance, leave a rating and review. That will help more people find and benefit from these conversations.

Now, here's my conversation with Oscar Trimboli.

Oscar Trimboli, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

Oscar Trimboli: Good day, Mahan. Absolutely delighted to be listening to your questions. 

Mahan Tavakoli: I am delighted and looking forward to learn from you, Oscar, on listening, which is so important to so many parts of our lives, including for leadership.

Before we get to that though, we'd love to know whereabouts you grew up and how you upbringing impacted the kind of person you've become Oscar. . 

Oscar Trimboli: To understand me, you need to understand the part of Sydney. I grew up in the son of two first generation migrants from postwar Italy, and I grew up in a community where the school I attended had 23 different nationalities.

Now, my father and mother are a bit of a Romeo and Juliet story. They were from completely different parts of Italy. And as a result, we weren't connected with our families. Both families weren't too happy with the fact that they got married as a result. Despite the fact I'm from Italian origins, I can only speak English.

And at my school with 23 nationalities, there was a wonderful Italian card game. That unified, the Brazilians, the Uruguayans, the Argentinians, the Estonians, the Latvians, the cprs, and the Turks as well, which is a feat in itself. And this game is played in teams of two. So you are paired, diagonally across each other.

And occasionally somebody would be short of a player, so they'd get the local. Me to play and play their position. Now what you need to understand the Brazilians are speaking Portuguese, the Argentinians are speaking Spanish, the poles are speaking, polish to each other, and so they're really confident that I can't understand them and more importantly, The Vietnamese person or the Cambodian, that's typically who I got paired with couldn't understand them either.

So they had a level of confidence that may have been misplaced because in their confidence, they gave away so much information in their face, in their hands, in their voice tonality, despite the fact I couldn't speak their language and. I'd consistently beat them and they'd get really frustrated. And what I realized later on, I was learning to listen and listen for body language.

The other thing it's important to know, I was basically a werewolf as a teenager. Meaning my jaw was protruded, front jaw from my face, about half my fist. As a result, I had to have orthodontics and a lot longer than most people would. So typically one to two years for orthodontic work, and mine was typically four to five.

And when you have a malformed jaw, the last thing you want is people to. Be paying any attention to you. So I got very good at asking questions, making everybody else the center of attention and wow, I heard a lot more than most people did through that. So that was the little spark that was an em all the way through my corporate career that I only know now Mahan, about how I discovered it.

Listening was a little superpower of mine. 

Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful origin story and journey. Oscar, whether it is being paired with the Cambodian person where people felt you would not understand their language. You were forced. Therefore, to pay more attention, listen carefully with your soul, or even something that I'm sure at that point in time as a young person growing up, not wanting to speak could have been from embarrassment, but that is something you became stronger through by listening and genuinely paying attention to other people, while many of them might have been just speaking and not paying attention to each other. 

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. And if you have the opportunity to go back and listen to Warren Berger's episode about beautiful questions I so enjoyed the way he thinks about questions. I think sometimes you can ask the wrong questions. You can ask inappropriate questions and you can also ask questions that signal you haven't really been listening.

So questioning of itself when it comes to listening is a compliment. It's the salt, it's the pepper, it's the seasoning, it's not the meal itself. When we have curry, it's about the rice. When we have a steak meal, it's not a bad. Out the pepper sauce, although it does make it taste a little different.

So I think when it comes to questions as Warren points out it's a curiosity to discover more. And when it comes to listening, our curiosity is probably in a different place to where Warren's curiosity is and most people's. Your curiosity needs to help the speaker discover what they think and what they mean rather than for you just to understand what they say the very first time.

And when most people change their listening orientation ever so slightly we play a fun game. I always ask people what color is your listening battery? Is it green and fully charged? Is it yellow? Is it orange? Is it red? Or is it about to hit black and you need a recharge? Most people aren't conscious of what color their listening battery is.

So when it comes to our listening, if we move our orientation to a third place, the conversation listening becomes light and easy, not difficult, and draining your batteries. 

Oscar, help me understand this point that you make, that asking the questions and listening is not as much about us understanding what the person is saying, but helping them clarify in their mind.

Listening at work. That's where our research has been done with 24,000 workplace listeners. It's not therapy. A lot of people confuse listening with an image they see in a movie of a psychotherapist or a psychologist or some kind of therapeutic profession where the person's lying down and somebody's got a notepad and stroking their chin and it's an hour long consultation. That's not what listening our work is. Listening is about three numbers, and these three numbers are designed to progress the outcome.

Not just to understand what the speaker says. So there are three positions in listening. The speaker who's got the hardest job, the listener, and the purpose of the conversation. These three are in a dance together, and most people think it's just you and the other person. Now, when you know these three numbers, The listening becomes really simple.

So let me unpack. 1 25, 400, 900. These three numbers will explain why most of us. Are only listening to 14% of what people say. We are not listening to the 86% that they haven't said. So a speaker can speak at 125 words per minute. On average. . So you'll get some people who talk a little bit faster.

And if you're a cattle yard auctioneer or real estate auctioneer, you can talk at about 200 words per minute and you completely understand everything. You might be listening to this podcast at 1.5 times speed on YouTube. You can go up to two times speed and you can still have complete comprehension.

So 1 25 is the speakers speaking speed. Now let's jump into their mind. They are thinking on average at 900 words per minute in complex. [00:10:00] Competitive, creative, or collaborative environments, they may be thinking at up to 1600 words per minute, but let's just pick the average. So the average is 900 words a minute in their mind, 125 that can come out of their mouth.

That means the first thing they say is 14% of what they think and what they mean. Mahan. I'm not a gambling man. I sense you are probably not either, but if you go to Las Vegas, they tell me you can get better odds than 14%. And the reason why listening is sometimes creating confusion and conflict or chaos in the workplace is because.

People are too fixated on listening to what's said rather than noticing what's not said. What's not said is 86% of what's in their mind. So that's the speaker's challenge. As I reminded you, it's a simultaneous equation, you, the speaker, and the outcome. Now, from a listener's point of view, let's unpack the numbers for the listeners while.

I'm speaking at 125 words per minute. You can listen at up to 400 words per minute, and while you are waiting for me to hurry up, your mind is anticipating, is solving, is drifting, is doing many things. While those 300 words I haven't said aren't being expressed, The difference between a good listener and a great listener isn't that they drift away.

It isn't that they never get distracted, it's just they notice they're distracted quicker. So these three numbers, whether I'm talking to bank tellers, police officers, prison guards, school principals, pharmaceutical engineers, or financial services planners, when they hear these three numbers, You can see this big light go on over their head and go it's hard for me to listen, but it's even harder for the speaker to get out what they mean and when they can say what they mean.

The conversation's actually shorter. The relationships are stronger and the outcomes are more impactful. I'm curious, Mahan. As you listen to 1 25 words per minute and then 900 words per minute, thinking specifically, how do you reflect on that? 

Mahan Tavakoli: One of the challenges I think about Oscar is the fact that, as you said, our minds are operating really fast. So to stay engaged with the conversation is very hard. We fill out what they are going to say sometimes. Not so correctly. One of the things I continually have to work with my girls over the dinner table is even if you know what the person is going to say, 100%, no question about it.

Don't complete the sentence. Just purely be there to listen so it is an ongoing challenge for all of us. I work with a lot of executives and in many instances I see that they are stressed, they're thinking about a lot of different things, and even when in person they're interacting with one of their direct reports or one of their colleagues, their mind is racing.

Focusing on other things and not being present. It's a challenge that a lot of the executives I work with have. So how can we, as the listener, do a better job of being able to stay focused and pay attention to what that person is saying and not have our minds run wild?

Oscar Trimboli: Listening happens before, during, and after the conversation. If you go and see an orchestra play or a band, any kind of musical performance, any kind of theatrical performance when it comes to the orchestra, no matter if they play in the same auditorium the night before with the identical instrument, they are tuning their instrument.

For at least five minutes before the performance. It's an act of professional responsibility. It's an act of respect for the other musicians, their instrument, the conductor, and the audience. It's an act of humility, honestly. Do they really have to tune their instrument after thousands of performances?

Yes, they do, because something might be quite off. If a professional musician can take the time before the performance to tune themselves in. My invitation to your executives is, what's your ritual to tune in? The most simple suggestion I've ever made. Probably transforms most of the executive's lives that you are talking about here.

So listening doesn't start by focusing on the speaker. Listening actually starts by focusing on yourself. Many of those executives you describe have got a lot of browser tabs in their mind, chewing up memory, so they're not really available to listen. So this very simple tip. Consistently, when my clients experience it in meetings with me, they go, oh my goodness, Oscar, I love coming to your meetings.

I arrived prepared. I've had time to go to the bathroom. I've had time for a drink. I've had time to collect my thoughts.

I have to apologize. As a former Microsoft Marketing director, I sold the software that creates this problem. Start your meetings five minutes after the hour. Send your meeting request for five minutes after the hour. If you are looking to have a one hour meeting, have a 50 minute meeting. Not a one hour meeting because it gives them five minutes on the backend, because not everybody in your system is going to do that.

They're just gonna pick the default from your Google calendar, your Apple calendar, your Microsoft calendar, and they're gonna pick the top of the hour. This simple hack, and by the way, you can change your personal default. It doesn't matter what your organizational default is. Start your meeting at five after the hour, because if you start your meeting at the top of the hour, this is what happens.

Oh gee, I'm really sorry I'm late. I just finished the back to back meeting. But I'm completely here now. They are physically present at about three minutes after the hour, but mentally they're present at about 15 minutes after the hour. If you just shave that five minutes off, they arrive at the meeting.

Present, whether that's you, whether it's them. So the first thing, you've given yourself a fighting chance in the difference between paying attention, which is what happens when you book the meeting at the shop of the hour and giving attention. There's two kinds of attention when we think about attention.

Paying attention is an obligation, it's a responsibility. It's a form of taxation. Giving attention is a form of curiosity. It's a form of generosity. Comes from a very different place when it comes to our listening. So tip number one for those busy clients that you'll work with is if you shave five minutes off at the back end, the front.

We know our research group tells us that your meetings actually shorten by between seven. 13%. So not only do you shave the 50 minutes off, but you get it back so people can report to us over our longitudinal study that they may get up to half a week back in their schedule because they're not doing the double back meeting to fix the meeting from the week before because everybody wasn't listening to each other in the project meeting, in the team meeting, in the campaign meeting, in the product launch meeting.

Three other quick tips if you. Want to get ready? Number one, drink a glass of water before you go into a meeting and drink a glass of water roughly every half an hour. Meeting as well that will send a signal to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the nervous system around your lungs and heart.

There's more nerves in that part of your system than there is in your brain. This is the nervous system that helps you with your gut feel. It helps you listen to your gut feel, and when you drink a glass of water, everything just settles down number two or number three, depending on how you're counting. I have this calculus. You can Google that and you can understand why I've got a poor relationship with numbers. Take three deep breaths before you go into a conversation in through your nose, down to the bottom of your diaphragm, and then out through your mouth. Most people don't actually know how to breathe.

There is a correct way to breathe, just like there's a better way to listen. And then finally, the bonus is this, for me, every meeting, whether I'm going in via virtual software, audio, video conference, or face-to-face meetings, I play a song that's calibrated to the outcome of the meeting. There's a song I play that's got no words in it.

It's completely instrumental. It's eight minutes long. This song is centering me when I'm working with clients who have really complex systemic challenges. Working with insurance companies on climate change is an example of that. How do you price for climate change? I have a mid. Range song that's upbeat, it's got wonderful tempo, it's lively.

Now remember, you're calibrating to the outcome of the meeting. It's also gonna change the wiring in your mind. And then my last one is at about 1 75 words per minute. It's a rap. It's called, remember the name by four minor? I don't recommend it. It's R rated , but in terms of getting me in the state to bring lots of energy into a keynote, It's the perfect song for me.

When you want to reset your listening, battery music is the fastest way to do it, and you only need 30 seconds. So three tips systemically, if you can just do a meeting, request a five after the. Your life will change. Your listening batteries will be recharged, and more importantly, the person coming to the meeting will be ready to tell you what they mean straight away.

Drink water. Three deep breaths. Some place of music. 

Mahan Tavakoli: What outstanding tips? Oscar, you mentioned the orchestra tuning their instruments before the performance and. These tips are away when it's important enough for us going into a meeting and listening to others to tune ourselves, to effectively be there, present, and willing to listen.

One of the things I do, I. With a lot of senior teams is work on their collaboration. And as part of that, I sit in a lot of senior team meetings and as an observer I can sit back. I'm not participating in a meeting, I'm just observing the meeting. And it's interesting looking at people's faces. You can tell in many instances the individuals are in their own world it takes a lot of effort to pull them back in. They come back in and then they go out, whether it is distractions or just the fact that they haven't tuned themselves to be there and present. So what you mentioned are great ways for that tuning. One of the challenges that I see is that we live in a very distracted world where.

Whether it's near Al and others who talk about how to be indestructible, they have come up with alerts and other means to distract us through technology. So in interacting with executives, whether it's in meetings or watching them interact with their team members, they're constantly distracted.

How can we manage some of that? Distraction in order to be present and be able to fully listen.

Oscar Trimboli: We are a rather self-absorbed modern society and in the research for the book we saw back in the 1880s in newspapers. 1880 we're in 2023 in 1880. They were writing about how the modern generation is distracted. They're not as patient as their previous generation. Yeah, it's on steroids. Again, I apologize.

I've worked at Microsoft. I'm responsible for those notifications. We know and the research is clear. The 1973 research to make sure that people mindlessly put money into slot machines in Las Vegas is the foundational psychological research for the red dot on an app, for a popup, for a WhatsApp message, for a popup, for an email, for a Slack channel, for all of those.

Now we have no excuse. Every single operating system, Android, Apple, Microsoft, all of them have one button that you can switch off your notifications. And if you are an addict and you don't know how to do that, there is another button that says, switch off my notifications when you look at my calendar and I'm busy.

Use the technology. Don't let the technology use you. Use the technology. Don't let technology make you a slave. If it's worth meeting, it's worth switching the notifications off. A caveat. I work with people who are emergency respondents in emergency rooms in hospitals who run complex production lines and they're on call.

They have to receive notifications. Mahan for the people you're talking about. Most of them aren't. Occasionally, you may have a sick child that you need to be in contact with. My dad requires specific care, and there are days that I will announce to people at the beginning of the conversation, my phone will be on silent and if it rings, I will leave the room.

The reason for that is I have to engage with my father's carer and people go, oh, wow. That's good to know, but more importantly, they know I'm present in the room.

Just use that simple hack to switch the notifications off.

I'm going back now to 2009, and Peter was a intergalactic vice president of Microsoft and he was traveling from Seattle to Sydney, which effectively. 24 hours, and he came straight into a meeting that I was hosting in a hotel room with 20 executives who were all competitors effectively, and he was [00:26:00] kicking off the meeting.

I made all the introductions and he just was about to commence. And then he stopped. He got up and he walked away. He went to his bag. He left his cell phone in the bag and switched it off, and he said, look, I've just traveled 24 hours and the most important thing I can do right now is to be completely available to hear what you've got to say.

Now it won't be a surprise to anybody that in the next one minute, 19 executives all. Ruffled into their pockets or their bags and switched off their cell phones. Why do I know it was 19? Because one didn't switch it off and it rang during the meeting, and I'm not gonna name them, but they felt pretty sheepish.[00:27:00] 

The role modeling by Peter to announce, I'm gonna switch my phone off. I want to give you my complete attention because I've traveled this far. Also set up an environment where people copied and did the same. Now, some people I work with do versions of this. They have a box that everybody puts their cell phone in, and I go, look, you're all adults. If I run a meeting, I don't set up those kind of rules, but they also know that there's no cell phone anywhere near me, and they have my complete attention. As a leader, it's not about the distraction. That's the symptom. The question you wanna pose to yourself is this, as a leader, what am I amplifying by my role modeling, if I am doing that?

What you're signaling to your team, to your organization, quite possibly to your customers, more [00:28:00] likely, your suppliers are more important than you are. Whatever I'm dealing with is more important than you right now. And as a result, you won't see nonverbal signals. You won't hear what's unsaid. You'll have a transactional conversation about a symptom, and you'll be back in that meeting next week fixing what you didn't listen to.

Now, for those of you who are listening and can't see the beautiful smile from Mohan, he is just nodding violently. I'm fascinated what that is all about. Oscar, 

Mahan Tavakoli: I couldn't have agreed with you more. One of the things I'm smiling about is the fact that I can see the listeners nodding as whenever I mention anything like this.

All the executives nod. Thinking, yes, people should do more of this. But I am [00:29:00] really good at it. So one of the challenges, and I know you talk about this as well, is the fact that we tend to agree with what you just said, the importance of listening, how it shows people.

That we value them, how that role modeling is important, but we tend to also think we are pretty good at it ourselves. 

Oscar Trimboli: Oh yeah, we certainly do. Back to the software we were talking about in our research group. The biggest culprit no longer is notifications. On cell phones and laptops and iPads.

It's this nasty little thing called the Connected Watch. Everybody thinks they're subtly looking at their connected watch and nobody's noticing. Here's the little tip, everybody. We know what you're doing and it's not checking the time. 

Mahan Tavakoli: You're not the first and only person to have an Apple watch.[00:30:00] 

Oscar Trimboli: Back to your question. I think this was summarized best for me with a review of the book, how to Listen. That said, and this was the title of the review, just like comedy and sex. We think we're better at listening than we actually are,

and the review goes on to say that. The value of comedy is in the audience. Comedy's a contact sport. You can't do comedy alone. It's just doesn't have the same impact. Now look, this is a G-rated podcast. I'm not gonna go into their expansion about sex and contact sport and all of that in the review.

Suffice to say in our research we asked a question on a scale of five where we asked people, [00:31:00] compared to everyone in your workplace, how would you rate your listening? Below average, average? Above average. We also ask people from the speaker's perspective to rate the listener same five point scale.

When people self-assess themselves as listeners and when they assess listeners from a speaker's perspective, the research showed that the speaker feels that the listener is listening above average and well above average in 12% of their interaction. The listeners feel on a self-assessment scale.

They're listening well. In about 78% of cases, people are rating themselves above average, well above average. This is no different from their self-assessment when they're rating themselves [00:32:00] as automobile drivers as well. People ask to self-assess their IQs. People will typically do that as well. So one of the challenges, Mahan, when it comes to listening is our self-assessment bias.

We have no framework to assess ourselves against, and the speaker equally doesn't have a framework to assess against, yet , the value of listening sits with the speaker, not with the listener. So when it comes to your listening, here's a very simple question you can ask at the beginning of any team meeting, at the beginning of any conversation, what would make this a great conversation?

What will make this a great conversation for you? Remember, there's the speaker that's a listener and there's the outcome. This question is designed to keep us on track throughout the conversation, both parties, to the outcome. It's not the agenda of the meeting. [00:33:00] This is designed to elicit how we want to have a conversation.

 And this. This becomes a listening compass setting all the way throughout a conversation. Remember, we're shaving five minutes off at the beginning and the end of a meeting in a 50 minute meeting. Let's just ask that question and check in about every 10 to 15 minutes.

Mahan, you said this would make it a great conversation. How are we tracking our research group says the first time you ask that question, a third of people say, I've got what I need. Have you got anything? Let's close the meeting out. A third of people say, I've covered what I need yet. I've just realized there's something more important we need to discuss.

And they get to that and they get to the really important meeting. And then the other third, they run the normal course of the meeting when we know. [00:34:00] That our self-assessment is always gonna be six times more than the speaker. It's just an invitation to be a little bit curious, a little bit more humble to ask questions that don't necessarily reinforce similarity, but expand and listen for difference.

There's two primary listening orientations. Most people, 93% of people, according to the Harvard implicit bias assessments say they listen for similarity. And this is because we are trained this way by the scientific method in our education system and the heuristic to go does that. Correlate with my life experience, my work experience, my professional training.

If it does, then I'm agreeing. If it doesn't, in my mind, while they're talking, I'm disagreeing. So be conscious. Are you listening for similarity or you're listening for difference? When we listen for similarity, we want the conversation to go in the same [00:35:00] direction, north south, on a compass as an example.

And when we listen for difference, we want to go 180 degrees the other way, east West on the compass. Let me give you the question example. Warren would be happy with these questions from your beautiful questions episode. So if we want the conversation to continue in the same direction and we listen for similarities it's a version of.

Say more. Tell me more about that. I'm curious. Say more. I'm fascinated. Could you just expand that a little bit more and that's gonna take the conversation in the same way and we're continuing along In a similar vein, when we want to go east west we're curious about. What haven't we considered?

 Have we thought about the customer? Have we thought about the competitor? Have we thought about the regulator? If you operate in regulated markets, so we thinking about the long-term future or the short-term future. The question we wanna ask [00:36:00] is a version of, and what else? This is a question that's taking the speaker's consciousness in a different direction.

Neither orientation is correct or incorrect. Mahan, the skillful leader will have the consciousness to go. What does the situation I am in right now require? For me, the group and the conversation I. Let's ask the question accordingly. If your head is in a laptop, in a cell phone, in a WhatsApp conversation, you've got no hope to be conscious enough to understand if you're listening for similarity or difference.

What's the cost of listening similarity group think I. Products that are late, products that don't meet the requirements, were still products that meet the requirements of the market for two years ago when you started building the product rather than today when people are using the product. So for many of us, we're not conscious that [00:37:00] we attend to the world with two completely different listening orientations, and if we're present, We listen this way the speaker feels seen, heard and valued, and as employees, they'll give discretionary effort.

That's worth listening. Just a little longer. 

Mahan Tavakoli: I see this relating in the conversations that people have and the listening that they do in recruiting for organizations. A lot more of that vertical questioning and listening.

That doesn't happen as much. We do look for those similarities. Even when the set of questions are standardized by hr, what we are looking for is those similarities, and as you said, there is nothing wrong with that. However, if that is the only thing we look for, [00:38:00] that yeah. Leaves huge blind spots. Then in meetings in organizations, We tend to ask questions and listen for those similarities.

So I can see blind spots both in individual interactions, whether for recruiting or other conversations, and in group interactions coming as a result of going vertical, not horizontal, as you talked about. 

Oscar Trimboli: And the questions for similarities tend to align themselves best with the first half of a conversation, a project, a timeline.

And the difference is the bottom to the second half of the conversation. The question I always ask is and I'll use a version of this. We'll shortly wrap up. What I'm curious about is if your leader was listening to our conversation right [00:39:00] now, what's the one question they wish we would've asked?

This is, a east west question. By the way. This is a listening for difference and guaranteed every time people say this, oh wow, that's a really good question. I need some time to think. And what they're doing is they're using a pattern match to go, what would that person say? And often they come up with a completely different orientation in their question as a result of this.

And they'll say they would ask about r o I. They would ask about what this means for staff. And pretty much in 99% of the case, we haven't even discussed that in the first half of the conversation, and yet it is the most important thing for their leader. We ask a version of this in a workshop that we do, and by the morning tea break.

Starting at nine, finishing at 10 30. By about 10 o'clock, the groups got into a groove and they're gelling together. And[00:40:00] I ask a version of this question. There's a really big topic we haven't even got on the agenda. I. I think if our competition was listening to what we've talked about for the last hour, they'd have a big laugh because we've forgotten one or two things.

What do you think that might be? And it's like the group dynamic moves into a different, more energetic place, but they expand their consciousness to difference. All of a sudden. You can ask a version of that for the regulator. You can ask a version of that for the media. You can ask a version of that for.

People who will be born in three generations from now if you're trying to do some long-term strategic thinking, my point is simple. There's no shortage of these relevant questions, but if you are not present to the group dynamic, if you do not. Make yourself available and role model what it means to be present.

You will get a predictable [00:41:00] transactional outcome. And if you want to have an impact beyond words, you want to have a transformational impact. One where employees turn up and give extra effort, just listen a little longer to what hasn't been said.

Mahan Tavakoli: So in listening longer to what hasn't been said, Oscar, one of the challenges that I've been thinking about over the years is some of the biases and cognitive biases that come into play in that oftentimes even body language experts talk about Things people traditionally think about, the person isn't looking you in the eye, therefore they must not be telling the truth that's not the case, 

so there are certain signals we typically pick up when we are trying to pay attention that are actually not correlated to. The true intentions or meaning of the [00:42:00] other person. There's a lot of misunderstandings that we have with respect to understanding other people, listening fully beyond those words that they're saying.

So how can we do that? Without then giving in to the biases that we have. Interpreting what the person is saying. Yeah. 

Oscar Trimboli: Quick commercial break from bias. Bias is not good or bad. It's value is neutral. It's your consciousness to know what your bias is the work that needs to be done.

We talk about open questions and we talk about bias questions. An example, a bias question typically has more than eight words. A neutral or open question will have typically less than eight words. Now, be careful. Neither is right or wrong. Neither is correct or incorrect. It's when is it appropriate for [00:43:00] that as a leader?

Back to your question about bias consciousness, the before you ask the question, before you make the statement, here's a heuristic for you to notice. Is my bias showing up? Ask yourself this question. Is the question about the content,

meaning I'm trying to understand more about what they're saying, or is the question helpful to advance The group is a very different orientation. And it's a quick heuristic. It's a really quick template for you to check in with your bias. So if you go, this is the question I wanna ask. Oh, it's about the content.

It's about me looking good. It's not about the group, it's not about the progress. Now, that's not to [00:44:00] say you don't ask the question because maybe you do need to understand something about the pricing algorithm for the life insurance table because it's got a regulatory implication. I. But is that question better asked now or later?

Is that question helpful for the group? If it is, it's probably a great question to ask, and it's probably not coming from a place that's reinforcing bias, but typically our bias comes from our needy little selfish ego that's trying to make us into a rockstar in the meeting.

Mahan. Just ask yourself, is this a question that's gonna help the group or is it all about me? That will be a quick flashlight to look into the dark corners of your unconscious bias. You're mentioning 

Mahan Tavakoli: Oscar requires tremendous [00:45:00] humility and self-reflection, so I appreciate what you are saying. It does take real reflection time, which I find we all could use more of.

As we reflect on the conversations that we have to give them the diligence that they deserve. 

Oscar Trimboli: Look I'm always reminded of a conversation Jennifer and Christopher had.

This was story shared to me. Michigan and Christopher came home from school. He was very excited. He told his mum, he learned the three is half of eight, and his mum, Jennifer thought she misheard him and she said, honey, could you say that again? And he said three is half of eight. She was very frustrated.

She thought, what are they teaching kids at school today? And she went to the cupboard. She got eight m and ms chocolate candy buttons and put them on the kitchen bench. And she picked Christopher up and said, honey, how many. M'S on this side, and he said four. And how many on that [00:46:00] side? And he said four.

And Jennifer said C three. It's not half a eight. Four is half a eight. And with that, Christopher raced across Leap to the other side of the room, got a piece of paper, and he drew a figure eight with a Sharpie like that.

I like that. For those of you who can't see, I've got a figure eight in front of Moham, and what Christopher did then was he folded the figure eight in half vertically and then he folded in half again, and then he tore it in half.

He showed his mom two perfectly formed threes, and in that moment Jennifer realized that Christopher, he processes the world completely differently to [00:47:00] everybody else. I. Now , if Christopher would've folded the piece of paper in half horizontally, zero would've been half of eight. So zero is half of a, three is half of eight, and four is half of eight.

And most of us in those really strong relationships, mahan. We go into conversations and people say three is half a eight, and they're thinking geometrically, and you are thinking mathematically and you're going, they're wrong. They're wrong. It's not three, it's four. It's four, and everybody has a three is half a eight moment.

And we have them more commonly in relationships that are the longest. And when I asked Christopher what advice would he give people to overcome their three years, half of eight moment, he said, If people were to invest just a little bit more time, In communicating about how to communicate. Christopher was a camp counselor at a summer camp, and he wasn't getting on with the head of the camp, and he took [00:48:00] the head of camp aside and said, when you tell your stories and they go for more than 90 seconds, I lose interest.

If you could shorten your stories to 90 seconds, I will get the point and I would change what I need to do and instantly. Their relationship moved to a completely different level because Christopher was communicating about how to communicate. Now, Christopher feels a lot of society pressure about communicating how to communicate because his neurodiverse, some people will call him autistic, and for those of us who are neurotypical, The same is true.

Communicate about how you communicate, and you will move long-term strong relationships to another level. 

Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful story, Oscar, and there are so many times when in teams and organizations people talk about the need for [00:49:00] diversity and the need for cognitive diversity and seeing things from different points of view.

are not able to see things from different points of view. If. We don't ask those questions and take that listening to a deeper level. A lot of times leaders in organizations have been successful because they have been the people that have seen the eights. Four plus four is eights, so if someone doesn't see it, rather than listening for, why is it that this person. Sees it as three, no, let me show you.

Let me teach you so the next time you can jump through my hoop and get the answer so I love this example because it can help all of us. It's not just recognizing neurodiversity. It can help all of us if we are willing to listen a little longer, a little bit more. [00:50:00] We can discover things that we wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

What a beautiful story, and you've got a lot of these great examples. Great stories. I love the fact that your book, you ask people to go through it and think about how to listen for a week because it is a practice. That we all.

Need to and can work on. So I really appreciate the work that you've done, the research that you've done on listening and teaching all of us how we can become better leaders through mindful listening. Now, Oscar what practices or resources do you recommend for us to continually work on becoming better listeners? 

Oscar Trimboli: If I had to pick one, shave the five minutes off your meeting, [00:51:00] invite time, and the bonus one is before any of those conversations, just play 30 seconds of music to bring your presence to yourself.

Mahan Tavakoli: I love that. And how can the audience find out more about you? Your book and your podcast? 

Oscar Trimboli: I would love you to discover more about your listening rather than discover more about me. Visit listening quiz.com.

There you can take a seven minute assessment, discover your primary listening barrier, and get a little report that gives you three tips based on that listening barrier to find out more. If you love to read or listen, how to Listen is available wherever you buy good books. 

Mahan Tavakoli: What a joy it has been to listen to you, Oscar, and share some of your thoughts on listening with the Partnering Leadership Community.

Thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. Thanks 

Oscar Trimboli: for listening. I.[00:52:00]