I'm here to listen. 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. Thank you, Sian, and thank you, Claire. I'm looking forward to listening to your questions today.
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 is called How to Listen. And there are soundbites 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, trying to bend budgets into political context, growth context, context, and a meeting supposed to go for 90 minutes. And at the 20 minute mark, 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 kind of... fine 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. And I went, oh, great. And as I stepped back only halfway 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, woohoo, I haven'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. The difference between hearing and listening is action. I hope I've honored Tracy and... You know, 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. Yes. I love that story on many levels. Oh, which level should we chat about? There are other backstories in my, my green heritage.
There are backstories in growing up in, uh, and going to a school with 23 nationalities. There are stories about how I, um, 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. something I can go towards rather than go away from. It's the irony that makes me smile that your breakthrough in listening came through when you didn't listen.
Nice. 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, 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 his listening. So, um, yeah, that's where the journey started and where are we at 2008? Yeah. We're a good, uh, nearly 15 years down the, down the track now. So what did audit listening look like? Sound like, feel like it was, um, an A4 piece of paper.
And when I started off, what I was always doing in, in group context is a map, map the room, like literally where is everybody sitting on a piece of paper? If you, 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. 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.
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. And we'll What I'm mapping 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.
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, did you mean the first bit, the second bit, the third bit, how's A, B and C connected or is it, and those kinds of things.
So 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. 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 on it? If I get into a topic, I'll go pretty deep, pretty quick. And there didn't seem to be a deep overlap between practitioner orientations and academic orientations.
Academic orientations tend to come from a therapeutic, psychology, psychiatry, some... some modality that was from a therapy rather than necessarily a commercial or organizational outcome. 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. Cause I always joke to people, you know, 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. 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, I talk about listening being situational, relational, contextual. It's such a dynamic orientation. You have to be about listening. And in the book, we talk about a what.
distinguishes good listeners from great listeners is their situational and relational flexibility, their 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. Um, and, and for me, my nerdy parts, you know, that was the fun in doing, you know, nearly a thousand qualitative.
uh, surveys and reviewing them line by line in spreadsheets and the quantitative and my favorite statistic is, uh, 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 write the other people's listening? Only 12 % of them write somebody above or well above average when it comes to listening. So there's a very different self -awareness.
Because we don't have, as we do in math, you know, we have four operators add, divide, subtract and multiply. It's really clear. 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 we're not quite listening. So many. How long have you got?
I, as my wife says, Oscar, you could talk about listening for the rest of your life. I said, well, that's the plan. Yes. Uh, I've been doing some work around the sound of conversations and the sound of how people pass from one to the other. Uh, and I'm definitely going to go away and think about your. And now your dots and your upside down question marks. Yeah, I've got a, I've got a little video.
that I talked over, I'll share that with you that's got an example of that happening over time where I'm coding a theoretical conversation. Tell me more about the sound of conversation. Fascinating. It connects to what you've said in your book.
So. For me, there's something about the offer about the handing over the conversation from the listener to 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. And OK 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 and so you can watch the toing and froing. Offering sounds sound like a comma. So, and, so, so they leave the sound with the other person, whereas okay is a stopping sound. So if I say, okay, you're gonna go, she's waiting to say something else. 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. Can we kind of play with something together? Please. I have a sense and if I won a lottery and had the opportunity to do a PhD, this is what I'm doing 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. And I want to be careful about how I explain a language. So a language might be music, a language might be math, a language might be chemistry, and a language might be your native tongue as well. And because of where I'm located and no doubt where you're located as well, we operate across multiple cultures. We operate across multiple contexts and people who, uh, 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. Typically it's English, but it may not be, it may be French, particularly in global NGOs and sporting systems and all of that French and Spanish and other languages. And when I'm in that situation and the 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 and I find the spoken language system words really quickly. So, because they go and connect with the feeling of when they said that before. But I also believe... Like sedimentary rock in a, in archeology dig, because you've got these extra layers through other language context, you listen in a completely different way. That's my speculation. What do you, what do you hear? What do you see? What do you feel when I say that?
I think that's so interesting. 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. Well, they don't need to be seeking 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, if deep, if, 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. Yeah. And in the book, there's an example where somebody says to me, be prepared. I'm just going to vomit on you. And, and they, they did. And it went for about 25 minutes where I was literally And I said, Oh, I just noticed something about halfway through and they go, Oh, what did you notice?
I said, Oh, your body shifted and you did this. And they go, yeah, that's when I decided I'm sick of my own excuses. And I actually made a decision. And I thought, wow, if they didn't have that reflected back to them, how, how more convicted they were about that decision with somebody else noticing, meaning that as we work with people, when they feel seen, heard, and valued, it's because you've, listen to what they think and what they mean, not what they've said.
What they've said is a series of ingredients. What matters is the recipe and the menu that ultimately that that places. And that's, that's why I think for, 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, although both my stepchildren went on exchange in, and had to learn German and French and, and later Hindi.
And I see how they process the world differently, but they process the world differently because they had 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. So I have these, you know, the sedimentary rock matters to me. I often want to go a lot further down into the layers that people may be staying at the surface on. What a beautiful story.
The vomiting for 20 minutes person. That was their words, not mine. Um, and they said, put your hazmat suit on, which was pre COVID days too. So it always sticks in my head. Um, and. The example I was thinking about the person, um, in the most recent example was speaking in Hebrew and, and their, their language flow. in a written format goes from left to right, not from right to left, not left to right.
And I 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. 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 dardiri, 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 because 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're 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. Just made sense of something. Thank you. Same old. 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 I, it 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, we use the acknowledgement of the lands and, 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. It's slightly different because we've taken out, especially the people's 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 wonder what, because I'm just thinking. 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. in a very human way, because you can get very organisational development about systems, can't you? But there's a humanity. 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. that we parcel.
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.
And in the context I'm talking about, our indigenous communities in Australia and our Maori 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.
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? 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.
You have a story brings them to life and helps people understand how it makes sense. So I'm very grateful. I'm on what a muddicle 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. They're not swapping them out all the time. And it's those ones that swap that 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 the 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.
Whereas in the West, silence is a cue to 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 English context that showcases and gives honor to the power of silence. It's continuously viewed in a context that's not productive. I agree. And when I was writing, I've just...
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 is that just because you're not talking doesn't mean it's silence. And you've just described. cultures who in their tradition have got a deep silence. not just and I'm not talking. And I'll bring in the matter 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? 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, you know, 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? 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. That's going to make it into a book, isn't it? Maybe, maybe not.
Earlier on you said, Oh, you're a good listener. What am I doing that signaling that to you? Because not everyone can see us. We're co -creating this conversation. So I'm listening to you and you're 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. Meaning a two -way dialogue? Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, because if you've come to promote your whatever.
Yep. the quality that comes out of the co -creation that comes out of the silence isn't always present. 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 sense or. Don't say that. Or I could respond to what I've just noticed. I'm going to come 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 you're, that's the listening demonstrated. in the responding to what's emerging. If that is a tiny little answer to your question. What do we think? And I think it answers both questions to some extent too, doesn't it? Yeah. You're going to build, so let me not interrupt. Well, my build is to encourage the listeners to build actually. And to join in the conversation. So what should they email to you and we've got some books to give away? 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? Um, kinda, kinda build, build. Uh, no clarification. Yeah. If, if you were, if you were to say that again for the audience, what, what is your expectation that they would email you? You've been very clear on what not to say.
Email us info at 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. Thank you. Well, thank you. And I've got some lovely copies to send out. 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.
And thanks to Dame Evelyn Glaney, 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, 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 change for me is to reinforce and continue this. curiosity about the role of language as a way to block more potent ways of listening. When by being present to you, Claire, you changed me, I know it's a great conversation. So thanks for listening. 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.