Episode 102 – Oscar Trimboli | Deep Listening Expert

In this episode I speak with Oscar Trimboli, who is on a quest to create 100 million Deep Listeners in the world. He is an author, host of the Apple Award-winning podcast—Deep Listening and a sought-after keynote speaker. Oscar is passionate about using the gift of listening to bring positive change in workplaces.

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Transcript

Murray Guest  

Oscar, welcome to the podcast. I really appreciate your time and I am super excited about chatting with you today because there is something magical that you focus on that I don’t think we focus on enough. And I say that with full authenticity because I feel like listening is one of those things that people take for granted, and they don’t really think about it, and I really want to explore that more with you today and get, get the opportunity to share some of your knowledge. So thank you.

Oscar Trimboli  

Looking forward to listening to your questions.

Murray Guest  

How are you?

Oscar Trimboli  

Yeah, I’m, um, I’m okay, if you were to ask me this question a year ago I would have said a roller coaster and now I’m pretty much set for the new, new way of working, and it’s, it’s all good. My family’s healthy. And that’s all I can ask for, everything after that’s a bonus. 

Murray Guest  

Yeah I feel like with the leaders I’ve been working with there’s been some resets around perspectives and gratitude. And I feel that myself as well. And I appreciate, and I’m glad to hear that people, people in your family are well right now. So Oscar tell me why did you go down a path of deepening your knowledge and exploring this area of listening.

Oscar Trimboli  

I didn’t choose it, it chose me. I was sitting in a boardroom, in a video conference between Sydney, Seattle, and Singapore with 18 people and at the 20 minute mark my Vice President looked me straight in the eye and said, please stay after this meeting we need to talk. Murray, the only thing that was going through my head is how many week’s salary have I got left in my bank account. Definitely gonna get fired. I’ve never been asked to wait behind in a meeting, with the way it was said. Meeting actually finished a little earlier than expected, it was a 90 minute meeting and finished at the 70 minute mark. And Tracy said to me when everybody had left, please close the door. I was like, great. It’s one of those meetings.

Murray Guest  

Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli  

And she said you have no idea what you did at the 20 minute mark do you? And I thought, Oh, am I getting fired. I don’t know why I’m getting fired. At the 20 minute mark I obviously did something. She said Oscar if you could code the way you listen, you could change the world. And in that profound moment Murray, I was doing no listening whatsoever. My immediate reaction was, Yahoo I’m not fired, I can put all that money back in my bank account that I’d taken out. And Tracy just made a few reflections and I left that meeting never thinking about it again. And four weeks later my Chief Financial Officer, Brian, said, Hey tomorrow can you come to our budget meeting, I want you to audit my listening. And I said, Brian, I haven’t got enough time for this listening caper, you’ve obviously been talking to Tracy. You remember you gave me a 34% uplift in my budget and I’m running about a billion dollar business at Microsoft at the time. So that’s a big chunk of change because we’re going through this big change in moving our business model from charging people up front to charging them per month and moving software distribution from DVDs to delivered over the Internet. And he said to me, Oscar, I’m not asking you I’m telling you. And I’m glad he did because for the next 90 minutes I sat down and audited Brian’s listening and realized he listened really differently to me and that’s kind of what was the spark that set this in motion. But whether you went back to my high school days where I listened to 23 different nationalities at our school, there was always a listening thread in my life but I only know it looking back, I didn’t know it in the moment.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, I was wondering about that because I often think about those formative years and what may have been happening early on in your life, which I can tell right away, and I’ve met you some time ago, we met a few years ago in Sydney, hopefully you remember that, you are a really…

Oscar Trimboli  

99 Walker street.

Murray Guest  

Oh there you go, great memory.

Oscar Trimboli  

Level 16, I think. I could be wrong on the level 16…

Murray Guest  

It might be 14 I’m not sure. But you have an innate I would say, ability, to really listen to someone and on your reflection, do you see that was part of, just the way you were as a child, as well. Do you think that was there all along?

Oscar Trimboli  

Yeah so, at the age of 14 I had to get massive orthodontic work done. I had basically a Werewolf’s jaw and and protruding teeth, and most children at that age they probably get orthodontic work that maybe two years I had orthodontics in for about four and a half. When you don’t want to draw attention to your physical looks, and somebody wants to engage you in a conversation, if you’re a really good listener and ask really good questions, you can definitely, I call it my superhero cloak of invisibility, you can hide in any conversation by being a really good listener. And yet, the irony of all of that is I thought that was a story that would guide the rest of my life. And you know, I’m the person who asked great questions and make other people successful. And the reality is I’m on this quest now for 100 million deeper listeners in the world, and I’ve had to learn how to speak, meaning public speaking, meaning keynote speaking, meaning speaking on other people’s podcasts to realize that quest because I can’t listen my way to 100 million deep listeners, I also have to speak. So, in, in a paradoxic way, it’s also helped me to find my voice, it’s also helped me to speak about the things that really really matter to me. And where I’ve noticed the cost of not listening in my corporate career it was projects that went over schedules, declining profitability, great staff leaving before they wanted to, customer complaints that were ignored. You could see it everywhere. And, yeah, now we’re on this journey. So you know, where are we at, we’re about 14 years later from Tracy’s request to code it. And we’ve coded into books, coded it into playing cards, and we’ve coded it into jigsaw puzzle games and we’ve coded it into the listening quiz. And when she meant code she meant put it into software. So, the quiz, the quiz is the first step into making it into software but longer term I’d love to develop a listening app that would be able to provide feedback to somebody either real time or after the event, about how they listened in some kind of meeting context so that’s that’s how my childhood influenced it. I think the end of the day, a lot of people just hang on to those stories for too long. And I’ve just taken what’s been useful in those stories and acknowledge the bits that have been left behind and thank them for bringing me to this point.

Murray Guest  

Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. I got to know you a bit better, and I really, in the articulation of the story, in the visualization, I was drawn in. So, again, I want to acknowledge how well you do tell a story, not just listen. Tell me though, let’s just jump forward or jump back to what you talked about, the audit. I think about an audit, generally your auditing against a process or system, a standard or something. Here you are walking in on the direction of the CFO to audit. So, what do you remember that you actually were doing to actually audit, at that point when you didn’t have something to compare it against.

Oscar Trimboli  

Well the good news is I did have something to compare it against, it just wasn’t written down. So Brian would kind of interrupt and I go, Oh wow, they hadn’t finished talking. Brian wouldn’t listen to everybody in the room, he’d only listen to the most obvious voices, and, and I remember I can picture that room because there was 11 people in that room, and only four spoke in the entire meeting. So that was another thing. So who’s who’s not being heard. How, how well are they, how well was Brian using pause, as an example, how well was he using silence. No coincidences that silent and listen have exactly the same letters, they’re just jumbled up in a different way. I also was curious about the kinds of questions he was asking – why questions versus how questions versus what questions versus where questions, and the proportions of each and where they were being used in the meeting, how he was and wasn’t drawing out people, and questions that were really statements with an inflection or a question mark at the end. And that really coded the first time I sat down and actually wrote something because I just went wow that’s how I listen, that’s how he listens, that was my point of comparison. And wind the clock forward a decade and a bit we, we have some really rigorous work we’ve done around the five levels of listening, the four villains of listening, we’ve worked with market research companies, data scientists, academics, to understand what gets in the way for people because for three years I spent a lot of time blogging about what what the world’s great listeners do. And ironically Murray, nobody was interested. No, nobody could relate. And I remember I was, I was in a, an industry event probably not too dissimilar to the one we met, where I was talking to Dermott an Irish guy, somebody who’s a friend today, and was an acquaintance at that time. And I said, Dermott you know I’m writing all these blogs and newsletters and he’s like, eejit. It’s listening so do a podcast. And in exactly the same conference I was lucky enough to meet two people who had written a book, Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan called Scared, Stupid and Simple. And I was lucky enough to overhear them in a conversation saying people relate to their weaknesses much faster than they relate to an aspiration. So people know they’re overweight. If they’re overweight, they don’t aspire to be fit and run a marathon and whatever their definition of fitness is, but if you if you can speak first to where they’re at and what they’re struggling with, what their problem is in terms of the change. And in that moment, and then I went and read Dan and Keiran’s book, in that moment, the four villains of listening were, the idea wasn’t brought to life I guess there was an inception moment for the four villains of listening, and then we researched nearly 1400 people to ask them three simple questions: What frustrates you when other people don’t listen to you, what gets in the way of your listening, and if you could improve one thing in your listening, what would that be? And this was an Aladdin’s cave of listening. And what was interesting was, we did some very basic rudimentary word analysis, on average, people could describe what got in the way of their listening in 8 words. When people were describing, bad listening behavior on average they could describe it at 16 words, in a sentence. So, when we describe someone else’s listening we can tell you exactly what’s wrong with it, and when we describe our own we struggle, and this is the first barrier for listening. 74.9% of people think they’re either above average listeners, or well above average listeners. So three quarters of people with no training, only 2% of the working population has any listening training, 74.9% of people think they’re either above average, or well above average, that means three out of four people that you meet are outstanding listeners, and yet when we ask the opposite question, what percentage do you think are great listeners, the answer is 23% which mirrors a kind of standard distribution curve. So for me, there’s an art and a science when it comes to listening, and there’s also a rigor in the work I approach. I don’t want to just pull it out of thin air. You know, I want to validate it not only from a data perspective but I want to validate it from the current academic research and theory perspective, as well as my practitioners perspective, as well as the clients I deal with you know, so a lot a lot of the people in the workplace, they say to me Well, what’s one tip. What’s that one tip you can do when it comes to improving your listening. And it’s your cell phone, your mobile phone, it’s anything with an electronic notification so if you’re stuck in video meetings at the moment it will be a Slack channel or a team channel, or some kind of other notification you may not have switched off your email notifications on your computer or iPad. So, when we’ve been tracking those 1410 people for four years now. And the number one thing that they say improves their listening is to switch off the notifications. Now, don’t get me wrong, Murray, there’s some professions that you can’t. People in the medical profession, people who are on call, people who deal with emergency and all of that. But for the vast majority of people, what gets in your way is electronic notification.

Murray Guest  

So I, a couple of years ago, I heard Tom Rath, in the US share a stat and I’ll see if I get this right and you might know this to, to absolutely support what you’re saying is that just having your phone physically present, you don’t need to be touching it, drops your cognitive ability, I think he said like 15 to 18%.

Oscar Trimboli  

Yeah, with your phone on, the other way that’s expressed, with your phone on you have the IQ of an eight year old. 

Murray Guest  

Yeah. Gotcha. So, these, these notifications and devices. So what I’m hearing here the actual insight is don’t try and listen harder but remove the distractions, make it easy on yourself.

Oscar Trimboli  

Yeah, you can’t, you know here’s, here’s the biggest myth about listening, focus on the speaker. It’s an interesting place to be. Once you’ve listened to yourself, but the first person you need to listen to is you. And you’ve got to remove distractions so you can be available to that person. Look, I’m lucky I’ve come from the tech industry, 30 years telecommunications technology software, you know, I’ve seen industries morph. One thing I know is true and most people don’t know this is the psychological research to make sure you stay on your phone, the red dot, the beep, the ding, the notification, the psychological research for that was done in the 1970s for the casino operators in Las Vegas to keep people’s attention pressing that button to make sure they put more money in. So, for anybody, I would say this. Control the technology, don’t let it control you. Technology’s amazing, but if you become a slave to it you have no processing capability whatsoever. And with with the device near you, and on, you have the cognitive processing capacity of an eight year old.

Murray Guest  

Wow, okay. So, I had a question I think you’ve answered it and which has actually demonstrated how much I wasn’t listening. I’m pulling up myself there Oscar. The difference between being a really good listener and a deep listener. How would you explain that baseline.

Oscar Trimboli  

Yeah, really good listeners listen to what people say and deep listeners listen very carefully to what people don’t say.

Murray Guest  

So, how do we do that.

Oscar Trimboli  

Well the first step you need to understand three numbers 125, 400 and 900. Let me unpick the neuroscience of listening for you. So you speak at about 125 to 150 words per minute. If you’re a horse race caller you go to about 200 words per minute, when you’re auctioning cattle or something like that. You can still comprehend it, 200 words per minute. And we know that deaf people can listen to audio, sorry, blind people can listen to audio books at up to three times speed and still retain complete comprehension. So the first number is speaking speed 125-150 words per minute. The second number 400 is the speed at which you can listen. So you can listen four times faster than I can speak. So some of you are thinking about your lunch right now. You’re thinking about the cognitive capability of an eight year old, you’re thinking about an audit with a financial controller, or you could be just doing your email right, because you can hear what I say four times faster than I can speak. And this is why we have peripheral vision, and we also have peripheral hearing so we can hear things. Now, I’ve interviewed a number of neuroscientists and I’ve interviewed a number of professors have written books on attention. And one of the things they say is listening happens at the front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the more modern part of the brain and takes place in a place called working memory, and working memory is finite, doesn’t expand, it doesn’t have neuro plasticity, it is finite. And a lot of people say, yeah but I can multitask. Have you heard that one Murray?

Murray Guest  

I have, and I’m going to try and be polite here Oscar. No they can’t.

Oscar Trimboli  

Yeah, you can actually, for routine predictable tasks. So you can drive a car, and listen to the radio. And you can multitask, you can chop up vegetables and watch TV. You can multitask. If there is limited cognitive processing going on in the routine task, you can multitask, don’t get me wrong. But zoom us into the workplace, to complex, creative, collaborative, constrained, competitive situations. This is not routine tasks. Therefore, the likelihood you can listen and do something else is zero because working memory is actually task switching, not multitasking. So you only have one CPU, you can’t parallel process for those people with a technology background. So knowing that it’s really critical that you understand that, being present, allows you to start to listen to what people don’t say. And now it sounds completely paradoxical, sounds like Yoda from Star Wars has rocked up, listen to what people don’t say. So here is 900. This is the average thinking speed of most people, 900 words per minute. Now there are people who can think it up to 1600 words per minute. People who have done masters and PhDs and very deep in their topic for example they can easily think up to 1600 words per minute, people have to do complex tasks. Think of a surgeon. Think of a musician. Think of an artist, that all these people can be thinking up to 1600 words per minute, but let’s just stick with 900 because that’s the average. So if I am speaking Murray at 125 words a minute. And yet, I’ve got nine hundred words stuck in my head. Why do most people accept that the very first thing that somebody says is what they actually are thinking and meaning, because whether we’re sending an email, we never send the very first thing we type. So when we listen why do we believe, why do we have this myth that the very first thing somebody says is what they mean.

Murray Guest  

Wow, wow.

Oscar Trimboli  

That means mathematically it’s 11% chance that if you just what you do is listen to what they say, you are hearing 11% of what they’re thinking. Now I don’t know about you but you get better at odds with black on a roulette wheel, then you do by having a conversation with somebody and just listening to what they say the first time. Now please don’t try this at home. This is all for workplace communication. Don’t try any of the techniques we’re about to talk about next with your loved ones or your children, because they’ll just think you’re plain weird. So, this is, if people know the neuroscience and the maths of listening and speaking, suddenly they know two things, why am I distracted. Oh, Okay, I’m distracted because they’re not speaking as fast as I can listen. Hmm, I don’t quite get what they’re saying, well, they don’t either because they’re just saying the first thing that comes out of their mouth. Because there’s an 11% chance that what they say the first time is what they mean. Now, if they’re lucky enough to have written a book or, you know, done a presentation on the topic yeah there you might get 22 to 33% of what they mean the first time. So I’m curious what that’s got you thinking about.

Murray Guest  

Honestly, what it’s got me thinking about is curiosity, and how we shift from taking what’s said first, as, for lack of a better word Oscar, gospel, to, as leaders, as employees, as team members, as humans being more curious, and actually being present, and as you’ve got me thinking about the curiosity and how do I listen to what’s not being said, and then ask a question to then go deeper. That’s what I’m thinking about.

Oscar Trimboli  

And you want to be thinking about this in a multi dimensional way too, Murray, this is not just one on one conversations, this is even more powerful in group conversations. In 2012 I was in a boardroom, in a very fast growing company, and we had the leadership team in in the room there was 12 of them. And they were wrestling with the question, how do we grow faster, because although they are growing at triple digits, they are growing about 125 to 130%, which was fantastic, but compared to their global peers where they were benchmarking themselves, where they were growing at four digits, they were growing at 1,000% per year, because it was a really fast emerging market. And we had the leadership team in the room. And you’ve probably been in these rooms their narrow, and, and this one particularly got me. The whiteboard had so much residue from whiteboard markers you know that that black, it looks like sand sitting in the, in the area from people cleaming the white board but the room was generically dusty as well. And I knew it was 12:36. And I knew this because the CEO looked me straight in the eye and said, Oscar, you know, we’re having lunch at one. I said, that’s no problem. And, and I’d ask the group a question. And by five to one we’d got through everybody bar one person. And the question was really simple. If this was, if this organization was an animal, what would it be and everybody kind of described a bird. That was fast. That was swooping and catching prey. An Eagle, an Ospreay anything that was really really fast. And at five to one we hadn’t heard from the very last person, and the CEO was giving me this death stare and pointing to his watch, because the food had already been brought in. And he was giving me this wrap up signal. Anyway, I stepped back and there was one person who hadn’t spoken. Eileen was a card carrying member of the introvert club. And the reason you know they’re a card carrying member of the introvert club is you say, Hey, if you’re an extrovert, put your hand up. And sorry I didn’t say stand up, I said, just put your hand up. Then you’ve got Omniverts who are both, and you say, put your hand up if you’re an introvert and they put their hands up, because the card carrying member of the introvert community will never admit it in public. And Eileen needed encouragement, but I didn’t say anything. What I did was I stepped back ever so slightly and I turned my body, but I didn’t create direct eye contact with her. And then I just put my hand out, and she said, I thought it was obvious. I thought we were a snake. You could feel the tension in the room explode, nobody said anything but you could feel the tension in the room explode. So we’ve gone from Eagle, Ospreay, some kind of hawk.

Murray Guest  

A bird of prey to a snake.

Oscar Trimboli  

And Murray, for the audience right now describe the characteristics of the snake from your perspective.

Murray Guest  

Oh, so if I think about a snake which, if I’m really open Oscar is one of my least favorite animals. And as a mountain biker it’s quite contradictory, legless, slithering, slow, but then ready to attack when needed, and doesn’t eat that often but when they do they eat quite a bit. That’s what I’m thinking about.

Oscar Trimboli  

So what you don’t know about Eileen is she’s from China. They have a very different relationship to the snake compared to Westerners. So in that moment, rather than saying, Thank you, you know, we’ve got all our animals. I simply turned to her and said, tell me more. And she said, Well, I thought it was really obvious. A snake sheds its skin every season. And we’ve forgotten to shed our skin and we’re holding on to practices and ways of doing things that aren’t helpful to our customers. Well the tension in the room changed dramatically and this full on conversation emerged. And Murray, the reason I know it’s 12:36 is because it was 1:36 before anybody said to me, Isn’t it time for lunch. Because now they were having a discussion about the practices that they were still holding on to. Because they listened to somebody in the room they don’t normally listen to, who didn’t have the obvious perspective. She was from finance, she was not from the dominant culture, and Eileen is quite a petite, small woman. But with just the most minute encouragement we could listen to what was unsaid in the room.

Murray Guest  

Can I acknowledge too, the bit that I really take from that Oscar, how you created space for that contribution in a way which of physically, as you said, stepping back and turning but not giving eye contact, that, that to me is also really in. I just want to make sure everyone acknowledges and thinks about that around listening isn’t just with your ears, and how you created that space for her to feel safe to then speak up. And then as you said, Tell me more about that, because the gold I can imagine was basically from 12:58 to 1:36.

Oscar Trimboli  

Yeah. And, and, and, you know the lunch got cold but nobody complained and what we, what we know happened next, the organization develops internal iconography around all different kinds of snakes. Snakes became work code words for various versions of software. Snakes were integrated into their sales presentations and they talked about why they chose snakes and it all went back to Eileen’s story, way way way way back in this dusty boardroom, and it’s the courage to pause and wait and listen to all opinions, because it’s very easy to get rushed off our feet. The other thing too if you facilitate and what I mean by that, if you host a meeting. Sometimes it’s critical that you stay rigidly to the timing on the agenda. And sometimes it’s really not. And it’s your intuition that you got to trust in that moment, to be present enough to feel, to hear, to see what is present, not just for Eileen but for the room, and the outcome. Sometimes, blowing up the agenda is the most potent thing you can do when you’re leaving the room because the end of the day, we’re only in that room to listen for who’s outside the room. And Eileen did that beautifully because she was bringing the customers perspective into the room. Whereas, I have to be honest all 11 people were maniacally obsessed about the competitors growing at 1,000% and themselves, as in the organization, and she just said we were not shedding the processes that we had from the past.

Murray Guest  

Wow. I love that story for so many reasons Oscar, and I think, as you have rightly said, I want to acknowledge again, doesn’t matter what you do, who you are, the, the approach of really listening and being present and slowing down, applies to everyone in their life. You haven’t convinced me to change my mind about snakes though, I just want to make sure you’re clear on that.

Oscar Trimboli  

It’s not my job to change your mind, by the way listening is the willingness to have your mind changed as opposed to changing your mind. Let me give you three tips people say oh that’s all well and good Oscar but make it practical for me. Here’s three tips to listen for what’s unsaid. Linguistically we know that questions that are more than eight words are biased, they’re biased questions. So the shorter your questions, the more effective they are. They’re more neutral. And they invite a wider perspective when you say these three. These three are really easy to remember, they’ll be really super quick, if you want to write them down, don’t do it now I’ll summarize them all really quickly. So the three questions when you use these questions skillfully what you’ll notice is the following. The person or the group you’re talking to will do the following. Their spine will change position, they’ll draw a breath in, and they’ll use any variant of the following phrases. Mmmmm. Now that I think about it a little longer, what we should talk about is… Or they’ll say, Hmm, actually Murray you know what, I haven’t told you about….. Or they’ll say, Hmmm are you okay if we change direction, because now that I’ve thought about it, I’m thinking about it in a completely different way. Does that ever happen for you?

Murray Guest  

I would say definitely. And I can even feel the situation, because it’s definitely happened.

Oscar Trimboli  

Tell me more. 

Murray Guest  

Well, I think it’s in those moments where what I think, the way I’ve actually described it Oscar is the 30 second conversation. And what I mean by that is, I’ve talked to leaders about quite often, we have conversations but if we just hang on for another 30 seconds. And it actually could be a couple of minutes but in your case for that story with Eileen it is quite longer. But my point being that when we stay that little bit longer, and we ask some more questions, and stay curious. We then, it might feel a bit uncomfortable, but that’s where the real gold lies, that’s where the real uncovering lies. And I think as a facilitator when I’ve done that. And there’s been that drawing of the breath. That’s where there’s been a major impact. And I’ve seen that as a facilitator and a coach so. And I think the, the flight mechanism kicking in of Oh can we change the subject, as well, because it may be, whilst we’re creating a safe space to share but also for some others that might be unsafe or want to change the topic.

Oscar Trimboli  

And tell me, you said you’ve felt it.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, so I feel that in my stomach and I think because it’s a connection to the moment of, Oh is this okay or is this uncomfortable or is this a bit, this is different. Something’s happening here. And that’s where I feel it in the stomach.

Oscar Trimboli  

Now for those of you who couldn’t see Murray, the way he first responded to tell me more was very cerebral, it was in his head and his speaking pace was very different. Notice if you want to go back and rewind, notice when I asked him about the feeling how his tonality literally changed, and he moved into his body and he went back into that moment, I sense it was quite visceral.

Murray Guest  

Definitely.

Oscar Trimboli  

Now in the West, we have this interesting relationship with silence. We call it the deafening silence, the awkward silence, the pregnant pause, we have a whole language set around it. Yet, in the East, China, Japan, Korea, in high context cultures like Australian Indigenous cultures, Maori, Polynesian cultures, Inuit cultures, African jungle cultures, and South American jungle cultures. Silence is just a sign of wisdom, respect and authority, it’s something that’s actually embraced it’s not pushed away, it’s not sensed as something that’s intimidating us. Our speed of response, we somehow correlate speed to quality and we know that’s not true. And 125 900 Rule proves the reason why it’s important to pause. And for those of you who work with indigenous communities and understand the impact of yarning circles, a great leader and elder will hold that space really well for an extended period of time in silence, to allow the feelings, not just the words, to be expressed as a group rather than just as individuals. Now I’m sure you still want to come back to these three questions. So here they are. And the first one I’ve already used. Tell me more. Very short question, easy to remember. Tell me more. I’m curious, tell me more. Fascinating. Tell me more. Just make it your own. Don’t make it too long but don’t make it robotic either. And please don’t use these three questions in sequence, because it’ll feel like you’re loading up something to move forward and not really focused on them so number one. Tell me more. Number two, and what else? And what else. And you can even shorten that question and merely say in a very curious way, and?

Murray Guest  

Hmm, I like that a lot. Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli  

Now for those of you can’t see Murray’s nodding his head furiously so we’re gonna ask him, What about that he likes.

Murray Guest  

I like the power in the simplicity. The curiosity. And I believe we’ve got a mutual appreciation for Michael Bungay-Stanier’s book The Advice Trap, which I’m a big fan of and have provided to a number of clients. And he talks about being curious and, and the power of questions, and that question there of, and what else or asking, and with a really good intent. And for those that couldn’t see the way Oscar asked that was, you could see his body sort of lean in with a beautiful smile and energy saying, I really want to know. So yeah, that’s why I like it.

Oscar Trimboli  

Alright. Tip number three. The shortest question, the most powerful question. Be careful how you use it, you’ve got to use this with the right intent here it is. Listen carefully. Don’t worry, Murray hasn’t messed up any recording. It’s no coincidence silent and listen have exactly the same letters, and the use of the pause or silence to allow them to collect their next 125 words out of their mind, or out of their gut, as it was with Murray and express that, will have an impact beyond words and if we are deep listeners we’re listening to what they’re not saying. Not for us, but for them. The last dirty little secret of listening is it’s not your job to make sense of what they say it’s your job to help them make sense of what they’re thinking. And ultimately, what they mean by that, as well. But that’s a story for another podcast where we can spend time understanding all five levels of listening.

Murray Guest  

Oscar, I want to thank you immensely for your wisdom and your time and sharing what you have been focusing on for these past 14 years, and this listening journey, helping my listeners deepen their knowledge and understanding and shift from being okay listeners or potentially good listeners to what it means to be deep listeners. I really encourage everyone to check out the deep listening podcast it’s an award winning podcast where Oscar has some amazing guests, helping explore and understand deep listening, and on the website, the listening quiz to get an understanding of your own listening, so check that out as well. I ask everybody on the podcast Oscar, what is their definition of inspired energy. I have yours, which is unique, I’m gonna just frame this up, it may be it’s changed since you…

Oscar Trimboli  

No it hasn’t.

Murray Guest  

So please. What is your definition of inspired energy.

Oscar Trimboli  

Mine is the ocean. And the reason that is is the ocean is a constant state of flux and change it balances stillness, with power. It balances, night and day. It moves tides across the earth but I love ocean swimming, and one of the things I can’t do at the moment and for the last year and a half is swim in the ocean because of the various restrictions we’ve had imposed to make sure that we’re all healthy but when I’m in the ocean I realize that my energy is connected to a much bigger energy than just mine, and when I’m in the ocean, the energy I feel, whether it’s stillness, or whether it’s crashing waves or worse still, swell. For those of you who don’t get into the ocean, the waves come and go but the swell relentlessly pushing you up and down like a cork in the ocean is the reason why I can’t eat breakfast before I swim because, unfortunately, my stomach sends a signal to the rest of my body that breakfast doesn’t belong to me. And the ocean is where I do my best thinking, and when I can’t swim in the ocean I swim at the local university pool here and it’s the energy of the water, and the sun and the moon if I’m doing it at night and the combination of all of those things that connect me to a bigger ecosystem and understand that I’m part of something bigger, no matter what I do.

Murray Guest  

My hope and wish for you is that you are in the ocean swimming by the end of October.

Oscar Trimboli  

That’s a great aspiration, I hope so too.

Murray Guest  

Based on restrictions changing. So Oscar once again thank you so much for being on the podcast, I really appreciate your time, energy and knowledge it’s been wonderful, and all the best for the remainder of 2021.

Oscar Trimboli  

Thanks for listening.