I guess the first thing I would say is that listening tends to be contagious.
So how each of us listens does tend to wear off on other people.
That mind that when people feel really, really, truly seen and heard, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project.
I'm your host, Shane Parish.
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My guest today is Carolyn Coughlin.
Carolyn has been an executive coach, facilitator, and leadership development specialist for over 15 years.
Her journey began in the corporate world where she was a management consultant first at PWC and later at McKinsey & Company.
I wanted to talk to Carolyn to deepen my understanding of adult development theory and become a better listener.
I've had multiple friends point out that she is one of the best listeners in the world.
And it might sound funny that I want to become a better listener most of what I do on this show is listen, but you'd be surprised at some of the insights I took away from this particular conversation, including specific language to use coaching myself and my kids.
Carolyn and I discussed need-to's versus want-to's, listening to ourselves and others including three different types of listening, listening to learn, listening to understand, and listening to fix.
We also discussed listening to our bodies which offer a different type of intelligence.
The most common skill she teaches her clients that are immediately useful and so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.
Let's start with adult development theory.
What is it and why does it matter?
So adult development theory is a, I sort of think of it as a map.
There are several different adult development theories.
I won't go into detail about them, but each of them is a theory that describes how once we get to be adults, so once we look like adults, how does our sense making change?
And the big news of adult development theory, really when it first was introduced about 50, close to 60 years ago, was this idea that even when we look like adults, we are actually, what's not so easily visible, can but doesn't always continue to change.
Just because someone looks, you know, that's 25 years old and looks like they ought to be a fully formed adult, there are still ways that the way they make sense of themselves in the world keeps changing.
So it gives us a kind of a map to describe how that happens and that's useful in a variety of ways.
Can you go deeper on that sense making?
Yeah, yeah. So sense making is when I look out at the world, how do I even know what what I'm seeing means?
So earlier in our lives, when young people look out at the world, what they see makes sense to them in relationship to their own kind of physical well-being mostly.
Like they look out and see things like I would look out and I would see my mother having a stern face with me and what I would think was, what does this mean for me?
Am I in trouble? Have I done something?
Do I need to change something so that I will be okay?
Later, we look out at an angry face and we think, oh my goodness, I've done something wrong.
I've hurt somebody. How do they might think badly of me?
So I must be bad. So therefore, what do I need to do to make the mirror that is this angry face looking back at me be different so that I can feel okay about myself?
Later on that changes, right?
I see an angry face and I might wonder, what's going on for that person?
What might be happening in their life?
And it doesn't get so conflated with me.
I get to be more separate from that angry face, but I wonder what does it mean and what...
It doesn't influence me so much.
So that's what I mean. Does that help?
Yeah, it's like we're making meaning out of what we're seeing.
Yeah, exactly. But then there's another aspect to it.
So we look out at the world and what is...
What meaning do we make of it?
But also there's a way. It's like, how do we make sense of ourselves?
And that changes over time too.
Of course, that's like closely related to what we see outside of us.
But it's this interplay.
It's really what we see.
It's the meaning that we construct.
It's often referred to.
Adult development theories are often referred to as constructive developmental theories because it's a question of...
It describes how do we construct reality?
How do we construct meaning?
And then how does that change over time?
And are there ways that we can change it?
Or is it just a way that we understand how we develop?
Yeah. So I described it as a map that's really helpful because it gives us kind of a...
I find that with my clients, certainly with myself and with my clients, it helps people understand it, gives people a language, a way to see what might be happening.
Like how I construct meaning of myself and the world has changed up till now, and how it might change in the future.
So it gives me like a reference point.
And yes, of course, there are many...
And this is what developmental coaching is all about.
It's like, how do we take the experiences that happen to us every day and use them when we are not quite fit, we find ourselves not quite fit for our context, like up to what Bob Keegan called it in over our heads.
What moves can we make to try to develop our meaning making to be more fit for the context?
It happens better with company.
Kind of a hard thing to do alone.
Yeah. I want to talk about that in a bit in terms of how we make sense of ourselves and how other people...
It prompted sort of something that you told me earlier as you were saying that, that a few years ago, a friend of yours noticed that you were saying things like, I need to check in with the kids or I have to get home right after we finish up, which prompted a conversation on the need tos versus want tos.
Can you explore a bit of that to me and the language that you're using?
Yeah. So I have a couple of go-to interventions.
I'll call them interventions.
Basically, kind of something that disrupts our normal patterns and language.
Noticing and disrupting language patterns, I find to be very, very helpful as a developmental move.
That story happened about 10 years ago when my children were younger and I was really torn a lot of the time because I was traveling around the world.
I was really feeling like...
I was experiencing the most exciting period up until then of my professional career and all parts of my life.
And I had these three children at home and a husband who was there with them most of the time because he's a teacher so he didn't travel, he was around more.
And I felt torn between these two parts of my life.
And a good friend of mine noticed that I often, when talking about my kids and my family just as you said, used the term, have to get home.
I need to check on them. I need to call.
And so this... I already had this idea that our language is not just an expression of our meaning-making, but it also shapes our meaning-making.
So when this friend of mine noticed that language pattern, I began to ask a question like, what words could I use that might actually change the way I make sense, make me...
it helps support me to be less torn about this kind of kids and family and the rest of my life thing.
And so that's what I mean.
And I did. So I started to really deliberately notice and I could also feel it in my body.
You know, when I was about to talk about need to and have to, there's like this tightness and constriction.
And when I changed the words to want to, it sounds like the tiniest intervention, right?
It seems almost so simple as to be silly, but it really, really changed the way I made sense of my relationship to my responsibility, the role in the life of my family.
It made it possible for me to show up differently with them as well.
Because effectively you're choosing it, but if you feel like you have to, then it almost feels like not a choice.
I almost think of this in terms of three categories, which is like things I have to do.
Like I fundamentally just have to do them.
Things I want to do. And then things other people want me to do.
And this helps me when I, especially when I feel busy, it helps me prioritize what I choose to take on.
And it's that little nuance in language that is really interesting.
And then often another nuance in language that you sort of prompted as you were talking is when I make a decision.
I usually, I try to say I choose to because fundamentally I'm making a choice.
Yeah. Just by using the language I choose to, it actually cultivates or constructs a new meaning around what you're doing.
Rather than the world or someone else doing it to you, you're stepping into it in a different way.
And it isn't just a pretend thing.
You know, this whole idea of acting as if it's talking as if speaking as if I were choosing after a while that translates into you're actually seeing it as a choice.
And often we just think of it as language as throwaway, right?
We don't see it as so important.
It's almost invisible to us a lot of the time.
It's habitual. One of the words that you used in that response was torn.
And often a lot of us are feeling torn between competing parts of our life.
And we sort of, the words that we use to describe this range from balance, work life balance to harmony, to integrated, to a mosaic.
How do you think about that and how do you help people who want to fulfill multiple parts of their life and they seem to have competing demands?
A lot of it really depends on where they are in terms of how they make sense of these things.
So work life balance, like notice the difference between work life balance and mosaic.
Those are really different.
If someone that I'm working with is talking about work life balance, I may not immediately go to, what if you thought of it as a mosaic?
Right. Because the work life balance, it's almost, I get the visual of one of those old fashioned scales.
And you're trying to get it just right.
I need just enough of work and just enough of home just to get it just right.
And it's as if there's a balance point that you can reach that will be static and sustainable.
So if someone sees it that way, I would probably ask a question, you know, what's the most important thing to you about getting the balance just right?
Or what's the worst thing, you know, about not getting it just right?
So I would probably want to disrupt that the underlying assumptions about work life balance is that thing first or offer it, offer a disruption and see where that goes.
I also have to find metaphors to be really helpful here with these sorts of things because often I will listen to the metaphors that a client uses and try to tap into those.
If somebody is talking about balance, I will present to them like a scale, an old fashioned balancing scale.
And I'll just ask them, like, how does that feel to you?
Is that actually what you're going for here?
Sometimes it makes sense for me to introduce a metaphor that's slightly different and ask them to consider that.
So when I think of work life, like work in life and integrating these components of life, it's not just work in life, right?
And we tend to break it down into this, but there's also your health.
There's your community.
There's all these other aspects that make for a meaningful life that once you start thinking about balance and you think about living a holistic life, it becomes impossible, I think, in my experience.
And so the mosaic term or sort of like integration of things is very different because the pieces at different points can take on different shapes and sizes, but they're always there.
They're always present.
And you're always giving some attention to it, but you know, it might be, I'm going to do less of this right now and more of this right now.
And this needs to be a bigger piece right now because that's more important.
And on my better days, I see it that way.
And, you know, when I feel overwhelmed, I don't know how it is for you.
I'd love to hear that it's harder to see it that way when things are really, really pressing on you for us to feel satisfied with the mosaic on any given day.
In some ways, we have to be able to step back and look at it and see how beautiful it is.
But when you're stuck in the mosaic because things are so pressing, really can't see the beauty of it.
All you can see is the mess.
One of the things that was interesting to me about that story, though, is how your friend took the words you were using and described a meaning to them.
And like sort of it was a deeper sense of listening to then just to the words.
Can you talk to me about that?
This friend is a developmental coach and she so she's kind of in the practice of wondering when she hears somebody use a word or a phrase.
She notices the dissonance between what she would mean by that and what she notices I might be meaning by that.
So this is the listening below the surface.
This is listening for meaning.
Getting below underneath the story or the words and wondering, wow, what does that person actually mean by that?
And it can be a really hard practice to be in because we also have to do that while we have to be able to notice what do what would I mean by that?
What do I assume they mean by that?
And wondering then like, how is it different?
Right, always noticing what I think it means is probably wrong and how could it be wrong and therefore have to imply.
And then the words that we're using change how we think.
So the power of language is really important in that.
How does the language that we use limit our progress or our ability?
Our language tends to be habitual.
Like I said earlier, we often don't even notice the phrases we use.
Right, so I had a client trying to let go of the achievement oriented nature of her life.
She always needing to do things in order to feel valuable.
And so she described to me what it feels like to her to be not adding value.
So she often used these terms that were sort of like, if I'm not doing something, I'm just kind of shuffling around waiting for things to happen.
You know, what we did was we explored what does it mean to be like shuffling around waiting and who are you when you're shuffling around waiting?
What does that mean for you?
But sometimes it's not that it's not that overt.
So language that is limiting for people is often as simple as what I describe to you, the have tos and the need tos.
It often shows up as like, I am just this way.
Or I am the sort of person who has to respond when somebody emails me right away.
I have to respond within five minutes.
Habits of language around identity.
I am this way. I am that way.
Other limiting language you can hear in what I sometimes call monolithic narratives.
So-and-so is always this way at work.
I never seem to get my voice heard.
There are so many of them.
So what we want is to find enabling patterns of language that help us in service of, you know, what it is we care about.
Talk to me a little bit more about language and our identity and how that affects our ability as leaders and people and perhaps our performance or how small shifts in how we see ourselves or even how we describe ourselves.
Even if we don't fundamentally believe it, can the language that we use talking about ourselves change who we are and what we're doing?
So I'm going to start with a definition of the definition I use of identity first.
I think it might be helpful because that word gets used in a variety of ways and all of them are right.
But I just want to be clear about what I mean.
I sometimes call it identity with a small eye rather than a capital I.
I don't mean like my social identity or my racial identity or my gender identity or anything like that.
What I mean is how I see myself and how I want to be in the world, how I want you to see me in the world.
It's something we've been developing all of our lives, each of us, right?
It's we adapt as kids. We learn what works.
We learn what doesn't work.
We amplify the things. We keep doing the things that work and we tend to hopefully stop doing the things that don't work.
So we get to a point in our lives, any point in our lives, we have this sense of who I am.
And we spend a lot of time projecting that identity, right?
We've perfected it up until now.
In what we do, what we wear, what we say, what we don't say, what we don't do, who we hang out with, we're always projecting this identity, right?
Most of it's unconscious.
And so what does language have to do with that?
It's just one of many ways that our identity is expressed.
And every time I say, I would never do that, I'm in the middle of a situation right now with a neighbor who's constructing something next to my house.
And I don't believe that this person has been particularly gracious or forthcoming or transparent about what they're doing.
And I say, I found myself saying yesterday, I would never do that.
I'm not the sort of person who would do that.
That reinforces my sense of myself as a person who's whatever, considerate, transparent.
So that serves me really well.
Like it's part of, I think it's part of what makes me successful in life and in work.
And it also can get in my way because I often don't stand up for myself.
If I see myself as the sort of person who would never do something that might upset another person, it really limits me.
That I can't do anything that would possibly hurt another person or seem like I'm putting myself first because it would disrupt my sense of my own sense of myself.
I think that's fascinating because one of the things I think about for biological creatures, which humans are, is that we have an innate sense of hierarchy in the world.
And hierarchy doesn't just mean status.
It can mean identity-based hierarchy.
And when you construct a world, and this can be completely wrong so pushback, but when you construct a world which is like, I'm not the type of person who would do that, you immediately put yourself higher than that person in this arbitrary hierarchy that you've created.
Which is like, no matter what, I would never do that to somebody.
And you might be right and you might be wrong, but that sort of like is not the point of this.
It's just you're placing yourself sort of in and you're not doing it consciously.
Like you're not trying to organize the world in this way where you're better than somebody else.
And I remember I first did this when it was like 16 at a grocery store.
We had this guy come in, he illegally parks, runs in, he's rude to everybody.
And I finally said something back to him.
It was my last shift at the grocery store.
So I won't say what I said, but I was walking home and it was like, well, I might not be rich and I might not be blah, blah, blah, but at least I'm not.
And in that moment, I was creating this arbitrary hierarchy in which that I was higher than that person.
What I really heard in your story that really struck me was what we're doing is we're creating a separation between us and other people.
It's like, I'm not that.
I'm this. Creating the separation between us and other people is on the one hand for our own identity formation.
It's useful, I think, like how do we create, how do we construct our own sense of self?
Again, in an adult development way, how do we become self-authored, right?
Like standing on our own separate from other people.
This is important. This is important developmentally.
And yet at the same time, the most complex problems that we need to work in our lives these days, they require us to see other perspectives.
They require that we build trust and connection with other people.
And so each time we kind of fortify our own identity as separate, we are severing connections that might actually be really, really important.
Like on a team in an organization, right?
If you have separation among people, it is a detriment to trust.
And when you're dealing with really hard problems that can't be predicted and something just happens, you have to be able to trust each other in order to respond well.
One of the things that I care about a lot these days is connection and how important that is.
And leaders don't think of that necessarily as a core part of leadership, or at least they haven't.
And it is, I think it's probably the most important thing.
When you say connection, what do you mean?
I mean a relationship between people.
People actually thinking about impact on others, trust between people.
It's simply, it's connection between people, it's love, it's trust.
You affect me, I affect you.
And together we are more than two people separately.
Talk to me a little bit more about this.
As you were saying that, I can help us think of sort of work from home as an example of having an impact on connection in terms of our impact on other people, trust.
But our impact not only on the people we work with, but the people that we don't see.
If you worked in a downtown core and you're no longer going to a downtown core, well, there's all those little corner stores and Starbucks and grocery stores that are now impacted by the fact that you do.
By the fact that you're not going to work.
And when you do go into work, you sort of get a more representative view of society.
You might sort of walk by somebody less fortunate than you.
You might interact with somebody else who has a very different view than yours.
Everybody has that crazy person at the office, but that crazy person at the office sort of like actually exposes you to what other people are thinking in a different way.
And now we're in our own bubble in a lot of ways if you're working from home and you're sort of less involved in society maybe.
And so you don't see the impact that you're having on this broader community.
And then also want to talk about trust and how trust is enabled or disabled by sort of being in person and physically connected.
I'm pointing to probably one of the most, the things that is most on the minds of the leaders that I am working with these days.
This whole work from home hybrid work question hadn't actually thought about it in the way that you just described, not quite so vividly as you just described Shane.
Like when we work from home, it's much easier to create our own echo chambers either on purpose or inadvertently.
And because we have so much more control over what we let in and what we don't let in.
You're surrounded by a world that looks like you, right?
So you hop on Zoom, you have this interaction with somebody, you get off of it, you hang it with your friends, you get delivery of food, groceries, whatever.
And the world just tends to look like you and the socioeconomic world looks like you, the political world looks like you.
And my hunch, and I hope I'm wrong, is that this starts to lead to political extremes.
Yes. I mean, you're hearing me hesitate here because it's such a dire hunt, the prediction, right?
If we were to play this out without any disruptions to that, then the world looks pretty siloed and polarized and isolated.
And we maybe, like, I hear people talk about, and this was true for me, you know, when the shutdown happened, my three kids all came home from university and we got to spend a lot of time together that I thought we would never get again.
So that was beautiful, right?
People talk about the wonderful things about work from home, and those are your sort of dire story that you laid out.
It doesn't take away from that.
And I think we really, really need to watch for it.
This is one of the things that we talk about a lot in organizations where I work, is that, you mentioned this earlier, taking multiple perspectives.
We have to often work to find the perspectives that are not only different from our own, but are maybe even threatening to our own.
And it's hard enough work when we're showing up at the office every day and going out into a world where we see differences.
Because, let's face it, we can shut those things out even, even when we're out in the world.
It's just so much easier when we're not interacting with people who are unlike us.
Can you go deeper on, you said it was sort of top of mind to all the leaders that you're talking to today and this work from home.
Can you go deeper on the relationship between remote work, hybrid work, work from home, you know, whatever you want to call it, going to the office, and its relationship specifically to connection.
And with connection, I'm meaning sort of impact and trust.
I mean, there is an assumption, you hear it in some industries, going to, getting people in the office is the only way to cultivate whatever the kind of office culture that people want.
That's a pretty simple solution.
And it was the obvious one before the pandemic, because that's what most people did.
Now you've got people who are working from home.
And one of the things that we see, I had a conversation with a leader several months ago, who's in an industry where they really, really wanted to get people back to the office.
He's the head of an office.
And so he's really watching the dynamics.
And she really, really wanted people to come back.
So at first he tried to get everybody to come back.
And what he saw was real pushback from particularly the administrative staff.
Now you could say that's a, you could make up a story that says those people just don't see the value of coming into the office.
They just want their cushy little lives and to stay home.
But when you look deeper, what he discovered was that these people tend to live further from the office.
So their commute time is really long, like over an hour each way.
And the professionals, what they would call the professional staff, tend to live much closer to the office.
When they're commuting, they're like in an Uber or something going from one side of Manhattan to the other side of Manhattan.
And they're working while they're in the Uber too.
What the pandemic has revealed is that for decades or longer, people have been coming into the office because that's the thing to do.
But there have been differences that have been not really acknowledged, right?
How coming to the office is a really different experience for different people.
You could say the same thing about, you know, like women in a heavily male dominated work environment, right?
Being at home, working at home for people who feel out of place in the office environment has probably also been a great thing.
And it's also true that for the most part, it's easier to connect casually when you're in the office.
It is not straightforward as everyone is finding out.
What is the US particularly?
What's the connection between that and connection and trust?
Our firm has been remote since we founded in 2011.
And I'd say we have a lot of trust, a lot of trust.
But we've developed mechanisms to be sure that we connect, that like create the conditions for us to connect frequently and deeply, both in the sorts of connections that we set up regularly as part of our systems and the way that we are together when we connect.
So it really, trust really can happen remotely.
What are those strategies that you use to create trust and enable it?
There are several, but I would say the biggest one is that when we meet, whether it's about a client situation or whether it's some internal thing that we're discussing or whether it's just that we're getting together just to be together, we start every meeting with the check-in.
We see it as a system scanning exercise.
So the check-in, someone poses a question and every person in the room responds to the question.
And then we step back and get on the balcony and look at the patterns.
The question being, what's in the room today?
What are the patterns we're seeing?
And particularly when you do a check-in, it's important not only to see the commonalities, the themes, but also pay attention to the outliers and also what wasn't said.
So it could take a long time to check in in this way.
And if you think about it, when you bring a group of people together to do something, it's the people themselves that matter the most.
That's the raw material from which the work is getting done.
We were doing it since the beginning and one of our clients caught onto it early on.
And then it sort of became a thing that a lot of our clients do as well.
I want to come back to identity and language just for a second before we go to the next topic.
Is it something where we can create our identity through language if we, for instance, want to go to the gym or be healthier?
And you say to yourself that I go to the gym every day.
I am the type of person who goes to the gym every day, even though you're not.
You're creating this identity.
And then you almost have a commitment and consistency by us to live up to this identity that you've fabricated in your head, just with these words.
And so you're more likely to go to the gym because you see yourself as that type of person, even though maybe perhaps that wasn't.
You're using language to create a habit.
What's your reaction to that?
Absolutely. I heard something about that recently.
It's speaking as if. And yes, I totally believe that.
It's not a guarantee that I talk about myself as a person who goes to the gym, that I will become a person who goes to the gym.
And it's a nudge to the system.
It's a disruption. It's one of the many things that can create the conditions for me to become a person who goes to the gym.
What does it mean to create the conditions?
And what are the most useful ways that we can think about creating the conditions for success or results or however you want to think or define that for you?
Creating the conditions is an idea that is one of the core ideas, moves and complexity.
So if you're wanting to make a change in a complex system, which since each of us as human beings is a complex system, creating the change of becoming a person that goes to the gym, that's a change to a complex system.
If I want my team to behave differently, I'm also dealing with complexity there because people are complex and human systems are complex.
So the idea is that in a complex system, you can't make change happen because the first thing that you need to do is understand how the complex adaptive system currently self-organizes.
So what are its current patterns?
So if you look at a family, a family is one of the easiest ways to see this, right?
Families have patterns.
They have dynamics, people play roles.
We've probably all heard stories or been part of a story where one person in a family suddenly changes and the family tries to reject the change, right?
They want to continue acting the same even when one person changes.
So the idea there is that in a complex system, you have to understand the patterns and then if you want to make a change, you don't intervene directly because the system will push back.
Instead, you make little nudges shape the path, create and amplify conditions so that something can change.
So in that family example, the family might, a couple key members in the family, you might identify who were the strong attractors for particular unwelcome patterns and start with those people and maybe those people begin going to therapy and maybe it's even much smaller, right?
They get a buddy who might have an influence on them in a particular way, for example, or conditions might be family dinners.
Or they might be, so family dinners are a condition, I think that that might create at least the conditions for family conversations, for example.
What role does environment play?
Are there examples of sort of environmental nudges that you can think of that come to mind in creating the conditions for success?
We always have the opportunity to change our environment, right, as a way to help us, let's take losing weight.
One condition that we could create is to take all the stuff out of our refrigerator that we're super tempted by that doesn't contribute to our losing weight.
Another way to create conditions, if you want to get stronger, is you could buy some light hand weights and keep them next to your computer so that you don't have to do much in order to lift weights and get your muscles stronger.
Buying a gym membership is an example of kind of a direct intervention that often fails.
I mean, it could be a condition-creating thing, but if we think that buying a gym member is going to make us go to the gym, anyone who's ever bought a gym membership or most people will at least have had one experience of doing that and finding that they just wasted their money.
That's why they sell 12-month memberships in November and December, right?
Exactly. Yeah. They're creating their own conditions for profitability as they know the patterns of human beings, the people who own the gyms.
What about something that comes to mind for me, and this could be completely off, but sort of like hang around people whose default behavior is your desired behavior?
So if I'm a leader and I want to cultivate better listening and I hang around somebody like you, do I naturally sort of acquire better listening?
Or if I am a runner and I join a running group, then I start to hang around with people who run, and then it makes it more likely that I become a runner or that I enjoy running, and then that makes me run even more.
I often think about how environment we think of our environment, most of the time when it comes to mind as physical, but our environment is also our identity, right?
We're creating an environment in our head, an artificial environment, if you will.
Our environment is also who we hang around, and there's sort of habits.
And if we hang around people who are sort of politically extreme, we will eventually become politically extreme, or we hang around people who are lazy, we become lazy.
Talk to me a little bit about your reaction to that and what your experience has been.
Well, I'm chuckling because I'm the parent of three young adults, and anyone who has ever had kids, you might notice that who your kids hang around with feels really important.
So I noticed that whenever one of the, not as much now, but when they were younger, when one of my children would be, have a friend that I thought would be a really good influence on them, either because they were like a hard worker or ambitious or kind, or not the sort of person who got into trouble, I always thought that was great, you know, and I wanted to amplify that.
So I think the less lesson there is there are, yes, of course, the people that we hang out with, I think, to make a huge difference in shaping and creating the conditions for us to grow in particular, grow and change in particular ways.
And as I've, you know, found out with my children, it's not a guarantee, right, trying to orchestrate things just right so that, you know, you're hanging out with exactly the right people who will get you the exact right result is probably the wrong mindset.
A more helpful mindset is that people, communities do create the conditions for particular things, and we can be intentional about which people in communities we spend time with in service of moving ourselves in a particular direction.
And it's no guarantee, which is the way it is in complexity always.
There are no guarantees ever.
Listening is something a few people have told me that you're extraordinarily good at.
I suspect that's because you listen below the surface and to the meaning and not just the words.
How would you teach your kids to become better listeners?
How do you teach adults to become better listeners?
I've never had anybody ask me exactly that question before, Shane.
I guess the first thing I would say is that listening tends to be contagious.
So how each of us listens does tend to wear off on other people.
So I noticed, again, with my children, that when I listen, what we call, I have a call, listening to win, which is to just make them wrong.
Or like, when I say, well, that's not true, you look great, or don't worry about that, you know, you'll be fine.
It might feel good to me in the moment, but it's not kind of, they don't feel heard.
That mind that when people feel really, really, truly seen and heard, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have.
And so just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end of that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen and fully seen is itself a condition for learning to listen well.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are very particular techniques that help people listen well.
For me, the most important one has been really the training and understanding of adult development theory, particularly the one that my colleagues and I have most depth in, which is the subject object theory, that it was developed by Bob Keegan and others.
And in the subject object theory, what you're listening for, the stage of development is defined by what is subject and what is object.
And when I say subject, what I mean is what you're fused with, it's like the water you're swimming in, the lens through which you see things but you don't actually even know you have a lens.
And what is object is what can be held out and examined and talked about, like a value is object if you can see how it's shaping what you do and don't do.
A value is subject if it's invisibly shaping what you do and don't do, for example.
So in this growth edge coach training that several of my colleagues and I run, what we're teaching coaches to do is to listen for what is subject and what is object.
In listening in that way, you have to be listening below the surface of the story.
And every time you hear a word or a phrase wondering, hmm, I wonder what that person means by that.
And so it's amping up curiosity.
It's really, really foregrounding the fact that we, each of us never really knows what another person means.
And so we can only be curious to find out.
I like the word curiosity.
When I think of listening, I think of seeing the world through the other person's eyes.
I don't have to agree with it.
I want to see what they see and I want to understand what they understand.
One thing you said there that I want to come back to you in part because I have a child that does this is listening to win.
How as a parent, do I coach, intervene, get this out of their system?
How old is your child? 13.
Yeah, I asked that because it really does make a difference at their developmental stage, how you might go about this.
And I'm struck by your phrase.
I think you said, how do we coach this out of them?
Yeah, maybe that's the wrong phrase, but it like drives me.
And he's super smart, which is like it amplifies it even more because often he's right.
So what is the hardest thing for you about that?
Just the social nature of it, right?
And how alienating it can be to always be the person who is listening to win, right?
So from his perspective, I listen to what you said.
I'm literal, right? And so it's incorrect and I'm going to do you.
He doesn't do it maliciously.
He's like, I'm going to do you a favor and point out why you're incorrect.
And as a parent, I don't know what to do with this because on one hand, on a literal sense, he's right on a social sense, he's wrong.
And on a, is this going to get you what you want in life perspective?
It's learning when to use that and when to not use that.
And I'm struggling with him in terms of how I go about this.
So you're worried that he will alienate people or is he alienating you?
Oh, he's not alienating me.
I think I'm worried that it makes it harder for him to fit in or be accepted by his people.
Yeah. So I can hear that really, that that sort of deep desire for him to not have, yeah, for life not to be harder for him because he is like smart.
He's playing on hard mode.
Yeah, playing on hard mode.
Yeah, he's playing on hard mode and he's already exceptionally bright, which in another way puts it on hard mode again, right?
In certain ways. Yeah, I hear so deeply this.
I mean, geez, the wanting to help somebody change something that is making, in your view, making their life unnecessarily hard and worrying that maybe tell me if this is right, but worrying that if you don't help them change this, it might just become a more and more and more ingrained habit that continues to make their life hard.
Yeah. Well, I think that as he gets older, I mean, my role changes too, right?
And it changes to your getting feedback.
Are you seeing the feedback that you're getting?
Are you instead of a direct intervention, like don't do this, do this, you know, it changes to when you did this, did it help you get what you wanted in that moment, right?
Or is doing this going to get you what you want?
And that coaching after the fact is usually very helpful for him because he's like, oh, I didn't mean it that way or I shouldn't have done that or I wasn't thinking when I said something.
And so it prompts at least a little bit of reflection around it, which we all have as adults too, right?
Like we all say stupid things on occasion or make a comment that we didn't intend to make and it has an impact on another person.
And then we reflect on it and we sort of that reflection codifies the learning a little bit.
So it takes that experience and it translates that experience into a little bit of learning and with enough reflection and enough experience and enough iteration, enough feedback.
We sort of self-correct as adults most of the time.
And I think you may have a part of your answer already.
So it sounds like what you're doing is you're creating the conditions for him to reflect on what the impact of the way he's listening or not listening is having.
Well, trying to, when you said the phrase listening to win and you were talking with your kids about not listening to win, I was like, well, is there a way that I can put a term around it or a label around it when I can just say you're listening to win?
And in that moment, that means this whole deeper conversation to him, which is like an instant prompt to correct or not correct to nudge behavior towards a better that he's choosing, right?
Because I don't want to make his behavior choices for him.
But can I say something like that?
And when you were saying it, that's what I thought you were doing.
So this is where the question I didn't I didn't intend for this to be like a longer question.
Yeah, yeah. So your question is is language giving language to something?
Can that be a help in shifting the pattern?
Well, it's sort of a broader question.
If we take it out of the context of me and my son, it's sort of, can we learn to listen to him?
Can we learn to listen to ourselves better?
Or does it take an outside person to sort of intervene and point out our blind spots?
And with my son, I'm trying to intervene or sort of point out a blind spot.
You're blind to this. It's happening.
I'm pointing out that it's happening.
It sounded like that's what you were doing with your kids or maybe I'm misinterpreting when you said listening to win, which I love that phrase, by the way.
Yeah, so accurate. Yeah, I there.
I guess my point is there are many things and what that you can can do to help somebody to notice what they're doing in turn in this case, in terms of how they're listening.
One is reflecting back to them, what you're seeing and the impact of that.
One is the invitation to invite them to reflect on it, the connection between what they're doing and what they want.
Another is giving it language.
I love hearing that listening to win is such a powerful phrase.
It is because you can just say that it it's like having some sort of a reminder every time you do something like a light goes off of something flashes and it helps to create the connection between this thing that you're doing a really instant connection, a reminder of what you're doing.
So the idea of listening to win absolutely can be a super helpful in shifting a pattern because it it helps you to notice the pattern instantly each time it's coming up.
The other thing I noticed just about feedback, the importance of feedback, right?
We often cannot see what we're doing.
And this is why we need company and we need company with whom we have trust who will tell us things that we can't see in ourselves.
This is one of the core conditions for being able to shift and change.
How did you use listening to win with your kids?
I mean, honestly, I didn't use the phrase with them.
I wish I had now. You know, I really wish I had been more explicit about it.
I took a more kind of indirect approach in which, you know, for example, if my twins and when when they were younger, my daughter would often, well, they all listened to win all the time to each other.
But there were times when I can remember when my daughter would get so upset with my son for making her life miserable in whatever way, right?
Like I have to do all your social life for you.
I have to remind you of, you know, what homework we have.
It was this kind of stuff.
And what when she was doing that to him or vice versa, what I would do is I would come in and make what I would call a listening to learn or listening to see move where I would say to her, it looks like you're really upset because because he is relying on you for everything and you don't think he should have to be doing that and it's not your responsibility.
Is that right? And they could just literally see her whole body like breathe out.
So I generally took the approach of doing something different, of making a deeper listening move.
And my hope was that they would see that over time and notice the impact it had on them.
I probably could have been a lot more direct about it now that you say it, Shane.
I love these phrases listening to win listening to learn.
I'm going to take this back and incorporate it and I'll report back to you and how how it works.
There is another one that you might find helpful, which is called we call it listening to fix.
And this is probably the by far the most common one.
So listening to win is let me make the problem go away by telling you you don't have a problem.
Listening to learn or listening to see is getting underneath what's being said and reflecting back to the person.
And listening to fix is let me take your problem and solve it for you or help you solve it.
So just so you have the whole repertoire.
No, I mean this sort of comes back to men are from Mars women are from Venus in a way, right?
Which is women typically listen to learn men typically listen to fix problem solve and this creates a divide between us or in your word earlier instead of a divide to create space between us.
But we tend to think that listening just applies to words, but we can also listen to our bodies.
I mean our emotions or feelings.
These all come from the same systems that produce our words and our bodies tend to respond to our environment more than our words or quicker than our words.
How can we learn to listen to our emotions or feelings or body and what it's telling us.
This one, I'll start with how someone else can help us do that.
And this is what a lot of coaches do this coaches who pay attention to the people somatic experience is simply to ask.
So if you were to say, Shane, I feel really like I have to get this thing done right now.
I'm so busy I can't be distracted by anything else.
I might say so where do you feel that in your body.
And if you're unused to even noticing that you have a connect that there's any that there's a connection, you might say, I what do you even mean by that I don't know.
And then I might just like invite you to to turn your attention inward and to see if you can scan and notice if there's any connection and what it might be between any kind of sensation in your body.
And this sense of being super busy and don't have time for any distractions.
So this is where another person can be so so helpful.
It's about creating noticing connections between things that are happening in our head, which is what most people are used to noticing and what's happening in our bodies.
So it's just practice that way really.
I like that question. Where do you feel it in your body?
And that's something we can even ask ourselves.
Yes. So you don't need another person.
It can become a habit, a habitual question that we ask ourselves.
I'm a case in point, you know, I would 15 years ago, if you had asked me to notice where do I feel something in my body.
I would say I don't know.
Like I would say, OK, I can make something up.
You know, let me just make something up.
I'll just tell you, it just takes practice.
We're only as good as the information we have.
There's a saying in psychology that if you could see the world the way that I see it, you'd understand why I behave the way that I do.
So a large part of the way we see the world is through the information that we have.
A lot of times the information comes from the questions we ask.
How do we go about the process of asking different or better questions of ourselves and others in order to get better or different information?
The first thing is to notice the questions that you currently ask.
So each of us has habitual questions that we ask as well of ourselves, of others, of the world.
I was working with a coach years ago who was extremely helpful and he noticed that I habitually asked the question, why do I do this?
And there's this idea that our questions direct our attention.
So you are alluding to this a minute ago.
So the question that I ask then becomes where I look.
So my attention, because of this question, I would get sort of intensely focused on trying to figure out what was wrong with me or what led me to do certain things.
And that turns out to be helpful in some ways, but often, you know, like most of us, we hit a dead end with that question.
And so even if I got to the why I do this, it didn't always result in me changing behavior.
So this is just one example.
So how do we get different questions?
I really do think we get them most from other people.
Often in them, at least as a start, so we borrow them from other people.
Right. Often when we're teaching about this idea of asking different questions, we ask who in your life asks the questions that are either most different from yours or the best questions.
And do you know what most people say?
Children. Children ask great questions because they're not, they don't have the overlay of what should I be asking?
They don't have the overlay of I need to look smart.
They don't have any filter.
They're just asking the question that comes that occurs to them.
And and so these are questions that we often as adults don't ask anymore.
And so like, like why is the sky blue?
For example, we don't ask those questions anymore because, you know, we feel that's a question we either should know the answer to or it's not relevant.
We often talk about borrowing questions from other people.
So listen to the questions.
Like I'm listening to the questions that you're asking Shane.
And I'm noticing some of them I love their questions.
I'm not the one that's thought to ask.
And so like I'm making a note of them.
I love those questions.
So that's the best way I know how notice the ones you habitually ask and borrow shamelessly from other people's questions.
I love the idea of borrowing.
I mean, the whole theme of our podcast is mastering the best of what other people have figured out.
What you figured out and then integrating it into our lives so that we can become better at what we're trying to accomplish or live a more meaningful life in the process.
I just want to say Shane that that there's something that happens to us as adults that we think we have to have it all figured out ourselves.
I don't if you don't have this idea, this is great for those of you out there who don't who have never had that idea.
Your way ahead of the game in my book, but we don't like that the world is way too complex for that that sometimes our greatest resource is right there in front of us in the form of another person or someone else's idea.
We don't have to do this alone.
So when you work with people, you like to teach skills that are immediately useful and developmental in nature.
What are the common skills that you find people struggling with that you teach them that make a big difference?
Well, I think the first one is probably listening.
Listening better is immediately useful because it enables you to get perspectives that you might actually need to solve a problem.
Right. Super useful. When teams listen to each other really well, it makes room for all the perspectives that might be needed to solve the problem.
But listening is also developmental because it helps.
It changes my relationship to me.
If I listen deeply, I begin to see that I might begin to question my own assumptions.
I might begin to see myself differently through your eyes.
So it's developmental in terms of the way I see myself.
It's developmental. It can be developmental in terms of the way I see the world.
The more perspectives I can make room for, the more complexity, the more the world becomes a mosaic.
Right. And so I begin to see it in its fullness more and more because that is a developmental move.
So listening would be the first one, I would say.
Another one that I find really, really helpful is actually the idea of complexity itself.
Right. So helping people to see the world as a friend of mine used to say, to see the world as it is rather than as you want it to be.
So there's a, you know, we teach about complexity through a particular framework called the Kenevan framework that is pretty widely known these days.
And so it's a framework that can help immediately to sort out if I'm facing some sort of a challenge, like again, as a team, to sort out which bits of the challenge are obvious.
So I can just like automate them, don't have to worry about them, don't waste time on them, which parts are complicated.
We need to figure them out in which parts are complex.
And then so we deal with those things differently as we talked about earlier.
But also seeing the world as this framework helps us see the world as it is in its full complexity.
That is also really developmental because it changes the whole mindset, changes my sense of what I need to be as a leader, as a person dealing with it.
It changes my view of others from obstacles to necessary parts of the system.
So there's all kinds of ways.
Do you want another one?
Yeah. I mean, two of the ones that you've said in past interviews that were the pyramid method and then polarity management, I believe.
Yeah, polarity management was the one that I was going to talk about next.
Yeah. Yeah. So in a nutshell, for those of you listeners who are not familiar with what a polarity is, this is based on the work of Barry Johnson who developed the idea of a polarity years and years ago, decades ago.
And I don't know whether it's just me who's now sees it sees polarities and polarity work everywhere or whether it's becoming more commonplace.
I think it's a little bit of both.
But a polarity is it's two things that are interconnected and that over time you need them both.
So it's like an example in organizations is centralized decentralized, right?
If the question is, do we need to be decentralized or centralized?
The answer is most likely both.
Yes. Sometimes we need to be decentralized.
Sometimes we need to be centralized.
In some places we need to, it's in its dynamic over time, right?
In a very personal sense, what I would call an intrapersonal polarity is like, is the question of do I focus on my needs or do I focus on others needs?
Well, both, because if I focus on only my needs, pretty soon I'm going to be able to get a lot of the negative aspects of that.
I'm going to be isolated.
I'm going to feel disconnected and I'm not going to be able to get my work done.
If I focus only on other people's needs, I'm going to get the negative aspects of that because I will lose myself.
I won't have a voice. I'll probably get burnt out.
So a polarity, it's two things that are like an energy system and that they are inherently interconnected.
And to get the best outcomes over time, you need both.
This is in contrast to a choice.
I have a choice every day when I drive to the office, do I go on the highway or do I go on the back roads?
That's a choice. That's not a polarity.
On any given day I can choose.
I'm fine. They're not super interconnected.
The polarities are so useful in organizations to help, not only to get different and more helpful perspectives on sticky problems, they also get people talking to each other in ways that I find quite magical.
But they're also polarities are seeing the world through polarities is also developmental because it literally changes the way you see the world.
Because you look out at the world and suddenly you begin to see so many things are interconnected.
So many things are not either this or that.
That's true inside me as well.
When we're younger, we tend to see ourselves as I am a this and I'm not at that.
I'm an athlete and I'm not a student.
I'm a person who likes big crowds and I'm not a person who likes to be alone.
But as we get older, I think we most people, many people naturally start to see themselves in more nuanced ways.
Polarity management, seeing polarities, polarity thinking helps us to see things in more nuanced ways, which not everything is nuanced.
A lot of things are not. But when things really are nuanced, it's helpful to see them that way and not try to shove them into a box of either or good and bad.
A lot of what we've talked about today is sort of recognizing that we're in a system and then trying to get a better aperture into the system that we're in.
And to your friend's point about seeing the world as it is rather than have you as you'd have it be.
How do we do that? I'm going to just start for a second with why it's hard.
It's hard because sometimes very often the world as it is can feel overwhelming.
It can feel too messy to solve.
It can feel unpredictable and in many ways as human beings, we don't like unpredictability.
Although interestingly, we do like unpredictability when it comes to things like athletic events.
Who would watch a soccer match if you knew who was going to win and exactly what plates were going to happen first, second, third, and fourth?
We wouldn't do that. That's what makes it fun.
Who would go to a movie if you knew exactly how it was going to turn out?
But somehow in our own lives, we don't like unpredictability because it leaves us feeling sort of out of control.
So seeing the world as it is does require a leap of faith in a way that we will be okay, that we don't need to be able to control everything in order for ourselves to be okay.
And so I think having that realization, really admitting that it is hard, we want the world to be a certain way because it gives us comfort.
And then the second thing I think is practicing being in discomfort, nudging ourselves just a little bit, a little bit, a little bit in safe circumstances to feel discomfort and stay in it.
Our urge is like going back to the body.
Often there's this thing called what I call an action urge that when we feel uncomfortable, there's something in our bodies that is saying, get out of the discomfort.
So we act or react to remove the discomfort somehow.
Part of seeing the world as it is, not just kind of conceptually, but actually being in the world as it is, requires us to practice being uncomfortable.
And our bodies are so, and all parts of us are really adaptable.
If we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations, whether it's a safe and supportive environment, it's like going to the gym.
If you want to build your muscles, you just have to go every day and you do it.
So those are the two things I would say are helpful, at least as starters.
I think they're actually more than helpful.
They're required. Let's talk a little bit about perspective taking and how we can use that more effectively.
Most of us are aware that we have blind spots and taking somebody else's perspective helps us remove our blind spots.
But when it comes to the moment, how do we prompt ourselves?
How do we turn this knowledge into action?
So we know we should do something.
We know it's probably going to help us in certain types of situations.
But we have a problem taking this knowledge and transferring it into action.
Are there prompts or habits that we can develop or cues that we can use to remind ourselves to take other people's perspectives?
Yes. I do have a very specific answer to that question.
Which is developing the habit of asking the question, how could I be wrong?
So just think about that for a minute.
Most of the time we don't even think we're wrong.
So the question, it doesn't even occur to us, could I be wrong?
And the question, how could I be wrong assumes that when it comes to the perspective of another person, we probably are very wrong.
Our perspective is our perspective and it's going to be different from other people's.
And so how could I be wrong increases our curiosity.
And ideally the purpose of the question is to prompt us to get more curious, to go beyond our initial kind of assumptions about what the truth is.
And get curious and ask questions of other people.
And so this is my favorite habit when it comes to perspective taking.
Two other questions before we wrap up here.
One of which is what did you use to spend time on that you now see as unhelpful or not valuable?
Oh my goodness, that's such a good question.
The first thing that comes to mind is trying to be on top of everything.
So I used to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to attend to everything from answering every email, you know, within a certain amount of time to having, so having a clean inbox, you know, where I could actually see the bottom of the inbox on the first page.
Attending to making sure my house was clean.
This is one that I just had to give up when I had three young kids.
And so just, you know, knowing the latest, like research on everything, you know, making sure that I knew every last possible question that someone could ask me before I walk into a situation so that I have an answer for everything.
These just don't seem, they first became impossible.
So it was through realizing that I was in too much pain trying to get it, trying to get these things to be on top of everything.
And now I see that trying to be on top of everything actually takes away my attention from the present moment from being fully present.
So I see the temptation of it.
I'm really, really grateful to be in this place in my life where I don't feel I need to do that anymore.
That's a really good one.
It's almost like, and I'm not mapping this to you, but when we think of being on top of everything, it's not like we're consciously choosing to be on top of everything.
It's almost like we feel like if we're not on top of everything, what will other people, what does that say about us?
What do other people think about us?
It's almost like somebody else has a scoreboard and part of that scoreboard is like, are you on top of everything?
And then we're playing to that scoreboard and eventually as an adult, you sort of like get to a point where you're like, you know what, I don't want to play by that scoreboard anymore because it's not serving me.
And it's just causing me to go crazy because it's almost impossible to be on top of everything.
Yeah. As you say that, I'm wondering, I'm asking myself, why was I doing that?
And it would be so many different reasons, but I think it shifted over time.
There's some element of if I'm on top of everything, my life will feel calm and settled.
Like there's some sort of a destination in mind.
It's like when you finish that last, when I was in university, you know, I'd finished my last exam of the semester.
There was this momentary feeling of, I'm done.
So I think I was in search of that, I'm done feeling.
I think, but there are also a couple other things.
One is I think I was conflating respect for other people with being on top of everything.
So particularly with regard to answering all my emails, I thought if I don't attend to things, I will be being disrespectful of other people.
I will not be. I mean, if you get down to the core of it, I will not.
Good people do not ignore things that need to be done, especially when they affect other people.
So there's that whole element to it as well.
And I'd say that was a much harder one for me to loosen.
And I still struggle with it sometimes because my impact on other people.
I'm talking about my identity now.
So you all as listeners can think about what yours is.
I have pretty strong identity around being a person who other people can count on and who would never intentionally do anything to hurt somebody else.
And you might wonder what does email have to do with hurting somebody else?
It's a pretty big stretch, but not in my mind sometimes.
I think it's also interesting where email is a medium where you want to be seen as reliable.
Right? We have this in the desire, but anybody can just email you and usurp your time without your permission.
And then you are mapping this to you, but like I feel guilty if I don't respond to people.
And I'm like, but I never asked for this email.
I never wanted this email.
Like why am I the one who's on the receiving end of this sort of like guilt?
And I'm putting it on myself, obviously, and not other people.
Is that what happens with you too?
I just think what we're both describing here is how incredibly complex we are as human beings, right?
And why it could be so hard to change because we have these back to identity, this sense of ourselves as a certain kind of person, and it has worked.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be here at this place where we have this identity in the first place.
And last question, what does success mean to you?
It sounds so trite. I just want to look back on my life and know that my presence mattered to somebody else.
Like that by me being in, whether it's in a room, you know, running a workshop or whether it's in a friendship, whether it's with my children or my partner or anyone else that my presence mattered.
And not because I had great ideas, not because I was so smart, but that in my presence, another person could be more fully themselves.
That's one definition of success for me.
That's beautiful. Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you, Shane. Thanks for listening and learning with us.
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