I used to assume that what I hear someone say is an accurate interpretation of what they mean. My assumption was wrong; what I think I hear (the words, the meaning) has a good chance of being inaccurate, regardless of my intent to listen carefully. But it’s not my fault.

During the years I spent reading, thinking, and researching for my book (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?) on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I was quite surprised to learn how little of what I think I hear is unbiased, or even accurate. Listening, it turns out, is a brain thing and has little to do with words or intent.

HOW BRAIN’S ‘LISTEN’

Our historic life experiences (education, family, values, Beliefs, mental models) filter all incoming words, creating biases and assumptions that keep us from translating incoming messages accurately. Generally speaking, our brain determines what we hear. And it’s not objective. Here’s what happens:

    • Words are merely puffs of air that emerge from our lungs, formed by our mouth and tongue. They are meaningless sound vibrations that enter a Listener’s brain and get made into signals that get sent to ‘similar-enough’ brain circuits for translation. Everything ‘heard’ is understood and translated as per the circuits the signals were sent – what’s been ‘heard’ before – leaving the possibility that incoming content may be at least partially misunderstood.
    • A Listener’s ears

– capture some portion of incoming sound vibrations,

– conducts them through historic filters (Beliefs, mental models, etc.)

– translate the remaining vibrations into signals that get sent to

– match ‘similar-enough’ existing circuits, which

– discard what doesn’t match.

The remainder is what we think we ‘hear’.

Listeners have no idea what has been discarded in the process, the relevance of the historic reference the translating circuit refers to, or what parts of the originating message are heard inaccurately.

    • Speakers have no idea how a Listener’s brain has interpreted or biased what they’ve said or how close to accurate it is. Neither do Listeners. We all accept the translation our brain offers us as real.
    • We speak in run-on sentences, not individual words, and a Listener’s brain must make sense of the variations in vibrations of each word.
    • People speak for approximately 600 milliseconds and respond (or begin formulating a response) in 200 milliseconds. Large portions of what’s been said is not even listened to.

In other words, what we think we hear is some version of what’s been said. With people we’re in regular contact with and already have circuits to translate, it can be pretty accurate. With others not so much.

DIAGRAM OF HOW BRAINS ‘LISTEN’

Herein lie the gap between what’s said and what’s heard: we all make inaccurate assumptions of what we think we hear, causing us to respond and choose actions from a restricted or flawed knowledge base. Of course, it’s not done purposefully, but it sure plays havoc with communication and relationships.

I once lost a business partner because he misinterpreted something he thought I said, even though his wife told him he had misheard. His comment: “I heard it with my own ears! Are you both telling me I’m crazy??” and stormed out, never to speak to me again.

Unfortunately, and different from perceived wisdom, brains don’t allow us to ‘actively listen’ to accurately understand what’s been said. Sure, Active Listening allows us to ‘hear’ the words spoken but doesn’t capture the intent, the underlying meaning. And given our neurological hearing processes are automatic, mechanical, and thoughtless, we’re stuck with what we think we hear. Here’s a simplified diagram of the process of listening:

INPUT (WORDS/VIBRATIONS) -> FILTERS (BELIEFS, MENTAL MODELS) -> CUE (CREATES SIGNALS) -> CEN (DISPATCH) -> OUTPUT (INTERPRETATION – WHAT WE THINK WAS SAID)

Here’s a graphic:

There’s little chance any of us can understand a Speaker’s intended meaning accurately.

GUIDELINES TO MAXIMIZE UNDERSTANDING IN DIALOGUE

Given how vital listening is to our lives, for those times we want to make sure we understand and get on the same page with a Communication Partner (CP) to reach consensus, here are some guidelines:

Get agreement for a dialogue: Often, Communication Partners have different life experiences and, potentially different goals – many of which might be unconscious. Begin by agreeing to find common ground.

“I’d like to have a dialogue that might lead to us to a path that meets both of our goals. If you agree, do you have thoughts on where you’d like to begin?”

“I wonder if we can find common goals so we might find agreement to work from. I’m happy to share my goals with you; I’d like to hear yours as well.”

Link to Purchase

Set the frame for common values: At a global level, we all have similar foundational values, hopes and fears – for family, food, shelter, health. Start by ‘chunking up’ to find areas of agreement.

“I’d like to find a way to communicate that might help us find a common values so we can begin determining if we share areas of agreement. Any thoughts on how you’d like to proceed?”

“It seems we’re in opposite mind-sets. How do you recommend we go about finding if there’s any agreement we can start from?”

Get agreement on the topics in the conversation: One step at a time; make sure CPs agree to each item and skip the ones (for now) where there’s no agreement. (Put them in a Parking Lot for your next conversation.) Work with ‘what is’ instead of ‘what should be.’

Enter without bias: Unintentionally our historic, unconscious beliefs restrict our search for commonality. Replace emotions and blame with a new bias for this conversation: the ‘bias’ of collaboration.

“I’m willing to find common ground and would like to put aside my normal reactions for this hour but it will be a challenge since my feelings are so strong. Do you also have strong feelings that also might bias our communication? I wonder if we could share our most cherished beliefs and then discuss how we can move forward without bias.”

Get into Observer: To help overcome unconscious biases and filters, here are a few mind hacks that will supersede automatic brain processing: in your mind’s eye, see yourself on the ceiling looking down on yourself and your CP. I call this the Observer (witness, coach) position. It will provide a different viewpoint for your brain, replacing the emotional, automatic response with a broader, far less biased, view of your interaction. Another way is to walk around during the conversation, or sit way, way back in a chair. Sitting forward keeps you in your biases. (Chapter 6 in What? teaches how to stay in Observer and reduce bias.). From your Observer place, notice elements of the communication of both you and your CP:

      • Notice body language/words: Similar to how your brain filters incoming words, your CP is speaking/listening from their filters and assumptions, which will be exhibited in their body language and eye contact. From Observer notice how their physical stance matches their words, the level of passion, feelings, and emotion. Now look down and notice how you look and sound in relation to your CP. Just notice. Read Carol Goman’s excellent book on the subject.
      • Notice triggers: Emphasized words hold beliefs and biases. You may also hear absolutes: Always, Never; lots of You’s may be the vocabulary of blame. Silence, folded arms, a stick-straight torso may show distrust. Just notice where/when it happens for you both. If your CPs words trigger you into your own subjective viewpoints, you’ve gotten out of Observer and must get back onto the ceiling where you have choice. But just in case:

“I’m going to try very hard to speak/listen without my historic biases. If you find me getting heated, or feel blame, I apologize as that’s not my intent. If this should happen, please tell me you’re not feeling heard and I’ll do my best to work from a place of compassion and empathy.”
Summarize regularly: Because the odds are bad that you’ll accurately hear what your CP means to convey, summarize what you think you heard after every exchange:
“Sounds to me like you said, “XX”. Is that correct? What would you like me to understand that I didn’t understand or that I misheard?”

“I’ statements: Stay away from ‘You’ if possible. Try to work from the understanding that you’re standing in different shoes and there is no way either of you can see the other’s landscape.
“When I hear you say X it sounds to me like you are telling me that YY. Is that true?”

“When I hear you mention Y, I feel like Z and it makes me want to get up from the table as I feel you really aren’t willing to hear me. How can we handle this so we can move forward together?”

Get buy-in each step of the way: keep checking in, even if it seems obvious that you’re on the same page. It’s really easy to mistranslate what’s been said when the listening filters are different.
“Seems to me like we’re on the same page here. I think we’re both saying X. Is that true? What am I missing?”

“What should I add to my thinking that I’m avoiding or not understanding the same way you are? Is there a way you want me to experience what it looks like from your shoes that I don’t currently know how to experience? Can you help me understand?”

Check your gut: Notice when/if your stomach gets tight, or your throat hurts. These are sure signs that your beliefs are being stepped on and you’re out of Observer. Get back up to the ceiling and then tell your CP:
“I’m experiencing some annoyance/anger/fear/blame. That means something we’re discussing is going against one of my beliefs or values. Can we stop a moment and check in with each other so we don’t go off the rails?”

Get agreement on action items: Simple steps for forward actions will become obvious; make sure you both work on action items together.

Get a time on the calendar for the next meeting: Make sure you discuss who else needs to be brought into the conversation, end up with goals you can all agree on and walk away with an accurate understanding of what’s been said and what’s expected.

COMPASSION, EMPATHY, AND RESPECT

Until or unless we all hold the belief that none of us matter if some of us don’t; until or unless we’re all willing to take the responsibility for each (inadvertent)act of harm; until or unless we’re each willing to put aside our very real grievances to seek a higher good, we’ll never heal.

It’s not easy. But by learning how to hear each other with compassion and empathy, by closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, our conversations can begin. We must be willing to start sharing our Truth and our hearts and find a way to join with another’s Truth and heart. By hearing each other accurately, it’s the best start we can make.

______________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision makingthe NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

March 11th, 2024

Posted In: Listening

teamwork-2198961_960_720Your solution is great. You know the narrative of the type of buyers who buy. You’re writing appropriate content and getting it out to the right demographic. But you’re still closing less than 5% from first contact and spending a ton of resource finding different ways to touch the same people as your competition touches – in hopes that you’ll have the right message that catches them at the right time or just grind them down.

Why aren’t more buyers buying? Do you know why your well-executed sales outreach programs – salesperson, social media, digital media, marketing – don’t elicit more closed sales?

DO YOU WANT TO SELL? OR HAVE SOMEONE BUY?

You’re not closing more because your messages target a restricted audience, those who have already

  • understood their risk of change,
  • tried all familiar resources and workarounds to fix their own problem and came up short,
  • decided their only route to a problem resolution is to make a purchase,
  • gotten appropriate buy-in and managed any disruption that a purchase would bring

and then you and your competitors work tirelessly to close a sale from that small pool of ready buyers.

Seeking those you believe are probable buyers (those who SHOULD buy) limits your spectrum of buyers to those who are prepared for any change a purchase will cause.

In other words, before people self-identify as buyers, they must first understand that the risk of change is less than the risk of the status quo. A buying decision is a risk management problem before it’s a solution choice issue.

Indeed, the last thing buyers want is to buy anything. Literally: the last thing. People don’t want to make a purchase, they merely want to resolve a problem with the least disruption/cost, and try everything they can to first fix the problem themselves.

By acting as if selling causes buying, we disregard the internal, private, idiosyncratic, systemic change management work buyers must do before they’ve got their ducks in a row and are ready to buy; until then, the risks of change are too high regardless of their need or the efficacy of your solution.

The sales model only handles the buying portion at the end (step 10 of 13. See steps below) of the complete Buying Decision Path. But this is merely a fraction of those who will eventually buy.

Here are the problems you face when targeting people who haven’t yet self-identified as buyers and don’t yet have all their ducks in a row:

  • Once prospects have determined a need, you’re already in a competitive situation and have to find ways to be better/cheaper/more branded.
  • You’re wasting over 90% of your time finding, following up, meeting with, and in several ways trying to connect with, those who appear to need your solution but turn out not to be buyers.
  • You ignore the high percentage of those who would/will buy but aren’t yet ready to (but could easily be gotten ready).
  • You overlook the possibility of connecting with and serving, real buyers early along their change management/decision path
  • and reduces the number of possible entry points onto the Buying Decision Team/buying decision.

Sure, you’re making great information available for those who are ready to engage. But you could be entering earlier and facilitating those who are in the midst of taversing the full range of risk/change management steps along the Buying Decision Path and not accessible with the sales model.

Sample

SELLING DOESN’T CAUSE BUYING

The problem has never been your terrific solution but in closing all the sales you deserve to close. It’s because sales are solution-placement driven, seeking optimal ways to get persuasive content to probable buyers in hopes of making a sale, but ignores the much higher pool of real prospects who aren’t far enough down their buyer’s journey to commit or engage.

The sales model is great for when buyers have completed their internal steps for change. But for those buyers who haven’t completed their buy-in and change/risk management issues, and haven’t yet determined if they CAN buy, sales don’t have the intent, skills, or focus. Sales wasn’t created to do that. It’s only meant to place solutions.

It’s possible for us to add a front end to sales and first facilitate people through their internal change work so they can self-identify as buyers. Then you’ll be a true relationship manager, quickly prepare the folks who WILL be buyers, and close quickly. Not to mention with a change facilitation hat on as you begin each interaction, you can recognize those who will become buyers on the first call and not waste time on those who will never buy.

The sales model we’ve been using is based on a model developed by Dale Carnegie, introduced in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937). He promoted relationships, face-to-face visits, finding folks with a need, placing solutions, for which he recommended developing great pitches.

Think about it: while there are certainly a helluva lot more bells and whistles in 2020, the basic skeleton of need/relationship/ appointment/ pitch, remains the same. It shouldn’t be. Selling doesn’t cause buying. They are two different activities.

The buying environment has changed dramatically over the past 100 or so years, far more complex than merely choosing a vendor or solution; the sales model hasn’t. It’s time for new thinking. Let’s join buyers where they really have their real ‘pain’ and facilitate Buyer Readiness earlier in their buy-in/systemic change process.

BUYING MEANS CHANGE FIRST

If prospective buyers might need a new CRM system, for example, they cannot buy until their tech guys, users, time frames, vendor relationships, current software etc. are in agreement, recognize they can’t fix their problem themselves and have assembled everyone who will touch the final solution to integrate the ‘new’.

Sales seeks out folks with ‘need’ in order to place solutions. But need is not the primary factor in a purchasing decision: until the risk of the new is a understood and accepted those who SHOULD buy will maintain their status quo, regardless of their need or efficacy of your solution. And the time it takes them to manage all this is the length of the sales cycle.

Buyers don’t want to buy anything. They just want to resolve a problem with the least disruption and the most efficient use of a resource. And

  • until they figure out that they cannot resolve their problem themselves,
  • everyone has agreed to bring in something new,
  • everyone understands and buys into the risk of change,
  • and they know how to avoid any disruption that something new invariably brings with it,

they cannot buy. Indeed, they’re not even buyers until everyone agrees. [Hence the reason they don’t heed our content outreach].

All prospects/buyers must do this anyway, with you or without you. It might as well be with you. Why not use your industry knowledge to help them figure out how to traverse their steps efficiently? With a different hat on and a new skill set, you can facilitate them quickly through their process and be right there with them as they decide. You want to seek/find those exact ones who WILL buy. And you can find them on the first call. You’ll just need a different hat on.

STAGES IN THE BUYING DECISION PATH

To design messaging to find buyers earlier in their Buying Decision Path, recognize the steps buyers take to be ready and able to purchase:

1. Idea stage: Is there a problem?

  • Does it need to be solved? When? How?
  • What’s the fallout?
  • Is the cost of a fix lower than the cost of the status quo?
  • Who needs to be involved?

2. Brainstorming stage: Idea discussed with colleagues.

3. Initial discussion stage: Colleagues discuss the problem, posit who to include on Buying Decision Team, consider possible fixes and fallout. Action groups formed. Research begins. New team members invited.

4. Contemplation stage: Group discusses:

  • Known workarounds and acceptable/fallout from each,
  • People who would need to buy-in.

5. Organization stage: Group collects all internal issues that need consideration, including finding more folks to invite into process; research into the elements of the status quo; fallout to change. Begins to assess the entire scope of problem, resolution possibilities, cost of change/no change.

6. Change management stage: Group to determine:

  • Types of research necessary (and who will do it),
  • If appropriate people are involved (and who else to invite),
  • A review of all elements of the problem and solution options,
  • How much change management would be required,
  • How much disruption is acceptable.

7. Coordination stage:

  • Review needs, ideas, issues of new members invited,
  • Incorporate change considerations,
  • Delineate everyone’s thoughts re goals and change capacity,
  • Appropriate research responsibilities.

8. Research stage: Specific research for each possible solution; seek answers to how fallout and change would need to be managed with each solution.

9. Consensus stage: Buying Decision Team meets to share research consider their givens: downsides per type of solution, possibilities, outcomes, problems, management considerations, changes in policy, job description changes, HR issues, etc. General decisions made. Buy-in and consensus necessary.

10. Action stage: Responsibilities apportioned to manage the specifics of Stage 9. Calls made to several vendors for interviews and data gathering.

11. Second brainstorming stage: Discussion on results of data gathering, calls with vendors and partners, and fallout/benefits of each. Favored vendors pitched by team members.

12. Choice stage: New solution agreed on. Change management issues delineated and put in place. Leadership initiatives prepared to avoid disruption.

13. Implementation stage: Vendor contacted. Purchase made. Everything put in place.

For those who want to explore these stages and all elements of how buyers buy, see my book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

A NEED ISN’T ENOUGH

Instead of only targeting probable buyers and ignoring the much larger pool of real buyers who are merely too early in their decision process to consider buying anything (but will, once they get to that point in their process), add a new focus: seek out folks who want to change, and facilitate them through to becoming buyers.

Note: your current messaging is the wrong tool for this part of their process because it’s not information, need, or buying driven. You need a new skill to facilitate change. To manage this Pre-Sales work, and as an adjunct to the sales model, I’ve developed Buying Facilitation® to

  • work with sales to enter the Buying Decision Path between Steps 1-9 above (Pre-Sales),
  • seek/find those who CAN buy (those who’ve recognized a problem in the area your solution serves, but aren’t set up to buy anything yet),
  • find the large pool of real buyers who can be facilitated efficiently through to Buyer Readiness,
  • collapse the time from problem recognition to discovery of need to purchase,
  • enable sellers to be servant leaders and real consultants, and be part of the Buying Decision Team when buyers get to the point they’re ready to buy.

Buying Facilitation® is a generic change management, decision facilitation model that can help buyers traverse that part of their journey that sales doesn’t handle. Using unique skill sets not currently used in sales (Facilitative Questions, Listening for Systems, change sequencing) it was designed to optimize the change/decision process. By adding some new messaging and Buyer Persona targets, you can find those who aren’t touched by your sales messages but are in the process of becoming buyers.

By targeting those who seek change rather than those who might have a ‘need’, by understanding the Pre-Sales (change management) steps all buyers take, by changing your messaging to enable the collection of the full stakeholder group, enable buy in from the disparate voices, and needs, you can find and facilitate the Pre-Sales decision path of those who WILL buy and enable them to ready themselves for a purchase. Here are two examples of success after learning Buying Facilitation®:

Kaiser Permanente initially made 110 visits and got 18 closed sales, wasting too much time traveling to those who WOULDN’T buy. Adding Buying Facilitation® to their sales, they made 27 visits and got 25 closed sales. They still needed to sell – but only to those who were ready/able to buy. And saved a ton of time/money only traveling to those who were real buyers.

Working with Wachovia small business bankers, they went from 100 calls, 10 appointments, and 2 closed sales over 11 months, to 100 calls, 37 appointments, and 29 closed sales in 3 months.

Using Buying Facilitation® outcomes are quite different. It begins by entering as a true consultant, seeking folks who seek change in the area of the seller’s solution. The conventional ‘need’ and ‘solution placement’ mind set not only misses those who are en route to becoming buyers and don’t (yet) have interest in content, but has the potential of alienating folks not already seeking to buy. Not to mention it’s a huge time waster.

Using Buying Facilitation® as a preliminary skill set,

  • Sellers can tell who will be a buyer on the first call and only visit people once they’ve completed their change process and have become buyers – a highly shortened process as the Facilitator makes the buying decision process much more efficient (half the time) and when a solution is finally discussed, it’s relevant to the buyer’s actual needs, timing, buy in, and stakeholder criteria;
  • Appointments are made only when representatives of the entire Decision Team are onboard [And note: this can take just one or two calls.];
  • By entering at the beginning of the Decision Path instead of trying to enlist the low hanging fruit who’ve already become buyers, it’s possible to close 8x more sales (as per 35 years of control group/pilot testing);
  • A seller’s first job is to facilitate the Pre-Sales steps, then add the solution placement component when they’re ready.

It sounds impossible if compared with the sales process of prospecting, qualifying, and pitching and ultimately closing 5%. But the entire process is different. With the focus on first facilitating the complete Decision Path from beginning to end (focus on change, not on selling), Buying Facilitation® expands the possible target audience by a factor of 8, to include those in the buying decision process, not just those who have completed it (the low hanging fruit). It’s a true Relationship Management tool, and saves time as sellers only sell to those who WILL buy.

Once people know all – all – of the elements (most are hidden, personal and idiosyncratic) of their Pre-Sales decision/change steps and have realized they cannot resolve a problem without outside help, they are buyers and seek a solution. By this time, they’ve gone through their steps and are have recognized that bringing something new in will ‘cost’ less than maintaining the status quo. Design messaging to help them traverse their steps (Note: offering information about your solution until this occurs is irrelevant) to manage change and consensus – and THEN sell. We wait while they do this anyway and run after the ones who have completed this journey. Why not add a new criteria and skill set to what you’re already doing and expand your focus to find those who WILL buy.

____________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision makingthe NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

March 4th, 2024

Posted In: Listening, Sales

Using current negotiation models, people feel they are giving up more than they want in exchange for receiving less than they deserve. As part of standard practice, negotiation partners going into a negotiation calculate their bottom line – what they are willing to give up, and what they are willing to accept – and then fight, argue, cajole, or threaten when their parameters aren’t met. People have been killed for this. But there is another way.

In 1997, Bill Ury (author of Getting to Yes) and I had to read each other’s books (my book was Selling with Integrity) in preparation for working together for KPMG. A week before our introductory lunch meeting, I read his book where BATNA – Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement – originated, marked the areas I disagreed with in red, and sent the marked book back to Bill.

There was a lot of red: his book teaches how to get what you want (potentially win-lose) rather than how everyone can walk away satisfied (win-win) and I was quite pointed in my annoyance with win-lose. The next day I realized what an ass I was and called him, telling him not to open my envelope and I’d explain all when we met. But he had already received, reviewed, and agreed with my corrections!

We had a long chat comparing our models, concluding with a very interesting discussion about the different outcomes between a win-win and a win-lose negotiation. And net net, he agreed with me and we worked with KPMG using a win-win model.

Sample

BELIEFS

Win-lose is an incongruity. Using benchmarks for ethics and integrity, if one person loses, everyone loses – hence there is only win-win or lose-lose. Yet in the typical negotiation process it’s hard to find a win when the ‘things’ being bartered are not ‘things’ at all but representations of unconscious, subjective beliefs and personal values without either negotiation partner understanding the underlying values these items represent to the other: i.e. a house in the country might represent a lifetime goal to one person, and just a place to live to another; a $1,000,000 settlement might illustrate payback for a lost, hard-won reputation to one person, and extortion to another.

It’s possible to take a negotiation beyond the ‘things’ being bartered, away from the personal and chunk up to find mutually shared values agreeable to both – and then find ‘things’ that represent them. So it might be initially hard to agree who should get ‘the house’, but it might be possible to agree that it’s important everyone needs a safe place to live.

FOCUS ON SHARED VALUES FIRST

Try this:

  1. enter the negotiation with a list of somewhat generic high-level values that are of foundational importance, such as Being Safe; Fair Compensation;
  2. share lists and see where there is agreement. Where there is no agreement, continue chunking up higher until a set of mutually comfortable criteria are found. A chunk up from Fair Compensation might be ‘Compensation that Values Employees‘;
  3. list several possible equivalents that match each agreeable criterion. So once Compensation that Values Employees is agreed upon during a salary negotiation, each partner should offer several different ways it could be achieved, such as a higher salary, or extra holidays, or increased paid training days, or a highly sought-after office, or higher royalties;
  4. continue working backward – from agreement with high-level, foundational criteria, down to the details and choices that might fulfill that goal, with all parties in agreement. The more time you spend getting agreement on foundational criteria, the easier it will be to get into agreement.

Discussions over high level values are often more generic, and far less likely to set off tempers than arguments over ‘things’: if nothing else, it’s easier for negotiation partners to listen to each other without getting defensive. And once values are attended to and people feel heard they become more flexible in the ‘things’ they are willing to barter: once Compensation that Values Employees is agreed to, it’s possible to creatively design several choices for an employee to feel fairly valued without an employer stretching a tight budget.

Think about negotiations as a way to enhance relationships rather than a compromise situation or a way for someone to win. There is nothing to be won when someone loses.

____________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

February 26th, 2024

Posted In: Listening, News

Customer buying decision pathI moved to London in 1983 to start up a tech company after spending years as a successful sales person. For years I had qualified prospects, created decks and wrote great content, chased appointments and networked, presented, and followed up. As I became an entrepreneur, I thought I understood buyers well-enough to become one. But I was wrong.

SELLING VS BUYING

My new role taught me the differences between selling and buying: I hadn’t realized the complexity of the Pre-Sales activity necessary to become a buyer.

As a sales professional my ultimate job was to place solutions; as a buyer, my main focus was to create and maintain Excellence in a way that caused the least stress on my company and team, and matched our internal norms.

As a sales professional I struggled to say/offer the right thing, at the right time, to the right prospects, in order to convince, persuade, and build relationships to close; as an entrepreneur and potential buyer I had to continually manage any change we needed using the most efficient, integrous, and least disruptive route to success to maintain happy employees and clients, and continue to develop a great product.

As a sales professional, I sought to find and influence people who ‘needed’ my solution; as a buyer, I couldn’t fully define my needs, make adjustments, or resolve problems, until all voices (stakeholders) and impediments to change were factored in and until we were absolutely sure we couldn’t resolve our problems internally. We certainly couldn’t make any changes until we fully understood the risks that any change would generate.

Selling and buying, I quickly realized, are two different activities: different goals, different behaviors, different communication and thinking patterns, different types of responsibility. And before becoming a buyer myself, I hadn’t fully appreciated how severely the sales model limits who will buy by seeking only those with ‘need’ – the low hanging fruit, those who had completed their internal change management determinations and bought-in to any risks, any disruption, a new solution would bring to their environment.

The act of making a purchase, I realized, was a risk/change management problem before it was a solution choice issue. Any needs I had were secondary to maintaining consistency and team agreements. After all, we were doing ‘just fine’ without bringing in anything new.

As an entrepreneur with many factors to juggle, I realized that no one started off as a buyer but had to go through a change management process first. And because the sales model focuses on selling, it could only seek and close those folks who considered themselves buyers already, overlooking those who could become buyers with some risk/change facilitation. Let me explain.

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THE JOB OF A BUYER

As a buyer, the very last thing I needed was to buy. Literally. But when I did buy, it was based on my ability to manage change without disruption.

Indeed: the ‘cost’ of a fix had to be lower than the ‘cost’ of maintaining the status quo, regardless of my need or the efficacy of a solution. So (hypothetically) if I needed a CRM system but had to fire 8 people to buy one, I had to weigh the ‘cost.’ And the time it takes to make this calculation is the length of the sales cycle.

As a seller, I had never realized that my biased questions (to ‘uncover needs’ of course), or listening for where my solution could be pitched, were restricting my success. The sales model never considered what occurred before folks even self-identified as buyers.

By limiting my search to folks with ‘needs,’ I had overlooked an 8x larger audience of folks in the process of becoming buyers but not yet ready. Not to mention that my definition of ‘needs’ was often biased by my own needs to sell, and didn’t necessarily mean the person was a buyer.

As a buyer, I had more to worry about than solving a problem. I had to take into account

  • the need for buy-in by all who involved in the ultimate solution,
  • the risk a change would bring,
  • the rules and brand of the company,
  • the well-being of the employees and staff,
  • how the problem got created to make sure it didn’t recur,
  • the integrity of the product or service provided,
  • the congruence and integrity of the status quo,
  • the needs of the customers.

My challenge was to be better without losing what worked successfully, to ensure

– everyone involved agreed to a common solution,

– there was consensus and a route through to congruent change,

– we were all absolutely certain we couldn’t fix the problem with something familiar,

– the risk of change was less than the cost of maintaining the problem.

As the Managing Director/Founder, I had a well-oiled machine to consider – great staff, great clients, fantastic ROI – one that had a few problems, but did a lot successfully; I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

WHAT I NEEDED TO KNOW BEFORE BECOMING A BUYER

Here’s what I needed to know before I began looking ‘outside’ for answers:

– Who did I need to get agreement from? And how would their combined voices inform our needs or a resolution?

– What would the ‘cost’ be to us, the downside, of bringing in something external? Was the downside worth the upside and could we recover?

– How could we fix the problem ourselves? At what point would we realize we couldn’t and needed outside help?

– How could we be certain upfront that the people, policies, rules, and goals we had in place would fit comfortably with anything new we might do, any solution we might purchase? And was it possible to know the downside in advance?

– How could I determine the risk of change before I brought in a new solution?

I had to make decisions that didn’t cause too much disruption and garnered buy-in.

I began annotating the change process I was going through. Eventually I realized everyone goes through the same change management process I was going through before deciding to do anything different.

13 STEPS OF CHANGE

As someone trying to solve problems without causing disruption, my decision making process had very specific activities, from understanding the elements of a problem to ultimately ending up with a resolution. Turned out there were 13 steps for change, and people didn’t self-identify as buyers until step 10!

I used these steps to design a Change Facilitation model (Buying Facilitation®) as a new tool kit to lead potential buyers through their risk issues. Indeed, with a Buying Facilitator hat on, I could identify folks who were on route to becoming buyers on the first call.

As a seller I never realized that unless people tried to resolve their own problems and had buy-in for change, until they understood and bought into any risks involved with a new purchase, they’re not in the market to buy anything. In fact, with all my awards for being a top producer, I never realized selling didn’t cause buying!

I taught Buying Facilitation® to my sales staff so they could help people on route to becoming buyers to

  • Assemble all the right people – decision makers and influencers of all types – to get consensus for any change at all. It was quite a challenge to figure out every one of the folks whose voices had to be heard.;
  • Enable collaboration so all voices, all concerns, approved action by a consensus. This was a systems-change issue, not a solution-choice issue;
  • Find out if there was a cheap, easy, risk-free way to fix problems with groups, policies, technology we had on hand or were familiar with;
  • Discover the risks of change and how we’d handle them;
  • Realize the point where there was no route to Excellence without bringing in a new/different solution;
  • Manage the fallout of change when bringing something new in from outside, and determine how to congruently integrate a purchase into our status quo.

For those who want to understand the process, my book Dirty Little Secrets lays out the 13 step Buying Decision Path or go to my site www.sharon-drew.com where I not only explain it but have hundreds of articles on the subject.

A WALK THROUGH THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

Take a look at this summary of my journey from a person with a problem to a buyer.

Like all people, I didn’t know what I didn’t know: I didn’t know who needed to be involved (It wasn’t obvious due to the hidden influence from some of the folks peripherally involved.); I couldn’t know if we could fix the problem ourselves; I didn’t know how disruptive a purchase would be and certainly couldn’t even consider bringing anything new in until there were no other options; I didn’t know what the ‘cost’ would be to bring in something from outside, and if the ‘cost’ was lower or higher than keeping the problem.

In other words, even though we had needs, buying anything was not the objective nor the first thought (and although I did research, I never paid heed to marketing or sales content). We needed to understand the complete fact pattern; we all had to agree to the goals, direction, outcomes, results, risks, and path to change – confusing because every voice and job title had different priorities, needs, and problems.

It was a delicate process, and there was no clear path forward until we were almost at the end.

Every buyer goes through some form of this. The sales model overlooks this, not realizing that by entering at the end of the Buying Decision Path, sales restricts who buys to those who are ready, the low hanging fruit.

This is where buyers go when they’re silent. They’re not dragging their heels or seeking lower prices; they need to traverse their Steps of Change to get to the point of even becoming a buyer.

As an entrepreneur there was no one to guide me through this. I sure could have used the help of an unbiased sales professional who knew far more than I did about the environment.

Once I figured this all out and developed Buying Facilitation®, we had an eight-fold increase in sales and no longer wasted time following up those who would never buy as it was very obvious.

The time it takes buyers to navigate these steps is the length of the sales cycle. And buyers must do this anyway – so it might as well be with us. 

BUYING FACILITATION® FACILITATES THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

Buying Facilitation® eschews trying to sell anything until or unless the buyer knows exactly how – not what – they need to buy. After all, you’ve got nothing to sell until they have something to buy.

Here’s what we don’t know as sellers:

  1. Where buyers are along their decision path.
  2. How many, or if, the requisite Buying Decision Team is in place, and ALL appropriate voices have been heard so a full evaluation of the upsides and downsides to change can be considered.
  3. Until ALL voices have been heard, there is no way to recognize or define ‘need.’ As outsiders we can NEVER know who belongs on the Buying Decision Team because it’s so unique to the situation.
  4. Who is a real buyer: only those who know how to manage change, and get consensus that they cannot fix the problem internally are buyers. Need doesn’t determine ability to buy.
  5. The fallout of the risk factors, and the ability for any group to withstand change.
  6. The types of change management issues that a new solution would entail.

The sales model does a great job placing solutions, but expends too much energy seeking those few who have completed their Buyer’s Journey and consider themselves buyers. Sales believes a prospect is someone who SHOULD buy; Buying Facilitation® believes a prospect is someone who CAN/WILL buy efficiently facilitates the Buyer’s Journey from the first moment of the first call, and THEN sells, to those who are indeed buyers.

For less time and resource, we can actually lead buyers down their own change route; and we can easily, quickly, recognize who will, or won’t, be a buyer. In one conversation we can help them discern who they need to include on their Buying Decision Team; if we wish an appointment, the entire Decision Team will be eagerly awaiting us.

And with a Change Facilitator hat on, on the first call it’s possible to find buyers at early stages along their decision path who need our solutions but aren’t yet ready to buy. We just can’t use the sales model until after it’s established who is actually a buyer.

Let’s enter earlier with a change consultant hat on, to actually facilitate buyers to the point where they could be ready to buy – and THEN sell. We will find 8x more prospects, immediately recognize those who can never buy, and be true Servant Leaders. Otherwise, with a 5% close rate, we’re merely wasting over 95% of our time and resource seeking the low hanging fruit, and missing a vital opportunity to find, and close, those who WILL buy. And more will buy, and quicker. Help people become buyers. Then sell.

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision makingthe NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

November 27th, 2023

Posted In: Listening, Sales

Being Right

I used to think that if I showed up intentionally and listened carefully, I would accurately understand what someone was saying. I was wrong.

While researching my book What? I discovered that when listening to others, we naturally assume we understand what’s meant and don’t question that assumption. But due to the way sound vibrations enter our ears, we actually only accurately understand some unknowable percentage of what is being said. Turns out our listening is pretty subjective.

Here’s what happens that makes accurate understanding so difficult:

  1. We only retain words we hear for approximately 3 seconds, and since spoken words have no spaces between them, our brains must also listen for breaks in breath, tone, and rhythm to differentiate words and meaning.
  2. Throughout our lives, the neural pathways we use when hearing others speak become habituated and normalized, limiting and biasing what we hear as per our comfort and beliefs. What we think we hear has been interpreted by brain circuits that historically interpreted similar-enough incoming messages – hence, we interpret what we hear the same way we interpret what we’ve heard before, thereby restricting and misinterpreting new content accordingly.
  3. When listening, our brain automatically and haphazardly deletes incoming ideas that are foreign to our beliefs and our brains fail to tell us what’s been deleted.
  4. Whatever is left after being interpreted subjectively by familiar circuits (potentially different from what was said), and with some unknown number of deletions, is what we think we’ve heard.

A simple example of this just happened today when I was introduced to someone:

Joe: Hey V. I’d like you to meet my friend Sharon-Drew.
V: Hi Sharon.
SDM: Actually, my first name is Sharon-Drew and I always use them both together.
V: Oh. I don’t know anyone who calls themselves by their first name AND last name.
SDM: Neither do I.
V: But you just told me that’s how you refer to yourself!

Because my type of double first name (vs Mary Ann which already has circuits in most brains) was foreign to her, her brain used a habituated pathway for ‘name’, deleting both how Joe introduced us and my correction.

Like all of us, she believed what her brain told her, and acted on the assumption that she was ‘right’.

ASSUMPTIONS RESTRICT AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION

We all do this. Using conventional listening practices, using our normalized subjectivity that we’ve finely honed during our lifetimes, we assume our brain circuits offer us accurate interpretations, making it pretty difficult to know for sure if what we think we’ve heard is accurate. We end up making assumptions based on our own mental models. But it’s not our fault.

Although we prefer to hear accurately, our brains are set up to routinize and habituate most of what we do and hear – it makes the flow of our daily activities and relationships easy.

But there is a downside: we end up restricting, harming, or diminishing authentic communication, and proceed to self-righteously huff and puff when we believe we’ve heard accurately, deeming any correction ‘wrong’. When I asked a magazine editor to correct the name Sharon Morgan that appeared under my photo he said (and I can’t make this stuff up!): “I didn’t get it wrong. You must have sent it to me wrong.” True story.

So: our brain tells us what it wants us to hear and doesn’t tell us what it left out or altered, potentially getting the context, the outcome, the description, or the communication, wrong.

Sometimes we assume the speaker meant something they didn’t mean at all and then act on flawed information. In business it gets costly when, for example, implementations don’t get done accurately, or people are deemed prospects’ and put into the sales pipeline when it could be discovered on the first call that they were never prospects at all.

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THE COST OF ASSUMING

Assumptions cost us greatly, harming relationships, business success, and health:

  • Sellers assume prospects are buyers when they ‘hear’ a ‘need’ based on their biased questions and end up wasting a huge amount of time chasing prospects who will never buy;
  • Consultants assume they know what a client needs from discussions with a few top decision makers while potentially overlooking influencers or influences, causing resistance to change when they try to push their outcomes into a system that doesn’t yet know how to change;
  • Decision scientists assume they gather accurate data from the people that hired them and discount important data held by employees lower down the management chain, inadvertently skewering the results and making implementation difficult;
  • Doctors, lawyers, dentists assume problems that may not be accurate merely because some of the symptoms are familiar, potentially causing harm – especially when these assumptions keep them from finding out the real problems; they also offer important advice that clients/patients don’t heed when the patients themselves hear inaccurately, or when offered advice runs counter to their assumptions that their self-care is adequate;
  • Coaches assume clients mean something they are not really saying or skewering the focus of the conversation, ending up biasing the outcome with inappropriate questions that lead the client away from the real issues that never get resolved;
  • Influencers and leaders assume they have THE solution, followed by matching reasons or rational behind their requests. They then blame the Other for resisting, ignoring, or sabotaging, when the assumed solution procures resistance.

Using normal listening habits we can’t avoid making assumptions. The belief that sharing, pushing, presenting, offering ‘good’ (Rational! Necessary! Tested!) information – based on what we believe we heard – will cause behavior change has proven faulty time and time again, across industries.

In my book What? there are chapters devoted to explaining how we make the assumptions we make, and how to resolve the problem. Ask yourself:

  • How do I know if my assumptions are accurate? And if they’re inaccurate, how will I know?
  • What would I need to believe differently to ‘assume’ I might not be correct, and be willing to ask more questions to elicit accurate data?
  • What is making inaccurate assumptions costing me?

Assumptions are costly when they’re inaccurate. How will you know when it’s time to make them, and when to avoid them?

____________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision makingthe NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

November 13th, 2023

Posted In: Listening

We all know the importance of listening; of connecting with others by deeply hearing them share thoughts, ideas, and feelings; by being present and authentic. We work hard at listening without judgment, carefully, with our full attention. But are we hearing others without bias? I contend we’re not. WHAT IS LISTENING? From the work I’ve done unpacking the routes of incoming messages in brains, I believe that listening is far more than hearing words and understanding another’s shared thoughts and feelings. Listening is actually a brain thing that has little do to with meaning. It’s about puffs of air. There are several problems with us accurately hearing what someone says, regardless of our intent to show up as empathetic listeners. Generally speaking, our brains determine what we hear. And they weren’t designed to be objective. There are two primary reasons:

  1. Words are meant to be semantic transmissions of meaning, yet they emerge from our mouths smooshed together in a singular gush with no spaces between them. Our brains then have the herculean task of deciphering individual sounds, individual word breaks, unique definitions, to understand their meaning. No one speaks with spaces between words. Otherwise. It. Would. Sound. Like. This. Hearing impaired people face this problem with new cochlear implants: it takes about a year for them to learn to decipher individual words, where one word ends and the next begins.
  2. When others speak, their words enter our ears as puffs of air without denotation – sound vibrations that have no meaning at all. None. And it’s all electrochemical. Words, in and of themselves, have no meaning at all until our brain translates them.

This second point is confounding and paves the way for misunderstanding: our ears hear what they’re set up to hear, not necessarily what a speaker intends to share. Just as we perceive color when light receptors in our eyes send messages to our brain to translate the incoming light waves (the world has no color), meaning is a translation of sound vibrations that have traversed a very specific brain pathway after we hear them. As such, I define listening as our brain’s progression of making meaning from incoming sound vibrations.

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HOW BRAINS LISTEN I didn’t start off with that definition. Like most people, I had thought that if I gave my undivided attention and listened ‘without judgment’, I’d be able to hear what a Speaker intended. But I was wrong. When writing my book WHAT? on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I was quite dismayed to learn that what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears are often two different things. It’s not for want of trying; Listeners work hard at empathetic listening, of caring about the Speaker and the conversation, of responding collaboratively and caringly. But the way our brains are organized make it difficult to hear others without bias. Seems everything we perceive (all incoming sensory) is translated (and restricted) by the circuits already set up in our brains. If you’ve ever heard a conversation and had a wholly different takeaway than others in the room, or understood something differently from the intent of the Speaker, it’s because listening isn’t based on words or intended meaning; it’s because our brains have a purely mechanistic approach to translating signals. Here’s what our brains do:

Input (vibrations from words, thoughts, sound, feeling, sight)
CUE (turns incoming vibrations into electro-chemical signals)
CEN (Central Executive Network finds existing ‘similar-enough’ circuits to interpret into meaning)
Output (meaning)

Here’s a simplified version of what happens when someone speaks:

– the sound of their words enter our ears as mere vibrations (puffs of air with no meaning),
– get turned into electro-chemical signals (also without meaning) that
– get sent to existing circuits
– that have a ‘close-enough’ match (but may not match fully)
– previously used for other translations,
– and then discards the overage
– whatever doesn’t match
– causing us to ‘hear’ the messages translated through circuits we already have on file!

It’s mechanical. The worst part is that when our brain discards the ‘overage’ signals, it doesn’t tell us! So if you say “ABC” and the closest circuit match in my brain is “ABL” my brain discards D, E, F, G, etc. and fails to tell me what it threw away! That’s why we believe what we ‘think’ we’ve heard is accurate. Our brain actually tells us that our biased rendition of what it thinks it heard is what was said, regardless of how near or far that interpretation is from the truth. In other words, we ‘hear’ only what our brains translate based on our historic circuits – or, our biased, subjective experience. With the best will in the world, with the best empathetic listening, by being as non-judgmental as we know how to be, as careful to show up with undivided attention, we can only hear what our brain allows us to hear. Being unwittingly restricted by our past, just about everything we hear is naturally biased. IT’S POSSIBLE TO GET IT ‘RIGHTER’ The problem is our automatic, mechanistic brain. Since we can’t easily change the process itself (I’ve been developing brain change models for decades; it’s possible to add new circuits.), it’s possible to interfere with the process. I’ve come up with two ways to listen with more accuracy:

    1. When listening to someone speak, stand up and walk around, or lean far back in a chair. It’s a physiologic fix, offering an Observer/witness viewpoint that goes ‘beyond the brain’ and disconnects from normal brain circuitry. I get permission to do this even while I’m consulting at Board meetings with Fortune 100 companies. When I ask, “Do you mind if I walk around while listening so I can hear more accurately?” I’ve never been told no. They are happy to let me pace, and sometimes even do it themselves once they see me do it. I’m not sure why this works or how. But it does.
    2. To make sure you take away an accurate message of what’s said say this:

To make sure I understood what you said accurately, I’m going to tell you what I think you said. Can you please tell me what I misunderstood or missed? I don’t mind getting it wrong, but I want to make sure we’re on the same page. Listening is a fundamental communication tool. It enables us to connect, collaborate, care, and relate with everyone. By going beyond Active Listening, by adding Brain Listening to empathetic listening, we can now make sure what we hear is actually what was intended.

______________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharondrewmorgen.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. 

October 16th, 2023

Posted In: Communication, Listening

questioning-questionsDecades ago I had an idea that questions could be vehicles to facilitate change in addition to eliciting answers. Convention went against me: the accepted use of questions (information gathering devices, biased by the Asker’s need to know) is built into our culture. But overlooked is their inability to extract good data; overlooked is their ability to facilitate congruent change.

WHAT IS A QUESTION?

Questions are biased by the expectations, assumptions, goals, unconscious beliefs and subjective experience of both the Responder and the Asker and limit responses accordingly. In other words, questions can’t extract ‘good’ data. They’re certainly not designed to lead Responders through to real change or accurate revelations. (What? Did you really say what I think I heard? offers a broad discussion of bias.) Here are the most prevalent ways we limit our Communication Partner’s responses:    

Need to Know Askers pose questions to pull conscious data from the Responder because of their own ‘need to know’, data collection, or curiosity. An example (Note: all following italicized questions are posed as a mythical hairdresser seeking business) might be: Why do you wear your hair like that?

These questions risk overlooking more relevant, accurate, and criteria-based answers that are stored beyond the parameters of the question posed – often in the unconscious.

Pull Data Askers pose questions to pull a range of implicating data considered useful to ‘make a case’ in a ploy to obtain their desired results (i.e. sales, leadership, marcom, coaching). Don’t you think it might be time to get a haircut?

These questions run a high risk of missing the full range of, or accurate, responses. Certainly they offer no route to enabling choice, decisions, or collaboration/buy-in. They encourage resistance, partial/missed answers, and lies.

Manipulate agreement/response Questions that direct the Responder to find a specific set of responses to fit the needs and expectations of the Asker. Can you think of a time you’ve felt ‘cool’ when you’ve had short hair? Or Have you ever thought of having your hair look like Kanye/Ozzy/Justin? Or What would it feel like to have hair like Kanye/Ozzy/Justin? Wouldn’t you say your hairstyle makes you look X?

These questions restrict possibility, cause resistance, create distrust, and encourage lying.

Doubt Directive These questions, sometimes called ‘leading questions’ are designed to cause Responders to doubt their own effectiveness, in order to create an opening for the Asker. Do you think your hairstyle works for you?

These narrow the range of possible responses, often creating some form of resistance or defensive lies; they certainly cause defensiveness and distrust.

Conventional questions restrict responses to the Asker’s parameters, regardless of their intent or the influencer’s level of professionalism and knowledge. Potentially important, accurate data – not to mention the real possibility of facilitating change – is left on the table and instead promote lost business, failure, distrust, bad data collection, and delayed success.

Decision Scientists end up gathering incomplete data that creates implementation issues; leaders and coaches push clients toward the change they perceive is needed and often miss the real change needed and possible. The fields of sales and coaching are particularly egregious. The cost of bias and restriction is unimaginable.

Here’s an especially unfortunate example of a well-respected research company that delayed the discovery of important findings due to the biases informing their research questions. I got a call from one of the founders of Challenger Sales to discuss my Buying Facilitation® model. Their research had ‘recently’ discovered that sales are lost/delayed/hampered due to the buyer’s behind-the-scenes change issues that aren’t purchase-driven and sales doesn’t address – and yay for me for figuring this out 35 years ago.

Interesting. They figured this out now? Even David Sandler called me in 1992 before he died to tell me he appreciated how far out of the box I went to find the resolution to the sales problem. The data was always there. I uncovered this in 1983. But the CEB missed it because their research surveys posed biased questions that elicited data matching their expectations.

Sharon-Drew’s new book coming out 9/16/2023

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WHAT IS AN ANSWER?

Used to elicit or push data, the very formulation of conventional questions restricts answers. If I ask ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ you cannot reply ‘I went to the gym yesterday.’ Every answer is restricted by the biases within the question. I’m always disappointed when I hear sellers say “Buyers are liars” or coaches say “They didn’t really want to change.” Or therapists or managers or leaders say “They’re resisting”. Askers cause the answers they get.

  1. Because we enter conversations with an agenda, intuition, directive, etc., the answers we receive are partial at best, inaccurate at worst, and potentially cause resistance, sabotage, and disregard.
  2. There are unknown facts, feelings, historic data, goals, etc. that lie within the Responder’s unconscious that hold real answers and cannot be found using merely the curiosity of the Asker.
  3. By approaching situations with bias, albeit unconsciously, Askers can only successfully connect with those whose conscious biases align with their own, leaving behind many who could change, or connect when their unconscious data is recognized. And conventional questions cannot get to the unconscious.
  4. Because influencers are unaware of how their particular bias restricts an answer, how much they are leaving ‘on the table’, or how their questions have skewered potential, they have no concept if there are different answers possible, and often move forward with bad data.

So why does it matter if we’re biasing our questions? It matters because we are missing accurate results; it matters because our questions instill resistance; it matters because we’re missing opportunities to serve and support change.

When sellers ask leading or ‘open’ questions that seek answers they want to hear, or coaches ask influencing questions that try to uncover a specific answer, or scientists ask questions according to their own presumptions, we’re coaxing our Communication Partner in a direction that is often biased.

Imagine if we could reconfigure questions to elicit accurate data for researchers or marcom folks; or enable buyers to take quick action from ads, cold calls or large purchases; or help coaching clients change behaviors congruently, permanently, and quickly; or encourage buy-in during software implementations. I’m suggesting questions can facilitate real change.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

Our brain stores data rather haphazardly in our brain, often in Long Term memory, making it difficult to find what we need when we need it, and making resistance prevalent when it seems our Status Quo is being threatened.

But over the last decades, I have mapped the sequence of systemic change. Following this route, I’ve designed a way to use questions as directional devices to pull relevant data in the proper sequence so we can lead Responders through their own internal, congruent, change process and avoid resistance.

Not only does this broaden the range of successful results, but it enables quicker decisions and buy-in – not to mentiontruly offer a Servant Leader, win/win communication. Let’s look at what’s keeping us wedded to our Status Quo and how questions can enable change.

All of us are a ‘system’ of subjectivity collected during our lifetime: unique rules, values, habits, history, goals, experience, etc. that operates consensually to create and maintain our Status Quo; it resides in our unconscious and defines our Status Quo. Without it, we wouldn’t have criteria for any choices, or actions, or habits whatsoever. Our system is hard wired to keep us who we are (Systems Congruence).

To learn something new, to do something different or learn a new behavior, to buy something, to take vitamins or get a divorce or use new software or be willing to forgive a friend, the Status Quo must buy in to change from within – an inside job. Information pulled or pushed – regardless of the intent, or relationship, or efficacy – will be resisted.

For congruent change to occur, appropriate elements within our Status Quo must agree with, and have prepared for, a possibly disruptive addition (idea, product, etc.). (See my new book HOW?) But since the process is internal, idiosyncratic, and unconscious, our biased questions cause the system to defend itself and we succeed only with those folks whose unconscious biases and beliefs mirror our own.

  1. People hear each other through their own biases. You ask biased questions, receive biased answers, and hit pay dirt only when your biases match. Everyone else will ignore, resist, misunderstand, mishear, act out, sabotage, forget, ignore, etc.
  2. Due to their biased and restricting nature, your questions will not facilitate those who are not ready, willing, or able to manage internal change congruently regardless of the wisdom of your comments or their efficacy.
  3. Without the Responder being ready, willing, and able to change, ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN CRITERIA AND SYSTEMS RULES, they cannot buy, accept, adopt, or change in any way.

To manage congruent change, align the Status Quo, and enable the steps to achieve buy-in, I’ve developed Facilitative Questions that work comfortably with conventional questions and lead Responders to

  • find their own answers hidden within their unconscious,
  • retrieve complete, relevant, accurate answers at the right time, in the right order to
  • traverse the sequenced steps to congruent, systemic change/excellence, while
  • avoiding restriction and resistance and
  • include their own values and subjective experience.

It’s possible to help folks make internal changes and find their own brand of excellence.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS

Facilitative Questions (FQs) use a new skill set – listening for systems – that is built upon systems thinking. Even on a cold call or in content marketing, sellers can enable buyers down their route to change and buy-in; coaches can lead clients through their own unique change without resistance; leaders can get buy-in immediately; change implementations won’t get resistance; advertisers and marketers can create action.

Using specific words, in a very specific sequence, it’s possible to pose questions that are free of bias, need or manipulation and guide congruent change.

Facilitative Question Not information gathering, pull, or manipulative, FQs are guiding/directional tools, like a GPS system. They lead Responders congruently, without any bias, from where they’re at to Excellence. How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle?

This question is a guiding mechanism to efficiently enable a route through the Responder’s largely unconscious path to congruent change.

Here’s the big idea: using questions directed to help Others efficiently recognize their own route to Excellence, and change as appropriate vs. using questions to seek answers that benefit the Asker. This shift in focus alone creates an automatic trust.

An example is a question we designed for Wachovia to increase sales and appointments. Instead of seeking prospects for an appointment to pitch new products (i.e. using appointments as a sales tool), we designed questions to immediately facilitate discovery of need, taking into account most small businesses already have a banking relationship.

After trialing a few different FQs, our opening question became: How would you know when it’s time to consider adding new banking partners, for those times your current bank can’t give you what you need? This question shifted the response to 100 prospecting calls from 10 appointments and 2 closes over 11 months, to 37 invites to meet from the prospect, and 29 closes over 3 months. Facilitative Questions helped the right prospects engage immediately.

When used with coaching clients, buyers, negotiation partners, advertisements, or even teenagers, these questions create action within the Responder, causing them to recognize internal incongruences and deficiencies, and be guided through their own options. (Because these questions aren’t natural to us, I’ve designed a tool and program to teach the ‘How’ of formulating them.).

The responses to FQs are quite different from conventional questions. So when answering How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle?’ the Responder is directed by word use, word placement, and an understanding of systems, to think of time, history, people, ego, comparisons, family.

Instead of pulling data, you’re directing to, guiding through, and opening the appropriate change ‘boxes’ within the Responder’s unconscious Status Quo. It’s possible Responders will ultimately get to their answers without Facilitative Questions, but using them, it’s possible to help Responders organize their change criteria very quickly accurately. Using Facilitative Questions, we must

  1. Enter with a blank brain, as a neutral navigator, servant leader, with a goal to facilitate change.
  2. Trust our Communication Partners have their own answers.
  3. Stay away from information gathering or data sharing/gathering until they are needed at the end.
  4. Focus on helping the Other define, recognize, and understand their system so they can discover where it’s broken.
  5. Put aside ego, intuition, assumptions, and ‘need to know.’ We’ll never understand another’s subjective experience; we can later add our knowledge.
  6. Listen for systems, not content.

FQs enable congruent, systemic, change. I recognize this is not the conventional use of questions, but we have a choice: we can either facilitate a Responder’s path down their own unique route and travel with them as Change Facilitators – ready with our ideas, solutions, directions as they discover a need we can support – or use conventional, biased questions that limit possibility.

For change to occur, people must go through these change steps anyway; we’re just making it more efficient for them as we connect through our desire to truly Serve. We can assist, or wait to find those who have already completed the journey. They must do it anyway: it might as well be with us.

I welcome opportunities to put Facilitative Questions into the world. Formulating them requires a new skill set that avoids any bias (Listening for Systems, for example). But they add an extra dimension to helping us all serve each other.

____________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

September 4th, 2023

Posted In: Communication, Listening

What if most of our viewpoints, interpretations and assumptions are so unconsciously biased that we unwittingly restrict our ability to accurately understand, or act on, incoming information? And what’s accuracy anyway?

Our brains are the culprit, as they set the stage for the way we make sense of the world. With historic and automatic circuits that instruct our thoughts and actions, we don’t question what our brains tell us.

Responding from our historic personal norms and beliefs, we instinctively assume our perceptions, actions, interpretations, are based on reality. But we invent our own reality. As David Eagleman says in The Brain,

“Each of us has our own narrative and we have no reason not to believe it. Our brains are built on electrochemical signals that we interpret as our lives and experience… there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth via billions of signals triggering chemical pulses and trillions of connections between neurons.” [pg 73-74]

Our brains actually restrict us to hearing, understanding, and learning what’s comfortable and acceptable, causing deep seated biases. Our subjectivity maintains us. At all costs.

Sharon-Drew’s new book coming out 9/16/2023

Sample

SUBJECTIVITY VS OBJECTIVITY

We live our lives subjectively, based on our personal, unique, and idiosyncratic beliefs, assumptions, and norms. We think we’re making good choices when we choose or consider one thing vs another, when we easily reject something because it makes no sense or annoys us. Or worse, when it’s ‘obvious’ to us that one thing should be valued differently than another.

We like to think we’re able to be objective. But we’re not.

The Wikipedia definition of objectivity is “… the elimination of subjective perspectives and … purely based on hard facts.” And “a lack of bias, judgment, or prejudice.” But is this possible? What are ‘hard facts’ when our brain rejects them as faulty? When our brains determine what ‘reality’ is? I suggest that objectivity is only slightly less biased than subjectivity.

Indeed, it’s pretty impossible to experience or interpret most anything without bias. We act, make decisions and choices, communicate with others, raise children and have friends, all from a small range of favored, habitual mental models that we’ve spent a lifetime culling and assume are accurate.

  • Regardless of how ‘factual’ it is, when incoming data doesn’t jive with our existing beliefs, our brains ‘do us a favor’ and resist and re-interpret whatever falls outside of what we ‘know’ to be true. Obviously, anything new has a good chance of not being understood accurately. Bias is just cooked in; we don’t even think twice about trusting our intuition or natural reasoning when there’s a good chance we shouldn’t.
  • Whether we’re in a conversation, listening to media, or even reading, we listen through biased filters, and hear what our brains tell us was said – likely to be X% different from the intended message. Unless we develop new neural pathways for the new incoming data, we will only hear what our brains are already comfortable with.

Indeed, our worlds are very tightly controlled by our unconscious and habituated biases, making it quite difficult to objectively hear or understand new idea-based incoming information that is different. It takes quite a bit of work to act beyond our perceptions.

WHY CAN’T WE BE OBJECTIVE?

Each of us interpret incoming messages uniquely. Have you ever spoken with folks who believe that ‘9/11’, or the moon landing, was a hoax or conspiracy? What about people who smoke, and interpret the health data uniquely, believing that because their grandfather smoked until he died at 95 that it’s not going to happen to them? Objectivity is not, well, objective. Here’s what happens: Sometimes

  • the way the new information comes in to us – the words used, the setting, the history between the communication partners, the distance between what’s being said and our current beliefs – cause us to unconsciously misinterpret bits of data;
  • we have no natural way of recognizing an incongruity between the incoming information and our unconscious thoughts;
  • our brain deletes some of the signals from incoming messages when they are discordant with what we already accept as true, without giving us the deletions to let us know what we missed (My book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? explains and corrects this problem.);
  • our beliefs are so strong we react automatically without having enough detachment to notice;
  • what we think is objective is often merely a habitual choice.

We each live in worlds of our own making. We choose friends and neighborhoods according to our beliefs and how our ears interpret ‘facts’, choose professions according to our likes and predispositions, raise our kids with the same norms and beliefs that we hold. In other words, we’ve created rather stable – certainly comfortable – worlds for ourselves that we fight to maintain regardless of how our biases may distort.

When communicating with others, ‘objective facts’ might get lost in subjectivity. In business we connect with different viewpoints and attempt to convince other’s of our ‘rightness’, and either they don’t believe us or they feel we’ve made them ‘wrong’. Our children learn stuff in school that we might find objectionable regardless of its veracity, or we might disagree with teachers who have different interpretations of our child’s behavior. What about the ‘fake news’ claims these days?

What, exactly is true? I contend the difference between ‘fake news’ and factual reporting is in our perceptions. Either can be objective or subjective given our underlying biases, and separate from the ‘reality’ of facts.

And of course, most scientific facts we deem ‘objective truth’ may just be opinions. Folks like Curie, Einstein, Hawking, and Tesla were considered to be cranks because their ideas flew in the face of objective science that turned out to be nothing more than decades and centuries of perceived wisdom/opinions.

The problem shows up in every aspect of our lives. Sometimes there’s no way to separate out objective fact from subjective belief, regardless of the veracity.

I remember when my teenage son came home with blue hair one day. Thinking of what his teachers would say (This was in 1985!) or his friend’s parents, I wanted to scream. Instead I requested that next time he wanted to do something like that to please discuss it with me first, and then told him it looked great (It actually was a terrific color!). But his father went nuts when he came to pick him up, screaming at both of us (“What kind of a mother lets her son dye his hair blue!!!”), and taking him directly to the barber to shave his head. For me, it was merely hair. Objective reality.

CASE STUDY IN OBJECTIVITY VS SUBJECTIVITY

I once visited a friend in the hospital where I began a light conversations with the elderly orderly helping her sit up and eat. During our chat, the orderly asked me if I could mentor him. Um… Well, I was busy. Please! he begged. Not knowing what I could add to his life and having a bias that folks who asked me to mentor them just wanted me to give them money, I reluctantly, doubtfully, said ok.

He emailed me and invited me to dinner. Um… well, ok. I’d donate one night. He lived in a tiny room in a senior living center, on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks. It was very clean and neat, and he had gone out of his way to prepare the best healthy dinner he knew how to offer. Shrimp cocktail. Nice salad. Hamburger and beans. Ice cream. During dinner he played some lovely music. Just lovely. I was transfixed. Who is that playing, I asked.

“It’s me. I wrote that piece, and I’m playing all the instruments. I have several CDs of music I’ve composed and self-produced. Can you help me find someone who might want to hear it and do something with it? I’ve never met anyone who could help me.” I helped him find folks who helped him professionally record at least two of his compositions.

By any ‘objective’ measure, using my own subjective biases and ignoring the objective truth that we’re all equal and everyone is capable of having talent, I didn’t initially consider that someone ‘like that’ (old, black, poor, uneducated) had the enormous talent this man possessed, regardless of my advocacy of non-bias and gender/race equality.

Unwittingly, we seriously restrict our worlds the way we process incoming data. We live subjective lives that restrict us. And as a result, we end up having arguments, misunderstandings, failed initiatives; we end up having a smaller pool of ideas to think with and don’t see a need for further research or checking; we make faulty assumptions about people and ideas that could bring benefits to our lives. I personally believe it’s necessary for us to remove as many restrictions as possible to our pool of knowledge and beliefs.

HOW TO COMPENSATE

To recognize bias and have a new choice, we must first recognize the necessity of noticing when something we believe may not be true, regardless of how strong our conviction otherwise. It’s quite difficult to do using the same biases that caused us to unconsciously bias in the first place.

Here’s a tip to help expand your normalized perception and notice a much broader range of givens, or ‘reality,’ to view an expanded array of options from a Witness or Coach or Observer position on the ceiling:

  1. Sit quietly. Think of a situation that ended with you misinterpreting something and the outcome wasn’t pretty. Replay it through your mind’s eye. Pay particular attention to your feelings as you relive each aspect of the situation. Replay it again.
  2. Notice where your body has pain, discomfort, or annoyance points.
  3. As soon as you notice, intensify the feeling at the site of the discomfort. Then impart a color on it. Make the color throb.
  4. Mentally move that color inside your body to the outer edges of your eyeballs and make the color vibrate in your eyes.
  5. When you mentally notice the color vibration, make sure you sit back in your chair or stand up. Then move your awareness up to the ceiling (i.e. in Witness or Observer position) and look down at yourself. From above you’ll notice an expanded range of data points and options outside your standard ones, causing you to physiologically evade your subjective choices.

Since the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is one of perception, and in general our brains make our determinations unconsciously, we must go to the place in our brains that cause us to perceive, and make it conscious. Only then can we have any objective choice. And next time we think we’re being objective, maybe rethink the situation to consider whether new choices are needed.

___________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

August 28th, 2023

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

I’ve trained many coaches, all of them passionate about serving their clients and helping them be their best selves. And yet sometimes they miss the mark. It’s their brain’s fault. Let me explain.

A client seeks a coach when they seek change, often after trying to make the change themselves. One of the main skills coaches use is listening to best identify the problem. But sometimes, through no fault of their own, coaches don’t accurately hear what their clients tell them.

EARS DON’T HEAR WHAT’S SAID

The problem is that our ears don’t actually hear words. To make it worse, words don’t get translated according to the Speaker’s meaning but according to the Listener’s existing neural circuits. In other words, sometimes neither the coach nor the client hear exactly what’s been said.

The problem occurs in our unconscious listening filters. As I write in my book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? the problem lies in our brains.

Here’s what happens. Words enter our ears as meaningless sound vibrations. After these are filtered (and some discarded!), our brain then sends them on to become signals that eventually get dispatched to a ‘similar enough’ (the term used in neuroscience) circuits that have translated similar signals before. And – this part is the most disturbing – where the signals don’t match up, our brains kindly discard the differences!

In other words, incoming thoughts and meanings get translated in our brains according to our current biases and knowledge, often missing the real intent, nuance, patterns, and comprehensive contextual framework and implications.

SHARON-DREW’S NEW BOOK COMING OUT 9/16/2023

Sample

When we think we’re listening carefully, we naturally assume we’ve accurately heard what clients want to tell us. But given how unreliably our brain translates incoming words, there’s a good chance we won’t fully understand.

Bias. By listening specifically for details, motivation, or story line, a coach’s brain will merely hear what it has a history of hearing. This causes a problem for a client. If:

  • there are unspoken or omitted bits,
  • there are meta patterns that should be noticed,
  • there are unstated historic – or subconscious – reasons behind the current situation that aren’t obvious,

the coach may believe something different was meant and might make the wrong assumptions, potentially offering inappropriate suggestions or comments.

Assumptions. If a coach has had somewhat similar discussions with other clients, or historic, unconscious, beliefs are touched that bring to mind questions or solutions they’ve used with others, coaches might offer clients flawed or inadequate suggestions.

Habits. If a coach has a client base in one area – say, real estate, or leadership – s/he may unconsciously enter the conversation with automatic habits from handling similar situations and miss the unique issues, patterns, and unspoken foundation that may hold the key to success.

WAYS TO HEAR MORE ACCURATELY

Disassociate

One way to avoid unwittingly misunderstanding or mishearing is to disassociate – go up on the ceiling and look down. This goes a long way to minimizing our personal biases, assumptions, triggers or habits, enabling us to hear what’s meant (spoken or not).

For those unfamiliar with disassociation, try this: during a phone chat, put your legs up on the desk and push your body back against the chair, or stand up. For in-person discussions, stand up and/or walk around. [I have walked around rooms during Board meetings while consulting for Fortune 100 companies. They wanted excellence regardless of my physical comportment.] Both of those physical perspectives offer the physiology of choice and the ability to move outside of our instincts. Try it.

For those wanting more information on disassociation, I explain in What? how to trigger ourselves to new choices the moment there is a potential incongruence.

Phrase to use

Given the possibility that you may not be ‘hearing’ accurately, the best way I know to get it right is to say this:

“In case there is a chance I didn’t accurately understand what you’re saying, I’m going to tell you what I heard. Please correct me where I’m wrong.”

That way you both end up on the same page. And to help you enter calls with fewer assumptions.

For those times it’s important for you to hear accurately, here are some questions for you to consider:

  • What would you need to believe differently to assume every speaker, every call, is a mystery you’re entering into? One you’ve never experienced before? To start each call with Beginner’s Mind?
  • What can you do to trigger yourself beyond your natural assumptions, and use them to pose a follow up question to yourself: What am I missing here?
  • What will you hear from your client to let you know that you’ve made an assumption that may not be accurate?
  • How can you stay on track during a call to make sure you’ve helped them discover their own unconscious drivers and aren’t biased by previous calls?

It’s possible to help your brain go beyond its natural, automatic translation processes. I can help you do this one-day program on listening if you’re interested. Or read What?. The most important take-away is to recognize your brain’s unconscious activity, and learn how to override it.

_____________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.    

August 21st, 2023

Posted In: Listening, News

I hear you my way - CopyI recently got an email from a subscriber complaining that although he’d read and learned a ton from my articles over the years, he was having trouble reading them on his computer and would I please put them up on my blog. (They’re up.)

When I read the email, I heard him from my own filters. At the time it sounded like he was telling me what to do and being disrespectful. My inner response: “Wait, what?! Why email me before checking? They’re already there! And if you loved my ideas why don’t you want to buy the learning tools that go with them?? And why would you contact me to tell me what I’ve done wrong when you’ve never even thanked me?”?

I didn’t say all that, naturally. Instead I wrote suggesting he check my site and suggested he print it out to possibly resolve his reading problem. He replied by offering names of other bloggers that do it his way (He STILL didn’t check! And I’m STILL wrong!) and that he was merely trying to help (Help what? Who?) so why didn’t I appreciate his efforts (To do what?), and (the best one): why was I getting defensive when he was offering me valuable advice (Valuable for who?).

Two people hearing what they heard, entering a dialogue with unique expectations, subjective filters and biases, and each some distance from the truth.

SUBJECTIVE FILTERS CAUSE A TRANSLATION PROBLEM

When a misunderstanding occurs Speakers assume they are in the ‘right’ because they ‘said it clearly’, and believe their communication partner is just ‘not listening’; Listeners assume what they think they hear is accurate and when there’s a problem, assume it’s the Speaker’s fault for ‘not saying it clearly’.

But both are wrong: Speakers erroneously think that because they choose what seem like the ‘right’ words to impart their message accurately, Listeners should understand exactly what they mean/intend. But it’s not possible, and it’s not a ‘listening’ problem, or a problem of intent, skill, or concentration. It’s a translation problem caused by the brain’s wiring.

As Listeners we can certainly hear the words spoken. But when it comes to interpreting them, we’re at the mercy of how our subjective listening filters translate the words we hear. Indeed, we only grasp our own unconscious translation of what’s been said, regardless of how disparate it is from the message intended.

My book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? breaks down how our subjective filters, normalized thinking patterns, and habituated neural pathways determine what we hear Others say. And as I learned while writing, it’s not our fault when we get it wrong.

Stay tuned for my new book coming out in September: HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change, and decision making.

WE CAN’T UNDERSTAND ACCURATELY

The problem is neither Speaker or Listener can get it right. And unfortunately, both assume the Other has heard accurately:

  • Speakers assume they’ve accurately communicated their ideas to Listeners. But they’re not aware of the translation process going on in the Listener’s brain as the sound vibrations from their ‘words’ (meaningless puffs of air, unfortunately) get ‘randomly’ translated into some sort of meaning. From the Speaker’s side, they’re turning their ideas/thoughts into spoken words that ‘should be’ understood.
  • Listeners have an unconscious issue to deal with. They automatically assume that what they ‘heard’ is what was intended. But in fact, it’s only X% accurate. What we hear is wholly dependent upon the number of filters and biases that mangle parts of the incoming sound vibrations; and the ‘similar-enough’ circuits the vibrations ultimately get sent to. [Note: I never figured out what ‘similar-enough’ means; there are 100 Trillion synapses to choose from!]

So net net, we hear according to our history, according to the existing neural circuits that translate incoming ‘words’ into meaning unique to us, regardless of how different from what the Speaker intended. And it’s all electrochemical, mechanical, and meaningless. Until our brain translates it for us.

What a Speaker intends is often not what a Listener’s brain translates. And it’s no one’s fault: no one intends mishear or misunderstand; everyone intends to choose words that can be easily understood; most of us pay attention. But our brain is in charge.

WHAT’S IN OUR WAY

Let me name just a few things that keep us from hearing accurately:

Bias: There are hundreds of types of bias, assumptions, filters, triggers, and habits that keep us congruent by making sure what we hear perpetuates our lifelong conditioning. Our brain actually deletes out signals! And Oops! Forgets to tell us.

Even if we try hard to hear the exact words spoken (if we write down each word as it’s spoken – we remember words spoken for about 3 seconds), knowing the words does NOT denote accuracy: our brains interpret incoming words idiosyncratically regardless of the meaning/intent behind the spoken words.

The story gets worse. Not only do we unwittingly interpret what’s been said according to our own beliefs and biases, we have no idea of the reality: we might hear ABL when the Speaker actually said/meant ABC and we have no way of knowing that our brains deleted D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K discarding elements of ideas, meaning, etc. in its search for compatibility.

We then, still unconsciously, assign a unique meaning to whatever remains according to compatibility (or incompatibility) and connections with our existing beliefs and history of similar ideas.

My goodness. How do we even understand each other? Hint: it’s why we live near folks we understand and agree with, work with folks we understand and agree with, and marry folks who are similar. Our lives are ruled by the ways our brain translates.

WHO GETS HURT

Here are some of the areas particularly affected by the way our brains translate what they hear:

Questions to gather information: when Speakers seek answers to achieve goals or gather data (i.e. sellers, doctors, coaches, influencers, parents, etc.) they can’t help but pose biased questions according to their need to know, and sometimes restrict the full landscape of possibility to a confined data set. So Listeners end up potentially offering ‘bad’ or incomplete data that is mistaken for Truth. It’s not bad data, exactly: Listeners brains get triggered to memory channels according to the biases inherent in the questions, offering Speakers some unknown/unknowable portion of reality.

Compounded with the natural unconscious translation process Listeners incur, most exchanges suffer some degree of restriction due to the biases in a Speaker’s questions. [Note: I’ve invented Facilitative Questions that are systemic, unbiased, directional, leading Listeners to specific neural circuits to actually discover and share more accurate answers.]

Influencer conversations: doctors, consultants, coaches, leaders, etc. offer advice, stories, requests, information, etc. as persuasion tactics, trying to use ‘rational reasoning’, Behavior Modification, intuition/stories/scientific arguments, etc. to cause, congruent change. Unwittingly, due to the Other’s brain neurology, and absence of circuitry to translate the new, they end up facing resistance.

Change requests from professionals: change leaders end up getting resistance when they assume their requests are heard as intended, especially when the Listener has not bought into the change. Unfortunately, as you can see above, we often cause the resistance we get.

Situations of great import to Speaker: regardless of the importance of the message – i.e. a doctor imploring a patient to stop smoking, or a parent discussing the danger of drugs to teenagers, for example – patients hear, translate, mishear uniquely, and too often end up with a different take-away than doctors intend; partners end up annoyed for no reason; buyers end up feeling manipulated and pushed.

I often tell a story of an unfortunate conversation I had with a new business partner and his wife: John suddenly got angry, shouting at me about something I never said. ‘I never said that,’ said I. ‘Of course you did! I heard it with my own ears! I was standing right here!’ ‘She never said that, John. I was sitting right here also. She’s right. She never said that.’ ‘What’s wrong with you two!!!! You’re both lying to me!’ and he stomped out of the room, ending our partnership.

Net net: unless the criteria, the mindset, the outcomes, the definitions, and the challenges have been agreed to prior to conversation by all communication partners, the odds are bad that Others can hear the intended message accurately. Obviously, this restricts the range of possible outcomes.

HOW YOU CAN BE HEARD

So:

  1. No matter how ‘carefully’ Others listen, there’s some chance they cannot hear the message we send. The farther the communication partners are away from the life experience of the Other, the more misinterpretation occurs. Listeners must check that they correctly heard what the speaker intended.
  2. Active Listening is built around Listeners noting the exact words spoken and then interpreting them ‘correctly’. It’s just about impossible for anyone outside the Other’s brain (including Group Brain) to fully, accurately interpret what Another means without specifically asking.
  3. In other words, when Active Listeners think they understand the Other’s intended message as per words spoken, they’re most likely guessing. The bigger problem occurs when they assume they’re right.
  4. In a conversation we automatically assume what we think we’ve heard is an accurate representation. Unfortunately, there’s no internal mechanism to automatically figure out the distance between accurate and ‘wrong’.

In What? I have chapters that tell Speakers how to notice when the responses they get seem to be faulty, and teach Listeners how to go ‘beyond the brain’ and listen from a ‘dissociative’ place (I devote Chapter 6 in What? to dissociative listening.) that avoids the normalized and habituated neural pathways, different from conventional listening.

Since many professionals believe they hear just fine (It’s the Other’s fault for mishearing!) I’d like to help you determine if you’re ready to learn additional tools to help you accurately hear what’s intended. Here are a few Facilitative Questions to help you decide (And note how they help you dissociate and recognize a broader viewpoint, possibly beyond resistance.):

  1. What would you need to believe differently to consider that Others’ ‘mishearing’ or ‘misunderstanding’ is a function of their subjective filters and that they’re not NOT paying attention or stubbornly ignoring you?
  2. How would you know if it were time to add some new skills to how you’re listening, to offer more options to expand the scope of what you hear?
  3. As an influencer, how will you recognize those times your ‘intuition’ may be faulty and that indeed you have mistranslated what you heard?
  4. How will you know when/if the questions you pose bias the data you collect and you’re leaving important facts undiscovered?

I know that many of you believe you hear accurately and act accordingly, and any inconsistency is the fault of the Other. But there’s a high probability that neither you nor your communication partner are hearing each other accurately.

It’s no one’s fault. But you can do something about it by dissociating, going beyond your brain, assuming you are unwittingly missing something. For those who don’t want to learn the path to dissociative listening, at least take an additional step in your conversations, assume both you and your communication partner may not be hearing each other accurately, and ask:

Would you rather think you’re right, or hear accurately? What’s the cost if you don’t?

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

July 17th, 2023

Posted In: Listening

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