Listening – Page 2 – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

While researching my book What? I discovered that we may not accurately understand what others are saying to us: due to the way ears ‘hear’ (not very well) we only accurately understand some unknowable percentage of what’s been said.

Turns out our listening is pretty subjective. And since listening is such a crucial element in communication and there’s a possibility we misunderstand what’s been said, any assumptions we make must be subject to self-doubt.

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While we don’t have choice over how our brain (mis)translates incoming words, we can have more personal choice with more awareness of our brain’s process. Did you know:

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.
Our brain interprets incoming words through already-existing circuits. That means if what was said is ‘similar enough’ to something we’ve heard before, our brain translates it according to the original, most likely misinterpreting the new content.

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 double first name was foreign to her, her brain used a habituated pathway and misinterpreted my name as Joe introduced us and my correction.

This type of thing happens daily. We believe what our brain tells us, make follow-on assumptions then act on them, and never doubt ourselves. Unfortunately, we often assume we’re ‘right’ and end up being wrong.

ASSUMPTIONS RESTRICT AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION

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: because our brain is mechanical, unconscious and automatic, it doesn’t consider ‘meaning’ during the electrochemical process between a Speaker’s words and a Listener’s understanding.

With so many deletions and distortions in the process, we end up making assumptions based on what we think we heard, and assume we’re ‘right’ regardless of the truth. When I asked a magazine editor to correct the name Charlotte Morgan that appeared under my photo he replied (and I can’t make this stuff up!): “I didn’t get it wrong. You must have sent it to me wrong.” True story.

THE COST OF ASSUMING

Assumptions are a natural part of how we think. But especially in leadership situations, they can cause harm:

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 only a few top decision makers causing resistance to change when they implemented to people not included.
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 sometimes make flawed assumptions when they hear issues similar to other patients they’ve had 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;
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 off their solutions then blame the Other for resisting, ignoring, or sabotaging, when the assumed solution procures resistance.

To have more personal choice around when, how, if you make assumptions, 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 the difference between accurate ones and faulty ones?

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen February 10th, 2025

Posted In: Listening

I 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. Indeed, there were two buying processes: the buyer’s side and the seller’s side.

As a sales professional my ultimate job was to place solutions; as a buyer, my main focus was to avoid risks while creating and maintaining Excellence.

As a sales professional my job was to get folks to make a purchase. As such, 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 necessary 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, 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.

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 (the low hanging fruit), overlooking those who could become buyers with some risk/change facilitation.

My book Dirty Little Secrets lays out all the steps people must take before self-identifying as a ‘buyer.’

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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 the team’s ability to understand my risk and 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’, the risk, of the change. And the time it takes to make this calculation is the length of the sales cycle. Unfortunately, the sales model does not offer tools to address this as it’s unique to the buying environment.

As a seller, I had never realized that my sales biases – biased questions (to ‘uncover needs’ of course), or listening specifically 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.

As a buyer, 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.

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 sales 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:

Where buyers are along their decision path.
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.
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.
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.
The fallout of the risk factors, and the ability for any group to withstand change.
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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen December 16th, 2024

Posted In: Listening, Sales

Decades 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 as information gathering devices is built into our culture. But overlooked is their ability, if used differently, to facilitate congruent change.

WHAT IS A QUESTION?

Standard questions gather information at the behest of an Asker and as such are biased by their words, goals, and intent. As such, they actually restrict our Communication Partner’s responses:

Need to Know Askers pose questions as per their own ‘need to know’, data collection, or curiosity.

These questions risk overlooking more relevant, accurate, and criteria-based answers that are stored in a Responder’s brain beyond the parameters of the question posed.

Why did you do X? vs How did you decide that X was your best option?

Manipulate agreement/response Questions that direct the Responder to respond in a way that fits the needs and expectations of the Asker.

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

Can you see how doing Y would have been better? vs What would you need to consider to broaden your scope of consideration next time?

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.

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

Don’t you think you should consider doing X? vs Have you ever thought of alternate ways of achieving X?

Data gathering When worded badly, these questions limit the possible answers and overlook more accurate data.

What were the results of your search for Z? vs How did you choose the range of items to search for, and what results did you get?

Standard questions restrict responses to the Asker’s parameters, regardless of their intent or the influencer’s level of professionalism, care, or knowledge. Potentially important, accurate data – not to mention the real possibility of facilitating change – is left on the table and instead may promote 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. The fields of sales and coaching are particularly egregious. The cost of bias and restriction is unimaginable.

Sharon-Drew’s new book came 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.

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.
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 Asker’s curiosity.
By approaching situations with the natural biases inherent in standard questions, Askers only obtain good data from Responder’s with similar backgrounds and thought processes.
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 don’t get accurate answers; it matters because our questions instill resistance; it matters because we’re missing opportunities to serve and support change.

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 making it difficult sometimes to find the right answer when we need it, especially relevant when we want to make new choices.

Over the last decades, I have mapped the sequence of systemic change and designed a way to use questions as directional devices to pull relevant data in the proper sequence so influencers can lead Responders through their own change process without resistance.

This decision facilitation process enables quicker decisions and buy-in – not to mention truly offer a Servant Leader, win/win communication. Let’s look at 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 us. It resides in our unconscious and defines us. 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.

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, change must come from within or it will be resisted.

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.
Due to their biased and restricting nature, standard questions won’t facilitate another’s change process regardless of the wisdom of your comments.
Without the Responder being ready, willing, and able to change according to their own criteria, they cannot buy, accept, adopt, or change in any way.

To manage congruent change, 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 and facilitating folks through their unconscious to discover their own answers.

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. And it requires trust that Responders have their own answers.

Facilitative Question™ Not information gathering, pull, or manipulative, FQs are guiding/directional tools, like a GPS system. Using specific words in specific sequences they lead Responders congruently, without any bias, down their unique steps of change to Excellence. How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle? Or What has stopped you from adding ‘x’ to your current skill set until now?

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. By word sequencing, word choice, and placement they cause the Responder to expand their perspective and recognize a broad swath of possible answers. A well-formed FQ would be one we formulated for Wachovia Bank to open a cold call:

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 from 100 prospecting calls from 10 appointments and 2 closes over 11 months to 37 meetings and 29 closes over 3 months. FQs found the right prospects and garnered engagement immediately.

Instead of pulling data, you’re directing the Responder’s unconscious to where their answers are stored. 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

Enter with a blank brain, as a neutral navigator, servant leader, with a goal to facilitate change.
Trust our Communication Partners have their own answers.
Stay away from information gathering or data sharing/gathering until they are needed at the end.
Focus on helping the Other define, recognize, and understand their system so they can discover where it’s broken.
Put aside ego, intuition, assumptions, and ‘need to know.’ We’ll never understand another’s subjective experience; we can later add our knowledge.
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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen December 9th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening

As instructors you’re committed to collaborating with your students, inspiring their creativity and sparking their original ideas. You pose interesting questions to enthuse them and work hard at offering knowledge in a way that inspires their learning.

But are they hearing what you intend to convey?

When I heard two highly intelligent people having a conversation in which neither were directly responding to each other (“Where should my friends pick me up?” “There’s parking near the bottom of the hill.”) I became curious. Were they hearing different things that caused disparate responses?

I spent the next 3 years studying how brains listen and writing a book on it (WHAT? Did you really say what I think I heard?). I ended up learning far more than I ever wanted to: like most people, I had assumed that when I listened I accurately heard someone’s intended message. I was wrong.

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HOW BRAINS LISTEN

Turns out there’s no absolute correlation between what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears – a very unsatisfactory reality when our professions are based on offering content that is meant to be understood and retained. Sadly there’s a probability that students are not taking away what we’re paid to teach them.

To give you a better idea of how this happens and how automatic and mechanical this process is, here are the steps brains perform when hearing spoken words.

1. A message (words, as puffs of air, initially without meaning) gets spoken and received as sound vibrations.

2. Dopamine processes incoming sound vibrations, deleting and filtering out some of them according to relevance to the Listener’s mental models.

3. What’s left gets sent to a CUE which turns the remaining vibrations into electrochemical signals.

4. The signals then get sent to the Central Executive Network (CEN) where they are dispatched to a ‘similar-enough’ neural circuit for translation into meaning.

Note: The preferred neural circuits that receive the signals are those most often used by the Listener, regardless of their relevance to what was said.

5. Upon arrival at these ‘similar-enough’ circuits, the brain discards any overage between the existing circuit and the incoming one and fills in any perceived holes with ‘other’ signals from neighboring circuits.

What we ‘hear’ is what remains. So: several deletions, a few additions, and translation into meaning by circuits that already exist.

In other words, what we think we hear, what our brain tells us was said, is some rendition of what a Speaker intends to convey biased by our own history. And when applying these concepts to training and instruction, neither the instructor nor the student knows the distance between what was said and what was heard.

I lost a business partner who believed I said something I would never have said. He not only didn’t believe me when I told him what I’d actually said, but he didn’t believe his wife who was standing with us at the time. “You’re both lying to me! I heard it with my own ears!” and he stomped out of the room, never to speak to me again.

HOW TO CONFIRM STUDENTS HEAR US

What does that mean for instructors? It means we have no idea if some/all/few of the students hear precisely what we are trying to convey. Or they might hear something similar, or something that offends them. They may hear something quite comfortable or something vastly different. They may misinterpret a homework assignment or a classroom instruction. It means they may not retain what we’re offering.

To make sure students understand what we intend to share, we must take an extra step when we instruct. Instead of merely assuming we’re presenting good content or asking creativity-building questions, we must assume we don’t know what the students have heard, regardless of how carefully we’ve worded our message.

In smaller classrooms I suggest we ask:

Can you each tell me what you heard me say?

Or, with a large class, say the same thing in several different ways: you can begin by explaining –

Because of the way brains hear incoming words, you’ll each translate what I’m saying differently. To make sure we’re all doing the same assignment, I’m going to tell you the homework assignment in several different ways:

Write a 3-page paper on [how your creativity is inspired]. Let me repeat this in a different way:

In 3 pages, explain what’s stopping you from [being as creative as you can be]. Or maybe this is clearer for you:

How do you ‘do’ your [creativity to end up with a new concept]? Explain in a 3 page paper. Or:

Hand in a 3 page paper that explains [your thinking process that triggers new ideas].

It might sound like extra work but the learners will:

understand what you intend for them to do (in their own way, but they’ll get the meaning);
promote uniform topic discussions;
eschew confusion and inspire original ideas;
circumvent regurgitation.

Since students sometimes fear offering original thoughts as they don’t want to hand in a ‘wrong’ answer, this type of exposition ensures they’ll all hear your intent and be willing to share their authentic responses. And, they’ll understand that if they don’t precisely grasp what their instructor is offering, it’s their brain’s fault.

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 25th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Our viewpoints, interpretations and assumptions are so unconsciously biased that we unwittingly restrict our ability to accurately understand, or act on, incoming information. Our brains are the culprit, as they construct the way we make sense of the world; we don’t question what our brains tell us.

Responding from 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 seeing, noticing, hearing, understanding, and learning what we already have circuits to translate – what’s comfortable and acceptable – causing deep seated biases. Our subjectivity maintains us.

Sample

In this article I will explain how our brain biases us and what we can do to override the patterns.

SUBJECTIVITY VS OBJECTIVITY

We live our lives subjectively, based on the way our brains code and retrieve our personal, unique, and idiosyncratic beliefs, assumptions, history 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 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 and neural circuits that come from oft-used superhighways in our brains 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, habituated, and brain-based biases, making it quite difficult to objectively hear or understand anything 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. Indeed, 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 telling us 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.

Sample

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.

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. We both had different ‘objective realities.’

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:

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.
Notice where your body has pain, discomfort, or annoyance points.
As soon as you notice, intensify the feeling at the site of the discomfort. Then impart a color on it. Make the color throb.
Mentally move that color inside your body to the outer edges of your eyeballs and make the color vibrate in your eyes.
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.

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 18th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

A few years ago I had an incident that illustrated the restrictions of my own curiosity. I’d begun attending life drawing classes as an exercise to broaden my observation skills. In one session I had a horrific time trying to draw a model’s shoulder. I asked the man next to me – a real artist – for help.

Here was our conversation:

SDM: Hey, Ron. Can you help me please? Can you tell me how to think about drawing his shoulder?

Ron: Sure. Let’s see…. So what is it about your current sketch that you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: If I put a gun to your head, what part would you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: You’ve done a great job here, on his lower leg. Good line. Good proportion. That means you know how to do a lot of what you need on the shoulder.

SDM: I do? I didn’t know what I was doing. So how can I duplicate what I did unconsciously? I’m having an eye-hand-translation problem.

Ron: Let’s figure out how you drew that leg. Then we’ll break that down to mini actions, and see what you can use from what you already know. And I’ll teach you whatever you’re missing.

Ron’s brand of curiosity enabled me to make some unconscious skills conscious, and add new expertise where I was missing it in places I wouldn’t have looked. His curiosity had different biases from mine. He:

entered our discussion assuming I already had all of the answers I needed;
only added information specifically where I was missing some;
helped me find my own answers and be available to add knowledge in the exact place I was missing it.

My own curiosity would have gotten me nowhere. Here was my internal dialogue:

How the hell do I draw a twisted shoulder? This sucks. Is this an eye/hand problem? Should I be looking differently? I need an anatomy class. Should I be holding my charcoal differently? Is it too big a piece? I can’t see a shadow near his shoulder. Should I put in a false shadow to help me get the proportions right?

Ron’s curiosity – based on me already possessing the skills I needed – opened a wide range of possibilities for me. I never, ever would have found that solution on my own because my automatic assumptions would have limited my curiosity to little more than an extension of my current knowledge and beliefs.

WHAT IS CURIOSITY?

Curiosity is a good thing, right? As you can see from my story, it’s far more restricted than we imagine it would be. But what is it? Wikipedia defines curiosity thus: a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and animal species.

What, exactly, does this mean? What’s ‘inquisitive thinking’? Does it matter that everyone’s inquisitiveness is subjective, unique, and limited by their biases? ‘Evident by observation’? Evident to whom? And by what/whose standards? And ‘observation’? Really?

In this article, I’ll explore what stops us from being curious (and why it’s so difficult to recognize or learn from the data we find), offer loads of questions that will take you beyond assumptions, and steps to follow to enhance our curiosity.

IT’S A BRAIN THING

We all see, hear, feel the world through our subjectivity. Our assumptions, what we notice, what we’re curious about, is largely automatic mostly outside our control. Even worse, adding new ideas when we seek out answers to what we’re curious about is not so simple as, well, adding new ideas; it’s a listening problem and a brain problem.

Listening: It’s hard for us to take in new information when it goes against what we take for granted. Because of the way our brain filters incoming words, we end up (unwittingly) restricting what we think we hear Others say according to our own beliefs and history, i.e. subjectively. As a result we may not readily accept new ideas that are different from what we currently believe because we ‘hear’ them through our own biases, even if they offer relevant data on what we’re curious about.

Neural Circuits (brains): We can only be as curious as our existing neural circuits allow. Said another way our curiosity is restricted to what we have stored in memory, and we can’t notice, think, etc. anything we don’t have representative circuitry for. Try as we might, our subjectivity rules our lives.

Since our exploration involves some unconscious ‘givens’, here are some questions to inspire a broader curiosity:

How can we know that the information we retrieve is accurate, complete, or the most useful data available?
Can we be certain that our data gathering was sufficiently broad?
How do we know that a new piece of learning is important, even though it feels uncomfortable and we want to dismiss it?
Can we supersede our biases that we judge all incoming data against?

Hence, I pose the question: can we really ever be entirely curious?

WHY ARE WE CURIOUS?

There are several different reasons for curiosity. I’ve included questions under each category to help you consider each:

Need to know something we don’t know. Sometimes we need to know something we have no, or skimpy, knowledge about. How do we know the difference between the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ answer? How do we know the most effective resources? How do we pose our query to lead to the broadest range of answers? How do we know that what our brain translates for us is an accurate rendition of new content?
Desire to expand current knowledge. We need more data than we possess. How will we recognize when the available, additional data is the appropriate data set? How do we pose an inquiry that offers the broadest range of relevant knowledge? How can we keep from resisting new data if it runs counter to our long-held beliefs (given that new data gets compared against our existing, unconscious judgments)? How can we be certain that we will accurately understand new content?
Achieving a goal. We’re missing data to achieve a goal. How can we know the extent of what we’re missing, or know to accept new content if our existing data has been our go-to knowledge and it now might be incomplete?
Interest in another person’s knowledge. We suspect someone has knowledge we need, but don’t know how to judge what might be accurate. How can we adopt/adapt new content so we can avoid internal resistance, so we ensure what we think we’ve heard is an accurate portrayal of what was said? How can we language our inquiry to avoid limiting any possibilities?
Complete internal reference points. Influencers (coaches, leaders, consultants, sellers) seek to understand the Other’s Status Quo to formulate action points. How can we know if our ‘intuition’ (biased judgment) is broad enough to encompass all possibilities – and be able to go beyond it when necessary – to match the Other’s mental models and existing/historic brain circuits? How can we know for certain that what was said to them was understood accurately?
Comparator. We want to know if our current knowledge is accurate, or we’re ‘right’. But we unconsciously compare our query and hear responses against our subjective experiences, running the risk of acquiring partial knowledge, misunderstanding what was said, or blocking important data.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty impossible to seek, find, or receive what we don’t know what we don’t know. When we hear content that doesn’t fit our existing circuitry – regardless of the efficacy of the information – we face:

Resistance: By the time we’re adults, our subjective beliefs are pretty much built in and determine how we organize our worlds. When we hear something that goes against our beliefs – whether or not it’s accurate, conscious, or unconscious – we resist. That means new knowledge will be accepted in relation to what we already know and believe, potentially omitting important data and making real change difficult.
Restricting data: What we’re curious about is automatically biased, mistranslated, and limited by our subjective experience, ego needs, history, and current data set. We have no way to know if we accurately understand what’s been said, or if we’re posing our search query in a way that will include the full range of possible answers.
Restricting knowledge. Because our subjectivity limits the acceptance of new knowledge to what fits with our current knowledge (we’re only curious about stuff that is tangential to current knowledge), our brains automatically defend against anything that threatens what we know. So we unconsciously choose answers according to comfort or habit rather than according to accuracy or need.
Intuitive ‘Red Flag’. When our egos and professional identity are curious about something we have assumptions and expectations about, we limit possibility by our unconscious biases. How do we know if there aren’t a broader range of solutions that we’re not noticing or eliciting?

If you’re interested in learning how to consciously generate wholly new circuits to permanently change habits and behaviors I’ve developed a How of Change™ program. Here’s a one-hour sample video of me teaching in the 5 hour program.

HOW TO EXPAND YOUR CURIOSITY

In order to broaden our curiosity and allow our unconscious to accept the full data set available, we must evolve beyond our biases. Here’s how to have a full range of choice:

1. Frame the query: Create a generic series of questions to pose for yourself about your curiosity. Ask yourself:

how you’ll know your tolerance for non-expected, surprising answers,
what a full range of knowledge could include,
if your answers need to be within the range of what you already know or something wildly different,
if you’re willing/able to put aside your ‘intuition’, bias, and annoyance and seek and consider all possible answers regardless of comfort,
if you need to stay within a specific set of criteria and what the consequences are if you don’t.

2. Frame the parameters: Do some Google research. Before spending time accumulating data, recognize the parameters of possibility whether or not they match your comfortable criteria.

3. Recognize your foundational beliefs: Understand what you believe to be true, and consider how important it is for you to maintain that data set regardless of potentially conflicting, new information.

4. Be willing to change: Understand your willingness to adopt challenging data if it doesn’t fit within your current data set or beliefs.

5. Make your unconscious conscious: Put your conscious mind onto the ceiling and look down on yourself from the Observer/Witness/meta position. This provides neutral data, sams your biases and resistence.

6. Listen analytically: Listen to your self-talk. Compare it with the questions above. Note restrictions and decide if they can be overlooked. And recognizing your brain may play tricks on you, be sure to ask if what you think you heard and learned is accurate.

7. Analyze: Should you shift your parameters? Search options? What do you need to shift internally?

Curiosity effects every element of our lives. It can enhance, or restrict, growth, change, and professional skills. It limits and expands health, relationships, lifestyles and relationships. Without challenging our curiosity or intuition, we limit ourselves to maintaining our current assumptions.

What do you need to believe differently to be willing to forego comfort and ego-identity for the pursuit of the broadest range of possible answers? How will you know when, specifically, it would be important to have greater choice? We’ll never have all the answers, but we certainly can expand our choices.

If you’d like some coaching on how to use your conscious mind to get into your unconscious neural circuits, I’d love to help. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen October 21st, 2024

Posted In: Listening

I’m a dancer. When I studied the Argentine Tango there was a foundational metaphor that I believe is true for all leaders: The leader opens the door for the follower to pass through using her own unique style; the leader then follows. If anyone notices the leader, he’s not doing his job. The goal is to showcase the follower.

Much of what is written about leadership falls into the category I call ‘trait-centered leadership’: someone deemed ‘at the top’ who uses their personality, influence, motivational skills and charisma to inspire and give followers a convincing reason to follow an agenda set by the leader or the leader’s boss – a mixture of Jack Welch, Oprah, and Moses.

But what if the leader’s goal overrides the mental models, beliefs or historic experiences of the followers? Or the change is pushed against the follower’s values, and resistance ensues? What happens when the leader uses their personality as the fulcrum to cause change? What if the leader has a great message and incongruent skills? Or charisma and no integrity? Adolf Hitler, after all, was the most charismatic leader in the 20th Century.

WHAT IS A LEADER?

Whether it’s for a group that needs to perform a new task, or for someone seeking heightened outcomes, the role of leadership is to

facilitate congruent change and choice by
enabling followers to discover their optimal behaviors
in accordance with their own values, beliefs, and ability,
to match agreed-upon requirements
without resistance.

In other words, enable them to employ their best skills in service of an agreed-upon outcome. It demands humility and authenticity of the leader to let go of their own concept of success and enable Others to bring their ideas, skills, values, and commitment to the project to meet agreed-upon outcomes uniquely. This way, the followers share their best ideas, creativity multiplies, and resistance is avoided as everyone buys-in to the project they own.

This type of leadership is other-centered and devoid of ego, similar to a flashlight that merely illuminates the most harmonious path, enabling followers to discover their own excellence within the context of the change sought.

And remember: change is an inside job. Leaders are outsiders.

YOU CAN’T LEAD IF YOU CAN’T FOLLOW

Too often leaders use their own assumptions and goals to influence and persuade others to comply with their vision. They begin with something they want to accomplish and work hard at inspiring their followers to make the fixes they believe necessary, using their passion and motivational skills to encourage buy-in, later wondering why they’re not on target, or work is falling through the cracks.

But being inspirational, or a good influencer with presence and empathy, or a great storyteller that seeks to motivate, or even being a ‘nice guy’ that staff generally likes following, merely enlists those whose beliefs and unconscious mental models are already predisposed to the change. It omits, or gets resistance from, those who should be part of the change but whose mental models don’t align.

When we try to change others, we only reach those who have a conscious ability to comply, bypassing those who could use what we have to say but aren’t ready to change. I call this trait-centered leadership: using our own skills as influencing strategies.

Sample

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

What if our jobs were to serve? What if we trusted that Others had good skills, and by agreeing on a course of action that met everyone’s values and the ultimate requirements, help them figure out how to get there their own way?

If we enter our leadership situations as Servant Leaders we are guiding Others through to their own best actions in the area we seek to shift, facilitating them through their own ability to change according to their own beliefs and norms. This form of leadership has pluses and minuses.

Minuses: the final outcome may look different than originally envisaged because the followers set the route according to their values and mental models.
Pluses: everyone will be enthusiastically, creatively involved in designing what will show up as their own mission – meeting the vision of the leaders (although it might look different), and owning it with no resistance.

Do you want to lead through influence, presence, charisma, rationality? Or facilitate Another through their own unique path to congruent change and ownership? Do you want people to see you as a charismatic chief? Or teach them how to congruently move beyond their status quo and discover their own route to excellence – with you as the GPS? Do you want to push your agenda using your own ideas? Or enable followers to discover their own route to systemic change? They are opposite constructs.

POWER VS. FORCE

Here are some differences in beliefs between trait-centered leadership and more the more facilitative leadership that I call Servant Leadership:

Trait-centered: Top down; behavior change and goal-driven; dependent on power, charisma, and persuasion skills of a leader and may not be congruent with foundational values of followers.

Facilitation-centered: Inclusive (everyone buys-in and agrees to goals, direction, change); core belief-change and excellence-driven; dependent on facilitating route to excellence rather than developing and strategizing the route to enable systemic buy-in and adoption of new behaviors.

Remember that real change happens at the unconscious belief level. Attempting to change behaviors without helping people change their beliefs first meets with resistance regardless of the efficacy of the solution or the need for the change.

New skills are necessary for the facilitation-centered, Servant Leadership style I suggest:

1. Listen for systems. This enables leaders to hear the elements that created and maintain the status quo and would need to transform from the inside before any lasting change occurs. Typical listening is biased and restricts possibility.

Sample

2. Facilitative Questions. Conventional questions are biased by the beliefs and needs of the Questioner, and restrict answers and possibility.

3. Code the route to systemic change. Before asking folks to buy-in, facilitate them down the 13 steps of change to build consensus and collaborate to define, agree on, and set strategy for, the necessary changes thereby avoiding resistance.

Sometimes Leaders assume that their job is to assign tasks and get shit down. From what I’ve learned with clients, that only gets them mediocre results, resistance and time wastage. Worse, it fails to capture the passion and creativity of the followers. Be the Servant Leaders who open the door and follow your followers.

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 30th, 2024

Posted In: Change Management, Listening

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.

Sample

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.

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 W hat?. The most important take-away is to recognize your brain’s unconscious activity, and learn how to override it.

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 23rd, 2024

Posted In: Listening, News

We live our lives with continuous stimulation – on-demand access to movies, articles, social media, friends, TikTok, books, games and music. With all possible, all the time, how can we hear ourselves think long enough for new and creative ideas to emerge?

I don’t know about you, but my mental commotion from a week of stress causes interminable noise coming from where my ideas should be. And given I’m a thinker, writer and inventor, hearing myself think is fundamental.

I’ve tried freeing up an hour or two during a week to sit quietly in hopes of hearing my creative voice, but that wasn’t sufficient. I needed a broader time span free of the stimulations involved with daily living. And given my schedule, the only time I had available was weekends.

My solution: weekends of boredom.

I now spend at least two weekends a month alone and off-line – off-line, as in no phone, no (on-line) social activity, no computers, and no email. Hence, weekends of doing nothing. A friend said “I would be bored out of my mind!” Precisely.

Do I like being bored? Not particularly. It’s not necessarily fun: sometimes I’m jumping out of my skin and must force myself to not call a friend. But if I can wait it out, I’m on my way to something unimaginable.

HOW I CREATE BOREDOM AND LISTEN TO MYSELF

Here’s my Idea Generating Action Plan for a weekend: during the week before my empty weekend, I stimulate my mind with gobs of fresh ideas (reading voraciously, listening to interviews of interesting people on NPR, watching documentaries). Early on Saturday and Sunday mornings I walk 3 miles to stimulate my physical side; to recruit my spiritual, juicy, non-intellectual side, I listen to classical music and meditate.

This all sets the stage for my process: Saturdays I go through hell. My brain is jumping all around, remembering things I haven’t finished, people I’m annoyed with, clamoring for me to get to the computer. But I can’t! It’s vital that I feel all my frustrations in order to let them go. Otherwise, there’s nowhere for new thinking to emerge. If it gets really bad I either listen to more music or go for another walk.

By Sunday morning I hear silence and am ready to do nothing. To sit quietly and be bored. I sit. And sit. And walk. And listen to music. And sit. And then, on Sunday afternoon, just before I am ready to exterminate myself, the magic happens. The ideas begin to flow.

New ideas. Surprising ideas. Interesting ideas. Stupid ideas. I don’t judge. I just write them all down. This past weekend I began sketching out an Advanced Listening Coaching program (based on my book What?) to help coaches and leaders hear clients without bias, or assumptions. First thing Monday I connected with two coaching schools who may have interest in collaborating. I’m not always this successful. But sometimes I am. Sometimes I plot out a new course, or draft an article, or come up with new ideas for clients. I never know what’s going to show up. But it’s always something I may not have considered without those empty days.

Sample

SPACES FOR IDEAS TO EMERGE

Boredom as a route to creativity is not for everyone. But I think many of us need something extreme to have the space to listen to ourselves, to have a block of time to clear our brain and silence our Internal Dialogue to enable our unique ideas to emerge. Some folks do this by going for a long run, or swim a mile or two. New ideas do emerge for me at the gym, but the inspirational ones – the hidden ones – come only after space and silence appear.

How do you listen to yourself? What are you listening for when you listen? Do you allow the time and space for an opening that enables emerging ideas? Ask yourself these questions, then ask the big one: What would you need to consider to be willing to take the time to hear yourself without barriers and literally brainstorm with yourself?

Try it. At least once – at least when an important meeting is coming up and you want to shine. Spend a weekend alone somewhere in the countryside, with no texting, no email, no telephone, no TV, no people. Nothin’. Then allow yourself to go a bit crazy. The initial silence might be a relief. But by the time you’re jumping out of your skin, you might end up hearing a very creative voice inside. Maybe not. Maybe you will have wasted a weekend and will email me to tell me I’m nuts. But just maybe, you’ll hear yourself come up with the new, new thing. If you do, you can give me an attribution.

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen June 17th, 2024

Posted In: Listening

Have you ever realized that people don’t always hear each other accurately? The problem is not that we don’t hear their words accurately; the problem is in the interpretation. Our brain gets in the way.

During the listening process, our brains arbitrarily filter out, or reconfigure incoming sound vibrations, turn what’s left into electrochemical signals, then dispatch them to existing circuits for translation where further deletions occur. This process ensures whatever was said matches something our brains are more familiar with – not necessarily what the speaker intended, and potentially biased.

Given that all filtering is electrochemical, and the signals (once words) are sent via neurotransmitters, the listening process is unconscious, physiological, mechanical and meaningless. By the time our brain translates incoming content into meaning, we have absolutely no idea if what we think we’ve heard is accurate.

The net-net is: we might ‘hear’ specific words accurately but our brain doesn’t interpret them as per the intent of the Speaker. With this in mind, I define listening thus:

Listening is an automatic, electrochemical, biological, mechanical, and physiological process during which spoken words, as meaningless puffs of air, eventually get translated into meaning by our existing neural circuitry, leaving us to understand some unknown fraction of what’s been said – and even this is biased by our existing knowledge.

Obviously, what we think was said is not necessarily accurate – and we don’t know the difference. So if I say ABC and your brain tells you I’ve said ABL, you not only have no way of knowing that you’ve not understood my intended message, but you’re thoroughly convinced you heard what I ‘said’. Obviously, this interpretation process puts relationships and communication at risk.

This is especially annoying in sales. When sellers pose questions to prospects to know what, how, when, or if to make a pitch, neither the seller nor prospect can be assured they’ve accurately heard the other.

CASE STUDY OF PARTNERSHIP LOST

Here’s a great example of how I lost a business partner due to the way his brain ‘heard’ me. While at a meeting with co-directors of a company to discuss possible partnering, there was some confusion on one of the minor topics:

John: No, SDM, you said X.
SDM: Actually I said Y and that’s quite a bit different.
John: You did NOT SAY Y. I heard you say X!!!
Margaret: I was sitting here, John. She actually did say Y. She said it clearly.
John: You’re BOTH crazy! I KNOW WHAT I HEARD! and he stomped out of the room. [End of partnership.]

Given we naturally respond according to what we think we heard rather than what’s meant, how, then, do we accurately hear what others mean to convey? Maintain relationships? Respond appropriately? I found the topic so interesting that I wrote a book on the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, the different ways our brains filter what’s been said (triggers, assumptions, biases, etc.), and how to supersede our brain to hear accurately.

Read Sample

But there are ways we can alleviate the problem.

CASE STUDIES OF PROSPECTS LOST

When we enter conversations with a preset agenda, we’re unconsciously telling our brain to ignore whatever doesn’t fit. So when sellers listen only for ‘need’ they miss important clues that might exclude or enlist our Communication Partner as a prospect. A coaching client of mine had this conversation:

Seller: Hi. I’m Paul, from XXX. This is a sales call. I’m selling insurance. Is this a good time to speak?
Buyer: No. it’s a horrible time. It’s end of year and I’m swamped. Call back next week and I’ll have time.
Seller:ok.iwanttotellyouaboutourspecialsthatmightsuityourbusinessandmakeyoumorerevenue.

And the prospect hung up on him. Because the Seller was initially respectful of the prospect’s time, they were willing to speak but lost interest when the Seller tried to pitch. As I was training the Seller on Buying Facilitation® that advocates facilitating decision making before pitching, I was quite surprised:

SDM: What happened? He told you he’d speak next week. Why did you go right into trying to sell something? You know to first facilitate the Buy Side before attempting to sell anything. And why did you speak so quickly?

Paul: He had enough time to answer the phone, so I figured I’d try to snag him into being interested. I spoke fast cuz I was trying to respect his time.

Obviously not a way to sell anything. Here is another example. Halfway into a sales call in which my client was facilitating a prospect through his 13 step Buying Decision Journey, and just as the prospect was beginning to recognize needs and was beginning to trust him, he blew it by making a pitch at the wrong time.

Prospect: Well, we don’t have a CRM system that operates as efficiently as we would like, but our tech guys are scheduled 3 years out and our outsourcing group’s not available for another year. So we’ve created some workarounds for now.

Seller: I’d love to stop by and show you some of the features of our new CRM technology. I’m sure you’ll find it very efficient.
And that was the end of the conversation. By hearing his prospect’s intent he might have said this and become part of their Buying Decision Team:

Wow. Sounds like a difficult situation. We’ve got a pretty efficient technology that might work for you, but obviously now isn’t the time. How would you like to stay in touch so we can speak when it’s closer to the time? Or maybe take a look at adding some resource that might alleviate your current situation a bit while we wait?
By hearing and respecting the prospect’s status quo the seller might have opened up a possibility where none existed before.

Unfortunately, in both instances, the sellers only listened for what they wanted to hear, and misinterpreted what was meant to meet their own agenda at the cost of facilitating a real prospect through to a buying decision. But there are ways to increase our ability to hear prospects.

WAYS TO INCREASE ACCURACY

We restrict possibilities when we enter calls with an agenda. We:

Misdefine what we hear so messages mean what we want them to mean;
Never achieve a true collaboration;
Speak and act as if something is ‘true’ when it isn’t and don’t recognize other choices or possibilities;
Limit our reactions and never achieve the full potential.

Here is a short list of ways to alleviate this problem (and take a look at What? for more situations and ideas):

Enter each call as a mystery. Who is this person you’re calling? What’s preventing her from achieving excellence?
Enter each call with a willingness to serve.
Don’t respond immediately after someone has spoken. Wait a few seconds to take in the full dialogue and its meaning.
Don’t go into a pitch, or make an assumption that a person has a need until they have determined they do – and that won’t be until much later in the conversation.
Don’t enter a call with your own agenda. That leaves out the other person.

Prospects are those who will buy, not those who should buy. Enter each call to form a collaboration in which together you can hear each other and become creative. Stop trying to qualify in terms of what you sell. You’re missing opportunities and limiting what’s possible.

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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 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.

Sharon Drew Morgen April 22nd, 2024

Posted In: Listening, News

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Assumptions: Why being right is wrong

The Real “Buyer’s Journey”: the reason selling doesn’t cause buying, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Questioning Questions

Are Your Students Hearing You? by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Noise of Subjectivity: how our personal biases shape and restrict our worlds

Inside Curiosity

Trait-centered Leadership vs. Servant Leadership, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

What Should Coaches Be Listening For?

Boredom: A Route To Creativity

Listening Biases Restrict Sales Success