On Becoming 69 by Sharon Drew Morgen
Today I turn 69. As I look back over my life I feel quite gratified that I have used what I was given to make this world a better place. But I was merely following directions. Let me explain.
By any objective standard, there was no path from where I started to being an authentic person and well-respected visionary/thought leader. I had one of those childhoods that would make a terrific movie (Friends say I was either going to be a saint or a serial killer). I had to get through unimaginable violence, Borderline Personality Disorder, and PTSD. The Asperger’s diagnosis didn’t come until I was 60.
GETTING FROM THERE TO HERE
I have always been aware that managing the hand I was dealt would shape who I became. I remember the moment I was given my marching orders. When I was 11, and slowly becoming conscious following an incident, I heard a voice in my head clearly say: “GET UP! You’ve got work to do! You need to get healthy! The world needs your ideas!” At that age I somehow knew enough to get up and start ‘getting healthy’ (whatever that meant), that failure was not an option.
I began running away to a friend’s house to get counselling from his mom. Over the next 40 years I had decades of psychotherapy to work through my rage, fear, safety and mistrust issues; mentoring and decades of training with Stan Grof (Holotropic Breathwork) to integrate my heart, mind and body (which had become dissociated); years of NLP certifications to code my systemic thinking; and still-continuing Vipassana silent retreats to open my heart.
I was scared and confused almost all the time – for decades. That never stopped me, even when it became clear that the way I think was so very different than the norm. Eventually I realized that I could code what I was learning to help others produce internal change and make congruent decisions: we could all serve each other if we could communicate authentically.
Looking back, I marvel at the risks I took, the relentless dedication I had to not letting anything stop me:
• With no funds or ability to get a scholarship, the Dean of Students got me work cleaning houses and a place to live as a nanny so I could attend Syracuse School of Journalism.
• With no knowledge of Wall Street I became a Stock Broker in 1979: I barged in to the CEO of Merrill Lynch (seriously – past the secretaries!) and told him to hire me. He did. “If you could do what you just did I’ll teach you the rest,” he said. I was rookie of the year, and one of the first women Brokers on Wall Street.
• I founded a non-profit for kids with my son’s rare neurological disease to fund wheelchairs and eating implements and get meds shared between countries. The foundation now helps kids all over Europe.
• In 1983 I started up a tech company in London. By 1987 we had a $4,000,000 revenue in three countries, and a 42% net profit – in a depression and before the internet, email, search engines or social media. With no knowledge of how to run a business, I had everyone (except the techies) pay themselves as profit centers (including the receptionist!). We doubled revenue every year.
• I ran my first “Helping Buyers Buy” program to KLM in 1985 after I developed Buying Facilitation® for my sales staff. Using the model, I went on to write 7 books (one NYTimes Bestseller Selling with Integrity), train 25,000 sales people globally, and language the thinking about the behind-the-scenes buying decision path (buy cycle, the buying patterns, etc.).
• A major publisher accepted my out-of-the-box book What? that codes how our brains cause us to mishear, bias and misunderstand, and how to rewire our listening to hear each other accurately. I pulled the book and self-published it as a free digital book so there would be no barriers to learning the material. 10,000 books were acquired the first 2 months.
• I am currently developing an advanced program for coaches to hear clients without bias and make appropriate interventions.
I cannot imagine how I had the courage to do what it took to get healthy, work through my myriad mistakes and keep going, gain the skills I needed to work in so many different industries, figure out how to code my unique ideas and get folks to use/buy them, or have the moxie to push so many conventional envelopes. I guess I always had that voice in my ear telling me to GET UP. And thankfully there have always been people to buy my original models.
OLD AGE
So now I am officially an ‘old woman’ although I often grab my passport to travel somewhere intriguing (I’ve been to 63 countries) and date men decades younger. Life is easier now that I have found Me. I recognize problems before they happen or retreat immediately; know what I want and don’t want. I know to apologize and not let my ego get in the way. Gone is the confusion, the fear, the search for safety. I have more empathy and acceptance of human nature, fewer questions, more answers, more flexibility, and more curiosity. I acquire less and enjoy more. I am clearly a demanding pain in the ass. I carefully choose who I share my time with. And my clarity has given me the freedom to create and innovate: without drama, conflict, confusion, or difficult people, there is an ever-increasing slow burn of original ideas pouring out of my brain. That’s my life’s work. Different from most, I know. But I feel honored to have made a difference.
So what next? Who knows? A mystery. I’m healthy, authentic, deeply spiritual, have a voice and an audience, and have fulfilled my legacy. I’m now 69. And it’s exhilarating.
Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. While written in the ‘sales’ genre, the material is generic, and systemically codes how to facilitate all decision making/change processes. www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com
What? Did you really say what I think I heard?. This funny, practical book filled with original thinking and breaks down how our brains cause a gap between what’s said and what’s heard, and then offers a model to hear each other without bias. www.didihearyou.com Take a look at learning tools also.
Read any of 1300 articles about how buyers buy, Buying Facilitation®, how to ‘close’, and where/how/why sales fails. www.sharondrewmorgen.com. To see how to learn the material through products, go to www.buyingfacilitation.com.
Sharon Drew Morgen February 16th, 2015
Posted In: News
Consensus: From Biases to Buy-in
When groups seek change – when considering purchasing a new solution, shifting strategies, reorganizing, for example – they need consensus. When families discuss putting a family member in a home, or start-ups decide to seek funding, they need consensus. How do groups achieve an outcome acceptable to all when their beliefs, goals, or convictions may be disparate?
While every group is different and each goal unique, the consensus meta-process is the same: the right people must
- be convened,
- approve the elements of the issue to be decided upon,
- find their way to agreement.
There are problems lurking at each stage:
- Gather the right people. Not as easy as it sounds. If there is no existing group, say a Board or a City Council, what mix of people would successfully represent the community? How can the right team be chosen to carry the voice of a new decision? In my experience, sometimes choosing the ‘right’ people is a political decision and too often excludes folks with an important voice.
- Include the appropriate elements to be decided upon. This is the biggest area of struggle: the correct criteria for agreement ends up being defined by folks with potentially divergent outlooks. Who gets to designate the acceptable criteria – and what is the cost of overlooking those unheard? Again, too often this decision is front-loaded, with the loudest voices carrying the most votes, and some important elements are ignored.
- Reach agreement. Members of the decision team may have unique – and potentially opposing – criteria. How will the group ensure the final outcome is an accurate indicator of the population and good-enough to be acceptable, while addressing each member’s values during the process? Until the outcomes and representative values of the group members – often hidden – are addressed, the search for agreement is a struggle.
BIASES ALTER REALITY
Unless it’s a small, homogeneous group, an outcome fully agreeable to all is pretty rare. Each member perceives problems and solutions according to their unique biases – individual beliefs and maps of the world – driving them to compete to be the arbiters of the group’s reality. And once members begin arguing about who’s ‘right’, some with softer voices may get overlooked.
From the studies I’ve read, group members are more willing to buy-in to an idea they are not fond of if they have had a chance to express their beliefs, ideas, and disagreements, and feel heard. How do we hear the full range of possibilities if we are each listening through our own biases? We don’t. So we need to listen differently.
In my new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? I illustrate at length (from several expert sources) how close to impossible it is for anyone to accurately hear what another person means to convey. Sure we ‘hear’ the words. But we regularly misconstrue the intended meaning because our biases, assumptions, triggers, memory patterns, and habits, automatically filter out words or ideas that offend our status quo, leaving us with the residue that we mistakenly believe is what was said – some percentage of what the speaker meant to convey. Makes it hard to find a path acceptable to all.
One way to help achieve that is to listen differently: it’s more likely to hear accurately by listening for more generic, acceptable themes, ridding the conversation of the bulk of the biases. So if an HOA seeks consensus on mandating guards at the resident’s doors during parties, for example, a general theme might be Building Safety. Once Building Safety is agreed on as necessary, then ways of being safe and responsibility for safety, might be discussion topics. Similarly if a group of hospital administrators seek upgrades to their technology amidst great contention, the ‘chunk up’ might be the need to capture patient data accurately and work backwards from there.
To accurately hear what our colleagues mean, we might shift our focus from
- promoting an idea, to encouraging win-win,
- getting agreement through compromise, to discovering how all voices can be heard,
- seeking a specific change, to collaborating around a more generic concept.
Then we have a better shot at achieving solutions that include creative ideas and acceptance from everyone. And everyone gets heard.
If you’d like to learn how to help teammates hear each other better, and add some skills to your approaches to consensus. go to www.didihearyou.com and get my book called What? Did you really say what I think I heard? Then, consider getting the Assessment Tools so everyone understands each other’s biases. Or, consider an online team learning with me. Contact me: Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or 512 457 0246.
Sharon Drew Morgen February 9th, 2015
Speaker or Listener: Who’s Responsible For Misunderstandings?
There’s been an age-old argument in the communication field: who’s at fault if a misunderstanding occurs – the Speaker communicating badly, or the Listener misunderstanding? Let’s look at some facts:
1. Speaking is an act of translating what’s going on internally into communication that enables others to understand an intent – choosing the most appropriate words for that particular listener in that particular situation. But the act of choosing is unconscious and may not render a full or accurate representation of what is meant.
2. Listeners translate what they hear through a series of unconscious filters (biases, assumptions, triggers, habits, imperfect memory) formed over their lives by their:
a) world view,
b) beliefs,
c) similar situations,
d) historic exchanges with the same speaker,
e) biases on entering the conversation (like sellers listening exclusively for need).
What a listener hears is fraught with so much unconscious filtering that their ability to hear accurately what’s meant is untrustworthy, except, possibly, when speaking with someone known over time.
3. According to David Bellos in his excellent book Is That a Fish In Your Ear?, no sentence contains all of the information we need to translate it. As listeners, are we translating accurately? What parts of what we hear is biased?
Since communication involves a bewildering set of conscious and unconscious choices, accuracy becomes dependent upon each communication partner mitigating bias and disengaging from assumptions; the odds of communication partners accurately understanding the full extent of intended meaning in conversation is unlikely. It’s quite a complicated mess of factors.
My new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? focuses on listening: how we mishear, misunderstand, and otherwise misinterpret, where and how the gap between what’s said and what’s heard occurs and how to avoid misunderstanding. [My next book might be titled Seriously? Did you really hear what you think I said? that focuses on speakers]. While researching and writing the book I realized that the responsibility for effective communication is heavily weighted in the court of the listener: if listeners don’t have skills to catch or prevent their biases or unhook from all subjective filters, the speaker’s words and intent are moot: they may be misconstrued regardless of their accuracy. And yes, sometimes speakers mis-speak. But when a listener hears precisely what is being conveyed and respond accordingly, a speaker can hear any problems and correct them.
So the answer is: the responsibility for an effective communication lie with the listener.
____________
Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling with Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.
More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.
Sharon Drew Morgen December 22nd, 2014
Do You Hear Your Buyers?
What we hear is not the objective of our communications: connecting is. As Senders, we speak as part of the communication process; as Receivers we hear as part of the communication process. But unless there is a completed cycle of Sender → Receiver → Sender, and a connection occurs in which there is mutual understanding, there is no communication. Given those guidelines, are you connecting with your buyers?
As sellers, we end up biasing many of our conversations due to the sales process itself. When we enter conversations with a goal in mind – to discover who might have a need for our solution, or seek an appointment, we bias the conversation and limit the connection. Not only do we listen only for what we want to hear, but we pose questions to get the answers we think we need and miss all that might be possible.
What if
- Someone does have a need and their buying path is too complex to discuss with a stranger?
- The response you hear is unconventional and you wrongly assume it’s not a prospect?
- It might be an appropriate prospect who can’t meet with you due to time constraints and you could become creative together and have a Skype meeting?
- What if you hear what sounds like resistance because you’re not getting what you expected and you could be facilitating a buying decision?
Because we bias our conversations with buyers, we restrict possibility. We get lost on our end of a conversation, and don’t enable something larger, like being real facilitators to a buying decision. When we make assumptions, we teach buyers how to defend themselves against our folly rather than work together creatively. When we misunderstand, mishear, or misinterpret, we lose buyers because our conversations seem to be about us, not them, and they feel ignored, abused, or as if they are pawns in a game not of their making.
It’s possible to hear your buyers without bias, assumptions, or misinterpretation, in order to achieve true communication. Are you willing to relinquish your restrictive goal and consider an inclusive one that enables creativity and leadership? Are you willing to truly communicate with your buyers?
I’ve written a new book that provides the tools and skills to hear others without bias, assumptions, triggers, or misunderstanding. What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? is a provocative, original book that covers new ground in the communication industry. It breaks apart how our brains keep us from hearing what’s being said, and offers tools to listen objectively. Let’s all start communicating, together.
Contact me with questions about how to hear others without biases or how to train your team. Let’s make ‘hearing what’s intended’ the new buzz phrase. Because if we all can hear what’s intended, we can make a huge difference in the world.
Sharon Drew Morgen | 512-457-0246 | sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com
www.buyingfacilitation.com
Sharon Drew Morgen November 28th, 2014
Posted In: News
Assessment: How much do you suck at listening?
Answer these questions to see how accurately you hear what your communication partner intends you to hear.
- How often do you enter conversations to hear what you want to hear – and disregard the rest?
- How often do you listen to get your own agenda across, regardless of the needs of the speaker?
- How often do you have a bias in place before the speaker’s points or agenda are known?
- Do you ever assume what the speaker wants from you before s/he states it – whether your assumption is accurate or not?
- How often do you listen merely to confirm you are right…and the other person is wrong?
- Do you ever enter a conversation without any bias, filters, assumptions, or expectations? What would need to happen for you to enter all conversations with a totally blank slate? Do you have the tools to make that possible?
- Because your filters, expectations, biases, and assumptions strongly influence how you hear what’s intended, how do you know that your natural hearing skills enable you to achieve everything you might achieve in a conversation?
- How much business have you lost because of your inability to choose the appropriate modality to hear and interpret through?
- How many relationships have you lost by driving conversations where you wanted them to be rather than a path of collaboration that would end up someplace surprising?
As I wrote my new book What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? and asked folks I knew to provide feedback, I received similar notes from all around the world saying that the book was great – for their spouses. The consistent message was that they, themselves, heard every word spoken and had no communication problems around their listening skills. Ah, I thought, but do they hear what’s intended?
It’s physiologically impossible to accurately hear all that our communication partners intend to convey. Here are some reasons why:
- we have biases, filters, triggers, assumptions, and habits that uniquely contort what’s heard.
- people don’t always accurately represent what they say and mean for us to hear, leaving out details they assume will be understood and aren’t, or choosing words that have different meanings than how their listeners define them.
- the situation in which our communication is taking place has any range of situational biases that make shared understanding challenging.
- we all interpret what we hear uniquely, according to our education, family history, religious beliefs, political beliefs, age, and ethnicity.
Are you getting the picture here? Assured understanding is not even close to possible. Yet most of us assume we hear accurately. Sure, we hear the words. But do we understand what’s meant?
When my new book What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? came out, I got notes from folks around the world telling me they listen accurately. And I wonder if they recognize the difference between hearing words spoken vs hearing what’s intended.
It’s physiologically impossible to accurately hear what our communication partner intends us to hear. We have biases, filters, triggers, assumptions, and habits that get in the way. And people don’t accurately represent what they mean for us to hear, leaving out details that they assume will be understood and aren’t, or choosing words that have different meanings for listeners. Or the situation we find ourselves in has any range of situational biases that make it difficult. We hear according to our education, family history, religious beliefs, political beliefs, age, ethnicity…..
Are you getting the picture here? Not even close to possible. So what is it we are defending? What is so important about believing we hear what’s intended when we don’t – and it’s not even possible?
My new book breaks down the good, the bad, and the ugly of how we hear, why we don’t, where we have problems (lots of assessments and fun exercises), and ways to fix it. Lots of funny examples of just plain dumb conversations between really smart people. And my snarky personality leads you through the process.
Contact me with questions about how to hear others without biases. or how to talk so others will hear what you intend to convey. And, I’ve designed some very affordable learning tools to help you figure out how to know exactly your particular ‘brand’ of bias, as well as one to lead you through the process of diminishing your biases and enhancing your ability to hear others. Let’s make ‘hearing what’s intended’ the new buzz phrase. Because if we all can hear what’s intended, we can make a huge difference in the world.
Sharon Drew Morgen | 512-457-0246 | sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com
www.buyingfacilitation.com
Sharon Drew Morgen October 29th, 2014