Head, Heart, and Hands Listening in Coach Practice
A new book by Kym Dakin DUE FOR RELEASE JULY 4th, 2023!
Ever wonder why you recall a conversation differently than the person you were talking with? Or how you’ve missed something critically important in listening to a client, a loved one, a colleague?
Listening is how we grasp another’s story, and build bridges to our own. It’s how we create relationships and build trust across difference in skillset, experience, background, race, age and gender. Effective listening gives us information beyond the actual words – once we know how to slow ourselves down long enough to pay attention to it.
“Head, Heart, and Hands Listening in Coach Practice” is about how we listen, what we listen for, why it matters, and how to do it better. The Head, Hands & Heart model provided in these pages is quickly grasped, easily applied and it could just transform your next important conversation.
If you are a coach, a counsellor or therapist, salesperson or teacher, you’re in a listening profession. This book is designed for YOU.
What do you pay attention to when listening? What do you often miss? With exercises drawn from a variety of disciplines, timely information and probing questions, “Head, Heart, and Hands Listening in Coach Practice” will help you quickly grasp your primary and secondary listening tendencies, and amplify the ones you need so you can expand your personal and professional effectiveness.
Can you imagine a world driven by more curiosity, empathy and understanding? It could start with you – reading this book.
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Featuring Excerpts from the Book in my Blog:
Leaders Who Listen???: My “Quiet Quitting” Story
I was a 20-something professional actor wannabe in New York City. Between some small exciting successes, bills had to be paid, so money had to be made. Temping at several employment agencies was how I made it. One of my longer term assignments was assisting an investment manager – “Gregory” in a large corporate bank on Wall Street.
My working attitude at that time was not unusual for a 20 year old with her sights set on fame and glory. I would simply do the temp job I was hired for, but I would invest no more focus, time or energy than the absolute minimum required to get my paycheck and pay those bills. I was cordial and professional, and my authenticity was absolutely shuttered from 9-5, Monday through Friday.
This attitude had gotten me through many a temporary job, and though I was offered permanent employment at a number of places, I also had a front row seat to what was required of full time employees. Many of them put in upwards of 60 hours a week, working at the behest of men (and in the late 80’s and early 90’s, they were overwhelmingly men) who would routinely growl at colleagues, bark at staff, and of course, ignore lowly temps. They were stressed, overbearing, often overweight, and simply toxic. Aside from the money, I couldn’t fathom the appeal of working in a culture like this. I would come in on time, leave promptly at 5 PM, often without saying anything to anyone, and practically run out the door.
One Friday, while working for Gregory, something shifted. He called me into his office on my return from lunch, and asked me to sit down. In my mind, I started rifling through the various projects he had assigned me, thinking I must have done something very wrong, as our exchanges in the three weeks I’d worked for him were pretty perfunctory.
He hunched over his desk and gestured to the piles of paperwork that covered every surface in his office, and exclaimed “I hate all of this”. He shook his head and sighed. Then he looked at me and smiled ruefully, ”And I can only imagine how you must feel.” My mouth … may have dropped open.
He then asked me “What would it take for you to become a little more committed to the work you do here?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I honestly had never thought about it. And it’s a question no one had ever asked me. “Uhm…I’m not sure I know what you mean…?” may have been all I managed.
He nodded. “Well, I’d like you to think about it over the weekend, and come back with some ways we could make this job more appealing to you.” He gestured again at the piles on his desk. “It’s obvious that it’s going to take a lot of work to clean this mess out, and I can’t do it alone. I need your focus and commitment. You do everything I ask you to do correctly and on time, but I need you to take more initiative, so I don’t always have to be giving you instructions. I know this job is not what you want to do with your life. So I’m asking what we can do to make the rest of your time here better for you, so that you can commit more of yourself to it, while you’re here.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
Let’s take a look at what happened in that exchange.
First, in starting off our interaction with the statement “I hate all of this” Gregory revealed some transparency and personal vulnerability. I instantly saw him as a human being – not a corporate cog in the wheel. His next statement “I can only imagine how you must feel” indicated that he saw my situation with a degree of empathy. He couldn’t have gotten my attention more effectively. Then he asks for my input. He offers to make changes in my working situation that would better serve me – the lowly temp, and he asks me to come up with them.
I did think about possible changes in my work situation that weekend. On Monday morning, I came in with a few that I was sure would get eye rolls. I walked into Greg’s office. He was on the phone, so I went to leave, but he gestured for me to sit down. He told the person on the phone that he had an appointment, he concluded that call, and turned his full attention on me.
After the usual morning greetings and the “how was your weekend” routine, he got right to it. “What did you come up with for changes?”
I swallowed. But this is what he’d asked for. I took a deep breath.
“Physical space is important to me.” I began. I watched him nod, his eyes directly on mine, his posture open and available. I continued. “Gray cubicles depress me. They make me feel like I need to take a nap.” This made him laugh, and then he offered “I can relate to that!”
Okay, I thought, here goes.
“I would like to be moved, if possible (and I totally thought it wasn’t) to one of the cubicles on the opposite side of the floor – where the windows are.”
He looked thoughtful. “I think that can be arranged.”
“And I’d like to bring some stuff from home to kind of create better surroundings in that space. More color. Nice photos, maybe a painting. Stuff like that.”
He nodded. “No problem.”
I prefaced the next request with a question:
“Gregory, I notice you are always here earlier than me. What time do you usually arrive?”
He tilted his head at my question, and leaned back in his chair. A slight smile crossed his face. “7:30 or 8.” I swallowed.
“Well, there’s a class I’d like to take a couple days a week, but it starts right at 5 PM. If I came in at 8:30 on those days, could I leave at 4:30 so I can get on the subway in time to make the class?”
He shrugged and said “I don’t see why not.” Then he thought for a moment. “But here’s the thing.” He gave me that direct look again. “I need for you to let me know ahead of time what days you’ll be leaving early, and you’ll have to remind me on those days.” I nodded. “And”, he shifted in his seat, and clasped his hands on the desk, leaning toward me. “Each evening, before you leave, you’ll need to come in and say goodbye, ok?”
“Deal.” I said.
This simple exchange completely transformed our working relationship from then on. Once I got the changes I had asked for in time and space, working there became physically more pleasant, but more than that, Gregory had listened to me with empathy and problem solving intentionality, and he continued to do this as time went on. I found my commitment to helping him deepened exponentially as we continued to work together. When my tenure there ended, I was even a bit sorry to be leaving.
Saving his City: Edi Rama’s Story
I discovered the following story of the mayor of Tirana, Albania, in the opening of Ingrid Fetell Lee’s excellent book “Joyful”. I include it here as it provides an example of divergent thinking coupled with Hands listening to forge a creative solution.
Edi Rama was at a loss as to how to rejuvenate his community. Constricted for decades by a string of repressive dictatorships, life in Tirana was starved of resources, devoid of motivation and by 1999, had become a hub of crime and corruption. As he walked through his city, Rama saw gray concrete, gray skies, and gray stony faces. The mayor of Tirana was not a politician, an engineer, or an administrator. He was an artist. He began to pay attention to the few places; the corner cafe, the grocery, where there remained some splashes of color and design. He noticed in these places that voices became a little more animated, and as he tuned his ears to the emotional tone, he could almost discern, every now and then, a bit of laughter, a hint of joy, an attempted joke. These sparks were quickly extinguished once the exchange ended and the customer went back out into the dreary streets.
Rama decided to turn his observations into drastic action. He commissioned a painting service to paint a few buildings in the center of town in outrageous colors: bright orange, hot pink, sun yellow, sky blue. No explanation was given, but the effect was extraordinary: people were at first confused, some even a bit angry, but the mayor continued in his painting project. Unusual changes started to happen, slowly at first, then building in momentum. People began greeting each other and spending time in the public square, children attended school more regularly, citizens even picked up after themselves, and the chronic litter problem disappeared. Shop windows no longer were barricaded with metal gates, smiles became bigger and longer lasting. The only change made was the color of the buildings, but Edi Rama won the World Mayor award in 2004 for the dynamic effect of this one application of creativity.
Hands listening is very often foundational to taking an untried action of some kind, as it was in this case. Often, this listening modality is key in the discovery of new elements that can feed creative solutions to chronic problems. These could be on the individual level with client issues that have defied solutions so far, or with issues in self-perception, as we will see in the next chapter.
Listening Like Life Depends on it: Heart Listening on Steroids
…Like so many men of his generation, he did not speak of his time in battle, but he did say this: “I learned the importance of listening with more than my ears, and that kept me alive”.