June 23, 2008OTL - TBE : Three things You Should Listen To
Outside the Lines - The Business Edition
Hear This!
For my birthday I got an indulgent and very cool present from my parents - a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They have a built-in microphone that listens to the ambient noise around the wearer and then creates the opposite sound wave that cancels out that excess noise. They’re particularly good on airplanes, as they cut down that persistent whine of the engines - which means you don’t have to watch the substandard movie at a volume louder than your average rock concert. They also work really well, by the by, when vacuuming the house…
Would it not be brilliant if Bose would design a similar set of headphones for work? Not for cutting out the ambient noise, but for reducing the excess of information that gets thrown your way. The headphones would cut out all that white noise that fills up the atmosphere, causing an unpleasant buzzing, knocking you off balance and distracting you from your Great Work.
In lieu of a pair of magic headphones, here are three suggestions on how to improve reception at work.
Listen to what’s good
I recently finished a series of the Coaching for Great Work training programs in Amsterdam. The feedback was very positive indeed, with one exception. And that wasn’t even a big exception, merely a suggestion of a different approach I could take to one part of the course.
Did I pay attention to all the positive feedback? Of course. A bit.
But did I gnaw and worry and fret over and generally harass the piece of not so good feedback? Absolutely. I stomped around Amsterdam ignoring the great sites of the city, being nearly mown down by the cyclists and generally stuck in my own head.
What got me out of my funk was this: remember to listen to what’s good. My bias is to give undue weight to any negative or neutral comments and to dismiss what’s good as not that relevant or somehow less important.
It’s summed up nicely in the movie Apollo 13 when Ed Harris, playing mission control director Gene Kranz says, “Thank you. I hear what’s wrong. Now tell me what’s good.”
The devil’s advocate
And having said that, let me contradict myself by saying this: be wary of all feedback, both the good and the bad.
In particular, be wary of feedback that projects a judgement towards you (”you’re terrific!” “you’re rubbish”). That can be difficult when the feedback sounds positive, but remember that such feedback is not the truth, it’s someone’s opinion, someone’s judgement. As tempting as it is to buy into the positive feedback, it’s no more grounded and useful than the negative feedback.
Feedback becomes valuable when the person giving it is specific about what you did, and then specific about the impact on them. That then lets you know the impact of your behaviour - and gives you the choice as to whether you’d like to shift it or not.
Want more?
Peter Block’s new book Community is a (typically) wonderful piece of work. He speaks very powerfully of the need to move away from focusing on the problem and the powerful impact that can have. The best business book I’ve read all year.
Another powerful resource on this is Marshall Rosenberg’s core work Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Rosenberg’s insight into how confused our typical communication is - and how you can restructure it differently - will change the way you relate to people at work and beyond work.
Listen to your intuition
With the busy-ness of business only picking up pace, we’re often in a place where we stop over-thinking things and just get on with doing them. Work becomes all about processing, churning through the work that needs to get done, punching out replies to the emails that clog the Inbox.
I’ve started thinking that one definition of coaching is as a pause button from this hectic pace, a way of stopping for a moment to get a new perspective on what’s really happening. One thing this “pause button” helps to do is to reconnect with your intuition, helps you realise the power of your subconscious to understand and decide about a situation before you’ve really thought about it.
To bring that to the surface so you are more consciously using your subconscious (if that doesn’t sound too confusing), the best question I know:
“Is this a yes or is it a no?”
Putting things in such blunt terms makes the choice clear and it somehow can override our big brains that often over complicate the situation.
Want more?
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink looks at the power of intuition and the subconscious in his usual elegant and entertaining style.
There’s a bunch of other great books on the marketplace about the power of the brain. I also really enjoyed Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology.
Don’t take my word for it
Smart folks thinking out loud about what to listen to.
“People say I don’t take criticism well, but I say ‘What the hell do they know?’”
-Groucho Marx
“Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience.”
-Rita Mae Brown
“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”
-Ray Bradbury’s advice to writers
You can read more quotes and add your own favourites here.
