How to listen – Oscar Trimboli – Review

Oscar Trimboli is the host of Apple podcast Deep listening which covers over 100 episodes with a wide selection of personas focussed on listening attribute. He has created an ambassador community on deep listening and is the author of a couple more books, Deep Listening – Impact beyond words and Breakthroughs: How to Confront Assumptions.

The introduction for Oscar makes it clear that he wants to make extensive use of his ears than mouth. We as humans are also biologically structured with a couple of ears but a single mouth giving us indications towards the proportion on how much we should be inclined to listen versus speak.

Oscar has interviewed over 2000 participants to break down the components of what gets communicated by the speaker and how does one extract true meaning from it.  He throws in an interesting number towards this process, an average human can think 900 words per minute, hear 400 words per minutes and speak 125 words per minute. It essentially means as narrative becomes longer there are bound to be thoughts that never gets communicated. However, the listening ability can act as a bridge and help us complete the communication jigsaw puzzle.

Oscar breaks down the listening process into five layers as depicted in the picture below:

Yourself – How we position ourselves to listen becomes one of the primary components of effective listening. A few checkpoints are eliminating external and internal distractions, the former one is easier to accomplish wherein one can switch of mobile phones or television or move to a quieter room to attain higher focus. Internal distractions are hard to eliminate especially the period after an argument with colleagues or boss, unexpected escalations at work or can even be a rough interaction with a rogue taxi driver. In the latter case, it’s advised to observe a period of silence and get into a calm state of mind. 

Content & Context – The key is to look for meaning rather than pick verbatim at face value. A lot of people tend to use words or terminology in loose fashion and hence it’s essential to wait for the phrase or sentence to be completed before deducing the meaning.

Prompting the speaker to give a background behind a narrative provides a robust platform to understand the intent behind it and the seriousness embedded in it. For example, let’s take the following statement, “John saw a tiger in just a 10 meter gap between them.” The statement takes an extremely opposite meaning and narrative when John is stationed in a zoo in comparison to a forest. There are plenty of examples in day to day life when the meaning gets misinterpreted due to lack of context.

A common pitfall in the listening process is familiarity bias, the mind generally rejects contrary opinions without giving it a fair consideration. In a way it’s a phenomenon of groupthink wherein a popular opinion gets difficult to be countered. The case of Micheal Burry highlights the fundamental flaw in listening to contrary opinion, he was a unique person who read through the fine print of financial prospectus and voiced out the impending danger to markets back in 2007. No one listened since it was contrary to popular opinion and the fact that he was a doctor by profession was pointed as reason towards marking it as unqualified opinion. In a way we can define it as hard bound perception towards not just a popular narrative but also towards a range of personas.

Psychogenic dysphonia is an painful disorder, the tongue is in perfect physical condition but the incoherent speech is a result of insufficient neurological pathways. The existence of disorder for decades together is due to the impatience exhibited by a significant number of listeners, thereby creating anxiety amongst the patient and further deepening the condition. Needless to say that an ecosystem of listeners who can exhibit empathy towards the patient can completely eliminate the disorder in a matter of time. 

I leave the readers to explore the remaining chapters as there is enough substance expressed already to pick up the book. As the world historically celebrates speakers, it’s time give listeners their due.

Good read!  

P.S - There are exercises at the end of each chapter which can enhance the listening skill if practiced with diligence.