Become a Better Listener

Become a Better Listener with Kymberly Dakin

Become a Better Listener
Leading to Fulfillment
Become a Better Listener with Kymberly Dakin
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Improve your communication skills by learning how to listen better. In this episode you’ll learn about the different ways we listen, and how to apply these techniques in your personal and professional life.

In this episode we discuss…

  • What are the heart, head, hand listening styles
  • How we listen differently with different people
  • A deeper dive into each of the listening modalities
  • Kimberly’s recent exit with her product, Nugget

About Our Guest

Kymberly Dakin has been a working creative, coach and trainer for almost 30 years.  She utilizes theatre and improv skills in high impact experiential training through her company: Voice Into Learning, LLC.

She is a founding member of Portland Playback Theatre, combining structured improvisation with community storytelling. She collaborated with Tortoise Labs to create a unique bookmarking tool: Nugget – that eliminates the need to take notes in online meetings. During the pandemic shut down,

Kym also wrote a book: Don’t Trust Your Ears: A Revolutionary Way to Listen that will Change Your World!

Resources Mentioned on the Show

Transcript

Kymberly Dakin: We’re such a content based culture that we often tend to take the media whatever news we’re tapping into at face value when really the communication is coming at us from a dip, a number of different channels. And it’s really our job, part of our animal Spidey sense. If you want to say that is to tune in to this nonverbal communication, because oftentimes that’s where the truth lies.

James Laws: Welcome to another episode of the Leading the Fulfillment podcast, where everything we talk about is meant to encourage people. First, leaders empower individuals to achieve fulfillment and to help your organizations become places people love to work.

I’m your host, James Laws, and I have a fascinating show in store for you. My guest for this episode is Kymberly Dakin.

Kymberly has been working creative coach and trainer for almost 30 years. She utilizes theater and improves skills in high impact experiential training through her company Voice Into Learning LLC. She’s a founding member of Portland Playback Theater, combining structured improvisation and community storytelling. She collaborated with Tortoise Labs, create a unique bookmarking tool called Nugget that eliminates the need to take notes in online meetings.

During the pandemic shutdown, Kim also wrote a book Don’t Trust Your Ears, A Revolutionary Way to Listen That Will Change Your World.

My conversation with Kymberly, we discuss…

  • What are the heart, head, hand listening styles
  • How we listen differently with different people
  • A deeper dive into each of the listening modalities
  • Kimberly’s recent exit with her product, Nugget

But first, I want to invite you to subscribe and leave a review for the leading to Fulfillment podcast and your favorite podcast tool. It helps us get a broader audience and reach more people.

We’re all over the place or on app or on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and you can even watch us over on YouTube.

Now let’s jump into my conversation with Kymberly Dakin.

Kymberly, thank you so much for joining me today on the Leading to Fulfillment podcast.

Kymberly Dakin: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, James.

James Laws: I’m really I’m really excited about this conversation. You’ve done some interesting things that I want to kind of bring to light. What to start I want to talk a little bit about a topic that seems to be coming up a lot on this particular podcast. Every single guest I talk to listening skills becomes one of the things that we kind of dove into in every conversation that we have.

And I think obviously the reason is, is one of the things that we’re talking about is how to be people first leaders. And in order to be people first leaders, we have to hone in on our listening skills. Now you have a book called Using Head, Heart and Hand Listening in Coaching Practice. Can you give me a little bit of an overview on what head, heart and hand listening is?

Kymberly Dakin: Yes, I’d be happy to. The first place that I encountered this framework was in the Waldorf philosophy of childhood development, and I know that it’s been called whole body listening in some other models. It’s a way of tuning into your own listening patterns and habits. And I couldn’t find any other examples of this head, heart and hands listening being used in adult learning.

And I thought, huh, well, that’s interesting. I have started coaching I started coaching, doing quite a lot of coaching on presentation training, which is sort of an odd way to get interested in listening. But it’s actually a primary element of effective presentations and effective speech making. The ability to tune in to the sound and the I guess the temperature of an audience is really key.

And now that so much has gone online, it’s become really, really important. So, there was that. But there was also the kind of things that I was realizing in my coaching and digging into how people were listening and what they were listening for. So I have taken that head heads at heart framework and applied it with infused it, I guess with my own curiosity to find out what are the primary instincts behind these three very different ways of listening?

What are the values of them? And also, what are some of the pitfalls? I know now we are trying very hard to implement more heart listening practice into what I’m going to term heart listening practice, into leadership, into managing people into our day to day interactions. And this is all very well and good. But there are some people, who are already specialists in heart listening, and many of them are my clients, and many of them are getting extremely burnt out.

So there are pitfalls in each of these particular listening style that I have spent about three, four years digging into. So I’m really pleased to put what I’m discovering along with some further questions, because it’s not by any means the definitive tome on listening. I myself, I had always assumed that I was a very empathic, heart focused listener but it turns out by my own reckoning, I’m actually much more of a hands listener.

And I discovered this when my when my daughter was going through a pretty tricky time in high school. She was having a tough time of that socially, just she had acne. She was losing friends for a variety of reasons. It was a pretty awful stretch of time. And so evening after evening, we’d be on the back deck.

We’d be listening. We’d be wiping her nose and holding her hand evening after evening. And I discovered that I there’s limitation to my listening capacity for heart listening after a while, I want to ask, well, what are we going to do about it?

By contrast, my husband, who I had assumed was going to be a pretty strong head listener, seemed to have endless capacity to just sit there, wipe her nose and say, that sucks. Just endless capacity, whereas for me, it’s like, let’s fix it already.

James Laws: That is, I find all of that to be really fascinating. We talk a lot about communication styles, how we present a message, but I don’t hear a lot of people talking about how we take in information and how we hear that information. And you’ve talked about this head hard, and I’d like to talk a little bit about each one for a little bit to understand them a little better.

I will start with heart, because that’s the one that I think everyone tends to think about. It’s like that if true empathy, what are the characteristics of heart listening? And what are some of the maybe the pitfalls of heart listening?

Kymberly Dakin: Well, the key among them you’ve already alluded to it is a capacity for empathy a capacity to tune in to the truth that’s underneath the words that are being spoken and able to tune in to facial expression, body language, tone of voice, the other person’s movement, style, gesture, others understanding what those are communicating aside from and sometimes even in contrast to what’s being spoken verbally.

When I ask people to start to discern the difference between what is being spoken verbally versus what is being spoken with all these other nonverbal communications, I sometimes if it’s, you know, election era, if it’s election season, I sometimes ask people to watch these politicians on television, get a sense of what they’re saying and then turn down the volume and see if what they’re saying and they’re expressive capacity is congruent.

When I call congruent, they’re both in the same they’re communicating the same kinds of things. Oftentimes they’re very much not, which is interesting. And once people realize that, then the other truly important element of heart listening is curiosity. And once they see the disconnect there, they start to get truly curious about what else they might be listening or missing in their own listening.

We’re such a content based culture that we often tend to take the media whatever news where we’re tapping into at face value when really the communication is coming at us from a different a number of different channels. And it’s really our job; part of our animal spidery sense if you want to say that, is to tune in to this nonverbal communication, because oftentimes that’s where the truth lies.

You know, the old joke about you ask your friend, how are you? And she says, Fine, right? I don’t know if I can use the expletive on this show, but fine being sucked up, insecure, neurotic and emotional. So, OK. Yeah. There you go. While her wise, she says that she’s gritting your teeth, forcing her smile, glaring at you and storming off.

That’s one of the most obvious examples, right? But yeah, but the more nuanced we become in our ability to discern the difference, the more we’ll be able to question our own assumptions, get less lazy about what we take in and how we take it in and become more curious, really, about the underlying truth in our interactions. So empathy, curiosity.

I think people who are true masters at heart, listening also are able to set boundaries around their time because heart listening demands as much presence as you can compel into a conversation it commands near total focus and attunement to the person you’re listening to. And I don’t know about you, but I feel like I can count on the fingers of one hand the times when I’ve been able to be totally attuned for a span of time to the person that I’m listening to.

Like maybe over the last couple of months. And it’s a muscle that I know I need to build better. And writing this book is part of my muscle building routine.

James Laws: Yeah. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. Do you think there’s you know, as you talk about it, I realize I have this feeling like, you know, as you describe more and more about a heart listener, I think I long to be a great listener, but I’m probably like you in that I’m not as much of the heart listener.

Is I as I internally think I am. And I also wonder, are there certain types of people that I am able to heart listen better than others? I as we’re talking about it and this sounds strange, I almost feel guilty saying it. I have a harder time heart listening to my son than I do to somebody. Who? One employee.

I don’t understand why that’s the case, but I as you describe it, I’m like, oh, no. I obviously have this, like, weird thing where I’m harder on my son and I’m that solution based. I’m with you. I’m I. Yeah, that is that is strange. That you might have that kind of certain people you listen to differently.

Kymberly Dakin: I find it with the. Yes, I find that the distinction a similar distinction in my own listening, I my heart listening really shines through in my capacity as a coach. But I think part of it is that we I’m only I’m only required to heart listen for an hour’s time at our time, whereas with my daughter, you’re there for a lifetime.

James Laws: 24, seven, seven days a week right?

Kymberly Dakin: Exactly.

James Laws: Well, let’s move into what I what I think I may actually be more of, as you describe it, what what are the characteristics of hand listening. Because I that’s one I’ve certainly had and ha I kind of automatically I connect to a little bit the reasoning and the emotional. But when you get into what is hand listening.

Kymberly Dakin: It’s, it’s a bit more nuanced. And I think maybe just so we can pull the two types of listening together before we discuss hand listening. I’d actually like to go into head listening a bit about Let’s do it and I have a story to start it off. This is actually the story that launched my exploration to listening styles.

I got quite a lot of work on building better communications in the workplace. One of my clients was my state environmental protection agency, so our Department of Environmental Protection. And they, they had contact with me because they had a number of field operators. These were scientists, essentially data geeks just drenched in environmental code and what it takes to save the wetlands or create better drinking water sources.

Just the list goes on and on and on. And they were having real difficulty when they had to have one on one conversations with landowners about how they were they were doing planning stuff that was against some environmental code. As you can imagine, these were very loaded conversations. Some people talked about being confronted with large dogs. Sometimes the landowners had guns.

You know, it was not friendly. And so they hired me to get these field operators to do better in their communications with the landowners. But what I discovered in talking with these highly skilled professionals was that they were under the assumption, the underlying belief that was motivating this program was that once the landowner understands and gets all the information, they will do the right thing.

And I think we know now why that was failing. Because it was clear by but after I had done a fair amount of assessing that, what needed to happen was they needed to stop listening for opportunities to share data, and they needed to start listening for opportunities to build alliance and relationship and how to position themselves as allies in whatever the larger dream is about.

And that’s one element of heart listening we didn’t get to. How do you listen for the larger dream that is underneath what this person is trying to do? He may be going about it the wrong way. In your assessment, But what’s the underlying dream and how can you tap into that to build alliance? So that’s what we had to start working on.

And that was the job that that started getting me curious about how we listen and what we listen for. Clearly, they were listening for facts, figures. What happened then? Head listening is very much attuned to patterns. That has already been established. Whatever’s been proven to be true, whatever has been proven to be true historically, it’s rooted primarily in the past, what’s already been established.

Heart listening. We’ve already talked about is primarily focus in the present. What is happening between you and me right now in this span of time?

So along with data, facts, history, what’s already known Had listeners are also very concerned with patterns and how to how to focus on the most important elements of a conversation. Head listeners are often extremely good at getting rid of tension in a room, largely because they’re the facts and figures that they have at their fingertips.

Can be applied to the situation they find themselves in. They’re deeply respected and they can sort through or they’re not distracted by the emotional context in the room. So when people are operating under false assumptions, if there’s a respected, respected head listener in the room that can work wonders to dispel hostility as long as everyone else, all the other parties in the room, hold a degree of respect for this head listener.

But the problem becomes and we have a lot of head listeners in leadership capacity all over the world, right. The problem becomes when had listeners become too good at ignoring the emotional vibe in the room? And even for bad listeners who are never going to be particularly adept to tuning into the emotional vibe, they have to at least value it so they can get a hard listener into the room with them to tune them into what they’re missing.

Does that make sense?

James Laws: Yeah, no. That I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And as you’re talking through, even though we haven’t even gotten into the hands, listeners that you talk about heart and head listeners, I keep thinking about every meeting that I’ve been in my entire team and conversations that we had, and I’m like, had Lester had listeners, our listener, our listener, not so sure.

That’s a sure I can I will start to kind of leave it. It almost feels like one of those personality tests where there’s three options right And I’m already kind of a cynic. I can see it like I can absolutely say; I find this all terribly fascinating.

Kymberly Dakin: Yeah, good. And it is it does start to get like one of those personality tests that Facebook is always poking at is there actually is an assessment on my website. Kim. Kim, taken K-Y and Daikon. That’s kind of fun. I tell people a true story that happened to me. And you get to gauge, you react and then you get to then you get to assess what your primary and secondary listening modalities are.

So but I love it. Yeah. So for a hand listening, hand listening at its best, you can utilize both the data and the facts and the pattern discernment of head listening with tuning in to what’s going on underneath the words of heart listening. And they can apply both of these two capacities to put forward. The primary focus of hand listening, which is taking action, solving problems, the best part of the hand listening is the creative ability to come up with new solutions, to think outside the box, to take what the known and the emotional ballast, put them together and come up with something new.

I want to say that there is a story in my hand listening that also gets into something that’s happening that was happening in my neighborhood before the pandemic. You know, that’s where we’re bifurcating our experience pre and post pandemic. Something called Makeshift Coffeehouse was put together by Craig freshly, and I do an interview. It’s the only interview so far in the book because Craig is really a good example of a hand listener He’s an expert facilitator.

And when it was when it suddenly became clear in 2016 that we had a huge problem with how divided our country had become, he made it his job through makeshift coffeehouse to try and get both red and blue opinions into the room to talk about topics that are of mutual interest as a way to get people to listen to each other He became highly effective at this.

It won a national award. This effort that I always have to go back and look on this website because I can never remember the name of the word. But he’s an example of a hands listener that has the capacity both for retaining facts and tuning in to what’s going on with his with his listeners that I find really powerful and effective.

That’s one example. But when you think about it, hands listening can also be can also go to the dark side, right? And what I mean by that is hands listening can become what people utilize with their running scams. They’ve got all kinds of information on you and me. And they have the ability to tune in to whatever our needs are.

Whatever they hear in our voices, they can tap in. They can they can get us to trust them. And before we know it, boom, off they go with our money. So, hands listening, also has a dark side to it, which I am going to. I I’m about a third of the way done with the book. Publisher wants me to have it done by the end of October.

And but the dark side of hands listening, I think, is something that needs to be in there because it can be like so many powers in the universe. It could be misused.

James Laws: Yeah. It sounds like the dark side of hands listening or running Facebook ads.

Kymberly Dakin: Oh, gosh.

James Laws: And there you.

Kymberly Dakin: Go, right?

James Laws: These are all because they’re taking my they take my money like crazy.

Kymberly Dakin: I know. It’s awful.

James Laws: How did you know? This is exactly what I wanted every single time How did you know?

Kymberly Dakin: Oh, creepy, really creepy.

James Laws: No, I think this is really, really interesting. So and so as we kind of look at that, you talk about the head listener being primarily concerned with the past. You talk about the heart listener being primarily concerned with the present and obviously the hands listener primarily concerned with the future. Yes. And very, very interesting stuff. I would definitely in hearing that.

I will I will likely take your assessment just to see what I come up with. But I, I have a feeling that’s the cat that hands listening is where I end up my team would tell you that I’m always if I was in the especially in the early days, I’ve gotten better at it. I’ve always sent them on rabbit trails of just interesting new.

There you go. Ideas and things that we want to go so I think probably fall in that category. I’ve gotten better at it. I’ve pulled it back. I still long to be a better listener and I have a lot of people on my team that are had success that I.

Kymberly Dakin: They are the best.

James Laws: Time.

Kymberly Dakin: I know that’s my yeah that’s my weakest listening capacity unfortunately. But yeah you just after a while you just say OK, I’ve got my strengths, I got my weaknesses and I hire Ed listeners.

James Laws: That’s surrounding yourself with what you lack. That is the cardinal rule of leadership and business. And running a business is surrounding yourself with all the people who have the strengths where you are the weakest right.

Kymberly Dakin: I’m glad you brought up.

James Laws: And.

Kymberly Dakin: I’m glad you brought up the distraction element, you know, like squirrel is that that it is yeah. That’s kind of the flip the flip side of the hands listener coin and oh my God, with all the social media, we are just off the charts distraction everywhere. And it really becomes really becomes a strength to learn how to focus, you know, go into to discern, at least for myself, to discern what is worth doing from what is just a new shiny whistle distraction that’s going to eat my time.

James Laws: Yeah. I mean, one of the books that I constantly recommend to people who are battling with the important is the book Essentialism. If you if you’ve not read it, it’s such a it’s such a fantastic book, but it’s just it’s simply about that. What is essential and what is not essential and an essential is concerned primarily with the essential.

And so it’s a great, fantastic book to read that I think talks a little bit about this when we’re talk about listening. I don’t want to wrap up our conversation before I talk about Nugget just a little bit, because when you talk about listening, you know, primary place where we have to do some of our best listening is in our meetings when we get everyone together.

Unfortunately, most of our meetings are now virtual. Now because of because of the pandemic or because, you know, like my company, we’re remote distributed and our people are all over the world. So we do have meetings. It’s over video or over a phone call and some of the things that you use to listen. Yes. Are not always available to you.

You can’t always read the body signals because sometimes you don’t have them and you can’t always read the tone because you’re it’s asynchronous written communication or whatever the case may be trying all these limits. But you started on a project called Nugget to help improve the meeting process. And I just as we wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about it.

Can you share what is Nugget and what was your motivation for working on that?

Kymberly Dakin: When the pandemic hit and so much of my in-person work just evaporated, I, I thought, well, what’s the silver lining? And the silver lining was time suddenly had a lot of unstructured time. So along with creating the book, I also signed up just kind of on a whim for a program that was primarily focused on getting women to develop online products.

And if anybody was trying to invent something new, the first and most important thing you have to do is figure out what problem you’re going to try to solve. Well, I was suddenly in all these online interactions. I mean, I’d done them before every now and then, but you know, now it had become a lifeline. It was ubiquitous.

And yeah, here I am trying to connect with you, but really I can’t look at the face on the screen because what you’re going to see is me looking down rather than up into the camera, which is giving you but it’s not giving me what I need. There’s just that. Then there’s all the distraction. I can tell in my meeting that, you know, Joe over here is really on his cell phone and Mary’s dealing with their kids.

And so I thought, huh, I know people are starting to complain about the distraction in these online meetings. And how it’s hard to get focused and stay focused. And when I drilled down, drill down, drill down, and I did this with an enormous amount of help from Nick Rim, czar of tortoise labs, who I cannot speak more highly up, absolute ace of a guy half my age.

And we just had so much fun together. But I thought, what can I do to help this distraction piece and I noticed in one of my meetings I was trying to take notes. This was not a coaching online. I was trying to take notes. And every time I had to write, I had to, like, look away and I had to apologize at the start.

I am going to take notes. All I’m doing is like taking notes. When I look away but my capacity then to take in what was going on with my client was fractured. And I thought, Huh? Maybe this maybe I can come up with a better way to take notes. Who knows? So ultimately, that resulted in Nugget runs independently of our meeting down a completely different platform so we could do it for two days on Sand Caster we could do it on Zoom or Google Meats or whatever runs quietly as background.

But when there’s something, I want to make sure that I flag so that I can get to it quickly in the transcript afterwards. I hit the nugget button. So when you’re saying something important to me, I have to do is hit the button. If I want to put a little context in there, there’s a little context bar, but mostly I just hit nugget the nugget button or the follow up on this button and boom in the transcript, those places are highlighted and tagged so we don’t have to spend another half hour going through the transcript for the important stuff.

I’ve got the nugget right there highlighted, so I’m happy to announce that we sold Nugget to Mary Solutions in December. So that was a nice feather in my cap, I have to say.

James Laws: And the graduations and the sale. Yeah, that’s, that’s really cool. You know, as a, as a business owner myself there, it’s a good, pretty cool feeling to build something that is useful that other people like and somebody else wants, right? And to be able to sell it and exit from that sounds like a really cool tool. Sounds like, you know, obviously if you listen to audiobooks and you’re on Audible, it’s like the ability to bookmark and maybe to make note, but much more visual, right?

Which is very, very cool. Awesome. Kymberly, thank you so much for being on the leading to Fulfillment podcast and talking about all through these listening styles. I found this very, very interesting. I want to give you the last word. If anybody wants to learn more about you, what you offer your resources or how to get in touch with you or anything else that you think I should have asked you and you want to share, this is your chance.

Kymberly Dakin: OK, great. Yeah. If you want to take a very quick and fun assessment to find out what your particular learning styles are, just go to kymdakin.com. That’s K-Y-M-D as in David A-K-I-N as in Nancy .com (kymdakin.com), you can go to the book page and it’ll be right down at the bottom. You can take the assessment and I would love it if you would share your results with me

You can also contact me directly through LinkedIn or by email. KDaikin56@gmail. James, this is such fun. I’m so glad to talk to you.

James Laws: It’s been an absolute pleasure for me as well. Thank you so much. We will put links to everything that we mentioned in the show notes so please check those out. Thanks again, Kymberly. I appreciate it.

Kymberly Dakin: Thank you, James. Have a great weekend.

James Laws: I love my conversations with all my guests on this podcast. But I really found the idea of listening modalities a fascinating topic to engage. And I want to thank Kymberly for bringing the topic to us.

Everything that we mentioned, including the full transcript of the show is available over on our website and you can access it any time by visiting leadingtofulfillment.com/017 that’s leadingtofulfillment.com/017.

Also on that website, I highly encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter where we let you know every time a new episode drops, we send you original and curated content and leadership managing teams and finding fulfillment. And that comes out every single Friday I like my guest today.

I have some experience in Improvisational Theater and for just a moment I want to share a couple of words that can transform your communication those words are yes and yes and are one of the core concepts of improve theater.

It’s the idea of supporting your scene partner no matter what crazy scenario they throw your way. Oh, no, we’re stuck in an intergalactic donut shop run by aliens. Wow. I ate this rodeo, radioactive spinach, and now I can lift a car with one pinky. Hey, stop playing with that talking rabbit. Help me wrangle these flying pigs. No matter how ridiculous or outlandish the scene saying yes and means you have their back supporting their ideas and building upon them.

The alternative is rejecting their idea in favor of your own this disrupts the scene, transforming it from a collaborative experience into a tense battle of wills. It lowers confidence and it makes the audience uncomfortable. Yes, and has applications far beyond improve, from conflict mediation to creative brainstorming. This concept opens doors for connection and innovation because of this. Yes.

And is a powerful tool in business. If you want to learn more about how you can apply these words in every area of your company, head on over to Circles.com where I’ve published my article, The Power of Yes. And we have plenty of other articles on how to level up your listening skills and organizational communication.

Thank you for listening and I hope you’ll join me on the next episode. And until then, may your businesses be successful as you lead your teams to fulfillment.