You’re ambitious, you’ve got big ideas, big goals and you want to go and make them happen.
BUT: how do you motivate everyone on your team to get on the bus?
The answer to achieving Big Bold Goals resides in the small human shifts we can all make.
I think these tiny shifts make all the difference between success and failure.
I learnt this lesson very painfully at home.
I almost got divorced.
It was at the same time my business was failing.
Both were pointing at a skills gap I had - a gap in my “human skills”.
At home, we’d reached a point where neither of us was listening to each other.
We were stuck.
Something needed to change.
I reflected on what I, and eventually we could do differently.
I needed to make what I now think was a small shift in human skills.
I had to relearn my “human skills” at home first.
Once I learnt them there, I then took them into the work arena, and used the same skills that had turned home life around to turn work life around.
How impactful are these “human skills”?
Watch Tom Bilyeu's reaction to the techniques I shared with him five years ago on his show Impact Theory.
In the past five years, I’ve gone considerably deeper and have now run this exercise and activity for tens of thousands of people all around the world.
On one level, this deep listening skill is simple.
On another level it’s easy to get it wrong and I think I’ve now had the opportunity to see every mistake in the book and to help people course correct when they get it wrong.
What happens when you get it right?
You master a skill that literally turned my home life, my family life, my marriage around.
You master an incredibly powerful skill that can be used to motivate and unite a work team.
It’s one of the most human skills imaginable.
I’ve seen many variants of Listening Skills and experimented with them all.
Active Listening. Empathetic Listening. Therapeutic Listening. Critical Listening. And probably a few more too.
And I’ve yet to come across anything that comes even close to being as Impactful as Deep Listening.
I cover this technique in Chapter 7 of The Big Bold Mindset.
If you’ve not got a copy, would you like me to send you the Chapter?
Message me here and we’ll send you the chapter.
Going Deeper
I’ve now got the benefit of running this exercise tens of thousands of times.
Would you like to know the behaviour patterns that can send you sideways rather than forwards?
The headline behaviour patterns I’ve seen time and again are:
The “Steam Roller”
The “People Pleaser”
The “I'm Holding Back”
The “Too busy to make time”
The “Too busy to listen”
The “Too busy to dream and explore”
The “I’m too fearful”
The “I’m worried we won’t find anything in common”
The “I’m just not interested”
The “I’m just not hearing things”
The “but I have to give this up”
The “we’ll do it one day….”
The “60 degrees C philosophy”
If you’re not getting the results you want, you’re team aren’t clicking and there’s a gap between where you are and where you want to be, my experience time and time again shows me the answer lies in developing your human skills.
So what can you do to engage your team with better Listening.
Here’s three ideas for you to experiment with:
When you next ask someone a question, stop and listen. Don’t think about what you will say next. Just think about what they are saying and be 100% present to them and if you’re not clear, ask for clarification. This is itself is remarkably rare!
Watch the interview where I explain at high level the process of Deep Listening to Tom Bilyeu. Link.
I’m certain you won’t cringe as much as I do when I watch this back! Way too much oversmiling from being a bit anxious going on!
Experiment with this at home or work and notice what happens when you try. Do you get stuck? Do you lose momentum? Does the conversation go down a particular angle? I’m fairly certain I’ve seen every mistake in the book. The trick is all in the application of the ideas.