Just Listen

Mark Goulston: Well, I called the book Just Listen because I think it would reach a wider audience. I wanted to actually call the book Just Care because I see the world as caring less and less about each other, people seem to be talking at and over people and everybody wants to be listened to but very few people are applying for that job, and speaking with my publisher, they said well if you call it Just Care you'll be preaching to the choir and a lot of the people who need to learn how to listen and need to learn how to care won't buy the book and people who are told "you really should read something on how to be a better listener because you're not very good at it" might. So what I'm hoping is that the book will not only teach you how to listen but it'll give you a way to actually care about the people you want to care about and that's not just in your personal life. I think when you care about your clients and your customers and the people who work under you, I think it pays amazing dividends and you can get amazing results.

Rachel Salaman: So what do people usually get wrong when they try to get through to other people?

Mark Goulston: I think what people get wrong is that they get caught up in their own agenda and people feel pushed upon. I love to collect wonderful quotes and my favorite quote of all time comes from a British psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion, who was one of the brightest thinkers and brightest psychoanalysts of the last century and one of the things that he said was that the purest form of communication is to listen without memory or desire, because when you listen with memory you are listening with an old agenda that you are trying to plug people into and when you listen with desire you are listening with a new agenda that you are trying to plug them into but in both cases you are not listening to what's on their mind and so there is actually a training that I offer called "Be a Pal" P-A-L, which is Purposeful Agendaless Listening and if your purpose is to serve the customer or client, to be of service to them in helping them to achieve and accomplish whatever is important to them, I think that can inform the best kind of listening and I think too often is what happens is that people are under such pressure to close deals and close business that they push and the other people can feel that and they resist.

Rachel Salaman: Your book, Just Listen, is a goldmine of tips and tricks to help people communicate better in all sorts of situations. How many of those techniques that are in the book come from the world of psychiatry, which is your professional background?

Mark Goulston: Well I think they come from the world of psychotherapy because that's something that I practice, that's been my entire career: even though I'm a psychiatrist I'm more of a psychotherapist than a psycho-pharmacologist but I think the techniques also come from realizing that in many conversations, the people in my career, in my consulting room and at home, that I just wasn't getting through and that the only thing that seemed to help was listening. Can I share an anecdote which really cemented it which comes from my personal life?

Rachel Salaman: Yes, please, do.

Mark Goulston: To appreciate this you need to know I am the third born in my family and my wife is the second born, that'll become relevant when I tell you the rest of the story. When my 27 year old daughter was eight years old, our first born, she had trouble, she had a terrible time sharing mommy with her younger sister and younger brother and when she was eight years old her younger brother was born and my wife would tell me "You need to manage Lauren because when I have to give attention to the baby, Lauren is just having tantrums and she is having a heck of a time" and Lauren by this time had learned some colorful language which would often cause us to send her to her room to calm down but on one occasion I thought, you know, there's something going on that's bothering her and I said to myself, if my wife would bring her in to my office and pay my outrageous fees I could fix this.

So I came home and there was Lauren in our den on the other side of a coffee table, I was standing on one side and she was on the other side and she kept saying "I want mommy", you know, my life is awful and then she engaged in some of this colorful language but instead of telling her, "you need a time out, honey" or maybe "you need to go up to your room to calm down", I just firmly focused on finding out what was going on and I said "Lauren, what is it?" This went on for about three to four minutes and there was a point, Rachel, when I think she was aware that I was being protective and caring and I wasn't going to go away and I think what happened is that I created safety for her and at that moment it was safe enough for her to say the thing that had apparently been terrorizing her and she blurted out "I was the first to be born, I'll be the first to die" and people might think "wow, that's pretty traumatic" but I would say, look, grandparents are dying, pets are dying and she is the first born so here she is, living with this terror and when she said that, she stepped from the coffee table between us, jumped up on it and then jumped into my arms, threw her arms around my neck and started crying and said "Daddy, keep talking".

Not only did I listen to her but I absorbed all that terror and I remember I looked up at the ceiling and I thanked God for doing it right because I thought, gee, if we've been punishing her for feeling terrified about something, what kind of message is that to her? So I think that was a ... I don't know that I did that because I was a psychotherapist or that I just realized that basically when most people act up, there's usually something going on underneath that if you can enable them to express it, they will not only vent at you, they will exhale, they will relieve themselves of whatever it is that is distressing them and you will literally feel the conversation open.

A business anecdote I'll share, because I think what people tend to remember are stories and I love stories and I hope I tell them well and then the lessons from them, but on a business-related story I remember there was a CEO I was trying to see, I finally made an appointment with him and when I sat down with him what was very clear very quickly is the last place he wanted to be was meeting me and I can be rather direct and blunt at times so when it was clear that he wasn't listening and he really didn't want me to be in the office, I looked at him and I said in this tone, "Hey, how much time do you have for me?" and he looked at me with a glare that said, "I think it's just about up." I obviously disarmed him and he said, "What?" and I said "Yeah, look in your calendar, how much time do you have for this appointment?" and he was flustered and he said "Twenty minutes" and I could see that I had thirty seconds and he was going to throw me out. And then I said, "Look, there's something on your mind that's much more important than meeting with me and I think what we are about to talk about is worth your undivided attention which you can't give me because of what's on your mind, so here is the deal I'm offering. Why don't we stop now and you take the remaining fifteen minutes to take care of whatever's on your mind and we'll reschedule this or if you feel I've been too rude, you never have to see me again but please, take care of whatever's on your mind because it's not fair to me, it's probably not fair to the other people you'll see today and it's probably not fair to yourself".

And he looked at me and he was a big footballer, a big tough guy and then he just grabbed on to my eyes with his eyes and he started to tear to up, and I thought to myself, "Mark, save your psychotherapy for your therapy room, you are out in the business world, will you stop making grown men cry" because I often do this. He looked at me and he said, "You've known me for four minutes and I'm rather private and you know something that people twenty yards from us don't know who have been here for years, there is something on my mind, my wife is having a biopsy and it doesn't look very good and she's stronger than me and she said "You go to work" and so I'm here but I'm not really here, my mind is elsewhere" and I said, "You know, I'm really sorry to hear that, maybe you should close down what you need to do and go be by your wife and take care of things." Then he shook his shoulders, almost like a big St. Bernard dog shaking off water from a rainstorm and he said to me, "Nope, I'm not as strong as my wife but I'm pretty strong, you've got my undivided attention and you've got my full twenty minutes."

Is that because I'm a psychotherapist? It probably helped but I think almost anyone, if you are not getting through to someone, if you can take a deep breath and center yourself and realize that there is probably something else going on, if instead of getting into one of these debates that goes nowhere, if you can say in the firm way that I said to my daughter, "Look, this is not going in a good direction, what's really going on for you?" But the key is that if people do open up and share what's going on with them and you can feel them being more vulnerable, you can't do what we call a bait and switch, you can't then show a little bit of caring and then push it aside and try and rush in with your agenda.

Rachel Salaman: But although that process you describe sounds simple, it does rely on people asking the right questions. What if people don't feel confident that they are going to ask the right questions and how will they even know what is the right question to ask?

Mark Goulston: The question you're asking me I get from a lot of people. Some years ago I developed an approach in therapy called empathogenic therapy, meaning you can't be empathic to another person's point of view and be angry at them at the same moment, it's impossible and the reason for that is that when you're empathic, it is a sensory experience, meaning you are taking something in and you're sensing them and when you are angry at someone it's a motor function, meaning you are blasting them or venting at them for some perceived injury.

Rachel Salaman: Doesn't this somewhat depend on how imaginative people are? Do you ever find that people aren't able to make that empathic leap?

Mark Goulston: Well it's interesting. I asked one of my friends a CEO of a billion dollar company in Los Angeles, said "How often do you use the word goals in your conversations with people in your company?" and he said, "Probably every meeting I use the word goals." And I said, "Well let me ask you, do people smile and jump on it like it's the best tasting ice cream they've ever had and they can't wait to talk about goals?" And he laughed and he said "Of course not". I said, "Well what do they do?" and he said "Well, you know, some of them sort of understand it, there's actually a few that I think look at me like deer in the headlights of a car, and then the rest of the people are just somewhere in the middle."

And I pointed out to him, I said here's the issue, that the difference between a CEO or people who don't think like CEOs is that CEOs can think proactively and what I call enterospectively, meaning able to think forward. So when you ask a CEO a goal that's part of what he or she is about, they need to be able to define goals and a vision and set the company on course for that, but the majority of other people are reactors and they are not enterospective, they have what I call a reverse bias in their thinking, meaning they can react much more than they can think forward and so when you frame the meeting so that it's already over and everybody has had the experience of a good meeting versus a bad meeting, they are able to imagine in their mind's eye good meetings they've been to and bad meetings they've been to so what you're doing, you're reframing the meeting to fit the mindset of the people in your company who are more comfortable with reacting to something after it's happened than thinking forward.

Rachel Salaman: A lot of the strategies in your book depend on the people you are trying to reach being receptive. Have you found that this approach, particularly the approach you describe which is about second guessing people's feelings, ever backfires?

Mark Goulston: Sure, all approaches backfire occasionally until you try to refine them but there are a couple of ways to reduce the backfiring to almost zero. Something I have discovered with people who, the people who want to progress and get better and do better in their jobs, they seem to be very receptive to your pointing out things that are not obvious to them but then attaching a solution to them. I think one of the reasons why I have such good relationships with a lot of CEOs is that the good ones are all coachable and that's because many of them were athletes in high school and college, but one thing they can't stand is if you point out a problem to them and then leave them hanging with it as opposed to a solution.

So for instance with one senior manager that I work with, and again I had a rapport with him, meaning he trusted me and he seemed to have confidence in my observations and what I said to him is something that I have noticed is when you want to make a point, the inflection of your voice goes up at the end and it gets pitchy, with a P not a B, and what happens is that it communicates anxiety and what you really need to do when you want to make a point is to have the pitch of your voice go down half an octave in pitch as opposed to up half an octave because then you will sound more definitive whereas the other way, what happens is that you get agitated and the pitch of your voice, when it goes up, it communicates doubt and anxiety and he looked at me and it was like his head spun around and he said, "You know, Mark, my whole career just flashed before my eyes because I see exactly what you're saying and you're absolutely right and that explains sometimes when I am making a final point and I think I'm being emphatic, why it doesn't seem to be as effective as I'd like it to be."

So he loved that and after that session I could almost do no wrong because that was such a useful, implementable solution, so it's true that if you are dealing with people who would rather complain, vent, whine and blame and don't want to change and they want to make it everyone else's fault and responsibility, it is not that easy getting through to them. In fact, one of the chapters that I am most often interviewed about in Just Listen is working with toxic people and those are the bullies and the whiners who make you nuts, but even with them, there's a way to get through to them.

Something that I kept to a minimum at the request of my editor at the publisher is neuro-science but I am a neuro-scientist and I love understanding what goes on in the brain that gets in the way of listening or can improve listening. I think anyone who has ever taken biology, whether it was an examination, or human psychology knows that there is not just one brain but there is actually three brains and they developed evolutionarily from a core, a reptile brain and a reptile brain is fight or flight. In other words, snakes, lizards, reptiles, they don't have emotions, they don't get stressed out, they either fight or flight. When they are cornered they either attack you or they run. They don't develop stress because stress is related often to emotion.

Mammals, the mammalian brain which sits above the reptile brain, is the emotional brain and it experiences stress, meaning it can pause and feel emotions and when you feel emotions and you're trapped, it will create stress ulcers in your GI system and we see this in mammals, mammals will have stress ulcers.

And then evolutionary, the most advanced brain is the human brain which is the thinking brain, in which when we're calm we can consider various options. The problem is that when we're under stress, the reptile and the mammalian brain often take control and one of the approaches that I have for people, if you are dealing with people who are venting at you or complaining or whining, one of the key things is when that happens, realize that kind of your lower fight or flight brain gets activated and you either want to pull away from those people or pulverize them or be angry with them, so recognize which people in your life tend to do that and when they do it, be centered as opposed to reactive.

I'll just give you a tip for how do you walk someone, a complainer, a whiner or a bully, how do you walk someone up from being in that aggressive tone into being actually receptive to you? So here are several steps to do that. When someone is venting at you or complaining or saying something that normally will get you very upset, you want to use the I word and the I word is important, meaning many people who act up in this way do so because, rightly or wrongly, they feel that the world is treating them as unimportant so let them say whatever they've said and you don't want to trigger them by saying "Are you through?" because that will just anger them. Instead, when they pause, say "Is there anything else you'd like to add to that?"

Just being that respectful will start to slightly calm them down. After that what you want to say is, "You know, it's really important that I heard exactly what you said so let me run it by you to make sure that I heard it correctly." When you then play back to someone what they've said at you in a calm way, it slows them down because you are forcing them to listen instead of venting. Venting again is a motor reaction, it is very aggressive, it's very pushy but listening is much slower and the reason they will listen is because you said that what they told you was so important so at some level they are feeling kind of flattered that you thought what they said was important and so they will listen and ask them at the end of that, "is that correct?" Then if they add something to it, repeat that back to them, say "Okay, good, I'm glad you corrected it, let me see if I understood and heard that correctly" and then you run that by them and what you're wanting to get is for them to sign off and say "Yes, yes, you've got it". So their saying yes also sets them up to be more co-operative.

What you've done is you've slowed them down, what you want to do is calm them down emotionally. Someone I know at UCLA called Matt Lieberman, he is probably the pioneer in I think social cognitive psychology but one of the things he discovered is when people put a feeling word, an accurate word to a feeling, it calms down their emotionality so that if you were to say to your colleague, your subordinate, your spouse, your kid or this person we are using in the example, something such as "And the way all of that makes you feel right now is..." and then you might add a few words that they could try on – frustrated or is it angry or is it impatient or what exactly? And they might say "Fed up, it's causing me to feel really fed up" and then if you were to say to that person "Well how fed up are you?" again what you're doing is you're inviting them to get all of this stuff off their chest and they might say, "Real fed up". So fed up you're thinking of quitting, so fed up that you want to leave your job, so fed up that you want to do something else?

Again as they give you answers, they are calming down and so what you've done is you've gone from their lower brain which was the fight or flight reptile brain, you slowed them down with the first set of questions by repeating what they said and now you've calmed them down emotionally, which is our middle brain, our mammalian brain, by having them attach a word to their feelings and now what you want to do is switch them up into their rational brain so you can have a constructive conversation so that the next place you switch it to is "And the reason ..." you want to get into why questions, "and the reason it is so important that we solve this now is?" and they'll give you a reason – well because if we don't get this solved and we're going to miss some deadlines and we're going to make some clients really angry and we're going to have another crisis here. They give you a why, it's important to solve this and then you can finally go into, we'll let's talk about how we might solve it. Then you are engaged in a collaborative conversation but in your mind's eye can you see how doing something like that could talk someone who is really hot-headed and turning them into someone who could collaborate with you?

Rachel Salaman: Yes, it seems to be very much proving the point you make in your book that people need to feel felt. That's a theme that runs through your book isn't it?

Mark Goulston: Right, right and feeling felt I think is a huge thing. I see communication on a continuum. At one end is probably, at the worst end is feeling rejected. As we move more positive, slightly better than that is feeling misunderstood, then the next stage is feeling figured out and then the next stage is feeling understood and then the highest stage is feeling felt. I think when people feel felt, that's when they feel cared about and, as I said earlier in the interview when I was talking to you about wanting to call the book Just Care I think when people experience you as caring about them and if in their life they don't feel much caring going on, people are incredibly grateful to that. That's one of the reasons, by the way, when someone gives us a random act of kindness and says "How are you doing?", if they notice that we are upset or we're not feeling well or they say in a concerned way, "Are you okay?", a fair amount of people will tear up when hearing that kindness and I think what's happening is at that moment that that person who's upset feels felt, they don't feel so alone in it and I think when they don't feel so alone in it, something inside changes and they start to tear up with relief and that's the theme of the book. I hope that will be the value added benefit of the book and something I'm most gratified about is that I'm getting some wonderful reviews on Amazon.com but some of the recent ones, people are actually giving examples of how this is transforming their relationships with the people they care about. I think what they are talking about is gee, I think finally my spouse or my kids felt felt by me, they felt I cared about them.

Rachel Salaman: If you were to offer just one tip to people that would help them get through to people more often, what would it be?

Mark Goulston: There's a saying in business, cash is king and I don't think cash is king, I think clarity is king because people feel very confused so I think the more that you can help other people be clear about what's important to them and how to go about achieving and accomplishing that, the more you'll get through to them and the more you can be clear in your communicating to people, the more you'll get through to people, so in other words if you come off as either confused or confusing, it really frustrates other people and if you enable people who are confused or confusing to become clearer, it pleases people. So the example that I gave you about the senior manager when I pointed out that at the end of the points that he wanted to make that his pitch was going up, what was happening is that was confusing the people on his team because here he was saying something definite but sounding anxious, so it was confusing to them but pointing it out to him what he did and a solution to it, he just loved that.

There's something that I write about also in the book that I call the CPI Index, C-P-I. This relates to what you need to do in order to gain the respect of other people and CPI stands for Clarity, Preparation and Integrity, because what I realized is that the opposites of those lose people's respect so if instead of being clear, you are confused or confusing, people lose respect for you. If instead of being prepared, you shoot from the hip and clearly show that you haven't prepared for what you need to do, people lose respect for you and integrity is about doing what you say you'll do, when you say you'll do it and taking full responsibility for your actions because people who don't follow through on what they say and people who don't take responsibility for their actions lose us respect.

So the tip is, if you could do a CPI Index on yourself and critique yourself after you've had conversations at work or even at home, then just be honest with yourself, it will help you improve.

Also, I think if you really want to improve, I think if you were to ask people, if you were to say to your team or people that you work with or your customers, your clients, if you say I'm working at getting better at what I do and something I want to check on with you is in our dealings with each other, do you perceive me to be clear and prepared and I guess honorable, do I do what I say that I'll do because I would imagine that if you don't perceive me to be those three things, that those are areas I could improve. Now that may seem gutsy but I can tell you, if you do that with a client or customer, they would admire you for making a commitment to improving yourself

Rachel Salaman: Mark Goulston, thank you very much for joining us.

Mark Goulston: It's been my pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Mark's book again is Just Listen – Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone. If you'd like to know more, you can go to Mark's website www.markgoulston.com and you'll find a lot of useful free resources there.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.