Think you’re a great listener? Think again. In this thought-provoking episode of Executive Connect,
Melissa Aarskaug sits down with Oscar Trimboli, author, speaker, and host of the award-winning “Deep
Listening” podcast. With experience coaching over 1,500 organizations, Oscar challenges conventional
leadership habits and reveals why most of us are only catching 14% of what’s actually being said—and
what that’s costing us.
Through captivating stories, practical tools, and brain-based strategies, Oscar teaches leaders how to
sharpen their listening skills, create psychological safety, and lead more effectively by what’s not being
said. If you’re ready to move from reactive to intentional communication, this conversation is your
roadmap to impactful leadership.

Chapters:
00:00 – Intro: You Think You’re Listening?
01:15 – Oscar’s Story: A Microsoft Meeting That Changed Everything
03:25 – The 3 Levels of Deep Listening
06:00 – “Three is Half of Eight”: Why Perception Shapes Meaning
08:00 – The Power of Silence and Two Magic Phrases
11:00 – The Role of the Leader in Shaping Listening Culture
14:15 – How to Make Meetings Truly Productive
18:45 – Time-Boxing and Water: The Science of Showing Up Present
23:00 – Embedding Deep Listening into Company Culture
25:45 – Statements vs. Questions: The Trust-Building Ratio
27:55 – The Four Listening Villains: Which One Are You?
31:15 – Leading by Example: Put the Phone Away
35:40 – Technology Addiction & Taking Back Control
38:38 – Final Thought: The Real Meaning Lies in What’s Unsaid
39:41 – Outro: Where to Go Next

Melissa Aarskaug (0:2.200)
Think you’re good at listening because you can repeat the last thing someone said? Think again. Most executives only capture a fraction of what’s actually being communicated, and that’s costing them big. On today’s Executive Connect podcast, we’re welcoming Oscar Trimboli, bestselling author and host of the award-winning Deep Listening podcast.
He’s worked with over 1,500 organizations to teach leaders how to go beyond words and uncover insights and drive powerful decisions. Ready to upgrade your listening skills and transform your leadership impact? Let’s dive in. Welcome, Oscar.

Oscar Trimboli (0:50.488)
G’day Melissa, looking forward to listening to your questions today.

Melissa Aarskaug (0:54.646)
I love it. Now you’ve been building an impressive career helping leaders go beyond just hearing words to truly listening with meaning. What interests you in this passion for deep listening and how did you learn and lead on your mission of creating a hundred thousand deep listeners?

Oscar Trimboli (1:17.774)
We have to zoom into a boardroom meeting in April 2008. I’m in a three-way video conference between Sydney, Seattle and Singapore, and we’re setting the annual budget for Microsoft. And you can imagine there are lots of people in this very long boardroom and 20 minutes in my supervisor, my vice president looks me straight in the eye across the room and she says, Oscar, we need to talk immediately after this meeting.
Now, I don’t know about you, Melissa, when you get the honey, we need to talk conversation. It’s not going to be good. So to be quite honest, I didn’t listen to anything that happened in the rest of that budget meeting, which cost me on my budget line a little bit later on. And all I was trying to do was figure out how many weeks of salary I had left and who the five people I’m going to call to get a job.
Meeting finished a little early and as everybody walked out Tracy said to me, Oscar, please close the door because what I have to say to you is very important. And as I kind of stepped back after closing the door, she says to me, Oscar, you have no idea what you did at the 20 minute mark. And I thought, great, I’m getting fired and I don’t even know why. I sat down and Tracy said, if you could code how you listen, you could change the world. What I heard was,
Woohoo! I haven’t been fired. And the difference between hearing and listening is the action you take. And ever since then, I haven’t tried to code how I listen, but I’ve tried to code how the best listeners in the world listen with interviewed hundreds of them from hostage negotiators to dolphin trainers and journalists and judges and
deaf people and blind people to understand what great listening is. So that’s where it started. And since then we’ve coded into software, into books, into jigsaw puzzle games and into the consulting methodologies we use.

Melissa Aarskaug (3:24.952)
Deep listening isn’t just a skill, it’s a discipline that one must practice. So can you break down some of those core elements of deep listening and explain how executives can apply them in their day to day?

Oscar Trimboli (3:40.607)
One of the first fallacies of listening is that focusing on the speaker is where listening starts. Kind of, that’s handy, but it’s not actually productive. The step most people skip when it comes to listening is listening to themselves. They have so many browser tabs open in their own mind, and this is multiplied for executives where they have the last meeting, the next meeting, the upcoming resolution of…
customer issue, quality issue, production issue. They’ve got so many things going on in their mind and they don’t have available memory to help everyone out. So there’s three things I would say that everybody needs to know about listening. And the first one is don’t focus on the speaker, start by focusing on you. The second one is it’s great to listen to what people say. It’s even more powerful to notice what they haven’t said.
And if you know the numbers of listening, it becomes really simple and don’t focus on yourself. Know what the speaker is going through. The speaker can speak at 125 to 150 words a minute. If they’re selling property, they might speak at 200 words per minute. They might go a little faster, but you can still understand them. Here’s the challenge for the speaker. Although they can get 150, 125 words out per minute in their head.
They have 900 words per minute they’re trying to get out. So the very first thing that somebody says is 14 % of what they think. So if you only focus on what they said the first time, you’re missing 86 % of what they think and what they mean. And if you want employees and customers to be seen, heard and valued by noticing what they haven’t said, you’ll make a bigger impact.
So when it comes to listening, the three things we talk about continuously is one, get yourself right. Two, make sure that you can hear not just what they say the first time, but create some space so they can say what they think and what they mean. And then finally, if you can hear what they mean rather than what they said, you’ll have an impact beyond words.

Oscar Trimboli (6:3.526)
And I often say to people, if I said to you, Melissa, three is half of eight, what will go through your head? You’d properly say Oscar’s wrong. He misspoke. yet three is half of eight and zero is half of eight. And so is four. See, while you’re listening to me speaking, you’re thinking mathematically and you go for Oscar four is the only answer.
But if you drew the figure eight on a piece of paper and cut it in half and thought about it geometrically, you’ve got two threes when you cut an eight in half and you’ve got two zeros when you cut the eight in half in the middle. Every day we’re having conversations with people where they’re saying three is half of eight and in your head you’re going, no, no, no, no, you’re wrong. You’re wrong. You’re wrong. In fact, they’re just looking at the world in a completely different way. So that’s how to think about listening.
Beyond the Words.

Melissa Aarskaug (7:2.498)
And I feel like 14 % is such a crazy number to me. That’s not very good if you’re uh in sales or dealing with people on a regular basis. you know, most of us focus on, like you said, what’s being said, but really what’s not being said. So when people are talking to someone, how can they, is it really just asking the right questions? So 14 %…
Listen, leaving silence and asking more questions for clarification.

Oscar Trimboli (7:37.183)
Oh yes, if it was only that simple. Yes, that’s a great starting point. And, but I want to allow you a very simple technique. By the way, if you work in a complex collaborative or competitive environment, the average person thinks that 900 words per minute. But if you’re in those complex environments, you’re thinking up to 1600 words per minute, which means what you say the first time is.
5 % of what you think.
So here’s the tip. The word silent and the word listen share the identical letters.
if you want to notice what somebody hasn’t said.

Oscar Trimboli (8:25.346)
If you just pause, if you just use silence, it’s like a magnet to pull out what they mean. For many of us, particularly in the West, particularly in Western workplaces, we feel an urge to feel the silence. We have a negative relationship with silence. We call it the awkward silence, the pregnant pause, the deafening silence.
In high context cultures, China, Korea, Japan, the Inuit of North America, the Polynesian cultures, the Australian Aboriginal cultures, silence is a sign of wisdom, respect and authority. So if you’re looking for one simple thing to draw out what they mean, quite often silence is the most difficult thing you’re ever going to play with. Treat silence like a word.
Listen to the beginning, the middle and the end of silence, which will give you enough time to go, Oh, they haven’t finished what they think. They’re just moving on to explaining it in a different way. Most people have a jumbled mess of spaghetti inside their head and it’s unlikely they can say what they mean the very, first time. If you’re looking for two simple other phrases, these
Phrases take the conversation in very different directions. Tell me more keeps the conversation going in the same direction. So if you want to listen for what’s similar, if you want to bring the group together, if it’s a group conversation, it’s always tell me more. So that keeps the conversation going in the same direction. But if you’re listening, trying to listen for difference.
And most people aren’t even conscious that they listen for similarities exclusively because they’re just trying to pattern match with past experience. The other one is, and what else? Now questions with eight words or less are neutral or unbiased. And in the early part of a conversation, in the early part of a relationship, in the early part of a project, you want to watch neutral questions.

Oscar Trimboli (10:53.194)
In the middle towards the end of the conversation or project, you do want to ask close questions. So a lot of people say you should always ask open-ended questions. That’s true if you’re a psychiatrist, but if you’re in a workplace and you’ve got finite resources, you have to allocate. Biased questions have a place as well.

Melissa Aarskaug (11:17.484)
And the pause, I always think of like I’ve been in some of those meetings that you’re talking about where everybody’s talking. Pausing is almost like it’s so uncomfortable that it makes people, you could tell who’s paying attention too, right? When you pause, I feel like the pause a lot of times, I could always tell, oh, they know they’re not paying attention. And it also is like, like you said, a secret weapon to really getting more information, but also paying attention.
to see who’s paying attention. And I think, now do you think it’s because the Westerners are just uncomfortable with the pause? Or do you think it’s just a lack of discipline?

Oscar Trimboli (11:59.855)
I think comes to what’s role modeled in the culture by the leader. If you’ve got leaders who are comfortable with the unknown to explore, to experiment, to not think they have the answer to every question, you’ll see pauses and silence and always present. If you’re like, use weight, W-A-I-T.

Oscar Trimboli (12:29.036)
Why am I talking as a way to think about silence? So if you can’t remember a silent and listening have the same letters, just remember, wait, why am I talking? Because often, particularly in group settings, the leader’s role is not to get everybody to listen to the active speaker. The leader’s role in groups is to get everybody to listen to each other and creating that space.
whether through silence or an offer for somebody else to provide input is a great way to get a different and possibly better solution to the same problem. So leaders set the tone and if leaders are comfortable flexing that muscle, then the group becomes more comfortable as well, particularly if people are jumping in in turn taking. And the leader might say, I noticed that
Mary hadn’t quite finished Oscar. Hold that thought. We’re going to come back to you. This is a particularly plays out with the classic introvert extrovert dynamic in a meeting as well.

Melissa Aarskaug (13:41.838)
go back to that example you said at the beginning with the budget meeting and everybody is in the room. how like playing off that example, how do you teach leaders in those situations where, you know, there’s multiple executives in the room, you know, everybody has to give their, you know, their pitch to get their dollars? How do you teach them these skills that you’re talking about? Is there a certain method that you use? Or how do you teach them that

Oscar Trimboli (13:47.404)
Mm.

Melissa Aarskaug (14:11.768)
so they can make better decisions in their careers.

Oscar Trimboli (14:16.494)
Well, the first thing to think about is listening and communication happens before, during, and after those set piece meetings. A lot of the success of those meetings happen well before the meeting. It’s uh a piece of theater, to be honest, whether that’s a set piece meeting, that’s a presidential negotiation, all the work’s by others beforehand.
The during piece is really critical. If you’re the leader who’s hosting that meeting, process is as important as content. How you set time up, how you ask questions, how you allocate time to various parts of it. Most leaders I work with have agendas and think that’s the answer. And in most cases,
It’s the answer to the output. It’s not the answer to the process or the inputs that are coming into the conversation. So during the meeting, no matter how many participants there are, if you don’t ask this question, most people will zone out during team meetings. If you don’t ask this question, you won’t get the most from everybody. If you don’t ask this question, you won’t get discretionary effort.
If you don’t ask this question, you won’t get the left field breakthrough ideas. And the question is simply this, what would make this a great meeting? Not what would make this a great meeting for you, which I hear a lot of executives ask, but we’re actually not interested in what would make it a great meeting for the participant. We’re asking for the collective. So we want everybody to go around the room and say, we’ll make it a great meeting because when somebody zones out,
I invite them to go listen for what the other person said. And that will give you a different perspective in terms of listening. So before the meeting, make sure you have everybody who are the right people in the room with the right inputs during the meeting. Make sure you have the right process set up by asking this question. What will make it a good meeting conversation project?

Oscar Trimboli (16:37.454)
Prequisition procurement process You can interrupt people that tell the same story just different ways a lot of people say oh Oscar I can’t listen to these people they just go on and on it’s like When you ask that question at the beginning you have a permission slip to interrupt them Melissa at the beginning of the meeting you mentioned this would make it a great meeting Given where you’re at with this story. How are we tracking? They will self-correct in most cases
And if they don’t and lack the self-awareness, then you can just say, look, given the time available, could you wrap it up? Could you say it in a sentence, whatever the case may be, but also make a point to check in with them. A lot of times the reason people say things over and over and over again, they feel like they haven’t been heard. Finally, after the meeting, this is where the biggest impact happens. The difference between hearing
And listening is action. If you don’t take the actions and the actions that were agreed in the meeting, nobody will ever think you’re listening in group meetings. So again, you need a process for tracking actions and checking in on actions before the next meeting. So listening happens before, during, and after a meeting.

Melissa Aarskaug (17:56.110)
it made me when you were saying, I’m one of those people that have all these file folders open. So when we go from meeting to meeting to meeting, we’re still digesting the last meeting and the meeting before the other meeting, you know, to figure out what we got to get done. And then we’re showing up to a meeting that we’re, you know, responsible for bringing some things. So how does one navigate and juggle that, right? I think even for myself, I do, like you said, have all those file folders open. And when I

Oscar Trimboli (18:1.987)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Aarskaug (18:25.858)
get on a call, I’m still trying to like, woo-saw and like bring it down to really lean in and focus on the current meeting. So is there any, you know, tips for those leaders and executives that are going from meeting to meeting, really attacking the day and problem solving all the time that you can share?

Oscar Trimboli (18:40.046)
Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli (18:47.566)
Yeah, I’m going to give you two both very practical. Number one, Melissa, if you had to speculate what percentage of meetings do you create? Like is it 50 % 80 % 20 %? Great. For those 50 % of meetings is your most common meeting a one hour meeting or a 30 minute meeting?

Melissa Aarskaug (19:1.686)
I would say probably 50.

Melissa Aarskaug (19:12.174)
I’ve been trying to do the 25 meeting mark and the 50 meeting mark. So there’s kind of minutes in between the other meetings.

Oscar Trimboli (19:20.906)
Okay, I heard the trying. I didn’t hear what you said after that. So are you doing it or are you trying it?

Melissa Aarskaug (19:28.408)
you
Well, in my industry, everything happens at the last end of the meeting, right? Everything happens at the end. So we kind of waste the parts of the meeting, then we get into the meeting and then everything happens at the end. Because like you were saying at the beginning, not everybody was paying attention. So we’re really going back and addressing all of those things. So I would say
I give myself a C, Oscar. I could be doing better.

Oscar Trimboli (19:59.873)
Okay, that’s fine. Most executives would. And if you’ve got an assistant, just hand it over and delegate it to them. But for the one hour meeting is definitely the five minutes either side. When you book a meeting with me, it’s 10 minutes after the hour. And everybody says to me at the beginning, did you make a mistake? Are we meant to meet at 10 after the hour? I said, no, no, that was by design. And they go, oh, that’s great. Cause I had a restroom break.
had a chance to collect my thoughts and I also take off 10 minutes at the end so they can process the meeting. So for the 50 % you’re in charge of, you can time box it so that you and the participants have got time either side of it. Because if you start at the top of the hour and it’s a group meeting, people are still going to arrive five minutes after the hour. It’s like,
Sorry, Melissa, was running late. had this and that and it ran over because the big breakthrough idea only came at the last minute in the last meeting. And they’re not there. They’re physically present, but they’re mentally not present. So listening as humans, as we evolved, ah we learned to listen after we learned to see. So our eyesight is more evolved than our listening.
Our listening happens in the more modern part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. So shutting down those browser tabs is really difficult because we’re using working memory. The brain, 5 % of body mass, but it consumes 25 % of blood sugars. This is where the work happens. So the second tip is this. Drink water. Drink a glass of water before the meeting starts.
and it sends a signal to the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s all the nervous system around your chest and lungs to go relax. Everything’s okay. Now, if you just time box it and drink the water, you’re going to be miles ahead. Listening is a skill. It’s a strategy and it’s a discipline. It’s not something that

Oscar Trimboli (22:17.322)
Oscar clicks his magic fingers, come on the course and off you go. It’s done. You’re the world’s best listener. No, listening takes discipline. It takes practice. It takes consistency. Listening is a contact sport. The only way you can practice it is by being in dialogue with another human. So great that you’re trying the time boxing.
With your teams, if you’re a leader, hopefully that will cascade into the meetings they create as well so the time boxing happens. And explain to people why you’re time boxing as often as possible, because time is the only finite resource we have in an organization. Money, people, that much more flexible than our time.

Melissa Aarskaug (23:5.484)
Yeah, I love that. That’s great, the great tips. Now, we talked a little bit at the beginning, you mentioned Japan and some other ah cultures that have, you know, they have been trained to do it. It’s embedded into their culture. Now, how can we take what’s being used in other parts of the world and really embed it, embed deep listening into our corporate culture? Is there a way that one could kind of blend that into our corporate culture if
a culture is not, as you said, into deep listening and everybody’s kind of just fighting their way through the meeting. Is there a way to embed that? See, there’s what I did. I re-asked the question. I did it myself.

Oscar Trimboli (23:48.175)
Beautiful, beautiful example of 125 words per minute, Melissa. Thank you. Completely unrehearsed and well done, but that’s a perfect example of that. And if you go back and hear Melissa’s first question and her second question, actually had very different emphasis and meaning in them. So as a leader in a corporate system, one of the things you want to pay attention to for the meetings you run is this. How many…
statements are made versus how many questions are made during a conversation. You can keep a tally of this, just put your little one, two, three, four, five, and then stroke with a gate so you can keep tallies in five. And then just notice the ratio of statements to questions. For underperforming teams, the statement ratio is very much higher in underperforming teams to the questions. depending, there’s no magic formula and
50-50 is probably not a good start. Start for 25 % questions and 75 % statements. That’s a good starting point. Here’s the most important thing you’ve got to pay attention to. When you look at the questions, how many of those questions are clarifying questions? Most people are answering the question that wasn’t asked.
why? Because they didn’t allow enough space for Melissa to say it the second time. Or confirm with Melissa, when you said X, did you mean X or did you mean Y or did you mean Z or did you mean something else? Clarifying questions should be at least 10 % of the total conversation and should represent at least a third of all questions asked.
When you increase the clarifying question ratio in team meetings, your meetings will actually be shorter.

Oscar Trimboli (25:55.619)
Those examples that Melissa talked about early where everything kind of comes at the end of the meeting, that’s because we’re just not listening effectively. And we get the chance to pull it forward by asking some simple clarifying questions. Because remember, again, most of us are going, four, four is half of A. You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong. Well, I’m thinking geometrically, you’re thinking in mathematics. So maybe we just need to agree on the language.
So for leaders, just keep a count. You can do this in your one-on-ones as well. Just keep a running count of how many times you’re asking questions versus statements. The opposite is true too. Too many questions doesn’t feel like listening. It just feels like you’re loading up more ammunition in a gun to put somebody in a corner. So be careful with how many questions you ask as well. Which one of those is helpful for you?

Melissa Aarskaug (26:49.422)
call that interrogation.

Melissa Aarskaug (26:53.931)
I call that interrogation, the too many questions. I know… oh Go ahead. Sorry, sorry.

Oscar Trimboli (26:55.980)
Mm. Yeah. uh
No, no, I just noticed your head tilted very differently when I talked about clarifying questions compared to statement to question ratios. And I think you heard it a little different.

Melissa Aarskaug (27:11.786)
Yeah, and I think for me sometimes I know I’m guilty jumping to conclusions, right? I’m coming hot out of a meeting and I know what the meeting is going to be about and so I instantly think I know what’s going to… So I’m instantly jumping to conclusions. Guilty of it, guilty of that. And so how can we teach people to not be that jumping to conclusions?
you know, talking over people, interrupting people, finishing people’s sentences. Is there, is it simple as just muting your computer so you just don’t do it or is there another way to teach people?

Oscar Trimboli (27:57.337)
So there’s four primary barriers to listening. We’ve researched 35,000 workplace listeners across the world in English speaking workplaces. And there’s four things that get in their way. Number one, the one you said, I’ve been there, I’ve done that. It’s not my first rodeo. I can patent match. I can solve. Hurry up. Finish a sentence because I know the answer, right?
So we call that the shrewd listening villain. They are awesome. They give great listening. They give you lots of, uh-huh in their head. They’re not paying attention at all. Just like hurry up so can tell you the answer. And what the speaker says in our research is all they’re trying to do is fix me. They’re not actually listening. So notice they say fix me, not the problem. So for those shrewd listening villains out there, you’re disproportionately represented in
finance in accounting in human resources in general and executive leadership, any service function, IT and sales. Shrewd is disproportionately represented there. Interrupting is someone who’s very conscious of time. But they’re the jeopardy quiz contestant who presses the buzzer before the host and they answer the wrong question and get it wrong. And what the speaker says is, you
Why am I bother talking? So you’re creating friction in the relationship. The final two is lost. I don’t know my purpose in this meeting. I don’t know why I’ve been invited. I don’t even know my place in the meeting. So you come across as vague and disinterested in the meeting. Ask that question if the host doesn’t ask you. What will make this a good meeting? So you can understand. Would you like me to listen from the customer’s perspective? Would you like me to listen from
the competitors perspective, what perspective would you like me to bring in this meeting? And then the final one, the dramatic listener. They love listening to your story. Oh, I’m struggling with my manager. This is the worst merger I’ve ever gone through. Oh, let me tell you about my manager. I’ve got, I’ve got an even worse manager than you. All of a sudden the spotlight goes on to them. So if you want to find out which

Oscar Trimboli (30:15.680)
one of the four listening villains gets in your way. can go to listeningquiz.com. You can take the seven minute 20 question assessment. You’ll get a five page report. It’ll tell you not only what your primary and secondary villain is, but it also give you three pages of tips about what to do about that combination of villains in yours. I’m not going to ask you to out yourself Melissa, cause you already have, you’re the shrewd listening villain.
Yet we listen differently at home than we listen at work. At work, I’m a shrewd listening villain. At home, I’m lost. My brother-in-law’s bang on about religion all the time when they come over to dinner. And their religion is the religion of canon versus Nikon. It’s photography. my camera’s my phone. It’s like occasionally I pretend I’m interested in the conversation.
but most of time I’m not.

Oscar Trimboli (31:18.166)
I’m completely zoned out. I don’t know my purpose in that conversation. So your skills of listening done well at work, you can bring them into home as well. At least you need to be aware of what gets in your way.

Melissa Aarskaug (31:33.184)
Now you’re making me question my listening. I’m thinking through how I’m doing listening. I find for me, I have to put my cell phone away and everything down. Otherwise, I’m distracted with listening, with the bings and the calls and the this and the this. So like you were, we listen different in our work in our home. I know in my home, if I don’t put the phone away, I’m half listening, which…
We know if I’m half listening, I can’t possibly be really listening. So, for me, the simple thing of putting the phone down and away and sitting and not thinking about what I need to be doing next and not what I need to be accomplishing later is the only way I’ve really been grounded in listening personally with my children and my family. So, I have to practice this more.
Maybe I’ll try the phone, putting the phone away at work and see how that works with focusing better.

Oscar Trimboli (32:36.878)
You remind me of an executive who flew from the US to Australia, effectively a 24 hour flight. I was hosting a room of 30 CEOs on his behalf, Peter’s behalf. He sat down. The meeting was about to commence. I introduced everybody and then he got up and went to his bag and put his cell phone in his bag and he sat down and he said, look, I’ve traveled 24 hours to be here. I apologize.

Melissa Aarskaug (32:38.062)
you

Oscar Trimboli (33:5.506)
I need to bring my full and undivided attention to this conversation. 19 of the 30 executives did exactly the same straight away. As a leader, what you role model to your teams will get duplicated. Now I know after the fact that this is a piece of theater that Peter created to make sure the executives paid attention to him.
And nothing to do with that. And more importantly, as he said to me later, Oscar, I don’t care if they pay attention to me. I wanted them to pay attention to each other. And that’s the difference between a good host and a great host. A good host gets everybody to listen to them. A great host gets everybody to listen to each other. So what are you role modeling when it comes to devices?
Are you role modeling frantic? Are you role modeling sneaky? Are you role modeling? Or can you simply say, look, my dad’s under medical care. He’s got an appointment today. My phone will be on. The only reason I’ll answer it is from his doctor. So if that phone does ring, people don’t go, oh yeah, he tells all of us to do it right.
but he doesn’t do it himself. So there are situations where you can’t switch the phone off. You might have a child that’s sick or a daycare center that needs to contact you. There are many reasons why the phone should be on and signal that to the team, but it should be the exception rather than the…

Melissa Aarskaug (34:47.948)
And that’s a really great example too because you’re being so authentic and honest and I think that builds trust with people and you you aren’t becoming a hypocrite like you were mentioning to tell them they can’t be on their phone but sure on your phone. So I love that example. That’s so, such a really important example. Now, do you think any of it has to do uh with the technology itself? Like the…
constant need I kind of feel sometimes the phone’s kind of like an addiction and I feel like we’re constantly feeling like we have to be busy and Important and doing things and answering texts and social media is is that play any end to any of it you think or is it just flat learning how to be a better listener

Oscar Trimboli (35:40.387)
So I want to apologize. I’m from the industry that created all those distractions. I sold email systems and instant messages systems and video conference systems. And what I taught then and what I teach now is actually not different. And by default, you should switch all those notifications off. Right? That you have a new mail, whether that’s on your phone or on your
tablet or on your desktop, really? Does it really matter that much? Or is it more important to role model being present to the person or people who are in front of you? Use the technology. Don’t let the technology use you. You have one button in every operating system that if turned on,
We’ll switch off all notifications based on what’s in your calendar. So if your calendar is empty, you’ll get the notifications. And if your calendar has got a meeting and it won’t notify you, if all you did was just switch that setting in your operating system to on no notifications during meetings, that would help many, many, many, many people.
For a lot of people, switching notifications off is like telling a drug addict they need to go call Turkey. They will never do it. Maybe switch your phone to gray scale when you’re in those meetings. So those little red dots that go from one to two to three to four to five aren’t as prominent for you. Learn how to use the vibrate feature rather than use the ring feature.
Use the technology. Don’t let the technology use you. All those red dots and notifications and vibrations and sounds all come from the exact same piece of research in 1973 that taught the software industry based on the slot machine industry in Las Vegas, how to keep people pressing a button mindlessly to put coins in it. So if you want to be a mindless gambler,

Oscar Trimboli (37:59.279)
keep your notifications on.

Melissa Aarskaug (38:3.150)
It didn’t occur to me until you said that Oscar, that I have had my phone on off the entire time I’ve owned my iPhone. I don’t even think my phone has ever rang unless it was an emergency. And it didn’t occur to me until just now that I have them all on to not disturb or silent. ah So maybe that’s why I’m more peaceful. I don’t know. That could be it. It didn’t occur to me until just now. I want to get any…
I want to ask you any final thoughts or anything that we didn’t touch on that you want to leave with our listeners today.

Oscar Trimboli (38:38.734)
No, simply a reminder that the first thing somebody said is, is unlikely to be what they think and what they mean. And if you truly want to have an impact beyond words, listen to what they have to say, but notice what they haven’t said. It’s the 86 % sits in what they haven’t said. And when you hear what they haven’t said, your meetings will be shorter. They’ll be more productive and more impactful.

Melissa Aarskaug (39:8.664)
That’s great. Thank you for sharing that Oscar. Now tell our listeners where they can connect with you and what’s the best way.

Oscar Trimboli (39:16.216)
Please don’t connect with me. Please connect with your listening. Visit listeningquiz.com and learn about your listening. And if you do want to connect with me, once you take the quiz, you’ll get all the fancy pants coordinates in there where you can stay in touch with me if you want to. But it’s more important you discover what gets in the way of your listening than spending time talking to me.

Melissa Aarskaug (39:41.208)
Thank you so much for being here, Oscar, and sharing your time with our listeners. That’s the Executive Connect podcast.

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