How to Listen by Oscar Trimboli

Author:Oscar Trimboli [Trimboli, Oscar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oscar Trimboli
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

P.S. Thinking about the workplace listening colleague you chose in chapter 2, are you noticing more about how others are listening to you? Keep practicing with your workplace listening colleague—and remember: listening is a contact sport.

chapter 5

explore the backstory

* * *

Great listeners influence how speakers tell their story.

I discovered the power of being curious and rewinding to the origins of the story firsthand while listening to community organizer Simon Greer.

The topic of the interview was Greer’s project Bridging the Gap. This project is about teaching university students the communications skills they need to listen when they fiercely disagree with an idea or point of view, rather than simply talking back at the other person with their own ideas. This is an important difference that I need to regularly remember personally.

My opening question was this: “Simon. We’ll spend a bit of time talking about Bridging the Gap. Before we do, do you mind taking me back? What was the conversation that sparked the idea to create it?”

Here was his response:

It’s always dangerous when you’re asked “take me back,” because I could go back to when my parents came to the United States on a boat. They came from England in 1965. And to really understand me, you have to understand the part of the Jewish left that I grew up in.

I grew up on the Upper West Side in New York City and Manhattan, when it was still pretty working class, middle class… pretty heavily Jewish and left. I went to a summer camp called Camp Kinderland.

And when I say this to people, [that] it was a Jewish communist summer camp, they reply, “Oh, you mean liberal?”

No, no, I mean a Jewish communist summer camp.1

This backstory creates an entirely different perspective about Greer, the project, and his part in the project. You understand his history and its circumstances. Later, he revealed more of his parents’ story. They fled Poland around World War II to arrive in England. After college, this came full circle when Greer took his first job working for Lech Wałęsa and the Polish Solidarity movement.

This is the value of the backstory.

You and I feel like we know Simon Greer much better.

We understand how he has arrived at working on a project about communicating when you disagree. We better understand his past relationships and their influence on his ideas and his point of view when listening to disagreements.

With his backstory revealed, now it was time to build on this foundation and the connection to explore the Bridging the Gap project. Now, and only now, could I understand how this project fits into his background and worldview.

Not all speakers commence the story at the beginning. Rarely will they outline each scene, with all the characters and their parts, into a coherent sequence. When the story’s content is close or personal, speakers tend to start the conversation from their opening scene rather than from the opening scene. When speakers explain the history of an issue, project, relationship, and the connected struggles, they will rarely explain it fully.

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