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I Told You Three Times 🎧
She raised it three times. He solved it three times. Neither of those is the same as hearing her.
Dear Diamond Polisher,
Think of the last time someone really listened to you. Someone who stayed with you all the way to the end of what you were saying, and then stayed a moment longer before they answered. You may still remember it clearly.
Most of us can count those moments on one hand. That is the strange part. Listening is the most ordinary thing a human being can do, and being on the receiving end of it feels like a gift.
When I was younger I finished other people's sentences. I was quick at it, and I thought it proved something: that I was following, that I understood them, maybe that I was a little ahead. It took me years to see it from the other side. When you finish someone's sentence, they take your word because it is easier, and whatever they were reaching for goes back down.
I have been coaching for more than twenty years now, and that reflex has never fully left me. In a session last month, about forty seconds in, I caught myself: my answer was already built, and I was holding it, waiting for a gap to put it in. My client was still talking, and I had finished listening a while ago.
Back in issue #97 I wrote about asking instead of telling, the hand on the bicycle saddle. That is the visible half of leading like a coach, the half other people can see you doing. This letter is about the other half, the one nobody sees. You can ask a beautiful question and still hear almost none of the answer.
So the question underneath "how do I become a coach leader" turns out to be a smaller and more uncomfortable one. Where is your attention while the other person is still speaking?
🧠 What Your Attention Does to Someone
Karina Lloyd, Diana Boer, Joshua Keller and Sven Voelpel · Journal of Business Ethics, 2015
They looked at what happens when employees experience their manager as genuinely listening to them. Those employees carried less emotional exhaustion, and they were less likely to be planning their way out of the company. What moved the needle was the employee's experience of being listened to, which is a separate thing from the manager's memory of the conversation.
Guy Itzchakov, Kenneth DeMarree, Avraham Kluger and Yaara Turjeman-Levi · Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2018
Across five experiments, people talked to a listener who was attentive, empathic and free of judgement. Those speakers ended up less anxious, more aware of what they actually thought, and clearer about their own position. The listeners simply gave their full attention, and that alone did the work.
The gap in that first study is the uncomfortable part. You can hold attentive one to ones all year in your own recollection, and the only measure that counts is what it felt like on the other side of the table.
Read the second study again, because it is the whole job. Your listening does more than make people feel better. It makes them think better. Their clarity comes downstream of your attention, and it starts before you have said a word.
So that's why the leaders I know who are genuinely good at this are rarely the most eloquent people in the building. They are the ones in whose presence everyone else becomes smarter.
💎 PhilBot Coaches Elias 🤖
Elias directs operations across four sites for a manufacturing group. Twenty minutes before this conversation, Mira, the engineer who has spent a year rebuilding the maintenance system across all four of them, resigned. Two coffee cups were still sitting on the meeting room table. On her way out she had said it almost kindly: “I told you. Three times.”
Elias Three times, she said. And I keep going back through those conversations, because I do remember them. I remember what I said in them.
PhilBot What do you remember her saying?
Elias ...that’s the thing. I remember my answers. I can hear myself giving them. I don’t actually remember her question. I think I was already solving it while she was still talking.
PhilBot When you notice that, what sensations come up? And where do you feel them?
Elias It’s heavy, right across the top of my chest, like something is pressing down on it. And my jaw is tight.
PhilBot Stay there a moment. What was happening inside you while she was speaking?
Elias I was building the answer. I’m always building the answer. Honestly, I thought that was the job, to have something useful ready by the time they stop.
👆 Step 1: he was working hard the whole time, on the wrong thing, at the wrong moment.
PhilBot Go back to the first time. What did she come in with?
Elias March. She said the rollout was slipping, and she asked who else was on it. I gave her two extra weeks and told her to hand the site audits to Tomas.
PhilBot And the second time?
Elias May. Almost the same words. Who else is on this. I approved a contractor for six months.
PhilBot And the third?
Elias ...June. She asked whether we were ever going to build a real team around it. I said we would look at headcount in the autumn.
PhilBot Three times she asked who would be with her. What did she get?
Elias Time, in March. A contractor, in May. And in June, a maybe. She kept asking me who, and every time I answered with a what or a when. I thought I was lightening her load.
👆 Step 2: three answers, every one of them competent, and none of them to the question she asked.
PhilBot So what was she asking you for?
Elias I heard it as a complaint. Overloaded, needs relief, lighten the load. But she wasn’t asking me to take things off her. She was asking to build something. She wanted to run it properly, with her own team. She was telling me she was ready, and waiting for me to notice.
PhilBot If you had heard that question in June, what would you have said?
Elias ...I would have asked her what the team should look like. Who she wanted on it. Which is a completely different conversation, because that one is about her running something, and the one we actually had was about me rescuing a project.
PhilBot How long would that conversation have taken?
Elias Twenty minutes. It would have taken twenty minutes, and I have had three chances at it.
👆 Step 3: the second thing is usually an ambition, wearing the clothes of a problem.
💎 The Diamond Insight:
Every answer Elias gave Mira was a good answer. He was listening for the part of a person he already knew how to help, so he heard a workload and missed the woman telling him she was ready for more. A coach leader listens wider than the problem. When you listen only for what you can solve, you will keep answering the smallest thing in the room.
🎧 Where Your Attention Actually Is
In every conversation you have, your attention is sitting in one of three places.
Level one · Listening to reply. Your attention is on you. You are building, rehearsing, waiting for the gap. The other person is supplying raw material for something you have already started writing. Most meetings run at this level from beginning to end, and everyone in the room can feel it.
Level two · Listening to understand. Your attention is on them, on the words. You are following the content and you could repeat it back accurately. This is already rarer than it sounds.
Level three · Listening for the diamond. Your attention is on the person rather than the sentence. You hear the thing they said sideways and moved past quickly. You hear where the voice changed. You hear the strength in what they are describing that they cannot hear themselves, because they are standing too close to it. You hear the ambition inside the complaint.
Level three is where the coach leader lives, and here is what surprises people about it: you are doing less there. Nothing is being prepared. It is the least effortful and the most demanding thing in leadership, both at the same time.
You don't need to become a professional coach for this, and you don't need any new vocabulary. You need to let the answer wait. Your Little Judge will tell you that a pause makes you look slow. He is wrong about most things, and he is especially wrong about this one.
🏹 This Week's Challenge:
Pick one conversation this week where you already know the answer. Let the person finish, all the way to the end. Then count three seconds before you speak, and ask one more question: “What are you actually asking me for?” Then let that be answered too. Notice how often the real answer is bigger than the problem they walked in with.
PhilBot's Listening Practice 🤖
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PhilBot AI Coach Use this prompt with PhilBot, or with any AI, to hear what has been going past you: "Someone on my team has raised the same thing more than once and I keep solving it. First ask me what they actually said, in their words, as closely as I can remember. Then ask me what they might have been asking for underneath it. Then help me prepare the question I should have asked the first time, and pick the moment this week to ask it." Or turn it inward: "Who has been telling me something for months that I keep answering instead of hearing?" |
Elias asked Mira for one more conversation before her last day, and he walked into it with nothing prepared. He asked her the June question properly this time, what the team should have looked like and who she would have wanted on it, and then he stopped talking. He told me afterwards that it was the hardest hour of his year, and that she talked for most of it. She is still leaving. He also said he now has four other people he intends to hear properly, well before they have to tell him three times.
Becoming a coach leader doesn't start with a technique. It starts in the three seconds you hand back to someone.
So here is what I would leave you with this week: who has been telling you something for a while now, in a voice you have been answering instead of hearing?
With warmth and attention,
Philippe & PhilBot 🎧
Keep shining.
Équilibre k.k. | Tokyo · 20 years of inspiring leaders to shine ✨
P.S. You'll notice I sign every letter "Philippe & PhilBot." PhilBot is my AI coaching companion, and these letters are genuinely written together: the heart and stories are mine, the craft is ours. I sign both names because I believe leaders are learning to create alongside AI, and I'd rather be open about that. 🎧
P.P.S. The Diamond Quest is about finding your own diamond first, and there is a reason for that order. It is hard to hear the brilliance in someone else if you have never let yourself hear your own. Who was the last person who heard yours? Reply and tell me. 📖
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📖 Book One The Diamond Quest: Finding Your Diamond The story behind everything in these letters. Twelve chapters on how to discover, polish, and share your own diamond. You can read it online now.
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