active listening

Do This 1 Thing to Write Chart-Topping Hits

Haig Chahinian

We Americans love to talk. It makes us a wonderful and lively bunch in many ways. Still, from all the chatter we can become hard of hearing. And no matter how well we multi-task, it’s impossible to speak and listen at the same time.

Lamont Dozier, songwriter and producer extraordinaire, knows this well. He’s responsible in part for hits recorded by Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Alison Moyet and other luminaries.

He recently spoke with the Trojan Family Magazine about his work, and shared with writer Allison Engel the one thing that primarily influences his songs:

A lot of the songs and ideas come from me being very observant and listening to people. I used to go into restaurants – I still do – and eavesdrop on people having conversations. I see lovers having quarrels and everything. Being a songwriter, I can’t help but listen. It gives me great material.

Yes! Active listening. He continues, about what it takes to teach songwriting:

First you have to be a good listener and an observer. A lot of people don’t know how to listen. They’re too busy trying to tell you about themselves. Also, I find myself opening my window early in the morning to listen to the birds. And you know some of the sweetest melodies and counter melodies come from birds chirping and tweaking little rhythms and things… I think all songwriters have listened to birds.

While we’ve poked fun at this underrated skill, here we see that listening is valuable in so many disparate careers, including penning songs.

It’s also a core component of bringing your whole self to work. Listening to what’s going on in your environment can help you identify how to relate the various parts of your self to the context of your work.

Dozier is currently teaching at USC, in the Thornton School of Music popular music performance program. His insight about the world of popular music probably sends his students soaring.

What do you hear when you engage in active listening at work?

Read the full interview here.

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5 New, Must-Have Skills for the Rough and Tumble 2010s

Haig Chahinian

Speaking of makeovers, the definition of human capital is getting a much-needed refashioning by David Brooks, author of the just-published The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.

He describes a “new humanism,” and breaks it down into 5 poetic-sounding terms: attunement, equipoise, metis, sympathy and limerence.  From his op-ed piece of March 8, 2011:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

Trip out, right? These sound like traits of godliness. They also sound somewhat similar to emotional intelligence and social intelligence. The question is, if you’re not the Dalai Lama, how might you develop these skills? Brooks refers to them as “deeper talents,” which suggests that some people have more of a natural ability in these areas than others.

The first step is to identify that these skills are something you wish to develop. Then, considering their complexity, you might benefit from working with a professional guidance counselor like an executive coach or psychologist.

Which is to say, talking about your self relative to acquiring more limerence, metis and equipoise is a helpful way to equip yourself to navigate the world of work in the 2010s, and beyond.

Do you identify as having any combination of these 5 skills? Which ones, and how?

Is Active Listening Overrated?

Haig Chahinian

America’s Career Information Network–one of our favorite online resources, sponsored by the US Department of Labor–defines active listening as:

giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.

Which basically means knowing how to keep quiet and use your full wherewithal to tune-in to what somebody’s saying. This type of acute listening leads to understanding people more truly, and making clearer sense of the world around us. It seems our friends at The Onion aren’t having it, though.

The article “Open-Minded Man Grimly Realizes How Much Life He’s Wasted Listening To Bullsh`t” equates active listening with listening to garbage. And the effect of such receptiveness can amount to hours of listening to:

* grossly uninformed political opinions
* both sides of pointless arguments, and
* parents’ bullsh’t about how important it is to be open-minded.

We laughed out loud! In the end, the news piece concludes with a quotation by “the open-minded man’s” colleague. He says “[my colleague] is such a good listener. A lot of people are closed-minded and self-absorbed, but [he] always makes an effort to hear where I’m coming from. The world could use more people like him.”

Heartened, we agree that the more people exercise their inherent active listening skills, the better the workplace becomes. Hear, hear!

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What Does an Animal Trainer Think About in Bed?

Haig Chahinian

Jennifer Vidbel, the animal trainer for the Big Apple Circus, recently sat down with us to talk about her work life on “Career Talk Live.”

Jenny revealed what happens backstage, who’s on top at the circus, and what she thinks about in bed.

Because the master tape is marred by a loud tone–our fault, boo!–we’ve transcribed the interview, with very few minor edits.

Part I:
Haig Chahinian: Hello, welcome to Career Talk Live. I’m your host Haig Chahinian and I’m here today with an extremely special guest: Jennifer Vidbel of the Big Apple Circus. She is the animal trainer for the whole circus. Welcome back to the show, Jennifer. We appreciate that you’re making the time to come talk with us about your work and your life, because the two, we’re learning, are so intertwined. Your life is your work, and your work is your life, it seems to be.

Jennifer Vidbel: Absolutely.

HC: OK, you agree with that. Again, welcome back to the show. We were talking in the previous segment about letting go: of a strategy, of a “plan” I heard you call it, sort of a pre-conceived notion of where you would like to end, and what that takes.  Thinking about this after the show, it seems it takes a lot of patience.

JV: That’s key.

HC: Where do you get that from?

JV: It’s just here. And I think it comes with the love. You’re doing what you love to do. Patience is just there.  Because you’re doing what you love, the animals are happy, I’m happy, so it’s absolutely going to be an amazing result.  So patience is just there.

HC: We were talking about the audience in the last segment, and for example, you’re not thinking about what the audience may have been promised, or something like this?

JV: No, I think that they know, and that the animals and I are showing that we’re just having fun. And I’m only human, they’re only animals, and of course it might not be perfect. No one’s perfect.  The important message is that we’re having fun, and we’re here to have fun with you.  But it’s not always going to go as planned. “As planned,” there’s that word again. So don’t plan!

HC: Is this the case for each performance itself?

JV:  Sure. It’s live entertainment. And whether it’s the animal act or the aerialists or the acrobats, it’s live entertainment. The aerialists are risking their life, the acrobats are doing really crazy, amazing things. They’re also doing what they love, and this is their passion. It’s not a movie, it’s not scripted, and I think that’s what’s so exciting about the circus. You never know what’s going to happen.

HC: Jennifer, I should say: I get the benefit of sitting directly across from you, however our viewers are only seeing your profile. So would you sit at a diagonal? I should have been clear about this earlier, so our viewers have the benefit of seeing you as well. OK, very nice. Thank you.

I’m struck again, I’m struck by everything that you’re sharing, in this case – how the animals bring out the humanity in your work.

JV: Yeah, they’ve taught me simplicity, they really have. And they’ve taught me to have fun, because they’re just fun to be around. They want to have fun, they want to eat, they want to sleep, they want simplicity. That’s the greatest lesson I’ve learned from being around animals.

HC: You talked about fun last time. Something that we’re learning about work today is, in Jenny’s case, and I think in many examples, it’s so important to be able to have fun in the work you’re doing. How did you learn this? Because it’s not a common lesson.

JV:  It’s not something to learn, I think it’s something inside of you. You have a passion, and you go for it. It can be fun, it is fun for me loading horses in the middle of the night in the pouring rain to get to the next city — I’ll have a story to tell the next morning. Setting up our tents, because we have portable stables for all the animals. Watching out during a storm all night, making sure the animals are safe and well cared for. It’s all fun, because I’m doing what is my passion, what I love to do. So it’s a great story in the morning. I have lots of war stories.

HC: Sounds like it. As you’re describing what’s fun, you’re also relating something very serious about the work: protecting the animals.

JV: Protecting the animals. And this is what’s interesting—that’s what’s so great about this business.  You never know what’s coming down the road; you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow. But it’s definitely not this 9 to 5, where you walk into the office. That’s what I love to do, of course the animals are my family, and I’m very happy to stay up in the middle of the night to make sure they’re OK, as any parent would do for their child. It’s protecting them, it’s part of what we do.

HC: I remember in the program that I saw, you shared how you wake up thinking about the animals.

JV: Yes

HC: Like they’re the first thing on your mind?

JV: They’re the first thing on my mind.

HC: Every day? Read more →

Come Out at Work: With Dyslexia

Haig Chahinian

We’re feeling momentum as we continue to feature parts of our selves which at first blush are easy to disparage. Then upon closer examination, we see the value of bringing the full spectrum of who we are to the workplace, with glorious results.  Next up: the senior vice president and chief brand officer for media company The Elle Group.

Robin Domeniconi is a well-regarded executive of ELLE, ELLE Decor and Ellegirl, and oversees content, strategy, sales and marketing for all three publications. She’s held prominent roles in other prestigious organizations, serving as vice president of U.S. advertising at Microsoft, and president of Time Inc. where she launched Real Simple magazine.

And she’s dyslexic. In an interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times, she spoke about being the boss in a corner office, and what she looks for in hiring new employees. Job seekers take note! She described the influence of her dyslexia on building relationships:

I also have dyslexia. A lot of times, people will say things that I don’t understand. I am never embarrassed to ask them to repeat what they’ve said. It’s a vulnerability that you show. I once had an editor say to me, “You’re the best publisher I’ve ever had because you’re not afraid to show your vulnerability.” … I have enough confidence to do that. I would like you to have enough confidence, too.

By exposing her dyslexic self to her employees, she authorizes her staff to bring their whole selves to work, breeding increased self-confidence, and she leads by example.  How invigorating to see a chief executive admit that there are things she doesn’t understand, and freely ask her colleagues to repeat themselves so she’s sure to comprehend everything. This attribute can be rare to find in a manager; must one have a learning disability to be this transparent at work?

In another segment of the interview, she described how she promotes an open work environment, enumerating the qualifications she seeks in interviewees:

I want someone who’s candid, who’s very willing to be open. To me, the willingness to be open takes a lot of courage, because you’re displaying your vulnerability. I find that if you’re willing to be open, to expose your vulnerability, you’re going to succeed with me. Because I don’t have all the answers, and you shouldn’t think that you have all the answers. So we need to be open with each other.

Is her openness a function of being a woman in the executive suite? It’s hard to know for sure. What is certain is the amount of love she has within her. Love for herself, in the most productive way, and love for the world around her.

Her invisible disability translates to amazing ability, wouldn’t you say? In the comments below:

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Your Whole Self and Profit: A Perfect Pair

Haig Chahinian

We find winter to be mostly miserable, and to add insult to injury we’re striving to shed the inches we’ve accumulated around our waistline over the last five years. The point of wearing a big coat is to cover up the effects of pizza we eat during these gray days and long, cold nights, right?

We’re feeling cynical, and hopeful, and we’re doing it via weightwatchers.com.  It got us thinking about the genius of business when integrated with your whole self.

Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW) offers a service to individuals who want to develop healthier eating habits. They provide a frame of reference by which to look at and measure your consumption of food, provide social support to keep you moving toward your weight goal, and less helpfully, produce packaged processed foods. For more sedentary folks like us–do you know bloggers who DON’T sit all day?–there’s the online interface.

How did all this start? In the early 1960s, Jean Nidetch of Queens, New York wanted to curtail the effects of her penchant for cookies, which brought her to 200+ pounds. She needed encouragement to stick with her new nutrition plan, so she recruited some heavier friends who could benefit from group support, and the first “weight watchers” meeting was born. Fast forward to 2001 when the company went public, and ten years later, today’s stock price fluctuates around $37.

So where does bringing your whole self to work fit into the picture?

Jean Nidetch looked inside and tapped into her wish to find help in losing weight. Momentum grew around Nidetch’s success, and in time financiers at Artal Luxembourg and the H. J. Heinz Company identified the remarkable business potential of WTW. With the requisite knowledge, skills and abilities, they’ve made many people wealthy, and healthy.

How does one monetize an internal, invisible feeling?  We have alot to learn from WTW. In the end (couldn’t help it), it behooves your pocketbook for you to stay connected to your internal world. Pay attention to your own desire, dreams, and fleeting thoughts; this is a large part of what constitutes the treasure trove within you, waiting to become a worldwide multimillion dollar business.

Image by author, because we couldn’t find a picture of Jean Nidetch that was legal to use.

Come Out at Work: With Depression

Haig Chahinian

With depression? It might seem totally natural to hide this aspect of your internal world from coworkers.  That is, until The New York Times Magazine featured the complexities of depression in a cover story early in 2010 and called it “Depression’s Upside.” Yes, there are positive aspects to depression, including how it can affect your work.

According to the story, “every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by [depression].” Moreover, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins found that “successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.”

So if you look around at work, there’s a certain probability that someone is depressed, regardless of their level of success. And it’s not impossible for that somebody to be you. How’re you feeling today? We ask so as to stir some self-reflection on the matter.

What’s so great about being depressed? To be sure, to live with depression is to suffer, badly. Still, when you accept this state of being, and work with it rather than fight it, the few bright spots become increasingly visible. Let’s look at 6 perks of being depressed at work, directly from the Times article:

1. You’re able to concentrate entirely on your work as you withdraw from the world. We’ve experienced this first-hand during these dark days of winter, and so did Charles Darwin. We’re in pretty good company, right?

2. You may understand interpersonal relationships better. Ruminating as a function of being depressed can help you realize you need to be more gentle with people around you, for example, or that listening more attentively to friends helps everyone involved feel better. You’re also less likely to stereotype strangers.

3. You’re not so sidetracked by irrelevant stimuli around you. Being pinged by colleagues throughout the day, terrible news headlines flashing across screens everywhere, and even the pressure to multi-task won’t distract you from what you’re intent on doing. This type of zen energy is otherwise very difficult to come by.

4. An extremely analytical style of thinking can result from increased activity in a certain part of the brain of depressed patients.  The tendency for the depressed is to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down a complex problem into its simpler parts. The bad news is that this thought process is really slow.

5. You have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. As well, you’re better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events. So if you feel up to attending that meeting, you’re primed to make significant contributions.

6. Your writing may improve.  According to a social psychologist at the University of South Wales in Australia:

Negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

Detractors of the upside of depression argue that people with significant depression usually ignore daily hygiene and can neglect giving people around them immediate attention. True, this may be a recipe for greater hardships at work, and which increased ability to focus and problem-solving skills won’t necessarily help.

Ultimately, knowing the benefits of your depressed episodes at work can help you embrace these natural occurences, and even open up to your workmates about them. In turn, you may find yourself more relaxed in the workplace, and more productive. Now why would you want to hide that?

Yes, to be depressed at work may be a messy experience, and yet  upon closer inspection, what part of being human in the workplace isn’t? It’s a rhetorical question; still, if you’d like to answer it in the comments below, we welcome it.