Tag: music

Listen like a musician.

How many professional bloggers write about listening skills? While I may be one of the many, I come with a unique perspective — I’m a trained musician. And as a trained musician, I can give you insights about listening that others might not.

Principle: Listen to how people respond.

To learn how to listen like a musician, consider learning to play an instrument. You’ll pick up an enriching fun hobby, and you’ll learn how to critically listen to how an instrument responds to you.

In your music practice you’ll learn how your actions influence the timbre and tone of an instrument. You’ll learn the upper and lower limits of the instrument’s capability. And if you’re playing with other musicians, you’ll learn how your sound (or voice) interacts and blends with the voices of others.

No instrument? No problem. In interviews, practice curiosity. When you ask a question – watch how someone responds and what they say. How do they respond when you ask about their interests? How do they respond when you become more curious about the things they’re interested in? How can you connect those interests to a concept at work? Are the answers you’re receiving more insightful than the (likely) prepared answers you receive from candidates?

Think this is poppycock? Perhaps I’m bridging too big a gap. But I’m not. I practice these ideas daily. My teams report that they value that I’m a good listener. Candidates are quick to tell me that they wish all interviews could be the way they had it. Allegorically, this method works.

Exactly how the instruments responds to the artist, so to do people respond to people. If you want to become skilled at interviewing or managing, you need to understand how things respond to you — you need to listen.

Certainty and confidence.

When you are enabling your talent on a new skill, they may express a lack of execution confidence. They may use words like “I’m confused about…” or “I don’t know about…” Your temptation might be to ask, “why didn’t you ask more questions in the training,” but that might be premature.

Principle: slow and methodical practice yields greater long-run returns.

I studied piano in college — music education and music composition. At a collegiate level, music students are taught that slow and methodical practice will lead to faster and more accurate execution. In the music world, near-perfect execution is the bar.

To create a practice similar to how a music student would practice, consider these steps.

Before training:

  1. Identify the outcome/output required of the process being trained.
  2. Identify why that outcome is important.
  3. Break the process down into bite-sized fragments.
  4. Identify a catchy metaphor that simplifies the process. “It’s like baking an apple pie,” or “it’s like sky diving,” or anything that gives the trainee a framework to understand the process.

Training:

  1. Explain the outcome and why it matters — steps 1 and 2 above.
  2. Explain the metaphor.
  3. Teach each step in the process from beginning to end.
  4. Teach the process from the end back to the beginning.
  5. Reiterate the metaphor.
  6. Ask your talent to teach it back to you.
  7. Look for the gaps in what they teach.
  8. Practice the gaps.
  9. Practice the whole process.

Finally, pick real-world low hanging fruit and push your talent out of the nest.