Build Relationships

Posted on by Byron Darden

Effective communication lies at the heart of all human interaction. It serves as the cornerstone of our relationships, both personal and professional. Miscommunication, often stemming from a lack of attentive listening, can lead to a cascade of negative consequences.

When we fail to listen deeply to one another, misunderstandings abound. These misunderstandings can escalate into conflicts, erode trust, and ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships. Whether in intimate partnerships, familial bonds, friendships, or workplace collaborations, the repercussions of miscommunication reverberate far and wide.

By honing the ART of listening, individuals can foster deeper connections and build stronger, more resilient relationships. When we listen with intention and attention, we signal to others that their words, feelings, and perspectives matter to us. This acknowledgment lays the foundation for trust and mutual respect.

Attentive listening equips us with the tools to navigate the intricate dynamics of social interaction with greater ease. It allows us to pick up on subtle cues, understand underlying emotions, and respond thoughtfully to the needs and concerns of others. In doing so, we forge bonds of empathy and understanding that transcends mere words.

In essence, the ART of listening is not just a skill; it’s a transformative practice that enriches every facet of our lives. By embracing this practice wholeheartedly, we can cultivate deeper connections, foster meaningful relationships, and navigate the complexities of human interaction with grace and compassion.

This also goes for the relationship you have with yourself. We suggest employing one of our learning tools we call, Engagement Query. It is an emotional intelligence-based tool used to create connection, enhance engagement, and deepen the influence you have with your audience during presentations, meetings, facilitations, and Interactions. It is also designed to help us develop questions we can ask ourselves to ensure we are truly present with ourselves. 

It accomplishes a similar outcome addressed in the phrase, “Should an emergency situation occur, you need to put your own oxygen mask on first, before attempting to help those around you.” While it isn’t necessary to wait for an extreme emergency situation to act, the sentiment of the phrase reminds us that we are more successful doing for others, what we’ve accomplished doing for ourselves.  

PUT ON YOUR OXYGEN MASK FIRST

Listen more effectively by Shifting Your Focus.

Be Present

Posted on by Byron Darden

The ART of listening, as we define it, is the ability to bring one’s full attention to the speaker, and be present without interruptions or distractions. You engage in what is being shared and not being shared, identified through all your senses. It involves:

  1. Thinking: Actively processing and reflecting on the speaker’s words and their implications. In the Buddhist tradition, the sixth sense is aligned with thinking vs ESP.
  2. Seeing: Observing the speaker’s body language for additional insights and cues.
  3. Hearing: Paying attention to the words spoken, vocal inflections, word choice, and emotional tone.
  4. Smell:  When we experience life and others, we may be aware of scent associations that we often give little attention to, such as when I think of my grandparents with whom I associate with the smell of the farm or the musty basement beneath the farmhouse.
  5. Taste: Being attuned to any olfactory cues that may reveal additional layers of meaning. An example of this is when I think of my mother, I’m often reminded of a scent she wore or the lemon icebox pie she used to make for me on special occasions.
  6. Feeling: Sensing the speaker’s emotions and intentions through their expressions and the sensations they evoke in oneself.

Though all our senses play a role in deep listening, what we perceive visually and physically outweighs auditory input by more than 50%. Taking this into account, we draw on our ART model to remind us to Approach our listening with a sense of curiosity and openness. We Resolve whatever issue is at hand by giving the speaker our full attention with the intention of reaching a conclusion, determination, or settlement. The accomplishment or desired impact that follows is the release of Tension that results from an effective and accurately received message.   

As you will note, listening is so much more than just hearing someone’s words. It is also listening through our senses to what the speaker is conveying (intention). We listen in this way to the messages our mind, body, and spirit convey in service to our protection, growth, and development. Think of it as listening to your gut. Examples of this are what is learned through meditation and somatic work.  

Listening itself comes in many forms depending on your environment. Here are some common types of listening and when you might use them.

  1. Informational Listening focuses on understanding the message being conveyed. It’s used when you want to remember what is being said. You’ll use this type of listening in work training, self-paced learning, or when listening to a coach or mentor.
  2. Discriminative Listening involves distinguishing different sounds, voices, pitch, or quality. It’s the most basic form of listening and helps us understand the basic auditory information in communication. Think of this as reading between the lines, such as when someone says “Yes” and they clearly mean “No.”
  3. Selective or Biased Listening means that you hear what you want to hear. This can lead to misunderstandings as you fail to fully process the message of the speaker.
  4. Sympathetic Listening is where you focus on understanding the speaker’s feelings, emotions, and perspectives. It involves having and demonstrating compassion, empathy, and sensitivity towards the speaker’s experiences and concerns.
  5. Comprehensive Listening focuses on understanding the message being conveyed. It involves grasping the main ideas, details, and overall context of what is being communicated.
  6. Therapeutic Listening focuses on providing support and understanding to the speaker. It involves creating a safe space for the speaker to express their thoughts, feelings, and struggles without blame or judgment. 
  7. Critical Listening involves analyzing and evaluating the message being presented. It requires assessing the validity of the information, considering the speaker’s credibility, and examining the arguments for evidence provided.

All of these types of listening can have the ART model applied to them.

USE YOUR SENSES TO LISTEN

Learn how to Build Relationships through the ART of Listening.

The ART of Listening: Impact on Relationship Building

Posted on by Byron Darden

In a world filled with constant activity as well as increasing distractions and competing demands for our attention, the skill of truly listening has become increasingly more important.  Listening goes beyond merely hearing words; it involves actively processing and comprehending the message being conveyed. It requires attention, empathy, and genuine interest in understanding the speaker’s perspective. 

Listening with our whole self means being fully present and attentive; listening with our ears and including our hearts and minds. It means setting aside distractions, suspending judgment in exchange for curiosity, and genuinely investing ourselves in understanding the speaker’s message. This holistic approach fosters deeper connections, builds trust, and cultivates empathy, fostering stronger relationships both personally and professionally.

This month, we explore how each of our senses allows us to become effective listeners, the different styles of listening, why it’s so important to listen with our whole self, and how we can practice deeper listening skills with others and with ourselves

I HEAR YOU

Learn how to Be Present.

Posted on by Byron Darden

Founders Corner – The ART of Listening

Children Will Listen from the Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway show, Into The Woods.

You may not have expected to open this month’s Founder’s Corner to experience me singing. Yet given this month is all about listening, I thought it fitting to grab your attention by demonstrating the impact and power of Listening.

Hi, I’m Byron Darden with another edition of Leading with Purpose on Purpose. In our continuing series on Transitions, this month we focus on The ART of Listening and its impact on relationship building. This is a particularly significant topic when you consider the emotions that are stirred when we find ourselves moving through major transitions in our lives. 

Whether I’m coaching leaders transitioning within their organizations to more senior roles, advising them on how to approach retirement, or making the decision to leave their corporate jobs to start their own firms, launch a nonprofit organization, or simply follow their aspirations beyond 9am to 5pm (which I must admit is a timeframe from another era), it is the listening that lies at the foundation of how I help clients get from their current state to their desired future state. 

I cannot recall the last time I worked with an executive who worked exclusively within the hours of 9 to 5. Which most likely leads to some of the desires they share with me about what more they would like to do with their lives going into their future. One of the ways in which I help many leaders is to inspire them to master their own listening. That sometimes means listening to the internal voice we all have that can lead us in the direction that most calls to us. That is when we can hear that inner voice over all the noise that often permeates our environment in order to build a stronger relationship with ourselves. Enjoy!

I’M LISTENING

Explore the Art of Listening.

Take Control

Posted on by Byron Darden

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” – Jim Rohn

Are you tired of living life on someone else’s terms?  

Perhaps you made choices that achieved your professional goal, and still something is missing.

At Triple Axel Executive Coaching, we coach you through the corporate dilemmas in which you find yourself – how to get to the next level or how to effectively lead your team.  Along the way, you discover more about yourself. Perhaps you find that your purpose doesn’t align with your job role. You may also find that you are exactly where you need or want to be and now have the clarity and confidence to move forward.  

Asking yourself how you want your life to look and feel are essential questions for your quality of life. You might sit down and envision a life filled with community involvement and relaxing breakfasts with your partner. Your reality might be 80-hour work weeks that start with 6 am power meetings.

Getting from your current reality to the life you envision is what life planning entails. I’m Byron Darden, founder of Triple Axel Executive Coaching and a Registered Life Planner RLP®. Book a call and we’ll start getting you from here to there in a way that works for you.  

BOOK A CALL

What You Gain

Posted on by Byron Darden

You may be familiar with life planning as it pertains to the end of your life here on Earth. You draft a will and decide that your china collection goes to your daughter or son.  We want to differentiate that from life planning, which is a plan for your life. It entails what you want your life to look like and how you are going to accomplish your vision.

Many of us set goals related to promotions or working until we are 67 ½ and then retiring. It’s easier to achieve a goal of $1 million in our bank account than it is to envision a better relationship with our partner or leave a legacy.   

Around 22% of people have end-of-life plans. Around ⅓ of people have life plans.  Some of us make plans for exercise, healthy eating, and our career aspirations, yet life planning is so much more. It’s been compared to a personal compass.

Of those who create and work toward their life plans, there is more focus and commitment. Among the benefits of a solid plan are:

  • Helps you direct your energy and resources toward specific objectives.
  • Prioritize your tasks and goals based on their importance and urgency.
  • Allocates time for various activities and tasks, including work, leisure, and self-improvement.
  • Motivates by visualizing your goals and the steps needed to achieve them.
  • Creates accountability when you share your goals with others.
  • Allows for flexibility when life is unpredictable.
FOCUS

It’s time for you to Take Control.

A Personal Breakthrough

Posted on by Byron Darden

In 2008 I stepped into my first ever experience of Life Planning. It was an eye-opening experience for me to stop and consider what is most important to me in my life. I was coached through the various steps involved in the process and what I discovered was surprising.  

At the deepest level of my life plan was the desire to be philanthropic, self-improvement-focused, and able to give back to others. When it came to how that would look, creating a business, publishing a book on how to thrive, and public speaking were at the top of my list.

What came out of that life plan was starting Triple Axel Executive Coaching, publishing a blog, and beginning to deliver keynote addresses. I also returned to my acting roots and was approached by long-term friend and theater director, Jane Staab. She cast me in Billy Elliot: The Musical. I left my home in New York City and relocated to Boston in 2017 to begin rehearsals and launch the production. It was an exciting time and a challenging one on a personal level.

Halfway through the run, my father’s health took a turn for the worse. On a Sunday evening following a matinee performance, I took the last flight out of Logan Airport before they closed due to a snowstorm and traveled to my father’s bedside in Denver. Two days later I flew back to Boston in time for a 10 am matinee the following morning. Upon my arrival in Boston, I heard from my sister that our father passed away.

I realized that as part of my life planning, I’d become closer to my sister, took time out to support my dad during his five-year illness following a stroke, and was impacting the lives of others through my performance on stage. That is when I discovered how powerful life planning can be.

Years later, I was reintroduced to Life Planning while attending weekly meditation with the father of Life Planning, author and retired financial planner, George Kinder. Two years ago, I began taking a deeper interest in Life Planning and decided I wanted to help executives by introducing them to this life-changing experience as it had been for me.

One of the other surprising revelations for me is that within my first Life Planning experience, I’d covertly alluded to becoming a Registered Life Planner myself. So I committed, signed up for the course, and did the training. What I had not expected to learn was how prepared I was to step into this work from all the previous work I’d done in becoming an Executive Coach that began over twenty years ago.

What I learned from this experience is that Life Planning and Executive Coaching go hand-in-hand. My certification in Organizational Change Management was also inextricably linked to who I am becoming in my field; an influencer in how the world of business runs.

LET’S CHAT

Find out What You Gain from life planning.

Where Do You See Yourself?

Posted on by Byron Darden

Think of your life in four increments of 8000 days (22 years). Each 22 years is a chapter that reads like a book. A time in your life during which you will transition to another. By the time you finish The Book of You, How would you want each chapter to read? 

Here is an activity you can start with:

Create a Four Square chart: The Book of You

Proceeding in a clockwise direction, starting in the upper left, name the boxes chapters 1 through 4. Identify each chapter by a name that is most meaningful to you and captures the general activities you recall taking place in the first two (the chart below has examples). 

Remember that the first chapter takes you to the age of 22. 

While the second begins at 23 and ends at 44 years of age.

Now imagine your future self in Chapters three and four. 

What name would you give each of the two remaining chapters?

What types of activities do you imagine being your focus? 

What do you like about what you see? What would you like to change? 

How do you imagine you would go through that process?

WRITE YOUR BOOK

Let me share A Personal Breakthrough.

Build a Ship

Posted on by Byron Darden

By inspiring your people to embrace the desire of wanting to make a difference, you begin the development of a leader. There is a moving quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery that reads: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the sea.”

When we inspire people to make a difference, and they discover the value they bring, we are planting the seeds that – when nurtured over time – will grow their confidence, passion, and visionary potential; key components of leadership.

When we are inspired, the dopamine in our brains is released stimulating a sense of motivation and energy. This energy is the rush we think of when positive thoughts enter our brains leading us to think in different ways that ultimately lead to the types of actions we take. One of the ways I develop leaders is to provide them with examples and put them in situations where they can draw on all their senses to physically experience, see, hear, smell, taste, and think about how they respond to positive vs negative language use. We address the concept of indoctrination that happens to all human beings within a society where norms are established.

We then perform a variety of activities that allow them to get in touch with how their senses take in the world around them and synthesize the individual components to produce different experiences in the mind, body, and spirit. Experimenting with these different experiences allows leaders the opportunity to gain insight into where their intentions may or may not align with their impact.

By transferring these experiences to their teams and employees, the leader begins to help those around them to rewire neurologically the synapsis that leads to new pattern development in their behavior. When we experience the influence that the new behavior has on our outcomes positively, we are more likely to repeat and embrace the different state of mind that aligns with the new future state that emerges upon completing a change initiative within an organization.

These are guiding principles to support your team through a change. They are also crucial considerations to take into account when doing your inner work of Life Planning. 

Life Planning is the human side of financial planning which seeks to discover the most profound goals of a leader through a process of listening and inquiry. Life Planning connects the dots between a leader’s financial realities with aspirations and the life they want to create for themselves. Through this process, the client harnesses behavior and relational aspects of financial planning that lead to the inspiration to mindfully pursue their aspirations.

Life Planning in contrast to Life Coaching – which can be a byproduct of Life Planning – results in developing another useful tool that serves you well as a whole person of whom, one of many roles is a leader. Once your Life Plan is in place, Triple Axel can work with you in manifesting that plan through coaching and program offerings designed to transition your life accordingly.

Examples

  • Life planning can provide you with a roadmap for the future
    • Starting a nonprofit organization
    • Retirement planning
    • Move to Volunteerism
    • Pursuing a promotion
    • Changing Fields/Industries
    • Starting a business
    • Living the life you want rather than someone else’s life because you did not plan your own 
  • Ground you in the work you’ve currently chosen
    • Supporting your personal brand
    • Clarifying your why and uncovering your motivations
    • Building compassion for your team and colleagues
    • Deepening your leadership effectiveness
    • Advise and coach your team with care
    • Sharing personal stories that inspire
  • See and experience others more mindfully and from a deeper knowing
    • Providing thoughtfully for your family
    • Building empathy for others
    • Sharing personal stories that inspire
    • Become a more effective listener
    • Deepen your inner peace
  • Reduce the anxiety and stress often coupled with climbing the corporate ladder
    • Develop focus and concentration
    • Manage anxiety and stress with deep breathing practice
    • Take more risks in low-stakes situations to build confidence
    • Increase self-reflection time and opportunities
  • Help you build a stronger and more sustaining relationship with yourself and your community
    • Capitalize on Strengths and Overcome Challenges
    • Enhance comfort with vulnerabilities
    • Strengthen your confidence
    • Let Go more effectively
CREATE A LIFE PLAN

Time to think about Where Do You See Yourself?

Design a Roadmap

Posted on by Byron Darden

Here’s a simple task to turn your experience inward and discover what’s important to you:

Start with identifying what it is that you do at the very heart of your role as a leader. Consider the essence of your leadership, not just your tasks. Consider a metaphor that sums up who you are as a leader and as a person that is inextricably linked to your what!

Then look at why you’ve found yourself on this path. 

Next, explore how your knowledge can help you build a roadmap through life transitions you’ll face up ahead whether or not you’ve prepared. Consider these questions:

  • Will you be leading teams right up until you decide you have something more you want to do? 
  • Will you view your current state as a stepping stone to something that is calling you? 
  • Are you even aware there may be a calling you’re not hearing because of all of the noise that gets in your way? 

Taking the time to look into planning your own life, will support you in more effectively planning a new life (future state) in which your team will do their work, accomplish their tasks, and achieve their personal goals.

BUILD YOUR MAP

Next learn how to Build a Ship.