YouSaid · the spoken record

Carolyn Coughlin

lines on the record: 77
first: 2023-01-24
most recent: 2023-01-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sounds so trite. I just want to look back on my life and know that my presence mattered to somebody else, like that by me being in Whether it's in a room running a workshop or whether it's in a friendship, whether it's with my children or my partner or anyone else that my presence mattered. And not because I had great ideas, not because I was so smart, but that in my presence another person could be more fully themselves. That's one definition of success for me.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just think what we're both describing here is how incredibly complex we are as human beings and why it could be so hard to change because we have this back to identity, this sense of ourself as a certain kind of person. And it has worked. Otherwise, we wouldn't have here at this place where we have this identity in the first place.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you might wonder what does email have to do with hurting somebody else? It's a pretty big stretch, but not in my mind sometimes.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was conflating respect for other people with being on top of everything. So particularly with regard to answering all my emails, I thought if I don't attend to things, I will be being disrespectful of other people. I will not be, I mean, if you get down to the core of it, I will not good people do not ignore things that need to be done, especially when they affect other people. So there's that whole element to it as well. And I'd say that was a much harder one for me to loosen. And I still struggle with it sometimes because my impact on other people, I'm talking about my identity now. So you all as listeners can think about what yours is. I have pretty strong identity around being a person who other people can count on and who would never intentionally do.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, as you say that, I'm wondering, I'm asking myself, why was I doing that? And it would be so many different reasons. But I think it shifted over time. But there's some element of if I'm on top of everything, my life will feel calm and settled. Like there's some sort of destination in mind. It's like when you finish that last when I was in university, you know, I'd finish my last exam of the semester. There was this momentary feeling of, oh, I'm done. So I think I was in search of that, oh, I'm done feeling. But there are also a couple other things. One is...”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so just, you know, knowing the latest research on everything, you know, making sure that I knew every last possible question that someone could ask me before I walk into a situation so that I have an answer for everything. They first became impossible. So it was through realizing that I was in too much pain trying to get these things be on top of everything. And now I see that trying to be on top of everything actually takes away my attention from the present moment, from being fully present. So I see the temptation of it. I'm really, really grateful to be in this place in my life where I don't feel like I. Need to do that anymore.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my goodness, that's such a good question. The first thing that comes to mind is trying to be on top of everything. So, I used to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to attend to everything from answering every email within a certain amount of time to having, so having a clean inbox where I could actually see the bottom of the inbox on the first page. Attending to making sure my house was clean. This is one that I just had to give up when I had three young kids.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that I do have a very specific answer to that question, which is developing the habit of asking the question, how could I be wrong? So just think about that for a minute, right? Like it is most of the time we don't even think we're wrong. The question doesn't even occur to us could I be wrong? And the question, how could I be wrong assumes that when it comes to the perspective of another person, we probably are very wrong, right? Our perspective is our perspective. from other people's. And so how could I be wrong increases our curiosity? Ideally, the purpose of the question is to prompt us to get more curious, to go beyond our initial kind of assumptions about what the truth is and get curious and ask questions of other people. And so this is my favorite habit when it comes to perspective taking.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put ourselves in uncomfortable situations, whether it's a safe and supportive environment. It's like going to the gym. If you want to build your muscles, you just have to go every day and you do it. So those are the two things I would say are helpful, at least as starters. I think they're actually more than helpful. They're required.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Control everything in order for ourselves to be okay. And so I think, you know, Having that realization, really admitting that it is hard. We want the world to be a certain way because it's mixed. And then the second thing I think is practicing being in discomfort, nudging ourselves just a little bit, a little bit, a little bit in safe circumstances to feel discomfort and stay in it. Our urge is like going back to the body. Often there's this thing called what I call an action urge that when we feel uncomfortable, there's something in our bodies that is saying get out of the discomfort so we act or react to remove the discomfort somehow. Part of seeing the world as it is, not just kind of conceptually, but actually being in the world as it is, requires us to practice being uncomfortable and our bodies are so and all parts of us are really adaptable if we”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to just start for a second with why it's hard. It's hard because sometimes very often the world as it is can feel overwhelming. Can feel too messy to solve. It can feel unpredictable. And in many ways, as human beings, we don't like unpredictability. Although interestingly, we do like unpredictability when it comes to things like athletic events, you know, like who would watch a soccer match if you knew who was going to win and exactly what place were going to happen first, second, third, and fourth, right? We wouldn't do that. That's what makes it fun. Who would go to a movie if you knew exactly how it was going to turn out? But somehow in our own lives, we don't like unpredictability because it leaves us feeling sort of out of control. So seeing the world as it is does require a leap of faith in a way, right, that we will be okay, that we don't need to be able to.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am a this and I'm not a that, right? I'm an athlete and I'm not a student, a person who likes big crowds and I'm not a person who likes to be alone. But as we get older, I think many people naturally start to see themselves in more nuanced ways. Polarity management, seeing polarity, polarity thinking helps us to see things in more nuanced ways, which not everything is nuanced. A lot of things are not. But when things really are nuanced, it's helpful to see them that way and not try to shove them into a box of either or good and bad.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is in contrast to a choice. Like I have a choice every day when I drive to the office. Do I go on the highway or do I go on the back roads? Well, like, that's a choice. That's not a polarity, right? On any given day, I can choose. I'm fine. They're not super interconnected. But polarities are so useful in organizations to help not only to get different and more helpful perspectives on sticky problems. They also get people talking to each other. in ways that I find quite magical. But there are also polarities are seeing the world through polarities is also developmental because it literally changes the way you see the world because you look out at the world and suddenly you begin to see so many things are interconnected, so many things are not either this or that. That's true inside me as well. When we're younger, we tend to see ourselves as”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes we need to be decentralized, sometimes we need to be centralized. In some places, in its dynamic over time, right, in a very personal sense, what I would call an intrapersonal polarity is a question of do I focus on my needs or do I focus on others' needs? Well, both because if I focus on only my needs pretty soon, I'm going to be able to get a lot of the negative aspects of that. I'm going to be isolated. I'm going to feel disconnected and I'm not going to be able to get my work done. If I focus only on other people's needs, I'm going to get the negative aspects of that because I will lose myself. I won't have a voice. I'll probably get burnt out. So a polarity or it's two things that are like an energy system in that they are inherently interconnected and to get the best outcomes over time, you need both.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Polarity management was the one that I was going to talk about next. So in a nutshell, for those of you listeners who are not familiar with what a polarity is, this is based on the work of Barry Johnson, who developed the idea of a polarity years and years ago, decades ago. And I don't know whether it's just me who's now sees polarities and polarity work everywhere or whether it's becoming more commonplace. I think it's a little bit of both. But a polarity is two things that are interconnected and that over time you need them both. So it's like an example in organizations is centralized, decentralized, right? If the question is, do we need to be decentralized or centralized? The answer is most likely both.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immediately to sort out if I'm facing some sort of a challenge, like again, as a team, to sort out which bits of the challenge are obvious so I can just automate them, don't have to worry about them, don't waste time on them, which parts are complicated. We need to figure them out and which parts are complex. And then so we deal with those things differently, as we talked about earlier. But also seeing the world as this framework helps us see the world as it is in its full complexity, that is also really developmental because it changes the whole mindset, changes my sense of what I need to be as a leader, as a person dealing with it. It changes my view of others from obstacles to necessary parts of the system. So there's all kinds of ways. Do you want another one?”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can be developmental in terms of the way I see the world, the more perspectives I can make room for, the more complexity, the more the world becomes a mosaic, right? And so I begin to see it in its fullness more and more, and that is a developmental move. So listening would be the first one, I would say. Another one that I find really, really helpful is, well, actually, the idea of complexity itself, right? So helping people to see the world as a friend of mine used to say, to see the world as it is rather than as you want it to be. So there's a, you know, we teach about complexity through a particular framework called the Kennevin framework that I think is pretty widely known these days. And so it's a framework that can help.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the first one is probably listening better is immediately useful because it enables you to get perspectives that you might actually need to solve a problem. Super useful. When teams listen to each other really well, it makes room for all the perspectives that might be needed to solve the problem. But listening is also developmental because it helps, it changes my relationship to me. If I listen deeply, I begin to see that I might begin to question my own assumptions. I might begin to see myself differently through your eyes. So it's developmental in terms of the way I see myself. It's developmental.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to say, Shane, that there's something that happens to us as adults that we think we have to have it all figured out ourselves. If you don't have this idea, this is great. For those of you out there who have never had that idea your way ahead of the game in my book, but we don't. The world is way too complex for that sometimes our greatest resource is right there in front of us in the form of another person or someone else's idea. Like we don't have to do this alone.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, like, why is the sky blue? For example, we don't ask those questions anymore because, you know, we feel that's a question we either should know the answer to or it's not relevant. I often talk about borrowing questions from other people. So listen to the questions. Like I'm listening to the questions that you're asking, Shane. And I'm noticing some of them, I love their questions I never thought to ask. And so like I'm making a note of them. I love those questions. So that's the best way I know how. Notice the ones you habitually ask and borrow shamelessly from other people's questions.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's just one example. So, how do we get different questions? I really do think we get them most from other people, often in at least as a start. So we borrow them from other people. Often when we're teaching about this idea of asking different questions, we ask who in your life asks the questions that are either most different from yours or the best questions. And do you know what most people say? Children children ask great questions because they're not, they don't have the overlay of what should I be asking? They don't have the overlay of I need to look smart. They don't have any filter. They're just asking the question that occurs to them. And so these are questions that we often as adults don't ask anymore.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing is to notice the questions that you currently ask. So each of us has habitual questions that we ask as well of ourselves, of others, of the world. I was working with a coach years ago who was extremely helpful. And he noticed that I habitually asked the question, why do I do this? And there's this idea that our questions direct our attention. So you are alluding to this a minute ago. So the question that I ask then becomes where I look. So my attention because of this question, I would get sort of intensely focused on trying to figure out what was wrong with me or what was what led me to do certain things. Turns out to be helpful in some ways, but often, you know, like most of us, we hit a dead end with that question. And so even if I got to the why, I do this, it didn't always result in me changing behavior.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so you don't need another person. It can become a habit, a habitual question that we ask ourselves. I'm a case in point. You know, I would 15 years ago, if you had asked me to notice, where do I feel something in my body? I would say, I don't know. I would say, okay, I can make something up. You know, let me just make something up. I'll just tell you. It just takes practice.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're unused to even noticing that you have a connect, that there's a connection, you might say, what do you even mean by that? I don't know. And then I might just like invite you to turn your attention inward and to see if you can scan and notice if there's any connection and what it might be between any kind of sensation in your body and this sense of being super busy and don't have time for any distractions. So this is where another person can be so, so helpful. It's about creating noticing connections between things that are happening in our head, which is what most people are used to noticing and what's happening in our bodies. So it's just practice that way, really.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This one, I'll start with how someone else can help us do that. And this is what a lot of coaches do this, coaches who pay attention to our people's somatic experience, is simply to ask. So if you were to say, Shane, I feel really like I have to get this thing done right now. Like I'm so busy, I can't be distracted by anything else. I might say, so where do you feel that in your body?”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is another one that you might find helpful, which is called, we call it listening to fix. And this is probably by far the most common one. So listening to Wynne is let me make the problem go away by telling you you don't have a problem. Listening to learn or listening to see is getting underneath literally really getting underneath what's being said and reflecting back to the person. And listening to Fix is, let me take your problem and solve it for you or help you solve it. So just so you have the whole repertoire.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To her it looks like you're really upset because he is relying on you for everything and you don't think he should have to be doing that and it's not your responsibility. Is that right? And he could just literally see her whole body like breathe out. So I generally took the approach of doing something different, of making a deeper listening move. And my hope was that they would see that over time and notice the impact it had on them. I probably could have been a lot more direct about it now that you say it, Shane.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, honestly, I didn't use the phrase with them. I wish I had now, you know, I really wish I had been more explicit about it. I took a more kind of indirect approach in which, you know, for example, if I have twins and when they were younger, my daughter would often, well, they all listened to win all the time to each other. But there were times when I can remember when my daughter would get so upset with my son for making her life miserable in whatever way, right? Like I have to do all your social life for you. I have to remind you of, you know, what homework we have. It was this kind of stuff. When she was doing that to him or vice versa, what I would do is I would come in and make what I would call a listening to learn or a listening to see move where I would say.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super helpful in shifting a pattern because it helps you to notice the pattern instantly each time it's coming up. The other thing I noticed just about feedback, the importance of feedback, right? We often cannot see what we're doing. And this is why we need company. And we need company with whom we have trust who will tell us. Things that we can't see in ourselves. This is one of the core conditions for being able to shift and change.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I guess my point is there are many things that you can do to help somebody to notice what they're doing, in turn, in this case, in terms of how they're listening. One is reflecting back to them what you're seeing and the impact of that. One is the invitation to invite them to reflect on it, the connection between what they're doing and what they want. Another is giving it language. I love hearing that listening to win is such a powerful phrase. It is because you can just say that. It's like having some sort of a reminder every time you do something, like a light goes off, something flashes and it helps to create the connection between this thing that you're a really instant connection, a reminder of what you're doing. So the idea of listening to win, absolutely can be a”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think you may have a part of your answer already. So it sounds like what you're doing is you're creating the conditions for him to reflect on what the impact of the way he's listening or not listening is having.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I hear so deeply this. I mean, geez, the wanting for somebody change something that is making, in your view, making their life unnecessarily hard and worrying that maybe tell me if this is right, but worrying that if you don't help them change this, it might just become a more and more and more ingrained habit that continues to make their life hard.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I can hear that really that sort of deep desire for him to not have, yeah, for life not to be harder for him. Because he is”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How old is your child? I ask that because it really does make a difference at their developmental stage, how you might go about this. And I'm struck by your phrase, I think you said, how do we coach this out of them?”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really, really foregrounding the fact that each of us never really knows what another person means. And so we can only be curious to find out.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I mean is what you're fused with. It's like the water you're swimming in, the lens through which you see things but you don't actually even know you have a lens. And what is object is what can be held out and examined and talked about. Like a value is object if you can see how it's shaping what you do and don't do, a value is subject if it's invisibly shaping what you do and don't do, for example. So in the subject, this growth edge coach training that several of my colleagues and I run, what we're teaching coaches to do is to listen for what is subject and what is object. In listening in that way, you have to be listening below the surface of the story. And every time you hear a word or a phrase wondering, hmm, I wonder what that person means by that. And so it's amping up curiosity.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end of that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen and fully seen is itself a condition for learning to listen. Well, on the other end of the spectrum, there are very particular techniques that help people listen. Well, for me, the most important one has been really the training and understanding of adult development theory, particularly the one that my colleagues and I are most, have most depth in, which is the subject object theory that it was developed by Bob Keegan and others. And in the subject-object theory, what you're listening for, the stage of development is defined by what is subject and what is object. And when I say subject,”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've never had anybody ask me exactly that question before, Shane. I guess the first thing I would say is that listening tends to be contagious. So how each of us listens does tend to wear off on other people. So I've noticed, again with my children, that when I listen what we call, I often call listening to win, which is to just make them wrong or like when I say, oh, that's not true. You look great. Or don't worry about that. You'll be fine. It might feel good to me in the moment, but it's not kind of, they don't feel heard. I find that when people feel really, really truly seen and heard, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have. And so.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“us to grow in particular grow and change in particular ways. And as I found out with my children, it's not a guarantee. Trying to orchestrate things just right so that, you know, You're hanging out with exactly the right people who will get you the exact right result is probably the wrong mindset, a more helpful mindset is that people, communities do create the conditions for particular things and we couldn't be intentional about which people and communities we spend time with in service of moving ourselves in a particular direction. And it's no guarantee, which is the way it is in complexity always. There's no guarantees ever.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm chuckling because I'm the parent of three young adults. And anyone who has ever had kids, you might notice that who your kids hang around with feels really important. So I noticed that whenever one of, not as much now, but when they were younger, when one of my children would be have a friend that I thought would be a really good influence on them, either because they were like a hard worker or ambitious or kind or not the sort of person who got into trouble, I always thought that was great, you know, and I wanted to amplify that. So I think the lesson there is there are, yes, of course, the people that we hang out with, I think can make a huge difference in shaping and creating the conditions for.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're creating their own conditions for profitability because they know the patterns of human beings, the people who own the gyms.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We always have the opportunity to change our environment, right, as a way to help us, let's take losing weight. One condition that we could create is to take all the stuff out of our refrigerator that we're super tempted by that doesn't contribute to our losing weight. Another way to create conditions, if you want to get stronger, is you could buy some light hand weights and keep them next to your computer so that you don't have to do much in order to lift weights and get your muscles stronger. Buying a gym membership is an example of kind of a direct intervention that often fails. I mean, it could be a condition creating thing, but if we think that buying a gym member is going to make us go to the gym, anyone who's ever bought a gym membership or most people will at least have had one experience of doing that and finding that they just wasted their money.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to therapy, or maybe it's even much smaller, right? They get a buddy who might have an influence on them in a particular way, for example. Or conditions might be family dinners, or they might be, so family dinners are a condition. I think that might create, at least the conditions for family conversations, for example.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have dynamics. People play roles. We've probably all heard stories or been part of a story where one person in a family suddenly changes and the family tries to reject the change, right? They want to continue acting the same, even when one person changes. So the idea there is that in a complex system, you have to understand the patterns. And then if you want to make a change, you don't intervene directly because the system will push back. Instead, you make little nudges shape the path, create and amplify conditions so that something can change. So in that family example, the family might, a couple key members in the family, you might identify who were the strong attractors for particular unwelcome patterns and start with those people. And maybe those people be.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creating the conditions is an idea that is one of the core ideas, moves in complexity, right? So if you're wanting to make a change in a complex system, which since each of us as human beings is a complex system, creating the change of becoming a person that goes to the gym, that's a complex, that's a change to a complex system, right? If I want my team to behave differently, I'm also dealing with complexity there because people are complex and human systems are complex. So the idea is that in a complex system, you can't make change happen because the first thing that you need to do is understand how the complex adaptive system currently self-organizes. So what are its current patterns? So if you look at a family as one of the easiest ways to see this, right? Families have patterns.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I heard something about that recently. It's speaking as if. And yes, I totally believe that. It's not a guarantee that if I talk about myself as a person who goes to the gym, that I will become a person who goes to the gym. And it's a nudge to the system. It's a disruption. It's one of the many things that can create the conditions for me to become a person who goes to the gym.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you bring a group of people together to do something, it's the people themselves that matter the most, right? That's the raw material from which the work is getting done. We were doing it, you know, since the beginning. And one of our clients caught onto it early on. And then it sort of became a thing that a lot of our clients do as well.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are several, but I would say the biggest one is that when we meet, whether it's about a client situation or whether it's some internal thing that we're discussing or whether it's just that we're getting together just to be together, we start every meeting with the check-in. We see it as a system scanning exercise. So the check-in, someone poses a question and every person in the room responds to the question. And then we step back and get on the balcony and look at the patterns. The question being, what's in the room today? What are the patterns we're seeing? And particularly when you do a check-in, it's important not only to see the commonalities, the themes, but also pay attention to the outliers and also what wasn't said. So it could take a long time to check in in this way. And if you think about it.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Environment has probably also been a great thing. And it's also true that for the most part, it's easier to connect casually when you're in the office. It is not straightforward as everyone is finding out. What is the US particularly, what's the connection between that and connection and trust? Firm has been remote since we founded in 2011. And I'd say we have a lot of trust, a lot of trust, but we've developed mechanisms to be sure that we connect, that like create the conditions for us to connect frequently and deeply, both in the sorts of connections that we set up regularly as part of our systems and the way that we are together when we connect. So it really trust really can happen remotely.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little lives and to stay home. But when he looked deeper, what he discovered was that these people tend to live further from the office. So their commute time is really long, like over an hour each way. And the professionals, what they would call the professional staff tend to live much closer to the office when they're commuting. They're like in an Uber or something going from one side of Manhattan to the other side of Manhattan and they're working while they're in the Uber too. What the pandemic has revealed is that for decades or longer, people have been coming into the office because that's the thing to do. But there have been differences that have been not really acknowledged, right? How coming to the office is a really different experience for different people. You could say the same thing about, you know, like women in a heavily male dominated work environment, right? Being at home working at home for people who feel out of place in the office.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT