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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There is an assumption, you hear it in some industries, going to getting people in the office is the only way to cultivate whatever the kind of office culture that people want. That's a pretty simple solution. And it was the obvious one before the pandemic because that's what most people did. Now you've got people who are working from home. And one of the things that we see, I had a conversation with a leader several months ago who's in an industry where they really, really wanted to get people back to the office. He's the head of an office. And so he's really watching the dynamics. And he really, really wanted people to come back. So at first he tried to get everybody to come back. And what he saw was real pushback from particularly the administrative staff. Now, you could say that's, you could make up a story. This is those people just don't see the value of coming into the office. They just want their cushion.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that you mentioned this earlier taking multiple perspectives? We have to often work to find the perspectives that are not only different from our own, but are maybe even threatening to our own. And it's hard enough work when we're showing up at the office every day and going out into a world where we see differences. Because let's face it, we can shut those things out even when we're out in the world. It's just so much easier when we're not interacting with people who are unlike us.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, you're hearing me hesitate here because it's such a, it's such a dire hunt prediction, right? If we were to play this out without any disruptions to that, then the world looks pretty siloed and polarized and isolated. And we may be like, I hear people talk about, and this was true for me, you know, when the shutdown happened, my three kids all came home from university and we got to spend a lot of time together that I thought we would never get again. So that was beautiful, right? People talk about the wonderful things about work from home. And those are your sort of dire story that you laid out doesn't take away from that. And I think we really, really need to watch for it. This is one of the things that we talk about a lot in organizations. Where I work.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pointing to probably one of the most things that is most on the minds of the leaders that I am working with these days. This whole work from home hybrid work question hadn't actually thought about it in the way that you just described, not quite so vividly as you just described, Shane. Like when we work from home, it's much easier to create our own echo chambers, either on purpose or inadvertently. And because we have so much more control over what we let in and what we don't let in”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the relationship between people, people actually thinking about impact on others, trust between people. It's simply its connection between people. It's love, it's trust. You affect me, I affect you. And together, we are more than two people separately.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be really, really important. Like on a, you know, on a team in an organization, right? If you have separation among people, it is a detriment to trust. And when you're dealing with really hard problems that can't be predicted and something just happens, you have to be able to trust each other in order to respond well. One of the things that I care about a lot these days is connection and how important that is. And leaders don't think of that necessarily as a core part of leadership, or at least they haven't. And it is. I think it's probably the most important thing.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I really heard in your story That really struck me was what we're doing is we're creating a separation between us and other people. It's like, I'm not that. I'm this. Creating the separation between us and other people is on the one hand for our own identity formation, it's useful, I think. Like how do we create, how do we construct our own sense of self again in an adult development way? How do we become self-authored, right? Like standing on our own separate from other people. This is important. This is important developmentally. And yet at the same time, the most complex problems that we need to work in our lives these days, they require us to see other perspectives. They require that we build trust and connection with other people. And so each time we kind of fortify our own identity as separate, we are severing connections that might actually”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's whatever considerate, transparent. So that serves me really well. Like it's part of, I think it's part of what makes me successful in life and in work. And it also can get in my way because I often don't stand up for myself. If I see myself as the sort of person who would never do something that might, you know, upset another person, it really limits me. that I can't do anything that would possibly hurt another person or seem like I'm putting myself first because it would disrupt my sense of my own sense of myself.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That identity, right? We've perfected it up until now. In what we do, what we wear, what we say, what we don't say, what we don't do, who we hang out with, we're always projecting this identity, right? Most of it's unconscious. And so what does language have to do with that? It's just one of many ways that our identity is expressed. And every time I say I would never do that, I'm in the middle of a situation right now with a neighbor who's constructing something next to my house. And I don't believe that this person has been particularly gracious or forthcoming or transparent about what they're doing. And I found myself saying yesterday, I would never do that. I'm not the sort of person who would do that that reinforces my sense of myself as a person.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to start with a definition of the definition I use of identity first. I think it might be helpful because that word gets used in a variety of ways and all of them are right. But I just want to be clear about what I mean. I sometimes call it identity with a small I rather than a capital I. I don't mean like my social identity or my racial identity or my gender identity or anything like that. What I mean is how I see myself and how I want to be in the world, how I want you to see me in the world. It's something we've been developing all of our lives, each of us, right? It's we adapt as kids. We learn what works. We learn what doesn't work. We amplify the things. We keep doing the things that work and we tend hopefully stop doing the things that don't work. So we get to a point in our point in our lives, we have this sense of who I am. And we spend a lot of time projecting.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Limiting for people is often as simple as what I described to you, the have to's and the need to's. It often shows up as like I am just this way or I am the sort of person who has to respond when somebody emails me right away. I have to respond within five minutes. Habits of language around identity. I am this way. I am that way. Other limiting language you can hear in what I sometimes call monolithic narratives. So-and-so is always this way. At work, I never seem to get my voice heard. There are so many of them. So what we want is to find enabling patterns of language that help us in service of, you know, what it is we care about.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our language tends to be habitual, like I said earlier. We often don't even notice the phrases we use, right? So I had a client trying to let go of the achievement-oriented nature of her life. She always needing to do things in order to feel valuable. And so she described to me what it feels like to her to be not adding value. So she often used these terms that were sort of like if I'm not doing something, I'm just kind of shuffling around waiting for things to happen. What we did was we explored what does it mean to be like shuffling around waiting and who are you when you're shuffling around waiting? What does that mean for you? But sometimes it's not that overt. And so language that is.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This friend as a developmental coach, and so she's kind of in the practice of wondering when she hears somebody use a word or a phrase, she notices the dissonance between what she would mean by that and what she notices I might be meaning by that, right? So this is the listening below the surface. This is listening for meaning. So it's getting below underneath the story or the words and wondering how does that person actually mean by that? And it's it can be a really hard practice to be in because we also have to do that while we have to be able to notice. and wondering then like how is it different right always noticing what i think it means is probably wrong and how could it be wrong and therefore i have to inquire”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on my better days, I see it that way. And, you know, when I feel overwhelmed, I don't know how it is for you. I'd love to hear. It's harder to see it that way when things are really, really pressing on you. For us to feel satisfied with the mosaic on any given day, in some ways we have to be able to step back and look at it and see how beautiful it is. But when you're stuck in the mosaic because things are so pressing, really can't see the beauty of it. All you kind of can see is the mess.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With these sorts of things, because often I will listen to the metaphors that a client uses and try to tap into those when somebody is talking about balance. I will present to them like a scale, an old-fashioned balancing scale. And I'll just ask them, like, how does that feel to you? Is that actually what you're going for here? Sometimes it makes sense for me to introduce a metaphor that's slightly different and ask them to consider that.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the work life balance, it's almost like I get the visual of one of those old fashioned scales, you know, and you're trying to get it just right. I need just enough of work and just enough of home just to get it just right. And it's as if there's a balance point that you can reach that will be static and sustainable. So if someone sees it that way, I would probably ask a question, you know, what's the most important thing to you about getting the balance just right? Or what's the worst thing, you know, about not getting it just right? So I would probably want to disrupt that, the underlying assumptions about work-life balance is the thing first or begin to offer it, offer a disruption and see where that goes. I also have to find metaphors to be really helpful here.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of it really depends on where they are in terms of how they make sense of these things. So work-life balance, like notice the difference between work-life balance and mosaic, right? Those are really different. If someone that I'm working with is talking about work life balance, I may not immediately go to, what if you thought of it as a mosaic?”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just by using the language I choose to, it actually cultivates or constructs a new meaning around what you're doing, rather than the world or someone else doing it to you, you're stepping into it in a different way. Right. And it isn't just a pretend thing. This whole idea of acting as if it's talking as if, speaking as if I were choosing after a while, that translates into your actually seeing it as a choice. It often we just think of our language as throwaway, right? We don't see it as so important. It's almost invisible to us a lot of the time. It's habitual.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intervention, right? It seems almost so simple as to be silly, but it really, really changed the way I made sense of my relationship to my responsibility, the role in the life of my family. It made it possible for me to show up differently with them as well.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Used the term have to get home. I need to check on them. I need to call. And so this, I already had this idea that our language is not just an expression of our meaning making, but it also shapes our meaning making. So when this friend of mine noticed that language pattern, I began to ask a question like, what could I, what words could I use that might actually change the way I make sense, make me help support me to be less torn about this kind of kids and family and the rest of my life thing. And so that's what I mean. And I did. So I started to really deliberately notice and I could also feel it in my body, you know, when I was about to talk about need to and have to. There's like this tightness and constriction. And when I changed the words to want to, it sounds like the tiniest.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I'm a couple of go-to interventions. I'll call them interventions. They're basically kind of something that disrupts our normal patterns and language noticing and disrupting language patterns I find to be very, very helpful as a developmental move. That story happened about 10 years ago when my children were younger and I was really torn a lot of the time because I was traveling around the world. I was really feeling like I was experiencing the most exciting period up until then of my professional career and all parts of my life. And I had these three children at home and a husband who was there with them most of the time because he's a teacher so he didn't travel. He was around more. And I felt torn, you know, between these two parts of my life.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I described it as a map that's really helpful because it gives us kind of a, I find that with my clients, certainly with myself and with my clients, it helps people understand, it gives people a language, a way to see what might be happening, like how I construct meaning of myself and the world has changed up till now and how it might change in the future. So it gives me like a reference point. And yes, of course, there are many, and this is what developmental coaching is all about. It's like, how do we take the experiences that happen to us every day and use them when we are not quite fit, we find ourselves not quite fit for our context, like up to what Bob Keegan called it in over our heads, how can we, what moves can we make to try to develop our meaning making to be more fit for the context? It happens better with companies.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. But then there's another aspect to it. So we look out at the world and what meaning do we make of it. But also there's a way. It's like, how do we make sense of ourselves? And that changes over time too. Of course, that's closely related to what we see outside of us. But it's this interplay. It's really what we see. It's the meaning that we construct. It's often referred to. Adult development theories are often referred to as constructive developmental theories because it's a question of, it describes how do we construct reality? How do we construct meaning? And then how does that change over time?”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Later on, that changes, right? I see an angry face, and I might wonder, wow, what's going on for that person? What might be happening in their life? And it doesn't get so conflated with me. I'm kind of, I get to be more separate from that angry face, but I wonder what does it mean and what, you know, it doesn't like influence me so much. So that's what I mean. Does that help?”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So sense making is when I look out at the world, how do I even know what I'm seeing means? So earlier in our lives when young people look out at the world, what they see makes sense to them in relationship to their own kind of physical well-being mostly. Like they look out and see things like, I would look out and I would see my mother having a stern face with me. And what I would think was, what does this mean for me? Am I in trouble? Have I done something? Do I need to change something so that I will be okay? Later, we look out at an angry face and we think, oh my goodness, I've done something wrong. I've hurt somebody. They might think badly of me. So I must be bad. So therefore, what do I need to do to make the mirror that is this angry face looking back? Back at me be different so that I can feel okay about myself.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So adult development theory is a, I sort of think of it as a map. There are several different adult development theories. I won't go into detail about them, but each of them is a theory that describes how once we get to the adults, so once we look like adults, how does our sense making change? And the big news of adult development theory really when it first was introduced about 50 close to 60 years ago was this idea that even when we look like adults, we are actually like what's not this so easily visible can, but doesn't always continue to change just because someone looks, you know, this 25 years old and looks like they ought to be a fully formed adult, there are still ways that the way they make sense of themselves in the world keeps changing. So it gives us a kind of a map to describe how that works.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 that mind that when people feel really, really truly seen and heard, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have.”
2023-01-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Carolyn Coughlin: Become A Better Listener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT