357 - Listening Like a Pro: How to Break the Cycle of Misunderstanding with Terri Lonowski

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational.

Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life.

Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Terry Linowski, welcome to Listening with Leaders.

You have a master's in education from the University of Nebraska, is that correct?

It is.

And your work is a lot like mine. You teach people how to listen and you have this process called Soulful Listening. So that's what we're going to talk about. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I've been looking forward to our conversation and here we are.

Let's just start off backstory and start there. I saw your TEDx talk. You had the picture of the mansion you grew up in in Nebraska on the second floor, restaurant down below.

Gosh.

Right? I'm interested in hearing about that and Grandma Helga. Let's start there.

All right. That just warms my heart to talk about Grandma Helga. But I, you know, as you mentioned, I grew up on the second floor of a stately mansion in a small country town in Nebraska. My family had converted the first floor into a bustling restaurant with banging and clanging and late-night bar crowds beneath my bedroom every night. And I had a quieter temperament. And what I wanted more than anything was to feel seen and heard. And my parents were all immersed in the business and they kind of turned to alcohol for their solace. Fortunately, I had one person that I could turn to, and that was Grandma Helga. Our relationship was important my entire life. One particular conversation after I went to my high school guidance counselor to discuss what was next, he said to me, "Terry, you're a small town girl. You get lost in a big city." Your best bet is to go to secretarial school and work for your family restaurant. Well, that was a death sentence for my spirit. So I turned to Grandma Helga, shared the story, and she was wise, successful in business, resilient, twice widowed. And so her words carried weight. And when I told her this story, she just presenced herself and said, Terri, look at all I've done. Without education. Think of what you can do with it. 2 weeks later, I was at the University of Nebraska. 4 years later, bachelor's. 2 years beyond that, a master's. 10 years after that, I paid off the student loans. So, but that one conversation was so pivotal. It changed the trajectory of my life. And I learned from her how to presence oneself, how to hold the space for other people to evolve even more. And that I've carried throughout my life. And then a series of events have kind of led me to about 9 years ago developing what is now known as Soulful Listening.

So what was the journey that led you into teaching listening as a career?

Yeah, that's a really great question. A little bit later on in my career, I was coaching human-centered design teams from across the nation.

What does that mean?

At the core of human-centered design is empathy, using empathy to change how services are provided to customers and how programs are administered. So you really get in touch with the empathetically with your customer and gain insights. And then from that point, make changes.

Let me step back. My next book is coming out in September. It's called Empathy Leadership.

That there is powerful.

One of the biggest problems I see in, especially in business, is that people talk about empathy. But they really don't know what it means.

How do you define it?

So I look at empathy as, you know, kind of walking a mile in my moccasins. So you gain from another person's perspective. You know what their experience is.

Let me give you my definition, see how it resonates with you.

Okay.

I define empathy, and this is called cognitive empathy, because there's cognitive, affective, and predictive empathy, 3 different kinds of empathy. Cognitive empathy, which is what most people are talking about when talking about empathy, is a learned skill that allows you to read and name the emotional experience of another person from that person's perspective.

Right.

How does that sound?

Yes, yes.

Very precise. Very precise.

Very precise. Okay. All right. I love it. I love it. So anyway, these teams competed from across the nation to showcase workforce innovations at the White House. So my teams, the teams that I was involved with, ended up going to the White House 2 different times, different groups of teams.

Wow.

And from that experience, I really got firsthand experience of the power of empathy. But I still believed that there were major missing pieces in how we communicate. At the same time, I was reviewing some research, and it indicated Over half of the population is lonely, and the health implications of that are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with the further health implications exceeding those of obesity. I wept. This broke my heart. So what, what are we doing? So I sequestered myself for a couple of months and dug deep, you know, like, what makes my relationships different? What makes— how? I interact different. And it took me all the way back to Grandma Helga and then evolved throughout my lifetime. And so I ended up framing this in 5 simple elements that are easy to repeat within the context of Soulful Listening. And it's where, you know, where we build trust and unleash human potential. And it's kind of where this wisdom that I've touched on and neuroscience meet.

Tell me about the neuroscience.

So the neuroscience, you know, you've studied it and you're an expert, so I'm going to be very careful on the words that I use. But when we are in a conversation and we're in fight flight, you know, or we're being triggered by the other person or we're triggered ourselves, we cannot slow down enough to get centered and open up our higher reasoning in the prefrontal cortex. But that's where it is tied together. And maybe it would be helpful for me to kind of skim over the 5 elements?

Sure.

Yes, the first element of Soulful Listening is self-care. And rarely is the direct connection made between high-quality self-care and high-quality communication, but they are linked. And it's the cornerstone. And it's more than a bubble bath.

Why isn't Chardonnay to that?

Now the formula is complete. That's good. But it includes things like, are we setting healthy boundaries? How are we taking care of our physical being? What's that loop that's going on in our head? You know, what's our self-talk? Are we entering conversations with a higher degree of emotional intelligence? Are we in reactive mode? So when we take care of ourselves in the ways that I just kind of touched on, we set ourselves up for the second element of Soulful Listening, which is becoming fully present.

They get bored and distracted really fast.

Sure. It takes intention.

That's right.

And what I love to do in live events is to walk people through a breathing activity so they can experience within their body what that feels like when you become a little more present.

So you teach them a little Vipassana meditation, huh?

Yeah. And it's well researched, the benefits of meditation, of deep breathing. And even like the Navy SEALs use box breathing.

Box breathing, right?

Yes. And so I love to share that. But for right now, why don't we take 3 intentional breaths just where we are right now? Because we all have busy lives. We've all been scrambling. So let's just notice our bodies right now. Notice where you're holding tension. Shrug your shoulders a couple of times. We're gonna exhale all the way, then we're gonna breathe in to the count of 4, hold, and then exhale to the count of 6. Let's begin. Breathe in. 2, 3, 4. Hold. Exhale. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Again, in. Hold. Exhale. Notice the warmth in your heart area. And a final time, in, hold, and exhale. Wiggle your toes. Wiggle your fingers. Notice your body now. What's changed? Yeah. We're all a little more present now. And now you've had an experience of what that feels like. When we truly take care of ourselves and we become present like we just did, we're really ready for the third element of Soulful Listening, which I refer to as Quantum Listening. And Quantum Listening to me would be if active listening, empathy had a love child, it would be this element. And it's where we listen all in with every fiber of our being. We notice things. We notice the emotions of another person. It's expansive. And when we listen in this way, And maybe we have high-quality questions that we interject into our conversation. We gain insights into how we might be helpful to another person, which is very powerful. And that teases up for the fourth element of Soulful Listening: Inspired Action. You know, we all have access to enormous resources, and it can be as simple as making a phone call on somebody's behalf, no strings attached. But when we find an area where we can be helpful and we take this inspired action, it's a game changer. And it helps to build stronger relationships. And then there's one final piece, and that's the feedback loop. And that's when you let a person know that you've taken this inspired action on their behalf. You know, absence of circling back, we spin, we tell ourselves stories, and Most often they're not true. It may be a story that says, oh, they didn't even hear me. They didn't care. I'm never going to open up again. But when we circle back and you say, hey, you know, I made a call on your behalf, or I'm connecting you with this person, look for their contact information on LinkedIn. Simple as that. It can embed integrity and confidence within our relationships. So the next time we come In front of this person, again, the guard is down a little bit further. Maybe they're now freer with offering their genius and great ideas. So anyway, that's in a nutshell.

So let me show you, share with you what I teach, and you can slip it into your platform. I came to listening out of desperation.

Okay.

I was a trial lawyer for 22 years, then I went back to earned my master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies and became a peacemaker in 2000. And in 2005, I was faced with an extraordinarily difficult mediation where the people despised each other and were just screaming across the table, and I had no idea what to do. I had learned active listening, I'd learned nonviolent communication, all of these listening techniques, none of which of course work, as you know. And the thought came to me, listen to the emotions, listen to what they're feeling. So I stopped them, stop, sit down, be quiet, pretty directive. And had, this was a divorced couple, they'd been divorced for 20 years. I had Susan, I said, Susan, I want you to listen to John, but I don't want you to listen to his words. I want you to ignore his words and just tell us what you think he's feeling. And in the beginning, they had a real challenge with that. But in a little while with some coaching from me, it was transformational. 4 hours later, they settled the case and walked out holding hands. And I mean, it was just absolutely unbelievable how it worked. So I didn't know what I'd done, but a couple of years later, a brain scanning study came out of UCLA that explained what happens when you listen to and reflect the emotions of another person, and it's called affect labeling. And you had it, you know, basically what it does is it inhibits the centers of the brain involved with negative emotion, primarily the amygdala, and it also activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that's involved in emotional self-regulation. And so I started teaching this, and then in 2010 began teaching people serving life sentences in prison, starting with women, how to do this. And for 10 years, from 2010 to the pandemic in 2020, I worked worked in maximum security prisons here in California and also in Connecticut and just saw incredible changes. And so that led to my fourth book, De-Escalate, which came out in 2017. And so today that's what I do. I teach people how to ignore the words, read the emotions, and then name the emotions. I used this in this mediation I had earlier this week in this very intense business conflict. And business people were totally not used to this, but I had people in tears. So that's what I teach. I think that would fall into the category of your quantum listening.

Yes.

And extraordinarily powerful. Tell me about, I'd like to hear some stories from you, people that you've taught these skills to, what kinds of changes and transformations have you seen in them?

Right.

You listen to? Yeah.

I have so many stories. I'll share a business one. And there was a company in Scottsdale that had grown from 100 people to $250 within a year. The CEO reached out to me and says, you know, we're having trouble, we're breaking down, we're miscommunicating, we're— on and on it goes. And so what I ended up doing, we agreed on what I would deliver, and then I took it a step further. I went and spent a little bit of time with the company, and I wanted to meet with people at all levels, you know, like the lower level admin all the way up to the C-suite folks. And I got some insights into where the breakdown what was happening. And so then I did a half-day workshop, a little more intensive workshop with all of the executives. And I was able to weave in some of the stories and some real-life examples. And I shared, of course, the 5 elements of Soulful Listening and then, you know, help them to understand how to apply it in the workplace. And then 2 days later, I did a keynote for all of the staff, all 250. So that's one, one way of doing it. And I do like to do keynotes. When I do a keynote, I want to know about my audience, and I will tailor what I speak about so that these stories connect and are relevant. So that's one example. So then the CEO has, you know, written me this amazing testimonial saying that they now understand how to listen and ask questions and, and, you know, it has made a big difference.

Doug Noll, I am just totally on board with what you're saying. And one of the things that I teach and wonder about is we're never taught how to listen, are we?

Yeah.

We're not taught. I think it's just assumed that because we can hear and we understand language that somehow we know how to listen. But my experience as a child, and I'm sure yours was the same, was that we were never told how to listen. And we were commanded to listen. So as a child, we had to listen to the commands of our parents. We had to listen to the commands of our teachers. We had to listen to the commands of our bosses and supervisors, but to never listen. I think that today, especially with technology and social media, the younger generations, they can't even do that anymore. And so I think we have a huge opportunity and a huge challenge to rediscover the power of listening. What do you think?

Well, a lot of ideas and thoughts are bubbling up, so I'm just going to go ahead and get started with that.

No, you're good. Oh, okay.

When you were describing being commanded to listen and commanded to do this, that, and the other thing. That sounds very unempowering when in fact listening is extraordinarily powerful.

That's right.

And so reframing that takes a lot of work because we think that we're being tapped down when we pause and listen. But really what happens when we listen and connect on this deeper level, we hold the space for greater possibilities within another, and within ourselves. That's right. And when we look at how we are communicating, I'll go out for dinner and I'll look at a table of 4 where all the people, the 2 parents and the 2 children, for example, are staring at their phone and they're not interacting. And what concerns me about that is it's not being modeled how to have just regular conversation. And really to evolve into our higher selves, we need to have high-stakes, difficult conversations.

That's right. But people avoid those because they're emotional and they trigger a threat status and we get reactive and people don't know, and then they become avoidant and the problem just escalates.

Right. And we're at a time, Doug, in our lives globally that we really need the best and the brightest in each of us fully expressed. If we're going to offer solutions to the challenges that we have before us.

That's right.

And I believe that deep listening is one way to unleash potential and the genius within.

I absolutely agree. I tell people that if even 10% of the population here in the United States could learn how to listen properly, we wouldn't have the political polarization that we have today. The polarization occurs because people aren't feeling heard. They're not feeling listened to. It's not about policy. It's not about MAGA or non-MAGA or progressive politics or whatever. It's about feeling heard, feeling valued, and feeling appreciated. And the only way that happens is when you— I call it listening another person into existence. When you listen another person into existence, that's when the transformation begins and starts to occur.

Beautifully said.

And so we're on this mission to teach as many people as we can to listen soulfully or to listen deeply and to really take the time to hear other people in a deep way. Every argument becomes unnecessary. All an argument is, is just a cry to listen to me, hear me, listen to me. And why do people yell and shout in an argument? Because they're trying to get heard. And the paradox of argument is I wanna be heard so badly, but I can't reach inside myself and listen to you first, calm you down, and then allow you to listen to me. I just want to, it's selfish. I want to be heard. And the other person has exactly the same feeling and boom, you're in it and can't get out.

Right.

And can't get out.

Yes. And that is a collide of wills.

Oh, big.

Yeah. And you know, we really don't need another person's permission to listen. Sometimes we think we go into a conversation, we have already played out both sides of the conversation. He'll say this, I'll say that. It's going to end like this. And we go in with this script that we are committed to repeating. And if we can just have the presence within ourselves, and it takes a lot to do that. And so that's why self-care is so important, so that when we come into a conversation, we're really coming into it with overflow.

That's right.

You're not pulling from another person.

Right. Exactly.

Yeah.

How do people reach out to—

if people want to find out more about your works, SoulfulListening.com, I think, is your website.

It is. Another way I like to connect with people is on LinkedIn. So feel free to just reach out to me and send me an invite, and we can connect that way. I also have a TEDx talk that I would love to invite people to take a quick listen to and watch.

Yeah, the link to that is on your LinkedIn page. I saw it there. And what kind of work are you doing today? So people wanted to think about engaging you, what kind of, what do you offer?

So I offer, you know, several different things. One of them is to work with a company and I could work with their executive team on this methodology of Soulful Listening. I'm engaged with Vistage right now as a Vistage speaker. So if you have members that are Vistage members, you know, reach out to me and we can have a conversation about that. So those are the ways. I'm in the process of writing a book. So I'm hopeful to have that picked up by a publisher and released, if not self-published, within a year.

That's a, that is a project and a half. Having written 4, actually having written 5, we're on my 5th book.

Congratulations.

It's something else. Simon and Schuster, my publisher is Simon and Schuster.

So Excellent.

Well, Terry, it's been really lovely talking to you. And thank you so much for the work you're doing and helping people learn how to listen. I think that's probably one of the most important things any of us can be doing today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag Listening with Leaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DougNoll. Douglass E. Noll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.