How to professionally tune your mind for listening in a group meeting

This question comes from Joyce in New Jersey "I'm in back-to-back meetings. The result is that although I arrive on time to the meeting and my mind and attention only arrive 5 minutes later - Do you have any recommendations, Oscar?

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Thanks for the question Joyce and your willingness to clarify your question during our InMail exchange.

Consider the role of tuning your mind, and noticing internal and external distractions.

Tuning

When a professional orchestra prepares for their performance, they tune their instruments every time, whether they are playing in the same concert hall or in a new location, or with regular or guest performers. The process and practice of tuning their instruments before they begin their performance is crucial to creating a predictable and consistently high performance.

Although a musician may have performed in the same building only 24 hours earlier with the identical instrument – they still humble themselves to their fellow performers, conductor, and audience and tune their instruments every single time. While tuning their instruments, they are simultaneously tuning into the sound of other instruments and performers. Tuning is a skill, a practice, and a strategy. Tuning is a sign of discipline, self-respect, and mutual respect—for the other performers, the conductor, and the audience.

Getting ready for the performance is about their physical presence – where they sit, how they sit, lighting, the placement of sheet music, and direct eye contact with the conductor.

Despite tuning thousands of times, the practice of tuning is an act of curiosity and care. It is a process of practice with a mindset towards mastery.

When tuning, they are not going through the motions. It is deliberate, sequenced, and thorough. It is not something they can fake. You either are tuning the instrument, or you are not.

This is a commitment to consistent improvement and creating a memorable experience rather than just playing music.

Professional performers will take between five to ten minutes during the tuning process. This varies based on the age of the instrument, their knowledge of the venue, and their familiarity with the music.?

When tuning, the Orchestra is always tuning to the note "A" (A is usually 440 Hertz or vibrations per second), led either by the Oboe or First Violin.

When you attend a concert or a performance, you take the time to prepare yourself to listen by taking the time to become present to the location, your physical and human surroundings. Knowing that you will be listening respectfully to the performers and the audience, you switch your mobile devices to a setting that reduces or removes distractions.

In the Deep Listening Research, respondents said switching their electronic devices to silent before their discussions commenced made the most significant listening improvement for 86% of participants.

This action makes a vast difference to your listening. Although it is easy to do, it is hard to practice.

The stories, static, and unhelpful frequencies playing in your mind before you arrive in a conversation makes listening hard. Listening is demanding and draining when you compete with the chatter in your mind.

If you are in a profession or a situation where you can't switch your phone to silent, vibrate or off, announce to the others at the beginning of the conversation that you are on-call or you are expecting a call—explaining before you start signals to the others that you will need to attend to it if a call or message arrives and helps them to understand and emphasize with your circumstances.

Questions and Reflections

1. Whilst reading the story about the Orchestra, what’s different in your thinking about listening?

2. How do you prepare your body, mind, acoustic environment, and physical surroundings before a Group discussion? (either as a participant and or host)

3. What ritual will you create, adapt or change to prepare for listening in every next Group Discussion?

Distractions

Your thoughts about the person or issue you are about to discuss may spark internal distractions. It can be long-term issues you are grappling with or a memory created by a pattern of thinking based on similar conversations. Anything can provoke an internal distraction. (You are even distracted by reading this!)

The crucial part of internal distractions is knowing that they will emerge at any time. People often ask me during media interviews, presentations, or workshops:

"Oscar, how to stop these distractions?"

Disappointing for you, you cannot stop distractions.

I sense the question people are actually asking me is “Oscar, how do I notice distractions and adjust accordingly?”

When you take the time to tune yourself before the conversation, you notice the distractions sooner. When you notice the distractions sooner, don’t judge yourself harshly. The process of preparing and tuning means you observe the distraction sooner, and you reengage in the discussion faster rather than merely drifting away longer.

Anticipating your distractions will reduce their impact.

Categories of internal distractions include:

• Time-based distractions; e.g., the past, the present, and the future
• Anticipating distractions about the conversation, relationship, issues and outcomes.
• Connecting thoughts like corn in a pot that is popping as an idea and thought bounces off the other.

Focus

A military sniper is a silent and singular professional. Although they may act alone in the moment, they need to consider what support they require from maps, their weapons, advanced scouting intelligence, the physical landscape, the environment, the temperature, time of day, and the wind. They need focus, patience, discipline and split-second timing.

When I discussed focus with Swedish is a world champion military sniper Christina Bengtsson she explained.

I encourage you to listen to the audio to help with your focus

We discussed preparing for inevitable distractions in her profession.

She explains:?“perhaps 30 seconds. It was one shot and I need to hit a 10 to win the world title. And of course my mind is full of all these nervous thoughts, especially thoughts connected to future, thoughts like what happens if I shoot a nine, a seven or what if I miss the target?

Time is ticking and the stress is very, very strong, and heart beat, is very, very fast. But then in that situation and with practice, I knew that I was not afraid of taking two seconds extra. It's too nervous. Thoughts like,

"Why have I put myself in this terrible situation."

"No, I'm not good enough. I haven't practised enough."

"Who do you think you are who can actually win the world Champion title?"

In a situation like that can feel like extremely short or extremely long. And If I use that opportunity that, try to get rid of the distracting thoughts and to actually learn to love that moment in which I was, the time kind of felt longer than it actually is.

I took a break and I looked at a little autumn leaf that was moving a little in the wind and I gave this little leaf just for a second or two my full attention.

And in this little second, I was back to focus. I was back to a kind of silence, a situation in which it was only me, my weapon and the targets and no disturbing thoughts at all.”[i]

Christina explaining her inner monologue in microscopic detail reminds you that distraction is something we all struggle with.

Your inner monologue can't be stopped, it can be tamed. Ironically to focus, Christina reset her attention with an autumn leaf.

When you don’t have an autumn leaf in your meeting room or video conference, you do have the opportunity to notice your heartbeat as Christina did.

If you can’t notice your heart rate, notice your breathing as it’s a reliable proxy for your heart rate.

Internal distractions are inevitable.

Rather than reacting, create a reset strategy to return your attention to the present.

It could be as simple as a leaf, a pen or for me I refocus and notice the color of the speaker’s eyes.

Question and Reflection

1. Whilst reading the story about focus, what’s different in your thinking about listening?

2. What technique or trigger will you use to reset your focus and attention when you get distracted?

Additional Question about Group Meetings

Joyce, this is another resource regarding your follow-up question about how to ask effective questions to and for the Group.

External distractions

Your environment, electronics, and other people continuously create external distractions. Some of these distractions you can anticipate, and some will be unexpected. One thing is sure: there will be external distractions. External distractions could be noise, notifications, and, ironically, something you hear in the conversation could be your biggest external distraction of all.

Planning and being conscious of external distractions allow you to anticipate them in advance. The location of the discussion – either face to face, online, or both. You cannot always choose a quiet space, yet you can pick the location with the least noise inside this space. This you can control.

When it comes to online meetings, the device you are using could become a distraction. You can anticipate this and adjust accordingly.

Consider the environment, electronics, and everyone else as three sources of potential distractions.

Environment

• Noise in the room
• Noise outside the room
• Opening door
• Fire Alarm

Electronic

• Phone
• Computer
• Watch
• Chat
• TV
• Online or Video Conference software that fails

Everyone else

• Their volume
• Their speed
• Their language patterns
• Unexpected visitor
• Late visitor

When you anticipate external distractions, their impact is minimized. It is limited because you can predict how to respond. The amount of time you will be distracted consequently will be reduced.

Rather than only your ears, your entire body is a powerful listening instrument.

Listening is about what you hear, see, and sense.

Listen from all parts of your body, including your heart, lungs, and the broader nervous system. These additional listening layers help reduce the effort to listen in your mind exclusively. When you start to listen with your entire body, it becomes lighter, simpler, and relaxed for you and the speaker.

Questions and reflection

1. Which external distractions can you anticipate before the discussion?

2. What can you adjust in advance of the discussion, to reduce the impact of the inevitable external distractions?

Joyce, I will be curious to hear about what you applied and what was effective for you?

If you have a question about listening in the workplace, send me a LinkedIn Inmail