Vocal Exploring Guide - Talk 5 of 25
Topic: Vocal Exploring Guide
Theme: Listening
Author: Barry Sweet
Date: January 7, 2018
Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com
The power of the Vocal Exploring Guide is in listening. The word listen in Japanese is made up of two symbols ear and gate as though the gate can be open… or the gate can be closed.
And if you take the word listen and scramble the letters all around and reassemble them it spells the words silent. And this is the power of what we're doing is knowing the power of listening is and being silent and letting another just simply explore and vocally explore.
So it seems that there are really two pieces. The vocal exploring guide does this combination of 95% listening and 5% speaking. But in creative solutions finding then there's this dynamic interchange and there's no percentage of listening or speaking or not there's just a there's the dynamic interchange… and what we do is we vocally explore together when it comes to solutions finding and often we call this vocal volleyball. If I've got an idea, I hit the ball over the net to you and then out of obligation it's your obligation to hit it back to me. And it is exploring together basically. There's a scripture in the Old Testament somewhere that says “As Stone sharpens stone and iron sharpens iron, so does one person sharpen another.” Neil says that there are two sections to the sharpening. There's the rough hew stone sharpens stone, and then the fine tune razor's edge hew which is the iron sharpens iron. We do both of those sharpening with each other when we're doing that dynamic interchange of ideas. We're looking for solutions.
And so I would prefer vocal volleyball rather than one-way volleyball any day.
A reciprocal volleyball game, that's lively and interactive. The best part about is that your story informs my story and just by you doing the telling of your story, it informs my story. You're not lecturing to me you're not trying to teach me something. You're just telling me your story. And then I have a chance of going “Huh…”. And “Huh..” by the way, is one of my favorite words in the English language. When you say that word you are engaged and... and you are “Got” and that's the great part about our stories is that my story informs your story and your story informs my story. That's why we do it to upspin from each other and to learn about how life works. But by the telling of your story or the or me telling of my story that is not The story.
We are always searching in life trying to find the story and we get wisps of it and learn about it from each other. Jeremy Coen says as a filmmaker the best thing you can do is not do the moral at the end of the story but have your watchers walk away and go “Huh…. “ and have it somehow seep into you. It doesn't kick in the teeth, it… you get it somehow and it's not even something you can sometimes put in words, it's in the realm beyond words. That's OK. That's where the life-changing stuff is. The idea is that we take each others’ story or each other solution or each other's idea and we do this thing called “Upspin Everything” and when we realize that upspinning is a possibility… to doEverything…then suddenly every idea can get better… if you learn something that changes your life (from me) up spin it, make it better and then share that with other people.
That's what it's about. It's all of us upspinning each other and coming to the greatest solutions and the greatest ideas and living greater lives, more fulfilled lives happier lives.
Let's say that we're doing some of this Vocal Exploring in a small group to try to find a solution. In your small group, they say you should sit exactly shoulder to shoulder. Nobody back one inch because if you’re back then that makes a statement about how deep your involvement is in the group. Everybody shoulder to shoulder, everybody with a voice. Not a person without a voice. Everybody with a voice. And also, it is encouraged for us to “Leave Nothing Unsaid.” Explore that little unswept corner, that little thing that you want to say but you think “that's not important enough”. But if you have a chance to say that… someone can upspin that and find the juice in it and that's what this is about.
Everybody has a voice. Solicit the quiet voice. Both the extroverts and the introverts. I had a conversation between the extroverts and the introverts one time and the introverts said “We can't stand you extroverts. You talk all the time. You think your ideas are the only ideas.” The introverts say “We can never get a word in the conversation because you extroverts never stop talking, so we never have a chance to say anything that we might think… you never get a chance to hear what we think we might have a great solution but you're so busy talking that you don't take the time to hear… We could be a treasure trove, a mine full of diamonds and you'll never know it.” This is where we need to back down from our egos and just say everybody speak, “Leave Nothing Unsaid”, tell us what's going on in your mind. That's when we have the opportunity to see what I've been calling “a hundred ways to photograph an elephant.” There are a hundred ways to photograph an elephant… from the left, from the right, from the front, from the back, underneath, from the top, from the tusk, close up, distant.
But we don't all have the privilege of seeing from all 100 perspectives. That's why we need each other. We need each other to speak each of those perspectives so that we can get a good view of the elephant. Get a good view of life. Figure out what's going on down here since they didn't give us a manual. We're trying to figure that out and get it piece by piece. It's cool.
It's a discovery. It's set up that way… the answers are not laid out on a silver platter for you. You gotta mine the diamonds… and I've often found that there are guards posted at the gate to the diamond mines. I don't know what it is, I don't know… part of the mysteries of the universe. But you go out to work hard when you get close to the truth because it's elusive.
And it is not there on the ground, because it's buried like treasure, you've got to dig… and the guards posted at the gate are posted to keep you out. That makes you have to even work harder to mine those diamonds and get those treasures and be able to live with him for the rest of your life.
I learned one of the best things ever from Paul Kite. He had his trailer and he came year after year and worked with us… and he said to me these words one day “I hate RV campfires. Because every night it's the same conversation… My bear story is better than your bear story”. And it doesn't matter what the topic is. My vacation was better than your vacation. And he said he came to despise those campfire talks until one day he finally realized that all anybody ever wants is for someone to listen to their story. That's all they want… without topping it. And saying “My story is better than your story”. So he said I decided that I would make myself that person. I would be the person that would listen to everyone else's story….and be enraptured by it and celebrate them and their story. And he said “It's been life-changing for me”.
That's a case in point of a person that's been able to let go of their ego, and make their life about something other than just themselves, and the power of listening. It becomes so much fun because people get affirmed for the first time and they get a chance to have someone celebrate them.
I think there's a little piece of that in all of us, that we just love it for someone to say “What a great story…!”
(“And now let me tell you mine” without going on to that last part.)
It's just a gift. It's a gift that we give.
It's a gift that we give one another.
It's a quiet service that we do.
So when we're doing solution finding… one of the most powerful images that I have is to talk about The Three Rooms of Discovery. The Three Rooms of Discovery… Again this is looking down from the top but we come into the first room of discovery and we come in at the door right here, and we walk in and we feel the walls because it's dark and there we can't see anything, and we bash our shins into this chair and then we fall into this hole and we keep feeling around and we get back here and then we say “Oh Wow… look there's a crack… Hey, that's not a crack… That's a door...!
And then we come into the second room of discovery… and in the second room of discovery, if you thought it was dark in here (the first room), it is superdark in there because all your ambient light is gone. And so what you do is you start feeling around on the walls just to see what it's like in that room of discovery and you get over here and you bash your shins into that chair and then you fall into that hole and then you keep following around the wall and you get back here to this end of the wall and you say “There's another crack…!”
Wow… it's another door… and then you go into the third room of discovery. This is when the fun happens, because when you get into the third room of discovery you find that there's another person in there who's just as brave as you have been willing to go way off the tracks to look for solutions. They're very creative and they're fun, they're risk takers, adventurous and that's when the party starts, because then you've got another person to help you do creative problem-solving. And the fun part about that too is that then they take you around the room and they say “Hey watch out. Right over here. There's a chair you're going to bash your shins into. And ooo look out for that hole…” And the fun part is, is that when you've got another person in that room with you in the third room of discovery you can find these wonderful creative solutions.
And when you're looking around… it is not surprising that when you get back up here… there's another door… And then you blow off the page and can find solutions that you had no idea even existed. Ideas that you never even dreamed of. It's all about exploration, but nothing like exploring with a friend. When you're doing solutions finding and creative problem-solving. There is no real wise mentor. There's no guide… there's no leader.
We actually don't even believe in mentorship where we work. The mentorship model says that the wise sage mentors the newbie. But we believe in something that we call the Mutual Mentorship model and we're all different sizes and in those different sizes of us…
We find that yes, the wise sage does mentor the newbie, but the young person teaches the older person how to run their cell phone apps and everybody teaches each other what they've learned about life.
And it goes all over the place. I have learned some of the greatest things of life from the 20-year-olds that work in my office and some of the greatest things of life from the 76-year-olds in my office. And it goes all different ways. There is no wise sage and wise guide because there are 100 ways to photograph the elephant… and none of us have the privilege of seeing from all 100 angles. So we've got to invoke what each other knows and have the benefit of learning the wisdom of what each other knows. (I can never see all of the combinations here on the Mutual Mentorship diagram. There are so many of ‘em). But it goes on and on and just when you think you've learned it all, you haven't at all, learned it all. There's still another connection that you didn't see.
And so we call it Mutual Mentorship and we use it every day. And when everybody has a voice and there are no silenced voices. You have this incredible benefit of wisdom from all around you. And you can't help but tap it. It's just too good to miss.