The Listening Campaign with Kai Degner: Recent Episodes
Kai Degner
Kai Degner focuses on expert listening and communication skills in the context of leadership and management, democracy and government, business and nonprofits, and relationships and personal mindfulness. In each episode (and over at the ListeningCampaign.com blog), Kai relates his Breakthrough Listening lessons and strategies to supervising teams, running meetings, designing public dialogue and civil discussions - and even running for office. Thanks for listening!
Just as with any behavior change, motivation is a key ingredient.
What do we do when we are not motivated to listen?
This Listening Lesson has 3 parts:
- A Quick Motivation Science Lesson
- Exploring Your Motivation to Listen
- Brainstorming Opportunities for your own Listening Breakthroughs
Get your pen and paper handy for this episode!
Learn 2 super simple listening techniques and 3 Breakthrough Listening strategies.
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Listen Anyway: The Golden Rule of Breakthrough Listening
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W.A.I.T.: Ask yourself, "Why Am I Talking"
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Tongue on Roof of Mouth!
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Follow the Speaker's Path
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The Listening Campaign Button: Use yours as a reminder and as a conversation starter (Get one today!)
This lesson continues the theme of creating a useful mindset for Breakthrough Listening. In the last episode, I introduced the concept of achieving breakthroughs in your professional, personal, or even political conversations by focusing more on leaving people feeling fully heard and understood. I’ll dive deeper into that soon, and if you want to get a headstart on that, use the worksheet in the Member’s Area of ListeningCampaign.com titled “Brainstorming Opportunities for Listening Breakthroughs.”
OK, so with that, Listening Lesson 3 has only two sections:
- A quick leadership science lesson about implicit prototypes
- 7+ Annoying Listener Prototypes - and how you can help me expand this list
You may be surprised to learn if you are a good or bad listener in the context of Breakthrough Listening. This new approach to listening has a unique goal, and Listening Lesson 2 continues to develop the mindset for a successful Breakthrough Listening Practice. Kai Degner reviews how Listening Blocks get in the way of feeling heard and understood - and reduce the opportunity to achieve breakthroughs in important areas of your life and organization. Members get access to 150+ Listening Blocks and the worksheet to Track Your Listening Blocks. This is the second lesson in the Breakthrough Listening Lesson Diet.
In the FIRST Listening Lesson of The Listening Campaign Podcast, Kai Degner covers three main topics:
- Food for Your Listening Thoughts: Some listening science that argues that you and/or your company should invest time and resources to develop individual and team listening skills
- Introduction to Breakthrough Listening Practice: a new type of listening orientation and skills that Kai teaches to leaders and teams
- Kick-off the Breakthrough Listening Lesson Diet: it is not as bad as it sounds!
Visit the episode's Show Notes to see the citations, resources, and other information mentioned.
My goal in this episode is to describe the rationale and structure of The Listening Campaign business and podcast. If you want to hear the backstory and learn a little more about me, you can do that back in the first episode, where I talk about the big “aha!” that lead me to this project. By the end of this episode, you should have a clear expectation about whether listening to the next episode - the real first episode! - of this podcast could be useful to you right now.
I’ll orient the second part of the introduction around the following three questions:
- What’s The Listening Campaign?
- What’s The Listening Campaign Podcast and how will I keep you awake during episodes about listening?
- Who the heck am I and why should you listen to me talk about listening?
A long, long time ago, back when I had hair, some college friends and I started a civil dialogue project for our campus. Our goal for The OrangeBand Initiative was to promote more engagement and civil discourse at our school, James Madison University, which had about 15,000 undergraduate students at the time (JMU is in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, a couple hours southwest of Washington, DC).
We were trying to do two things: spark conversations about issues that matter, and promote respectful dialogue when people disagreed.
This episode explains OrangeBand and introduces the major rationale for The Listening Campaign.