Class Two - Recap and Homework

Our homework following Class Two, the homework's everything, right? It's our opportunity to go out in the world and execute practice and really get good at our empathy-based listening. Let's start. First thing I want us to do with the breadcrumbs, we need to know what these are. How do we figure out what these look like? What I want you to do first, when you're listening to conversations, both sides will be dropping breadcrumbs. I want you to start, every time somebody speaks, ask yourself, "What was the breadcrumb they dropped? What did they most want heard?" Right? On both sides. Then when you're in conversations, I want to make sure we are hearing the breadcrumbs that the person is telling us. We want to be able to make sure, when we hear a breadcrumb, do we know what category it goes into?

Next, we have to respond. We have to respond to demonstrate what? All empathy-based listening is, is we're training ourselves instead of listening to keywords or what we thought were key, but now even real breadcrumbs. Do we make it about ourselves? Do we drag them onto our stage? What does that look like? Are we giving solutions? Are we turning their breadcrumb into a funny story about ourselves or some way that we can look cool or talk about something cool that one of our kids has done? Or are we picking up the breadcrumbs using the IDAMAD to discover? Our homework, I want you to, first of all, don't watch too many people because nobody really graded IDAMAD, but watch how they don't discover. And then I want us to always practice.

Did I discover? Did I solve? Solve, no good. That's our stage. Discover, that's fantastic. That's their stage. When we want to take this to the next level, if you really say, "This is it. I'm all in," it comes down to the art of the IDAMAD. Remember, if I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter. The shorter your response on IDAMAD, the better. It could be simply something as tricky. That's it. But IDAMAD, it's six steps. Remember, blah, blah, blah, blah. Make it simple. Why? The quicker that we give them the opportunity to talk, that's like giving them the breather with the oxygen tank. Now, we're going to look at IDAMAD and it's going to look real complicated. Oh, my god, there's step one, two, three, four, five, six. If you really want to practice and you want to master empathy-based listening, work on your IDAMAD. Make it short. We don't want our words to be fast, but we want our IDAMAD getting on their stage to be quick. That's all I want you to do for homework.

 

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