Oscar Trimboli: The sophisticated and paradoxical power of deciding if and when to listen. G'day, It's Oscar, and today we have a question from a Deep Listening Ambassador in Japan.   Shaney: Hi Oscar. This is Shaney from Tsukuba Ibaraki, Japan, and my question is about listening as a leader. Do you have any suggestions about how to continue to listen deeply as a leader when you tend to receive comments, suggestions, and ideas from so many people all day every day. It can be quite surprising for people who are new to leadership positions to realize just how much time leaders spend listening to people and how tiring it can be when the fourth or the eighth person in a day asks you if you have a minute and then launches into a rant or a criticism or a suggestion of how to improve something. Listening is so very important to leadership, but it can also be really, really hard to listen to comments and suggestions all day long, especially because you feel a personal obligation to fix the problems that people bring to you.   Oscar Trimboli: Thanks, Shaney. This is a wonderful paradoxical and universal question independent of organization, culture, location, or country. My favorite kind of question, if you like Shaney, have a question about listening in the workplace, email  podcast@oscartrimboli.com This question, it's a question about choice and timing. It could be about when to listen and when NOT to listen. It's also a question about attention and your listening batteries. When it comes to your listening batteries throughout the day, you need to check and notice what's your battery level right now is a green, yellow, red. You need to check what color your listening battery is before you start listening. Something I learned from James Clear in episode 67, advice is often context dependent. Shaney, I'm going to avoid giving you advice here as James points out questions can help you navigate beyond the context. Let's listen to how James explained it.   James Clear: And one of the women that as a reader of mine and I talked to as I was working on the book, she lost a lot of weight, and she had this really great question that she carried around with her. Questions are often more useful than advice in the sense that advice is very context dependent. It's like, "Oh, it works in this situation, but what if you find yourself in a different situation now it doesn't apply as much." And the question that she carried around with her was what would a healthy person do? And so she could go from context to context and sort of have that question to reinforce the identity. That's actually in many ways, more useful than having a good workout program or a good diet plan because that you can only do once. But no matter where you're at, you can ask what would a healthy person do?   Oscar Trimboli: Shaney, I'll share with you four types of questions, four categories of questions for groups of questions that have helped my other clients. It's important to understand that the question you are asked is very, very common and it's amplified when you're in a leadership role. The categories of the four questions are what, when, how, and who. Let's start with WHAT. What would make this a good conversation? What would make this a great conversation? What would make this an effective conversation? What do you want from this conversation? In the book, how to listen, we cover off the use of this question throughout the book, creating a listening compass for you and the other participants. It's a great way to hack the conversation to make it much shorter for you and for them. The reason we want to ask a WHAT question right up front is you want to understand the context for them and for you, because shortly I'm going to invite you to make a choice about when you should think about answering this question, Shaney. So let's move to WHEN Here's a group of questions to think about. When is the best time to discuss this with you? When is the best time for us to