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How to become a great listener with Theresa Campbell

 

In a recent Training Unleased podcast, Evan Hackel and his guest Theresa Campbell discussed highly unusual, revolutionary techniques for becoming not just a good listener, but a great listener.

You will hear practical guidance on listening in this podcast – insights that you will not find anywhere else. You will want to spend some quality time watching it. Here are some highlights of their talk.

Theresa Describes How Most of Us Think about Listening

“I like to remind people that being a master of anything happens when the master knows that they’re forever the student,” Theresa told Evan. “So there’s the initial pressure of, `Oh, I’ve got to make sure I remember what he said or what she said.` But no, no, no, you’re a student and you’re just continuing to evolve and deepen your listening and your ability to connect with yourself and others. The thought to have is `I’m a student like everybody else.’ And that helps you relax into it.”

On Using all Five Senses to Listen

“Listening is not just what we hear,” Theresa told Evan. “I like people to remember that listening is a five-senses experience . . .  what are you seeing as this person says something to you? What are you feeling? What do you smell? What does that message taste like?”

Theresa – and this is unusual – believes that great listening also means focusing on your own reactions to what is being said.

“So not just what are you hearing,” she explained, “but what do you feel? What are you sensing? So when I teach people how to listen, if we can segue to that, there’s an acronym that I love that was taught to me by my first listening teacher. It’s SIER.”

Understanding Theresa’s SIER Structure

Here is what that acronym means . . .

  • S stands for sense, meaning what are you sensing, using all five senses
  • I stands for interpret, meaning that you interpret what you are taking in.
  • E stands for evaluate, meaning that you think about what you are taking in.
  • R stands for respond, meaning that you respond or react to what has been said to you.
How to Introduce Intuition into Great Listening

Theresa believes that great listening happens when people connect to much more than the words that are being said, Great listeners go on to connect with how they feel about what they are hearing, how they receive it, and how their bodies accept it.

“It’s the sixth sense,” Theresa told Evan. “You know, the sixth sense . . . What’s your intuition . . . what is that feeling . . . what is your body telling you? Because a lot of times, we’re not necessarily encouraged to listen to our feelings, right? That’s not professional! We want to keep the emotion out of it. And what I’m saying is you can become so proficient in hearing that you can have a visceral experience and trust that, even if everything somebody is saying sounds true, but something in you says, no, you can trust that. You can create a relationship with yourself and your capacity to listen to yourself.”

Theresa’s Offer to Members of the Training Unleashed Community

Theresa invites you to investigate the complimentary listening sessions that she offers through Her Life, Her Legacy.

“Oftentimes people don’t feel listened to,” she told Evan. “So I invite them to come into a space where they know someone’s going to listen to them. No judgment! I’d love to have a listening session with your listeners, and we can do that!”

Using Deep Listening in Training

Evan believes that Theresa’s ultra-effective listening approaches can help take training to higher levels. When you use them to connect more deeply with trainees, the entire training process can be optimized!

About Our Guest Theresa Campbell

Theresa Campbell is the founder and CEO of Her Life, Her Legacy, a leadership development organization dedicated to the power of deep listening. As a leadership coach, author, and life-long learner, she helps you find and listen to what matters, most.

Theresa, lovingly known by her clients as Coach T, serves humbly with an unwavering focus on service. She has over a decade’s worth of experience in the business and corporate world and has led multi-million dollar sales and marketing initiatives with a Fortune 500 organization (Ford). Her work has been featured in the likes of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Ford Motor Company, Women’s Executive Exchange of Central Florida and Journey by Afrotainment.

As a self-proclaimed, life-long learner, Theresa is committed to mastery. She’s a graduate of Michigan State University (Go Green!), received her MBA from Rollins College and is proudly coached by the world’s top leadership experts. Theresa believes that to be the best, one gets to learn from the best. It’s this attitude of growth, faith, and possibility that drives her mission in life.

She’s the proud author of three books. Her most recent work, Just Listen: Creating Confidence in Yourself, Others & God, is set to be released in the fall 2021.

2021-09-14T17:46:16-04:00September 14, 2021|

Learn from the Way NASCAR Trains with Jay Nadeau

Things can go wrong at NASCAR races. The crowds, parking areas, concessions, all offer opportunities for problems to arise. But despite those risks, NASCAR has established an enviable record of safety for both race patrons and NASCAR employees.

In this episode of Training Unleashed, Evan Hackel speaks with Jay Nadeau, Director of Risk Management and Loss Control for NASCAR, the person who makes everything run safely. 

Many of the training strategies Jay uses can be applied to training in your company too. Let’s take a closer look.

Jay Describes Race Day

“If anybody’s ever gone by a racetrack,” Jay told Evan, “They know it is an empty facility for a good part of the year. And then all of a sudden, the population pops up. There are hundreds, in some cases, thousands of people supporting that event. And for every moving part you have, there’s a potential for injury or accident, and that equates to a loss, whether a personal or financial loss. Safety for any business is always going to be one of the most important priorities.”

Evaluating Success

“Year after year, we look at incidents, which we consider in two buckets,” Jay explains. “First, we want to look at what happens to our employees. And then we look at stuff that happens in our facilities with our guests. Every year, we want those numbers to be less and less.”

NASCAR’s Approach to Training

There are a lot of different roles that people need to be quickly trained to perform. In addition, there are different kinds of people who work the events.

Jay explains, “You’ll have somebody who maybe sells auto parts in his job from Monday through Friday, and then he’s going to run a food concession stand at the track. Well, that person has to be trained. Sales knowledge does not apply to making hamburgers! That’s as simple as I can make it. Without training, things would be chaos, that’s the word I would use.”

How Does Training Work?

In general, training of short-term, seasonal employees starts about two weeks before race day.

“It varies from facility to facility,” Jay told Evan. “Volunteers will come in. They could even be Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, whatever, who want to raise money. They could be helping to park cars or hand out gifts at the gate.

“So the training would be about what the workers are going to do . . . whoever the lead person is, we make sure that they have the proper training or that they have the proper credentialing, and we expect them to pass on what they know to their volunteers. When it comes to concessions, for example, there are food handling requirements, and the training will be in person. For other roles, we might offer an online training course . . .   there is never just one method of training that will work for everyone.”

Training Permanent NASCAR Employees

Jay also points out that NASCAR itself owns 15 racetracks that are located all over the country. So NASCAR has a group of permanent employees who travel to those different facilities. But even though those employees have been trained to do their jobs, they still need to be taught to adjust to the needs of the next facility where they will be working.

“So now you’ve got people who will be working at a different facility,” Jay explains. “But what we’ve learned is prior to those events, we get department heads on a phone call and kind of walk through the whole event again. You can’t have a thousand employees on one phone call, but empowering those department heads to teach their employees and come up with plans they believe are going to be the most effective . . .  it’s a team effort.”

About Our Guest 

Jay Nadeau currently serves as the Director of Risk Management and Loss Control for NASCAR.  After  20 years as a public servant he retired as Battalion Chief from the fire department in  2013. Upon his retirement he assumed the role as the Manger of Emergency services at the Daytona International Speedway “The World Center of Racing”.   After overseeing emergency operations for 6 years he moved to NASCAR Corporate offices in 2019 where he assists in OSHA Compliance, Property Insurance, and all aspects of safety at the various NASCAR owned properties.  During his spare time he enjoys hunting and since 2005 he has instructed new firefighter recruits at Daytona State College.   He is a lifelong resident of central Florida where he lives with his wife and a whole bunch of 4- legged children. (Dogs, Cats and Horses).

2021-09-07T15:10:38-04:00September 7, 2021|

The Transformative Power of Culture with Chuck Cooper

In this episode of Training Unleashed, Evan Hackel and Chuck Cooper on the Transformative Power of Culture.

What steps should you take to lead your enterprise during the post-Covid-19 return to business? Every business leader is trying to answer that question today. So it was timely that Evan Hackel interviewed Chuck Cooper on this issue in a recent Training Unleashed Podcast. Chuck is a consultant and author who is a deep thinker about leadership, motivation, company culture, and more.

We know you will want to take the time listen to the powerful ideas that Chuck explored in his talk with Evan. Here are some highlights from the Podcast.

Leaders Need to Focus on the Nuts and Bolts . . . Get Things Done!

Chuck told Evan, “I think when you’re looking at where we are as a country right now as we’re making that transition into what we would consider our norm, there’s just a lot of uncertainty at this point.

“Yet I think leadership has a good handle right now and has clarity on how they want to move forward. They’re just not sure about the nuts and bolts of how they’re going to go about it. Are they bringing all the people back into the office, or are they going to continue to let part of their organization work from home? And how do you handle that hybrid?

“So there are some unknowns at this point, but I think that overall people are feeling much more optimistic and they’re more sure about where we’re going as it relates to businesses today.”

There Are Many Reasons to Be Optimistic

In speaking of his own company, Chuck said, “So overall, the last year has been really amazing . . . it really opened up a lot more opportunities for us to work with our clients from coast to coast. And so there have been great opportunities because of the number of people who have been vaccinated and the fact that we are moving very quickly. I’m feeling much more optimistic right now where we’re going for the next six to nine months. And I think 2021 is set up to be a really good year for a lot of companies.”

How the Focus on Virtual Work Has Expanded Our Horizons

“Virtual has changed everything,” Chuck told Evan. “You know, where you were in a region before, now you can be anywhere in the country or for that matter, you could be anywhere in the world. You could be in California and be working on jobs in North Carolina. I was just on a call this morning, and we had somebody from South Africa that was that was a part of our conversation.

“So virtual has opened up from a global perspective. We’ve got opportunities now to work anywhere in the world. And it’s going to create some interesting issues for people in the U.S. when we start having people from Japan or from China or other countries taking positions or, you know, accepting opportunities here in Charlotte.”

The Rubber Band Analogy

Evan and Chuck compared what we have been over the last year to stretching a rubber band.

“Over the last year we have done things so differently, we have stretched the rubber band,” Chuck said to Evan. “And if we just release that rubber band, it’s simply not going to go right back to the shape it had before the pandemic. And even if it did go right back to the way it was before, that’s not the right place to be.”

One Key Role Training Can Play

Chuck believes that training can plan an important role. As one example, he mentioned the period when employees are reviewing and renewing their participation in benefit plans.

“I think there has to be an education strategy that has to be implemented from a training perspective,” Chuck observed. “And so what we do with a lot of our clients is we actually have created annual programs for them where we will do things like `lunch and learns’ where we provide PDFs or with handouts and provide them with other tools that can help educate them just on the terminology of the benefit plans and also help them understand how to most effectively use the benefits that they have.”

An Opportunity to Create and Grow to Become Whatever We Want To . . . to Make Things Much Better

Evan and Chuck got excited when they began to discuss how exciting it will be to realize that rubber band is never going back to what it used to be. 

Chuck explained, “The reality is, we’re not going back. It’s never going to be the same. The great thing is we’ve got an opportunity right now to be able to create what we want things to be going forward . . . Let’s make something better, because when you think back the way things used to be, I can remember everybody talking about how the work/life balance was so bad . . .Well, we’ve got an opportunity to make things better. So let’s focus on that. Mental health is going to improve.”

Focus on Company Culture: A Deep Insight from Chuck

“Let’s get back, though, to culture,” Evan said to Chuck. “Because culture is king. Someone once said that every company has culture. The question is, are you the one creating it or is it being created by itself?”

Chuck was quick to take up that line of thinking and added, “Yes, most companies that I’ve spoken with over the last year have had to pivot and make a change in direction about how they are going to be able to move forward. . .  we’re trying to understand at this point exactly what we want our culture to be.

“So when I talk with leaders today, they are working very closely with their leadership teams to identify what their mission, vision, and values are, and what’s really important to them from a from their people perspective.”

“And I think that employees, when it comes to culture, are looking for leadership to be much more empathetic, to be much more transparent, to provide more granular communication so that employees can have confidence and have trust in their leadership. So they as an organization can move forward together more as a community rather than the hierarchy that we’ve seen in the past.”

A Special Offer for Training Unleashed Podcast Listeners from Chuck Cooper

If you visit whitewaterconsulting/trainingunleashed, you will find a selection of special resources that Chuck and his team have made available to the Training Unleashed Podcast community.

One of those one of the gifts is a copy of the recent Business Saver case study from WhiteWater. In addition, Chuck and his team are offering a complimentary 20-minute phone consultation to viewers of this Training Unleashed Podcast.

Chuck summarizes, “We’d love to be able to be a resource for you.”

About Our Guest 

Chuck Cooper is Founder and Managing Member at WhiteWater Consulting, a Charlotte, NC-based consulting firm with the simple yet powerful mission to “help small to mid-size companies become better . . . Our team is committed to helping companies strengthen and automate their processes so that they can focus on growing revenues, managing expenses, maximizing profits, and taking care of their greatest asset, their people.”

At WhiteWater, Chuck sets the Mission, Vision and Values for the company. Over the past 25 years, Chuck has had the experience of starting, acquiring, building, and selling businesses in multiple industries. During this time, he experienced the thrill of victories and the agony of defeat. His passion for founding WhiteWater Consulting is to help enable employers and HR practitioners to drive their organizations to realize an improved company culture while simultaneously attaining enhanced financial results.

2021-08-31T17:13:51-04:00August 31, 2021|
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