In this solo episode, Trisha turns the CQ lens on herself, examining a habit she caught in her own listening since her conversation with Mike Newton in Episode 82.

What is your thumb actually doing when a song comes on? Trisha unpacks four different doors music uses to move us — the beat, being moved, surprise, and story — and realises she's only ever really been opening one of them. What does it mean when the same song that feels like home to one person tells another they don't belong? And what might be waiting in the very songs your thumb reaches to skip?

Trisha closes with an invitation: choose one song from a genre you usually skip, and use the PAUSE process to stay with it all the way through.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• 🎵 Listen to the episode playlist on Spotify: The Beat Beneath The Bridge - Music for The Shift Podcast Episode 82
• The PAUSE Process — first introduced in Episode 53, "Responding to Moments of Shift with PAUSE"
• Listen to Episode 82 — Mike Newton, on music, culture, and perspective

Trisha would love to hear from you — share a piece of music from another culture that shifted something in you, or tell her how you've used music deliberately in your own CQ practice, on LinkedIn.

Join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.

Hi there, everyone. I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness, the shifts in our thinking.

As regular listeners will know, I talk a lot about cultural intelligence, CQ, and it's made up of four areas. There's motivational, CQ drive; cognitive, the CQ knowledge; metacognitive, the CQ strategy; and behavioral, CQ action. And in this podcast, we often focus on the thinking about our thinking, the metacognition, CQ strategy, because that's where the shifts often happen So this week I want to tell you about something that I've caught myself doing a bit, since our last episode.

I've probably done this heaps of times previously without even noticing it. But since my conversation with Mike Newton in the last episode, episode 82, I've been listening to the playlist that we built together. Mike and I spoke about music and how it can shift us, and we built a playlist, as we spoke about different songs and different experiences with music called The Beat Beneath the Bridge.

Put it on Spotify, and it was in the show notes for the last episode, and we'll put it again in the show notes for this episode. And a few days ago, I was listening, while my husband was driving in the car, and a track came on, and it was hip-hop, and I saw myself move towards the skip button sort of automatically before I'd really even thought about it.

And this time, probably because of everything Mike and I had talked about, I stopped, and I asked myself mentally the question that I'm always inviting you and people that I coach to ask, "What's happening here? What was I doing?" And when I thought about it, I realized that my listening has a doorkeeper, and the doorkeeper checks one thing before it lets a song in.

Can I understand this? Can I hear the words? Can I follow the story? Can I grasp what it means? And if the answer is yes, the door opens. I truly love a song that tells me its story. In that episode with Mike, I spoke about Archie Roach's Took the Children Away, and that song in the playlist, I didn't just sit with it.

I replay it over and over and let it break my heart because I can follow every word Give me those testimony tracks, the storytelling songs, and I'm all in. But if I can't catch the lyrics, if the vocals move too fast, or if the language isn't mine, if the accent's hard to pick up, if the meaning is in something other than the words, that door closes, and I push skip.

And when I looked at which genres my thumb was skipping, I had to be honest with myself. More often than not, from that playlist, it was hip hop. It was many of the Black musical genres that Mike loves so deeply and knows so well. The music where so much of the meaning lives in the beat and the groove and the voice itself is the instrument.

And dear friends, that is a bias. It was implicit, unconscious. Now it's not. Now I can see it, although I should probably say I can hear it. I can hear myself doing it. I notice myself doing it. And I want to think out loud with you about what it means because quite possibly some of you might be a bit like me.

I might not be the only one. Let me go back to something Mike and I talked about in that episode. we made a distinction-- Well, Mike did more than me. I asked the question, but he explained it, between music that shifts your mood and music that shifts your perspective So Mike said that mood music takes you to an old place, a familiar place like nostalgia or summertime or the barbecue in your memory.

Perspective music often takes you somewhere new. So he gave the example of Public Enemy telling you that 911 is a joke in somebody's town. Or Tyler Childers asking his own Appalachian community to imagine a long, violent history happening to their folks. Wow, that one really hit me. Both those songs were amazing.

And I realized I've been welcoming perspective music. One door only, the cognitive door, the lyrics door. I let music change my mind when it explains itself to me. But dear listeners, there are other doors, and the music that I skip is music that sometimes comes through those doors. So what are those other doors?

That's the question that Mike and I circled a bit. what's actually happening when music moves us? I've been reading up a little bit since the episode on some of the psychological research. It turns out a single song is doing several things to us at once through different channels. Let me give you four, and there may be lots more because believe me, I am nowhere near any sort of an expert in this area.

But the first area is the beat, what researchers refer to as entrainment. When music has a groove, our bodies begin to synchronize with it. Our motor system, our breathing, even our heart rate start to move with the pulse, and this happens before we decide anything. There's a neuroscientist, and I may have the pronunciation of their name wrong, Petra Jannatta.

They study groove. They describe it as a pleasurable drive toward action. The body joins before the mind is consulted. So think of the line dance tracks on Mike's playlist, the Cupid Shuffle, the Cha Cha Slide. Their whole purpose is bodies moving together in a room. The second is being moved. There's actually a scientific name for this emotion now.

Researchers call it Kama muta, from the Sanskrit for being moved by love. It's the chills, the tears, the warmth in our chest when we witness sudden human connection There have been some enormous examples of that in the football World Cup with songs and chants that unite and move people. And here's the finding that I really loved when I was reading about it.

Studies have shown that when people are moved by watching members of a group, not their own but another group, care for each other, they then see that whole group as more human afterwards. Being moved does that work that an argument, a theory, a speech, if you like, cannot do. So the third area is surprise, expectation.

Our brains really are prediction machines. We know this. And music plays with our predictions constantly. When we hear music from another culture, our predictions might miss The scale blends differently. The rhythm lands where we didn't expect. That little jolt can feel like confusion or like beauty. It's our model of the world updating in real time to include something new, which if you think about it, is a very small shift But it can be a rehearsal for bigger ones

And the fourth doorway is the one that I know best. It's the story. Lyrics as carriers of cultural memory. The, the testimony. It's Archie Roach, it's the Public Enemy. You and I could probably name many, many more songs like it. This channel is real, and it's powerful. And my mistake isn't, you know, loving this door, it's thinking that it really is the only one.

So notice something specific about the first three. None of them need to be understood. The body entrains whether or not you speak the language. Karma Muta arrives before you can explain it. Surprise just happens to you. Only the fourth channel requires comprehension to enter, and that's really the only one that I'd been using So if you've been with me through the past few episodes, you might hear a bit of an echo here because when we talked about the overview effect and about minimization, we kept bumping into the same tension.

The things that unite us and the things that make us different are both real and both matter, and the temptation is always to resolve the tension by dropping one side. I think I asked the question, whose same are you using? Well, music holds exactly the same tension. On one side, music might be the closest thing humanity has to a shared practice.

Researchers who compare music across the world, and Patrick Savage is a name I'm now following in this field, have found that music is not a universal language, but it does have near universal features and almost every society on earth sings together, moves together, makes rhythm together. The impulse is everywhere, but the songs themselves are really particular, really different.

Particularity is not a bug, it's the whole point because music, it both is and gives identity. It gives pride. Hip hop, as Mike said, gave voice to communities that weren't being heard. He talked about learning New York and Los Angeles through their artists and about songs that made injustice visible.

Archie Roach gave the Stolen Generations a song that carries their history and their pain to anyone willing to listen. Bluegrass carries the Appalachian Mountains The music of a culture is one of the places a culture keeps itself. And my mind went to Ruby Tui, some of you may know of her, a New Zealand rugby union player.

After Aotearoa, New Zealand beat England in the Women's Rugby World Cup final at Eden Park, she took the microphone off the person who was interviewing her, and she just started to sing to the crowd. And

the crowd shouted back, "Aue," and then went on to sing the next line. That's that example where the music of a culture is one of the identities of a culture. And so it means, as just as exactly in that example, every song draws a circle, but that circle has both an inside and an outside. I told Mike my Nutbush moment, the story of sitting at my daughter's year six graduation while every parent in the room got up and did a line dance that I had never seen before, and feeling in my body, "I don't belong here."

And Mike told his version. The wedding dance floor, the stereotypes, and the feeling of being watched and found wanting. So the very same song that says home to one person says, "You're not from here" to another. So here's the CQ, the cultural intelligence truth that I want to hold onto or introduce us to here.

Music unites and music excludes, and it does both through the same mechanism, belonging. So if we only tell a uniting story about music, we're doing the minimization thing. We're saying music is a universal language when it isn't. It's thousands of particular languages, some of which will welcome you, and some of which will show you, kindly or unkindly, that you've got things to learn.

And maybe that's exactly why it's such a powerful CQ practice ground because a song from outside your circle gives you a safe three-minute experience of being the outsider, of not knowing the dance, of not catching the words, and there's nothing at stake here except your own comfort

So let me go back and draw the threads together through the CQ lens, because there was a number of different ones here. So first of all, music works in our CQ drive. It can give us the energy and the desire to lean toward a culture. It works on CQ knowledge. There are songs that you simply need to know to belong in a place.

Yep, ask me about Nutbush. It works on CQ action. Every time Mike chooses what to play for a room, he's adapting behavior to context. DJ-ing is CQ action in real time. But the deepest work for me this week has been CQ strategy, and not necessarily in the way I expected. The shift didn't come from thinking about music, it came from noticing my own listening.

Watching my own thumb, really, and catching that doorkeeper in the act. That's a metacognitive move, and what it revealed was that shum- some shifts don't start in our thinking at all. They start in the body, in the feeling, in the surprise, and our thinking arrives afterwards to notice it and to name it.

And the noticing is still essential, it's just not always first. So here's a practice for you and for me this week. Choose one song from a genre your thumb usually skips. If you've got our playlist, there'll be at least one track on it that isn't for you. It might be one of mine rather than one of Mike's.

But that's the one. Stay with it all the way through. Not to analyze it, not to translate it, just to be with it. And if you know the PAUSE process, we've, we've spoken about it, uh, an episode or heaps of episodes ago. I'll find the link and let you know. We can put it in the show notes. But here it is. P is for physically settle.

You could let the music do this bit. Notice what the beat does to your breathing. And then there's the A, acknowledge. What's coming up? Is it boredom? Is it irritation? Is it judgment? Trisha has such terrible taste in music. It might be the itch to skip. Name it And then U, understand before responding, which means here, before deciding whether you like it, get curious about it.

And then S, shift perspective. Ask yourself, "What might this song be doing for the people who love it? What does it give them that I can't hear yet?" And then E for engage. Maybe that's listening again. Maybe it's looking up the artist. Maybe it's asking someone who loves that music to tell you more about it.

So sit in the discomfort of not understanding. That's not a failure of listening, that's the practice. And honestly, it's a bit of a three-minute rehearsal for every real cultural moment where we don't know what's happening

And now I want to hand this to you because this conversation is way bigger than my listening-- my very limited listening habits. The next episode belongs to your voices. So I want to collect some short voice notes, a minute or two, from listeners and practitioners around the world. And I think I've shared before, dear listeners, that at last count, there were a hundred and eighty-one countries, listeners in a hundred and eighty-one countries for this podcast, which truly brings me such joy.

anyway, I have two questions for you. The first is for everyone. Tell me about a piece of music from a culture other than your own that shifted something in you. What was it, and what shifted? And if you can name it, if it's the beat or the words or the voice or the moment, tell me about it. Or tell me about the other side when a song showed you that you didn't belong Or if you'd rather, a song from your culture that carries your identity and your pride.

I want those stories too, because that's all of the tensions that we're holding together. And the second is for practitioners, the facilitators, the coaches among you. Have you ever used music deliberately in your work across cultures, with a team in a training room, or with yourself before a difficult conversation?

What did you play, and what did it do? I'd love to hear these, so please, send me a message on LinkedIn, and I can fire you through my mobile number so that you can send me a WhatsApp message. Or if you'd rather, if there's a way to send voice messages on LinkedIn, I'm not 100% sure, but send them through to me.

Reach out, and we'll find a way, and I'll gather them for an episode where we listen to each other listening. So let me leave you with the question that I've been sitting with this week. What's your listening looking for before it lets a song in? And what might be waiting for you in the songs that you prefer to skip at the moment?

Thank you everyone for being part of The Shift today. Cultural intelligence is something we develop together, and these conversations are part of our shared learning journey. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might also be exploring cultural perspectives, and maybe you could share it with a song.

Please make sure that you've pushed follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, and I look forward to meeting with you again on the next episode of The Shift