845: The Surprising Power of Shutting Up with Dan Lyons

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Dan Lyons
Well, thanks for having me. It’s nice to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat about the wisdom of your book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. But, first, I have to tell you this is fun for me because I have seen every episode of “Silicon Valley,” and I’d love to hear if you have any particularly fond memories or moments from your work on the show.

Dan Lyons
Well, the funny thing is I was on the writing staff, and we would come in for, I’ll say, 12 weeks or something before shooting began, and then I’d be gone, so I wasn’t ever really there. I think, once, I’ve stayed for a couple of weeks of shooting, so I never really saw the show get made. And one thing that struck me, because I’m not a career TV guy, was that one script that I worked on and delivered, when the episode came out, it had bits and pieces that resembled what was on the page.

Because I think what happens is you write it, then they do a table read that goes well or poorly or somewhat in between, and then they do another rewrite, and then they start shooting but then they tell on every take, tell these guys to improv, and so a lot of the improvised takes are better than what we wrote. And then it goes, it gets edited, and then at that point, they’re looking at the whole season. So, they’re moving things around that used to be in episode two are now in episode five.

So, I learned a lot about how TV gets made, and there were funny moments but, I tell you, it’s kind of a grind. You just sit there, and it’s, like, ten people in a room. Or, imagine, for 12 weeks, five days a week, in the longest business meeting you’ve ever been in, and, yeah, some of the people are really funny but also you spend a lot of time sort of agonizing trying to make plots work. Yeah, it sounds like ridiculous. It’s a lot of work. It’s that hard. But mostly you’re just sitting there dealing with boredom, so, anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I wondered how that works in practice, and maybe different writer rooms have different kind of work vibes and styles and approaches. But I imagine it would be a little bit of a divide and conquer, like, “Okay, Dan, you go and write and bring it back.” But is it pretty much, “Nope, all of us are in the room together, slogging through each line of dialogue”?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, the latter. And I don’t know how all shows are, but there’s always a showrunner. And the showrunner really is the head writer and it’s his show. It’s, like, in our case, it was Alec Berg, who’s really a real veteran. And we would all sit around and fill whiteboards with ideas together, and then once we had an episode, it seemed like, “Okay, that’s all there,” Alec would go off and write a version of it in prose, not in screenplay format.

And then he would dish that out to person A, person B, or me, and say, “Okay, now go take this and put it into final draft, put it into screenplay format, and give it back.” And so, it wasn’t really writing. It was more talking and pitching ideas in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you for the inside scoop there.

Dan Lyons
I’ll tell you another thing I learned, which is, and I was always guilty of this myself. You’d watch a show and be like, “I think they’re wrestling with this and that and the commentary.” Every week on “Silicon Valley,” I think it was TechCrunch, or maybe it was another tech publication, would do a big essay. Oh, one was the one that Sarah Lacy had.

Anyway, they do this long, long piece about analyzing the story and who they thought this character was based and what the themes were. And I can tell you, nobody talked about themes or big ideas in the room. It was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, “How can we get more jokes? And what plot would be at least plausible?” And, yeah, nobody ever talked about big ideas, or grand themes, or doing satire.

There was some but, yeah, so they would ascribe meaning to these episodes, and I would read it and kind of crack up, going like, “I was there when we envisioned that. Believe me, that was…” so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s funny and reassuring because I remember, as a youngster, when I was first learning about the very concept of a theme in literature, and I was skeptical from the get-go, it’s like, “Do you really think the author had that in mind the whole time when they were doing that?” And I think, in hindsight, my take on this now is like, “Okay, books like ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’ like, okay, is straight up is allegorical. It’s just trying to say something.” But other things, it’s like, “I don’t know. Maybe he just wanted to write a cool story, and you just made that up.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, you know, I taught creative writing and sort of literature after grad school at the University of Michigan. It always comes up, like, “Do you think the poet or the short-story writer of the novels meant that?” And I think sometimes, yeah, clearly, you know what they were trying to do, what the point is they’re trying to make with the story. But you get down to these details of, like, wordplay and stuff, and I actually came to believe, like, “I don’t care if the author meant that. It’s kind of interesting, so let’s just untangle that. Let’s talk about that because it’s kind of interesting.”

But, yeah, I wonder, too, intention, what was there, what wasn’t. Or, who said this? Oh, my son was telling me about this. Oh, no, maybe it was a painter, but he was asked to explain, “What’s this mean?” And he was like, “Well, if I could explain it in words, I wouldn’t need to paint it. It’s a painting, just look at that.” So, yeah, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And sometimes words are something that we just hold onto and keep our mouth shut. Tell us, this book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you made while putting this together?

Dan Lyons
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you a couple. Well, this podcast is about how to be awesome at your job, so I’d talk more about listening. There are a couple of things up front that have to do with health and wellbeing, and the connections between how you speak and even, like, your immune system. There was this fantastic researcher at the University of Arizona, who, for the past 20 years, has been trying to study these connections between speech and other aspects of our lives and our physical and emotional wellbeing, and he’s making these incredible breakthroughs.

And he’s not ever really been written about. There are articles about when each of these studies comes out, but I spent a lot of time with him. He’s just a fascinating, fascinating guy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s his name?

Dan Lyons
Matthias Mehl, M-E-H-L.

Well, so I don’t know how I stumbled across him. I set out trying to figure out how to keep myself from talking too much, how to talk less because I had a problem with compulsive talking. And I started doing research, like, on two things, “Why do some people talk too much? And how can you fix it?” And I found these researchers who had created something called the talkaholic scale. It was a test you can take. The test, it’s in my book.

And I pegged the needle on talkaholic, just way, way up the charts. And then started trying to figure out, “Well, how do you fix that?” And so, I go off on this journey. And in that journey, I met Matthias Mehl. Because in the ‘90s, there was this book called The Female Brain that came out and talked about who talks more, men or women. And for centuries, the stereotype was always that women are the talkers and men don’t talk.

And The Female Brain came out and said, “Yeah, women speak 20,000 words a day, and men speak 6,000,” ballpark, and like 3x. And Matthias and some of the other people who were at…he was a grad student then at UT Austin, looked at that, and said, “That cannot be true. Those numbers cannot be true.” So, they built this little thing called the electronically activated recorder, or EAR, and, basically, the original was the primitive kind of like digital recording device, and maybe even tapes, with a thing attached to it that would turn it on at random intervals.

So, you had people carry this for a day or a few days, and it turns on and off, and on and off, and from that, you can extrapolate how many words a day they’re speaking. And what they found is, like, no difference. Men and women absolutely the same, both about 16,000 words a day. And, at the extremes, the highest talkers on the survey were all men, so it kind of blew this all up.

So, then he said, “Well, God, if we can study how many words you speak, why couldn’t we study what words you’re using or what kind of conversations you’re having?” So, they did the same thing but they tried to extract the character of your conversations. Then they tried to correlate that with happiness. So, they would have you carry the EAR device and they would calculate how many substantive conversations you had, how many really good conversations you had in a day, and how much of your talk would shift small talk and chitchat.

So, how much of your day is chitchat? And then they found that the people who had more good conversations and fewer bad conversations, or less small talk, turned out to be happier when they did self-scored reports of “How happy are you?” Then he said, “Wow, if people who have good conversations are happier, I wonder if they’re healthier?”

So, he did another passthrough, recorded all these people, then matched them to blood draws that measured their immune system, and found the same thing. Good conversations correlate with healthier immune systems or a lower risk of heart disease and inflammatory disease. And it’s gone a little beyond that, too.

But, yeah, it’s fascinating to think, and it sort of reinforced what I was thinking, that when I stopped just going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and became intentional about my speech, and spoke less, yeah, I did get happier, I did feel better, and I thought it was just that I was not annoying people as much. But Matthias sort of said, “No, it really is a physical reaction.”

And his example, if you want to know what a good conversation is, is that it’s authentic and you’re being honest and transparent. And the best way he puts it to me is it’s the difference between saying, “Hey, how are you?” or saying, “Hey, how are you?” or, “Really, how are you?” Anyway, that was a huge thing. And I think it does apply to work because I think it’s one thing maybe we don’t always do at work is to really have deep substantive conversations.

And I don’t mean like talking about your personal life, but at work, really digging into really important things that I think probably makes a healthier workplace. I think a lot of the lessons that I learned that apply to individuals also can be applied to an organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, that’s a lot of powerful stuff. And it’s sort of funny, as we’re speaking now, you say you’ve recovered from being a talkaholic.

Dan Lyons
Well, there it is, I just gave you an overly long answer to a simple question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, as I contrast the conversation that we’re having now with videos we’ve seen of you being interviewed elsewhere, and from years past, it is like you have a different demeanor. So, it checked you out.

Dan Lyons
Do you think so?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Dan Lyons
Well, I don’t know because I…hmm.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when you’re talking about “Silicon Valley,” the startups being a Ponzi scheme, I was like, “Wow, that guy is really going.” And it’s like, versus now, it does. It’s a different vibe in terms of just thoughtfully considering the pieces and the pacing. Yeah, I see the difference, Dan, for what that’s worth.

Dan Lyons
That’s good to know. My wife was very relieved that I did a lot of work on this. Can you imagine?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so far, fascinating, the quality of our conversations can determine the quality of our happiness and health. That’s cool right there. So, can you tell us, your subtitle is The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, in addition to being happier and healthier, what else can folks, looking to be awesome at their jobs, get from keeping their mouth shut?

Dan Lyons
Well, I’ll tell you another story. I do a lot about listening, again, so if you’re not talking, obviously, you have the opportunity to listen. And it’s something very few people can do well, and I include myself on that. I don’t think I’m a great listener, although I’m working on it. So, I’ll tell you a story. When I wanted to learn how to listen, there’s an executive coach named Jerry Colonna, who, he’s called sometimes The Yoda of Silicon Valley, or The CEO Whisperer.

So, he works with CEOs, with startup founders, or sometimes big CEOs, and he does these, like, three-day intensely emotional bootcamps, and everybody ends up sobbing, talking about their shame and guilt. He really digs deep into this, but the biggest thing they teach in these workshops is how to listen. And I think it’s become pretty much conventional wisdom now that a leader needs to listen more than talk.

So, I called him up, I got an appointment with him, “Can you just teach me a couple of the techniques you use in a bootcamp? I can’t come to a bootcamp but what I wanted to exercise is what I would do while I was there, and give me a couple of quotes. As a journalist, just, like, give me a couple of good quotes.” And so, we get on the call, and it’s like this, on video, and say hi or whatever. And then I get my laptop, I had my keyboard here, and I’m ready to ask him questions, and he says, “Dan, all right, stop talking. Stop taking notes.” I mean, not talking. “Stop typing. Stop taking notes. Stop and just look at me.”

I’m like, “Oh, crap.” He’s like, “So, what are you thinking right now?” And I’m like, “Enough of a jerk. Well, I’m thinking I’m not going to get anything useful for my chapter.” And he’s like, “Okay, fine.” He’s not rattled by that. And he starts interviewing me, and the questions get more and more intense. And his final one is like, “What do you fear? What do you most fear? What are you afraid of?” And I end up telling him this thing that I probably told two people in my life, like my wife, and I don’t know if I’ve even told anyone else. Like, really deep.

And then I’m welled up, like I’m kind of crying on this call. And then we’re out of time. It’s 30 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s how you listen, Dan.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. Listen, dude, so I hang up. And he’s like, “We can book another half hour to do the interview.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah,” but I hang up and I was like, “No way am I ever getting near that guy ever again. Like, he’s a witch. I’m not getting near whatever he does.” But, also, I was kind of angry, because I was like, “Now, I got nothing. I wasted all this time.”

And then I realized what you just said, like, he didn’t tell me he’s listening. He just showed me how to do it, and then he showed me how devastating it can be, like how powerful it can be if you do it well. So, I keep encountering this in work. We have meetings, and someone says, like, “Let’s have a half hour,” and there’s five of us, and someone just throws up, “Let me share my screen,” and throws up a PowerPoint deck with eight zillion datapoints on it, and just talks for 30 minutes, and the rest of you just sits there, going, “Oh. Mm-hmm.”

Or, companies do all hands, and it’s just an hour and 90 minutes of slam, slam, slam, slides and then five minutes for questions. And I come to think that if you’re a boss or you’re just a manager with a few direct reports, or you’re the CEO of a company, like listening is probably the most powerful thing you can do. Just imagine, if you’re a CEO, all you do is talk, you never listen, you have no idea what’s going on in the business. You live in a bubble. So, yeah, I really, really became, like, born again about the power of listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s powerful stuff. And I’m thinking about times that I’ve really been listened to, and I’m thinking about this dude. His name is Corey McQuade, he was with the Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, and we’re just talking about insurance-y finance-life things. And so we did that in one meeting, and he was really listening, and he’s taking some notes, and then we had a follow-up meeting. He said, “You know, Pete, I heard you say duh, duh, duh, duh.”

And it was weird because it’s like, “I know I told you those things, and yet the fact that you internalized them, held them for this period of time, and are able to summarize, synthesize, represent, share implications, is like casting a spell on me.” It was wild.

Dan Lyons
Right. Yeah, it’s incredibly powerful. And it applies across all sorts of things. There’s research that I cite about working in sales, and how important listening is, talking less, asking questions, and then really listening. So, you’re not trying to sell something, you’re trying to figure out what the problem is that you can solve.

And there’s, like, a study where a company called Dong uses machine learning. They suck up, like, thousands of hours of sales calls, analyzed them down, and tell you your top performers, asked this many questions, speak this many words, or this percent of the conversation is them talking versus the other. Yeah, it’s phenomenal, like it crossed pretty much every aspect of your life. Like, for me, it’s more with my kids and my wife, but where I’ve seen amazing, amazing changes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so just keeping your mouth shut enables listening, although it doesn’t guarantee listening. Dan, can you share some pro tips on, once we’ve shut our mouths, what do we do in order to do great listening from there?

Dan Lyons
Right. So, there’s a concept that people call active listening, which means you’re not just hearing. You’re actually leaning in, you really have to listen, and it’s really, really hard to do. One expert says if you’re listening, really listening, for 30 minutes and you’re not exhausted at the end of it, then you weren’t listening hard enough.

So, yeah, it’s a skill, I think, you can develop, and there are exercises. Like, one is you and I would sit down and I think we pick three questions, and I ask you those three, and you answer them, and I think you speak for five minutes without being interrupted, and then we flip it. Maybe it’s just one question. Anyway, so we take turns.

And if you don’t use the whole five minutes, we still sit there in silence, like I don’t speak for five minutes, and we flip it around. And then you just talk about afterwards, like, “How did you feel when you were listening? How did you feel when you were talking?” So, you talk about the exercise.

There are other types, yeah, where it’s just pretty much a recall with the guy you mentioned, listen to someone talk for 10 minutes then write down everything he came up. Don’t take any notes while they’re talking, so you just listen, then you go write it down. And it’s amazing how little you remember, or you can get better at it. But I think it’s a skill you can develop.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you just work it, there is practice.

Dan Lyons
You’re probably really good at it. I mean, to be a good interviewer, I think I’ve come to believe, I used to think it was about having great questions. I now think it’s about being a great listener, and then responding.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think the advantage I have in this context is we’re blessed to have so many incoming pitches, and we proactively seek out other folks, so that, by the time we’re talking, I am so fascinated by what you have to say that it’s like I’m chomping at the bit to get all that wisdom.

Dan Lyons
You know, I’m the same way. I used to be a journalist for a long time, and it’s what I loved about the job. If you go meet fascinating people, they would talk to me because I came from a magazine, so they thought, “Okay.” And, yeah, just hear their stories, and I go back and write their stories. But, yeah, it was fascinating.

I still like that. Like this book was really me just calling all sorts of interesting people I interviewed. I found a psychologist who works with prisoners in California, and the big problem they had was when they get up for parole hearing, they start and they’re okay, but then they get a little provoked and they start talking too much, and they will basically blow their parole hearing.

And so, she works with these mostly guys, and to teach them how to breathe and relax, and how to not lose it during an interview, and how to just stay calm and under-talk.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, when it comes to keeping your mouth shut, we got better health, better happiness, better relationships, and the opportunity to listen really impact folks in a cool way and strengthen those connections. Well, now can you share with us how do we know if we are talking too much?

Dan Lyons
That is a really good question. In my case, I just knew that I was annoying people. I would leave a party and say to my wife, “Did I talk too much?” and she’d be like, “Yeah,” because it’s mostly driven by anxiety. So, I’d get anxious in a party and I would start talking, and then I just keep talking. One way you know you’re talking too much is if someone tells you, someone just says to you, “Hey, you really monologue too much. You should let other people get a word in.” I think a lot of people who really talk too much, basically, knows. A lot of people have said to me, “Oh, yeah, I want to read your book because I know I talk too much, it’s like a problem.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, they already know. It’s not we have to look for some special clues in terms of the body postures or body language of the people we’re talking to. You just got to know.

Dan Lyons
Or, you see people trying to pull away, you know what I mean. You’re talking, you realize…

Pete Mockaitis
Their feet are pointed away.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, they literally start to turn their body, or they go, “Oh, I’ve got to meet…” There are clues, and that’s a problem. Some people are such compulsive talkers, like, they don’t pick up on those cues. And so, I actually have a part of the book, too, about how to escape an over-talker. And there’s another version of an over-talker who’s the interrupter. So, how do you break the habit of interrupting? And then, also, how do you deal with someone who’s interrupting you?

Again, it’s almost always men. Men interrupt women constantly. The stats are incredible, and there’s just lots of research, it’s not like it’s one study that found this. But, yeah, so then it’s a lot of times men aren’t aware that they’re interrupting constantly until you record a conversation, and then show it to them, and they’re usually mortified.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right.  With the Gong Group that was doing that machine learning and data analyses on the high-performing sales folks, was there something like a magical ratio or range associated with questions asked or proportion listening?

Dan Lyons
The most successful sales reps asked 11 to 14 questions. Fewer than that and you’re not digging deep enough but more than that, and the call starts to feel like an interrogation.

Pete Mockaitis
And is that like in half an hour or what time are we thinking here?

Dan Lyons
They analyzed more than 500,000 calls. On the sales calls with the best close rates, where, one, in which reps knew how to keep quiet and ask questions instead of making a sales pitch, 11 to 14, they deduced the calls worked best and the questions are scattered throughout. And when a rep identifies three to four specific problems, no more, no fewer, that the customer needs to solve, the best reps made calls feel like conversations.

They spent 54% of the call listening, 46% talking. The worst reps talked 72% of the time. And I don’t have how long a call was to land those 11 to 14 questions. But, yeah, those are some interesting datapoints. I don’t know how prevalent the idea is. I think it’s an outdated idea that sales guys or salespeople just talk, talk, talk, they’re fast talkers, and they kind of twist your arms, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that my impression is that most sales folks are aware that they should ask questions and listen. And yet the common practice is often not as much that, even though that is the best practice that is published and known and promulgated. That’s my sense, anyway.

Dan Lyons
I think so, too. And I think that’s only because it’s really hard. Even if you know you should do it, it’s really difficult to do that well. And it’s a skill you really have to work on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say we’re after those benefits of talking less where we clearly understand, “Okay, yup, I am talking too much,” can you break down for us, Dan, some of the key practices or step-by-steps to successfully talking less?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I actually came up with five, that I guess you call them exercises, that I do. So, not every day, but I think of it like a workout that it’s, like, going to the gym and you don’t even have to do this all day every day. You might pick an hour or an opportunity to use one of these is how I view it. So, the first one I have is called ‘when possible, say nothing,’ which is very obvious, but it’s often very possible to say nothing when you’re checking out at the store. So, there are occasions where gabbers like me will start striking up a conversation with someone but you don’t really need to. So, that’s one I practice with.

Another one is mastering the power of the pause. So, it’s this idea that when you pause, it makes people uncomfortable, and can be uncomfortable for you to sit with a pause. There are some research that shows it only takes four seconds, a four-second break in a conversation for people to start feeling uncomfortable. So, if you can master that and live with that uncomfortable silence, you have a lot to gain.

Actually, even in public speaking, but in negotiations, for example, pauses are a really huge thing. And I interviewed a few master negotiators about just that, how to use a pause strategically in a negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s intriguing. So, four seconds of pause makes people uncomfortable. And so, are we saying, one, live with that yourself. But is it sometimes the right answer to, “Go ahead and have them feel uncomfortable in that pause”?

Dan Lyons
Well, no, no. Yeah, exactly right. So, like car salesmen, I think they’re trained to do this and to say, “Here’s the price,” and then sit. And according to one negotiator I interviewed, a woman in Boston, she’s brilliant, she’s like, “When they do this, people actually start negotiating against themselves. It’s often, too, with a job offer and a salary offer that you know it’s too low, and they’ll just sit there.”

So, if I hold ideas, you just do the same back, you go, “Well, hmm, I’ll think about that.” And she told me something evil, which is that, I don’t know if it’s all the time or at least once. She would practice on car salesmen because she felt like they were fair game, and they’re out there, and it’s like easy prey. They’re always available for practice. So, she would find, she’d get an offer for a bait-and-switch offer in the paper, or, no, flyer, “If you want to trade in your car, you can get this much and get this much of a deal on,” whatever new car it was, or some crazy offer you weren’t going to get.

And so, she walked in, and said, “Hey, I’m interested in this offer.” She told me, “I didn’t want to get a new car. I like my car. I have no desire to buy a new car.” She says, “Well, I saw this offer.” They said, “Well, you know, that’s…we can’t blah, blah, blah, we don’t have one of those. But what we can do blah.” And she was like, “No, I came in because there was an offer, so if you can give me this offer, I’ll buy the car.” And then she just waits.

And she said, “They’ll to, like, try stall you. They’ll go out back and talk to the manager. There is no manager.” Like, she worked in the car business, too. She’s like, “They’re not going there. They’re going to have a cup of coffee and just make you sit there.” So, she said, “I brought, like, a thermos and a book, and I would sit there and wait.” She’s like, “I picked a day when I’m just going to do this.”

And she said she knew it wasn’t going to end up in her buying a car, so it was really just sharpening her own skills, “Can I just go and sit with this quiet?” And, eventually, you go back and forth a few times, and they say, “Well, I guess you’re not going to get a car today. Bye.” But, yeah, so, using that discomfort. There’s a story, too, in the book of a guy who was making a big sale to, I don’t know, someone in charge of government in the Middle East to have a franchise to sell candy or chocolate in this country, and the salesman says, “Well, here’s the price,” and the guy says, “Hmm, that’s too high.”

So, the other guy just sat there. And the story goes, he sat there for 45 minutes, and then finally the customer said, “Okay, we have a deal.” Like, they just sat there. I like that. To me, it almost sounded like it can’t be true but, yeah. So, pauses are very powerful. I had other things where I tried to find, add silence to my life.

I found this stuff called forest bathing, which is you go out in the woods and you don’t really do much. You just sit in the forest, usually with a guide, which I found really good. I also think you should quit social media, if not completely, then almost, as much as you can. I think social media is creating mental illness at a societal level, which is also what pushes us all to talk too much. We live in this culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, there are some spooky data, especially with teen and pre-teen girls. Ugh.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. But also it just, if you think about it, the model they have is “We need to keep you on the site as long as possible so you look at many ads as possible. How do we do that? Well, if you’re just reading, you’re not going to stay that engaged, so we need to get you talking, and sharing, and retweeting, and getting in arguments with people.”

So, the best way to get you engaged is make you angry. “So, we put stuff into your feed, we figure out using machine learning algorithms,” they know collecting thousands of datapoints about you, like down to “How long did you pause over that photo?” Everything. So, they know exactly how to provoke you. But the problem is then that anger you experience online carries with you back into your real life.

So, you get on this dopamine cycle if it feels good, and then you stop and you crave the dopamine, but you’re also creating this cycle of just epinephrine just flowing through your bloodstream all the time which causes all sorts of health problems. Like, for example, you notice how angry people are now compared to 20 years ago? And what’s changed in 20 years? The internet. Social media. So, yeah, I think if you can stay away from it.

I, actually, think there’s a larger problem of information overload, where there’s just so much stuff. I have statistics on how many movies or how many hours of entertainment Netflix is going to make this year. The number is crazy. So, we just have a lot coming at us, and I don’t think our brains have evolved as fast as the internet has.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got some silence, we got quitting social media. Any other key practices?

Dan Lyons
Well, the last one was learn how to listen, which we already talked about. But I tell you, I also interviewed a woman who runs this thing called the International Listening Association. I couldn’t imagine there is a thing like that. They have an annual conference. And I said, “What is this, like people walking around, not talking?” And she said, “Oh, everybody makes that joke.”

And she and I had become friends since then, but she also is a professor. She teaches a course in listening, like the whole course is just how to listen. And it turns out to be very powerful in that you can be interviewing someone, I found. I interviewed someone who’s really, really shy, like almost couldn’t get on the phone to talk, like really, really has social anxiety, so I knew that conversation is going to be difficult.

If I go in rapid-fire questions, blah, blah, blah, like that just going to just shut it down. And so, I had to really take a deep breath, ask my questions and not fire off the next question, just listen, and it kind of worked. And I told this professor about it, I said, “You know, it’s amazing is this woman. The more it went out, she became really fascinating. When she was super shy and uptight at first and really uptight, and by the end, she was laughing, and telling me stories and about her life and growing up.” And I said, “She was the most amazing person.”

And my friend, the professor, said, “That, actually, that’s what happens when you listen to people. They actually do become more interesting.” So, I was like, “Wow, that’s really powerful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s the name of the professor?

Dan Lyons
Her name is Sandra Bodin-Lerner, that’s B-O-D-I-N dash L-E-R-N-E-R. I should introduce you. You might find her to be a really interesting guest. She first got a career, she was like a public-speaking coach for people in business. And now she does that, but she also does listening workshops in companies because they realize, “Oh, yeah, it’s not just about speaking well.”

At one point, she made, I think, it was really fascinating, and we talk a lot about sort of in companies now, of we need to have these difficult conversations. We need to have these conversations and reckon with big issues, but nobody ever tells us how to have a conversation. So, yeah, she’s a fascinating woman.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, tell me, Dan, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dan Lyons
No, I’m all good. I appreciate you taking an interest in my book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dan Lyons
Well, along the lines of this, Winston Churchill’s mother was named Jennie Jerome, and she once described…this is about listening, a story about listening. She once described the difference between having dinner with William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, so two very big, important British politicians.

And she said, when she had dinner with Gladstone, “I left thinking that he was the cleverest man in England. When I had dinner with Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.” And, to me, that always just summed up why listening works, what the effect it has on the other person.

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine she liked the latter more afterwards.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Dan Lyons
Oh, I think it would be Matthias Mehl’s research about good conversations and the immune system. It’s a remarkable report.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dan Lyons
I’ll just tell you what I’m reading right now, which is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It’s, like, an unbelievable book. It’s huge. I guess, as a writer, I admire it because it won the Pulitzer Prize. Just the writing is amazing. Just the amount of research he did, and how he shaped into a narrative, into a story. It’s phenomenal.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be more awesome at your job?

Dan Lyons
Oh, at work you mean? Yeah, I’d become a big believer in notebooks. I got this while I was researching my book, reading Richard Branson’s book. And Richard Branson is a big believer in listening, and one thing he does is he always carries a notebook and a pen, and takes notes. And he says it’s one way to become a better learner, he forced himself to learn and write things down. And then also you have a record of every meeting you have. So, yeah, in the last two years, I’ve become really, really a believer in notebooks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be all the more awesome at your job?

Dan Lyons
I put sticky notes above my computer screen on the wall, and say things like “Quiet,” “Listen,” “Wrap it up.” I just put reminders not to talk too much. And that habit, it has helped me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think it is that the first beat of the book for me was talking less, listening more, speaking with intention, can do so much for you. It can make you happier, healthier, more successful, blah, blah, blah. The second thing I realized that I did not anticipate going in is that the real power of it is that you make the lives of people around you better. So, that’s the real ripple effect of this, and that was quite profound for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dan Lyons
Oh, my website DanLyons.io.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, yeah. Next time you’re in a meeting, which will be tomorrow, you probably have eight tomorrow, see if you can listen more than talk. Oh, here’s a great exercise. If you’re on a Zoom call with one other person, if the person will agree to let you record the call, record the call, take the recording, send it to Rev.com, or something like that, have it transcribed.

Then print it out and you see, literally, in front of you, just in blocks of texts, how much you talked, how much the other person talked, and then keep trying to work on that so you’re less and less. That, to me, was like an eye-opening exercise and, yeah, I think a really good one to try. If you want to learn to listen more, talk less, that would be a great exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dan, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun as you keep your mouth shut.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, thanks for letting me talk for so long about not talking, but I appreciate it. Thank you.