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904: How to Gain Trust and Insight by Asking Better Questions with Mark Balasa

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Mark Balasa shares the most important lessons learned on trust from his celebrated career in asset management.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to build trust with anyone
  2. How trying to sound smart can hurt you
  3. The most important question to ask in any meeting

About Mark

Mark is the former founder and CIO of Balasa Dinverno & Foltz LLC, a wealth management firm.

Mark has been a featured speaker on investment and technology topics with organizations such as Morningstar, the Financial Planning Association (FPA), Charles Schwab & Co., and Standard & Poor’s. He has been quoted in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barron’s, Smart Money, and BusinessWeek.

Mark has been recognized as one of the top wealth managers in the country by organizations such as Robb Report Worth magazine, Medical Economics and Bloomberg. He previously sat on Blackrock’s RIA Advisory Board, J.P. Morgan’s RIA advisory board, PIMCO’s advisory panel for RIAs, the advisory board for State Street Global Advisors, and the technology board for Charles Schwab & Co. Mark has written for INC. magazine website and publications for CCH.

Resources Mentioned

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Mark Balasa Interview Transcript

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

Mark Balasa
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to dig into your life and career and the wisdom to be gleaned from it but, first, I want to hear a little bit about when you grew up, you were in a town of 300 folks. Tell us what was that like?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, it’s funny. Looking back, it was such a small town. Of course, when you were growing up, you don’t know that. That’s just normal. So, when we went to the nearby large town of 7,000 to go to school and shop and everything else, but it was awesome. You knew everybody, everybody knew you, very relaxed. It was a great spot to grow up.

Pete Mockaitis
Now was there anything odd that, I guess, you later learned was odd about the experience of being in such a small town that came to light?

Mark Balasa
What struck me, as I came to Chicago to start my career, was how unusual that was in many ways. Because you knew everybody, there was, of course, good and bad. They knew all your business, you knew theirs, but for the most part, it was very positive. And going into a much larger city and into a working environment, where you had to learn the ropes about how to trust people, how to navigate relationships that you didn’t grow up with them, because it was so intimate in such a small town, so that was a period of adjustment, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. It’s sort of, like, “Huh, this is different. I know nothing about you, and you, and you, and you.”

Mark Balasa
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to youth. Okay. Well, I’m so excited to dig into… you’ve had just an impressive interesting career, and we’ve had a number of really delightful exchanges and conversations, so I think that we have a lot to learn from you. And I want to hear maybe just the four-minute version so we can get a little bit oriented. Can we hear a bit about your journey from founding your asset management company to exiting it, and then we’re going to dig in a whole lot more from there?

Mark Balasa
You bet. Again, the four-minute version of this is I was in the financial industry, I found that very boring, so I went back to get additional schooling in credentials, etc. I always thought it fascinating to be able to work with somebody about what’s really important to them, and finance, of course, checks that box pretty well.

So, I started a firm inside of an accounting firm and left that, went and started a wealth management firm and I brought in partners as I went along. For me, the journey was fascinating, Pete. The opportunity to help people, to get to be, in many cases, friends with them, to know their families and get paid for it at the same time, it was a dream career.

I loved getting up every day going to work. I love growing the firm. There was lots of challenges. Of course, there is in any business but it was so rewarding. We had people that were clients for 30 years. Some, of course, were just started just as I was leaving, and everything in between. But it was the relationships and the ability to help people that made it so rewarding.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, tell me a little bit about the decision to sell or exit as well.

Mark Balasa
We became victims of our own success, in a way, and, of course, it’s a first-world problem but, as the firm went along, Mike, and Armand, and I were the three founding partners, and we wanted to bring in additional talent to grow the business. So, a really important way to do that was to give ownership. Not give, I should say, but to provide ownership, which they had to pay for.

So, as the firm continued to grow, and we got leverage, if you will, in terms of our asset growth and so forth, the revenue and the profitability was quite high. And so, what happened is the ownership interest became very high and very expensive. And so, what in the beginning was kind of a manageable debt load for a young person to buy in became very expensive, and it got to the point, actually, it was borderline not doable.

So, we looked out into the future, we said, “Gosh, it’s going to take probably another 12 years, maybe 15 years, to transition the firm internally,” and I was 60 at the point, “And do we want to work that many years?” And the answer was no. And so, we decided to look to the outside. I would tell you that, over the course of the firm’s trajectory, I would say three, four times a year for the last 20 years, we had people approached us to buy us.

So, we know that there was an interest. We always deflected that because we have the opinion that we wanted to have our own control, grow at the pace we wanted to grow, etc. And so, in making this decision, we knew it would be a big one because we’d be bringing an outside capital, in the end, actually, ownership but the reason for doing it was the ability to transition internally and transfer the firm got too expensive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, a victim of your own success, yes, well, I guess that’s what I wanted to establish here because you are a kind, humble, generous man, but you said the revenue and profitability became quite high. I’ll say it for you, it seems like you guys were crushing it in terms of you were growing well, more and more folks were entrusting their assets to you, you were named seven times one of the best financial advisors in the US by the magazine that report such things.

And, yes, as I’ve interacted with you, I have also been just impressed by your way. And so, I kind of want to dig into the underlying skills or mindsets associated with your success. First of all, is it fair to say, your success as a company was not due to the fact that you generated massively superior returns relative to all of your competitors? Is that a fair statement?

Mark Balasa
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I imagine there’s something else going on there because that would be kind of obvious, “Oh, hey, Balasa’s company makes the most money. Let’s just go over there.” There were some other factors that were driving this success and growth. And what do you think some of them were?

Mark Balasa
That’s a great point. Each industry has its nuances, Pete, and ours, returns from an organization are like a state secret. Unless you’re a public mutual fund or a hedge fund that we have to report some of this stuff, it’s almost impossible to get people’s returns. And so, I can talk about our returns relative to peer groups, if you want to do that later, and then we were very proud of them.

But you’re absolutely right, when people come in to hire someone like us, you don’t do it based on returns. I would calmly tell them the criteria for a high net worth individual to hire someone like us is as follows. Number one, do you trust them? That’s a gut instinct. The second is, what is their background, if you will, academic and so forth?

Number three, what’s their scope of services? Number four, who’s the team I’m going to work with? Number five was fees. And number six was returns or vice versa. The last two were fees and returns. So, the thought process of hiring was not based on returns.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about trust. There’s something that I think all of us would love to exude, to have a vibe such that folks want to trust us to buy into our ideas, our proposals, or what we’re after. And, in some ways, that feels kind of intangible. I think some people just give you a vibe that you’re like, “Hmm, I don’t know about that guy.” And others, like, “Yes, I really like and trust them.” What, Mark, do you think is behind this in terms of you and your team that made you come across as trustworthy?

Mark Balasa
I’ll answer that in two different ways. First, structurally, our firm collected a fee for the services provided. We got no compensation from any other source. Not selling any products, not giving information, literally nothing, so we had no other objective other than serving our clients. In other parts of the financial world, there is that conflict where you’re being sold a product that has a commission or some other incentive for the person to sell it. We didn’t have that.

So, structurally, us and firms like ours, had that to help, if you will, as the foundation. But to answer your question a different way, for me, it’s trying to not sell in the sense of, “Look how good we are,” but, “Let me sit down and ask you, what’s important to you? What do you struggle with? What are your problems? And can we solve them?” And being honest about whether or not we can solve them. So, if we can’t, then say that, “You’d be better served over here,” or, “This is what we can do in terms of what you’re struggling with. This, we can do, we can do very well.”

So, it was, frankly, something I never learned in school but in the real life, which is how important it is to ask good questions, and how important it is to listen. Those skills are unbelievably important to me to build trust in the sense of solving a problem and not selling something.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect. Well, Mark, I was hoping you’ll bring this up or I was going to foist it upon you because that’s what exactly what I’ve observed as we’ve had interactions. And, in some ways, I think it could be rather easy to become sort of prideful or arrogant or to think you know a lot. But in our conversations, I know you’ve experienced much more success and experience in terms of financially and scope over the course of running your business and career.

But when we’re having conversations in the world about media, podcasting, etc., you are full of questions and listening well, and not cutting me off. And I really do feel like I am the expert, you are the pupil, and it’s kind of fun, it’s like, wow, you can teach me so much. But here you are, you’re in a learner mode and it’s just great to be on the receiving end of that. And I imagine your teammates probably felt likewise over the course of your career journey. Have you heard feedback along those lines?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, very much. Thank you for those kind comments. I would give you an example to illustrate the point. So, for a number of years, we did recruiting on college campuses for new team members. We eventually gave up on that. We only wanted people with two- or three-years’ worth of experience. But whether it was someone with two or three years of experience, but certainly, for sure, someone coming out of college.

They would come in and they would have a lot of background, let’s say, on investment or taxes or estate, whatever, and then we would give them additional learning. So, let’s say two years in, they’re now going to present to a client on some specific topic. They tended to come in with, in their mind, a prepared avalanche of information and data.

And what you had to encourage them on was, “Look, a couple things. One is they really don’t care what you know until they know you care.” You hear that a lot but it’s so true. The person doesn’t think that you’re there for their self-interest. They don’t really care how much you know. Number two, you’ve got to learn to modulate that. So, things I used to talk to our new team members was, “Look, on a scale of one to ten, if you know a lot about the subject matter, and one means you know very little.”

A client comes in, an interior professional so you know ten, or whatever the subject matter is. A client comes in and, in my case, let’s say it’s investments, and it’s a widow, and she’s on a three on a scale of one to ten. Well, then you need to talk at a level of four, just ahead of where she’s at but not over her head, not jargon, not tons of data but more stories to give her the point and the comfort to take her and educate her to where you need to go.

By comparison, if you’ve got a CEO from a company in Chicago coming in, and he’s a nine, well, then strap on, go to ten, and get data and give concepts, and give hard-charging data. In other words, you have to modulate with who you’re in front of to help them bring them along. To come back to your point about how do you build trust, and how do you communicate well, it’s doing two things. Being aware of who you’re in front of, and being good at what your subject matter is.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that really resonates. As I’m thinking about conversations I’ve had, if someone is dropping lots of complicated stuff on me, way over my head, I never really walk away thinking, “Wow, they’re so knowledgeable. I felt clueless. I should really go with them.” I think, “Hmm, this guy probably knows a lot because I wasn’t understanding it, but they could also be a con man. They could just be making up these things I don’t actually know.” So, that doesn’t give me a great impression even when they do know a lot, and they’re sharing a lot to prove that they know a lot.

Mark Balasa
That’s very true. And I’ll give you a nuanced example of that. Almost always, when a husband and wife came in, they were on a different spot on a scale of one to ten, so you had to adjust your presentation, the questions you ask, and how you presented it, to both audiences at the same time, especially the wife, which is stereotypical but, unfortunately, it’s true.

They’d have less knowledge about taxes and investments, and so forth. Most of them didn’t have an interest in it. If they felt that they couldn’t understand or follow you, and they left the meeting, that was not good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no.

Mark Balasa
No, no, because the husband and wife are going to make decisions in the car on their ride home, and she says, “I have no idea what that clown was talking about.” That doesn’t help your cause, so you’ve got to learn to do both at the same time without being disrespectful or condescending to either party.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share a little bit about how you, if you are, I don’t know if I want to use the phrase dumbing it down, but let’s say you have a ten-level knowledge, you’ve ascertained that the person you’re speaking with has a three-level knowledge, so you’re aiming to be a four. When you are doing that, how do you do that in a way that doesn’t come across as patronizing, or like, “Well, listen up, little lady, let me simplify this to you. Mommy and daddy have a lemonade stand…”? How do you do that skillfully without coming across as patronizing?

Mark Balasa
You have to do both. You have to talk intellectual, high-level, for the one that’s a nine or ten, and give data or numbers, but then give stories, give examples, or say, “Out of that, tell me what you heard.” Let them play that back, “I heard nothing or I had these two bits.” “Great. Here’s the other thing I’m trying to explain.”

And many times, not always, many times the husband or the wife, vice versa, will step in, and say, “Here’s what he means. Here’s what they’re trying to say.” And, of course, almost all of them appreciate that because you’re trying to meet them where they’re at. And so, it’s more of a conversation at that point, which is what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so now I want to talk a bit about asking good questions and listening. When you were in the process of having a conversation, and attempting to do just that, how do you do that? What is your mental process by which you are generating good questions and listening well?

Mark Balasa
You bet. Some of it, of course, is just practice makes perfect. But in terms of how to approach it, I always took it from the perspective of, “If I was in their shoes, what would I want to know?” I’ll give you an example. One of the reasons I came into this business to begin with was when I got out of college, I was studying for the CPA exam, and a buddy of mine that I was growing up with from northern Michigan, lived in Chicago, he came to sell me insurance, and he asked me a bunch of stuff. Here I was, I’m 22 years old, he’s selling me life insurance, “Okay, I’m not sure I need it.”

But he’s asking me all these stuff in the sales process, I think, “Well, I don’t know.” So, I remember going to the library, back in the day when people went to the library, there was no internet, and trying to find an answer to how to buy life insurance, and I could not find it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. And so, I told myself, “Well, gosh, if I can’t find it, there’s got to be other people that are confused by this sort of thing.” And that’s literally part of the reason I went into this business.

So, I try to put myself in their shoes, their age, their gender, if they’ve got kids, if they’ve got a mortgage, they like their job, they don’t like their job, all that stuff. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “What’s important to them? Why are they here?” And so, I would try to build the questions off of this specific scenario, but there are some standard ones that you could certainly start with.

So, for example, “What does success mean to you? If we were here together a year from now, and you’re with us, and you look back, what would you say, ‘Gosh, this was a homerun for us to work with your firm’?” I would ask that question. Another one I would ask questions about is what is their experience around money or taxes or estate. Those are generic. Several don’t apply, frankly, but you get the idea. There’s a handful of standard questions to get things started.

But, almost invariably, when you ask a couple of things, especially around, “When do you want to retire?” Oh, my gosh, is that loaded. All kinds of stuff would come out of that. So, I just gave you a bunch of openings to start to ask questions about, “Why did you say that? What do you mean by that?” So, I can give you examples but that was kind of the general premise.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you’re in other contexts and generating good questions and listening, how do you think about that? So, in the world of asset management, you are asking questions to gain an understanding of their situation to tailor what you’re going to share and to see if you’re a sensible fit. When you’re in learner mode, it’s a little bit of a different process of generating questions. How do you play the game in that context?

Mark Balasa
For me, part of the answer to that question is I try to think to the end, “What am I trying to accomplish? What do I need to understand better?” And I try to take it back from there. So, in the example, let’s take, I’m starting to do more in the social media world, which I don’t know much about, so there’s infinite ways for me to learn.

So, I try to say, “Okay, why do I need to know how Instagram works? Why does someone who views it, what do they get from it? If I’m a sponsor and I’m going to monetize Instagram in some way, how does that work? Why does it work that way?” So, in other words, I start at the end and I come back, as best I can, and try to say, “What do I need to understand to get to that point?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I still don’t think I understand Instagram, Mark. So, okay, kudos. All right. So, we start at the end, and so then we ask the questions that drive us there. Do you have any favorite master questions that you find you use again and again as you’re trying to get the lay of the land and understand the situation?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, I hope I can think of examples. So, let’s say we’re going to look at a brand-new piece of software, and then maybe we can take other examples, Pete, if you like. But I don’t know anything about the software so I would start with the salesperson on the phone, “Tell me about you a little bit. Great. Tell me about your company. How many employees? How much revenue? How long have you been in business? Can I talk to some of your referrals as a client, a client referral? Tell me who your chief competitors are?”

So, it’s a series of things to understand more about their business, nothing to do with their software yet. Because if those things don’t check out, I don’t really care about your software, frankly. I want to know that that’s a stable business, if you will, before I’m going to proceed further.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Mark, I’ve made that mistake by not asking those questions, because, a lot of times, when it comes to someone who’s very eager to give me a software demo, the answer is, “It is a super cutting-edge hip startup who has revenue and profit that is minimal, that existed for less than a year,” and I’m sort of there to help them learn how things work. In a way, that’s okay. That’s sort of fun. That’s sort of how things can get created, it’s sort of a two-way street.

But you’re right. To the notion of, “Do I want to invest myself in this software?” that becomes important because, like, “Oh, shoot. There’s a high risk it won’t be around in a year or two.” And then it’s like, “Well, now what? I guess I’ve got to go find another one to solve the problem I was trying to solve.”

Mark Balasa
Yeah, and that came true just making some mistakes for our firm with technology over time. I did exactly what you said. I remember we had a CRM early on, it was neat stuff but the company wasn’t viable, and so we had to convert a year later because they were out of business.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, CRM conversions, not pleasant. Okay. So, lovely. And now when it comes to the listening, how do you ensure that you are really tuned in and getting the goods?

Mark Balasa
That was one of the hardest things, frankly, to mentor and train new people on, was the ability to just be still and listen. And I mean not just thinking about what you’re going to do tonight after dinner, but listening. And, for me, some of that comes back to inside of you. It takes humility, it takes patience. Some people, depending on personality, it takes perseverance. But, in my view, it’s critical.

How many sales presentations have you been in? I’ll give you an example. So, we went to update our website a couple times in the last 10 years in our firm. Both times we put out an RFP, and you would have these three or four firms coming in, all kind of preselected, certainly know what they were doing. But you would watch the sales process, it was so fascinating. You’d have one group come in, they came in actually from New York, flew in, it was an hour meeting. They spent 55 minutes with their deck. They never even asked our name, and it was just this long trudging page-by-page process of just listening to what they had to say.

By contrast, if you start a sales meeting, or actually even a regular meeting, by saying, “What’s important? Why are we here? Let me ask you some questions. What’s your biggest pain point?” Even though you’ve already prepared a deck, I would always start with saying, “What questions do you have first?” Because if they asked a question, they come out and then frame something they’re struggling with, even though you’ve had two sales pre-calls, if you will, sometimes that’s with different people, sometimes it’s with them, invariably if you ask them that question, they tell you where they want to go.

And so, one of the hardest things in telling and training a new team member for us was they’d be very prepared for the meeting, the sales meeting. They’d have a 10-page deck and all kinds of data to back that up if we needed it, and their inclination is to present that, and we would always say, “No, no, don’t do that. Because out of those 10 pages, you probably need a page and a half. You just don’t know which page and a half it is. You have to start with what’s important to them, and then come back and use the pages that represents or makes that point.”

My favorite way to listen and to engage someone is with the whiteboard. Because when you present something that’s written, on a PowerPoint or whatever, it’s kind of pre-canned, and people kind of almost automatically kind of turn off a little bit, especially after four or five pages, they do. By contrast, if you’re on a whiteboard, and you ask me a question, and I draw a picture, and I write words, and draw numbers and designs, you’re engaged the whole time because I’m building and it’s custom. It’s a reaction to what you just asked me. It’s not pre-canned.

And so part, to me, the importance of listening is you can do that in person, real time, you ask me a question, here’s an answer based on all my experience, my network, and my training specifically about something you asked, as opposed to, “Turn to page seven now, and we’re going to go through these six bullet points next.”

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, very different energy. Very different feel there. Absolutely. All right. Well, Mark, tell me, anything else about listening, questions, engaging people, relationships, you want to make sure to mention?

Mark Balasa
I think those have been a good series of questions, Pete, no.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now since you happen to have a towering expertise in money, let us know, as professionals who have an interest in their money, are there any top things that people tend to get wrong as they’re thinking about money or managing their money that you’ve sort of seen as a pattern over and over and over again?

Mark Balasa
There’s lots of ways to answer that question. I’ll pick two. On the actual specifics, expenses are really important when it comes to money and investing. You want to try to minimize costs. That’s universal. Morningstar’s done two studies over the last 20 years about bond returns. And so, there’s, pick a number, 2500 bond, mutual funds in the United States. The difference between the top tier and the bottom tier, the number one difference is their expense ratio. It’s not how clever the manager is, it’s not how the duration of the bonds, it’s not the quality of the bonds. It’s their expense ratio.

Because the bond returns are so narrow that if someone is charging you 1% to manage your money as opposed to 0.2 of a percent, that’s a 0.8 of a percent immediate benefit to you, that’s a huge difference in terms of collective return on the bond side. So, expenses are always important. Taxes, always important. So, when you’re investing, what’s your after-tax return, not so much your growth return? So, if you have a high turnover, you’re constantly selling and buying, you’re going to pay a lot of capital gains, short term, in particular, capital gains, that really eats away at your return.

So, there’s a couple of examples of universally always true things on the investing side. Let me answer your question a different way, and this is behavioral finance. Are you familiar with behavioral finance, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’m thinking Richard Thaler comes to mind, Nudge.

Mark Balasa
Yup. Yup, exactly, Nudge. That’s exactly right. Daniel Kahneman is another one. They both won Nobel Prizes for their work in behavioral finance. For your listeners, it’s a field of study that tries to look at mistakes that human beings make when we’re dealing with finances just because of the way our brain is wired, and they’re called heuristics. I’ll give you just a couple of examples.

Human beings as a species are overconfident. Now, that helps us in many ways. So, when you go to start a new job, you’re going to get married, go to college, you’re really not sure what you’re up against, but, “I can do this, by God. Here I go.” And that’s awesome for us. But when it comes to finance, overconfidence is not an advantage.

We think we know more than we do. So, if you have a stock, you work in a company, you think you know all about it, well, really, you don’t. And so, helping people against some of these heuristics, overconfidence, loss aversion, framing, anchoring, all of those things play tricks on how we make our decisions. I’ll give you an example, loss aversion. This is one of the chief things that you have to deal with when people are investing their money.

When a human being sees a loss, it’s very different than when a human being sees a gain, and that bleeds into their decision-making. Thaler has done this one, a great example. He’s got a room full of participants.

And he says, “I’m going to flip a coin. And if it’s a head, I’ll give you $1500. If it’s a tail, you give me 1000. How many of you want to take the bet?” Like, no hands go up. Well, mathematically that makes no sense because the 50/50 bet and you get an extra $500 if you win. No, human beings don’t like that chance that they could lose.

How about 2000 to a 1000? “No, I don’t know.” Twenty-five hundred to a thousand? No hands started going up. That was his way of quantifying that for a human being, a 10% gain is one unit of pleasure, a 10% loss is two and a half units of displeasure. And so, think about your portfolio. What people do then, psychologically, is they hold on to their losers because they don’t want to recognize the loss, and they’ll get rid of their gains because it feels fabulous to say, “I sold a stock when it doubled.” So, that’s not a good recipe, selling your winners and holding onto your losers.

And I can’t tell you how many times people come in, we’d go through the portfolio, and we say, “Okay, we should get rid of these six types.” “Well, no, I can’t. I’m underwater on those. We have to wait till they come back.” That makes no sense.

So, behavioral finance is a really rich area for people in terms of how they can check themselves. One of the things you can do there is encourage everybody, and it’s maybe too pedestrian, but to be a long-term investor, and it’s easiest to do many times with exchange-traded funds or mutual funds as opposed to individual stocks because you don’t see all the moving parts. It’s easier to stay the course.

But in periods of like 2008 and during the pandemic when we got big drops, oh, my gosh, is that hard. I was at a meeting in Chicago, and there was a person who sat on the board for an endowment for one of the prominent universities here in Chicago, PhD in Finance, runs an enormous firm. So, he’s on the investment committee for this university in Chicago for their billions of dollars of endowment.

2008 hits, and you know how bad that was, right? One month led to the second month, led to the fifth month. It’s like its sixth month, constant grubbing of the portfolio. Portfolio has easily lost in the stocks at 50% of their value. So, here’s this sophisticated university, with world-renowned people on the board, including this gentleman, and the investment committee came in about five months into this, said, “We’re going to sell a bunch of the stocks.” “No, no, no, don’t do that. We’re probably near the bottom. We don’t know. We’re probably near the bottom. No, we can’t.”

“As a fiduciary, we have to stop the bleeding.” “No, no, you can’t.” “Oh, yeah, we have to.” And they did. About two months, maybe 30 to 60 days before it bottomed, it went up. And when it goes up, it goes up disproportionately quickly in the beginning. And so, the psychology there is, like, “Yeah, I missed the first 30% back. I got to wait till it drops again.” It’s all bad.

So, to come back to your question, what are some things, as an investor, you should know? Taxes matter. Costs matter. Diversification matters, I didn’t touch on that. And on the behavioral side, coming up with checks and balances so that you don’t get greedy, and that you don’t get frightened.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Well, so now you have sort of turned over a new chapter in your life and career. You have towering knowledge in asset management, and now you’re in media. What’s the story here, Mark?

Mark Balasa
You bet. As we sold the firm, I wanted to do three things, Pete. I wanted to try to work with my family, so I’ve got some family members involved in the new business. I wanted to do something, not to give back some of my money, but also my time. And the third thing is I wanted to do something faith-based. And so, our new venture does those things.

And so, I’m a complete novice at this world, but the people I’m working with are much more experienced, so I hope I’m bringing some of my experience to the table to help us reach a younger audience with things that are impactful for them, for their lives, and for their families.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you give an example of something that you’re putting out there that’s impacting folks?

Mark Balasa
We recently just started a podcast about a month ago, it’s called Is THIS for Kids? And it’s two young parents, Jonathan Blevin and Katie Ruvi, who review each week something in terms of a movie, a song, a video game, or TV show through the lens of, “Is this good for your kids?” And they’re not telling you whether or not if it’s good for your kids, but they’re telling you things you should be aware of, especially with things a lot of parents don’t have time to review, like video games or music, “Are those lyrics, are they okay? That video game, is that too violent? Is it too much sexual content?”

You, as a parent, can decide but we want to tell you, “Here’s what you should be aware of.” So, it’s an attempt to help busy, young parents, with the avalanche of stuff that’s available to their children, about how to navigate that world. So, that’s a specific example of how we’re trying to bring to the market with something that hopefully is helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And I’ve watched “Is THIS for Kids?” and I actually really love it because I am a semi-young, approaching 40 parent, and it’s not just a couple of prudes, like, “Oh, dear, dear, I was so repulsed by this egregiously inappropriate whatever.” It’s sort of like, “Well, hey, in Barbie, there was a masturbation joke, and it was kind of an eye-roll but I actually didn’t think Barbie was that fun anyway.”

And then just, generally, sharing, “Hey, these are my thoughts, these are my observations, this is my best guess for what age it’ll probably be fine,” and it shows that two good parents – I assume they’re good parents, they come across as good parents, Mark – can come up with different interpretations and conclusions of something, and have a lot more fun and laughs and nuance than, “Oh, no, they said the F word two times, so, therefore, this is immediately banned.”

So, I think it’s really cool. So, good job.

Mark Balasa
I appreciate that. And I’ll just tell you, one of the first things that struck me about the point you just made about the interplay between the two of them, because they don’t agree on many things, so Jonathan tells Katie that she’s getting older, and Katie says, “Well, I’m like a fine wine. Jonathan, you’re more like a sippy cup under the couch.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s a nice chemistry in that they seem to genuinely like and care about each other, but they do not mind to razz. Okay. So, that’s a very different thing, “Is THIS for Kids?” and faith-based media stuff. So, tell me, how have you used these skills associated with listening and good questions as you do something totally different?

Mark Balasa
Well, what I’m trying to do is, as you just said, you assemble those skills that I’ve acquired in my other business into this and help the team learn how to do sales presentation, how to do an interview, how to work with a new vendor, kind of some of those universally needed skills, if you will, regardless of what the actual business is, whether it’s a service or a product, and trying to bring that to them, so that’s hopefully my contribution.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell us, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mark Balasa
I think that’s it. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Balasa
I thought about that, it’s a great question. I’m not sure if I can attribute this to Winston Churchill but I remember reading it in context of him. I’m a real big World War 2 aficionado. And he said to some of his military leaders during the war, he said that, “Authority is taken, not given.” So many times, when a young person would be in our firm, they’d say, “Well, how do I become an owner? And how do I get to lead a team?”

It’s one of those tricky things. You don’t really have a checklist, right? You know it when you could see it but I would always tell, “Look, you have to essentially take the authority because no one is going to step up and say…” Well, I shouldn’t say no one. It’s less likely someone is going to tell you, “You should go do it,” as opposed to stepping up and take it.

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

Mark Balasa
Going back to behavioral finance, I love that stuff. I would use it with our clients all the time. In many cases, I would tell them if I’m using it so they would see the folly of their own decision-making, and that area is ripe with so much interesting research. Like you said, Richard Thaler with Nudge, he did another one recently. What was it? Misbehaving. Daniel Kahneman has got a great book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That’s actually one of my favorites. But there’s so much stuff in there that’s not applicable just to finance. It’s applicable to running a meeting, to how to interact with people. I think it’s just a really helpful thing for anybody’s career.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Mark Balasa
I’m a big fan of Patrick Lencioni. And so, two of his books are actually a required reading at our old firm. We’re doing it at the new firm as well, which is how to be an ideal team player, be humble, hungry, and smart, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good stuff. Pat was on the show. It’s so good.

Mark Balasa
Very nice.

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

Mark Balasa
This is a boring one. As bad as it’s going to sound, Excel. I just use it. Even my to-do list, as something as simple as that, I just found it indispensable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, now I got to ask. A to-do list in Excel, are you putting some numbers or quantification on some of the columns? Or, how does Excel enhance a to-do list?

Mark Balasa
It doesn’t. It’s just easy. It’s a great question. I’m not that sophisticated.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I thought you’re like, “Approximate hours required to complete this task.” All right. And a favorite habit?

Mark Balasa
Favorite habit for me is probably reading, if I can answer that broadly. Whether it’s for your own benefit, for your own edification, for your professional development, I know media is voraciously consumed by the younger generation, but maybe it’s just me and my generation, but I don’t retain things as well when I watch them as opposed to when I read. And so, for me, reading is critical on all fronts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget that you’ve shared with colleagues that people associate with you or they quote back to you often, a Mark original?

One of the things I almost always would ask at the end is, “Is there anything else I should be asking?” And so, I would get teased for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have asked me that, and I asked that myself, so it’s a good one. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mark Balasa
BVM Studio. Right now, we just have a landing page. We’ll have more to come but that’s an easy way to reach out.

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

Mark Balasa
For me, as I look back over my career, the things that stick out is this. The world is a hard place, and an act of kindness, a sincere effort to help someone is always recognized and it’s almost always rewarded.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with BDM Studios and all you’re up to.

Mark Balasa
Thank you very much, Pete. It’s great to spend some time with you.

807: How to Develop Confidence, Credibility, and Advocates with Heather Hansen

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Heather Hansen shares powerful advice on how to build the confidence to believe in yourself and get others to believe in you.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The simple mindset shift that builds your confidence
  2. Why you’re already more qualified than you think
  3. The master key to winning over more advocates 

About Heather

Heather Hansen helps leaders, sales teams and high powered individuals master persuasion and build credibility with diverse stakeholders. She gives leaders the tools to make the case for their ideas, their products, and their leadership. With these tools, they change other’s perspectives and help them to believe. Heather has worked with companies like Google, LVMH, SavATree, the American Medical Association and Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, and has lectured at Harvard Business School, Stanford Law School, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also appeared on The Today Show, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, Fox Business and CBS.  

Heather is the author of the bestselling book The Elegant Warrior-How to Win Life’s Trials Without Losing Yourself, which Publishers Weekly calls “a template to achieving personal and career goals”, and the host of The Elegant Warrior podcast, an Apple Top 100 Career podcast. Her most recent book is Advocate To Win-10 Tools to Ask for What You Want and Get It. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

Heather Hansen Interview Transcript

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

Heather Hansen
Pete, it’s always nice to talk to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat as well, particularly about some of your new insights with credibility that you’re teaching, but, first, we need to hear a little bit about your childhood speedreading backstory. What’s the scoop here?

Heather Hansen
I didn’t know that I was a fast reader when I was a kid. I just read how I read but they started taking me out of class all the time and bringing me to this room where I would sit by myself and it would be dark, and, on the wall, they would put up words and sentences faster and faster and faster until I told them that I couldn’t keep up with what they were putting up on the wall.

And it turned out that I was a really fast reader, and then they would give me tests on whether or not I was actually comprehending what I was reading, and I was for the most part. So, I’ve used that skill, which I didn’t realize that I had, throughout law school. It allowed me to get through the legal briefs a whole lot faster. And now I love to read and I’m really fortunate that I can read a lot of books in a year.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I’m just imagining this scene like from X-Files with the two-way mirror and people with lab coats, and saying things like, “My God, she’s off the charts.” Was it like that?

Heather Hansen
I don’t know what they were doing in the other room but I know they would give me a box of SnowCaps candy when I was done, so I was a happy camper.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, excellent. You are rewarded. So, do we know what kind of speed we’re talking here in terms of like words per minute rate?

Heather Hansen
I really don’t remember. I just remember that they were quite impressed with the speed at which I read. And I know that now I average about 200 books a year.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s awesome. Wow.

Heather Hansen
Yeah, it’s great. It’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m just going to play it out a little bit. So, if you have, like, I don’t know, a 300-page business book, how much time do you spend in knocking that out?

Heather Hansen
See, it really depends because, like I just finished a book that I loved. It was called Golden. Let me think what the subtitle is.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, about silence?

Heather Hansen
It’s “The Power of Silence in a World of Noise” is the subtitle, and I loved that book but I was also underlining it and making a lot of notes in the caption. So, that book probably took me a weekend, and that I was about…I want to say it’s like 400 pages, but lots of footnotes. And then I would go to the footnotes, and sometimes I would look up what was in the footnotes, and I really loved that book. Plus, I had the authors on my podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we did, too.

Heather Hansen
And so, it was like a little bit of homework. I read a lot of fiction. I read fiction at night on my Kindle, and those I can go through pretty quickly. Sometimes I finish a book a night, depending on the book and depending on how good it is. Again, some of the books you can just rip through. Others are a little bit more time consuming.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this isn’t even our main topic, but I’m just so fascinated. We talked about speedreading twice before with guests on the matter. It seems like this is just something you did naturally as opposed to a skill or a thing that you learned. But I’m curious, do you actually, I guess they call it subvocalize, read the words inside a voice in your head or not?

Heather Hansen
I think I do. I only know how I read. I never tried to learn this. I know that some speed-readers skim, like they have a certain method of doing it. I think I read the words inside my head but I don’t really know any other way. Even back then, no one ever said, “How do you read?” They were just sort of interested in the pace at which I read, and they didn’t, I think, believe that I was really reading, and that’s why they started testing me in the first place because that comprehension piece was a big deal to them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, fascinating. Well, that just sets the stage for listeners, that Heather is a super genius.

Heather Hansen
No, no.

Pete Mockaitis
And everything that you’re about to say is golden.

Heather Hansen
Not even close. Not even close. And I’ll tell you something else, so I’ve written two books and I bemoan the fact that I can’t write as well as some of the authors that I like to read. And so, we all have our strengths. Mine is reading, and, hopefully, I hope that one of my strengths is taking what I’ve read and interpreting it for audiences that don’t want to read it, or don’t feel up to reading it, in a way that they can understand. That’s one of the things that I would love to be able to say I do well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear about some of your interpretation summaries and insights when it comes to the topic of credibility. You’ve been doing a lot of work and research on this lately. What’s the scoop in terms of what you’re up to?

Heather Hansen
So, as we discussed in the past, my thing is I teach people how to advocate for their ideas, their businesses, themselves, whether it’s for raises, promotions, new jobs, and to, ultimately, turn the people around them into their advocates. And I do that using what I call the three Cs of an advocate but one of those Cs is credibility.

And I have found time and time again, the other two are curiosity and compassion, but if you don’t have credibility, Pete, you can’t win. I was a trial attorney for many years, in the courtroom, if the jury didn’t believe me, I could be prepared, I could be curious, I could be compassionate, I could be nice, they might like me, but if they didn’t believe me, I couldn’t win.

And for every one of your listeners, your “jury,” and I’m putting that in quotes, those people that you need to influence and persuade to get what you want, if they don’t believe you, you can’t win. So, credibility is paramount. It comes before trust. It comes before compassion. It comes before empathy. And I think that it’s something that people don’t focus on enough, and they don’t know that there are skills to help you build it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s dig into some of those skills and how it’s built. And maybe just to get our curiosity salivating, could you share a particularly surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating discovery or nugget you’ve come about in your work and research here?

Heather Hansen
Yeah, I think that the most important thing to recognize is that you can’t prove something until you believe it. So, for example, if one of your listeners is going for a job, they have to believe that they are the best person for this job, that they have the skills and the energy and the enthusiasm and the talent and the experience to do that job before they’re going to make the perspective employer believe. And if you want more resources, if you want a raise, if you want to be on a certain team, the same is true.

In the courtroom, people have often asked me, I defended doctors when their patients sued them, and people would often ask me, “Well, what do you do if you knew the doctor made a mistake?” And the answer to that is, “I would find something I could argue and believe in.” I wouldn’t say the doctor hadn’t made a mistake because the jury would be able to tell that I didn’t believe that.

And so, for your listeners, they need to believe first, and that means that you have to advocate to yourself, decide what it is what you want to believe, and then collect the evidence so that you believe first, and then you can have the energy of that belief and bring that to the people outside of you that need to believe you and that you need to build that credibility with.

Pete Mockaitis
And it really does resonate in terms of I’m just thinking about, in my own entrepreneurial journey, selling stuff in terms of I think there are times, like, “I don’t know if I’d pay that many thousand dollars for me as a keynote speaker. I’m not so sure.” And so, thankfully, the agency did the selling so I didn’t have to be in that tricky position.

But then later, when I had really developed a training program, like, “Oh, my gosh, we’re getting some results here. You’ve got to buy this if you want your team to be effective with the money you’re spending on their salaries. You just got to.”

Heather Hansen
You just absolutely spoke to it, right? When we can’t advocate for ourselves well, we try to outsource it, and that works sometimes. But most of the time, it comes down to us at some point. And so, you saw the difference between when you were sort of maybe lacking with a little bit of belief in that credibility with yourself and when you were full in. And it’s a different energy and the results are different.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it just feels good even being able to walk away, if necessary, in terms of, it’s like, “Well, hey, they didn’t have the budget and that’s okay. Hoping they can find someone else who fits with their budget,” I gave them some names, and I’m not thinking, “Oh,” I’m not second-guessing myself, like, “Oh, maybe I should’ve…I don’t know.”

Heather Hansen
Yes, absolutely. You’re not worried that the next thing isn’t going to come along because you believe, and that belief takes a little bit of work. We can talk about the way that I coach and teach people to build that belief but it’s not like you’re just going to wake up one day and believe. It takes collecting evidence, which is what you did. You just described it perfectly.

You did some training sessions. You saw that those training sessions worked. You collected evidence. The evidence fed you energy. So, one of the formulas that I use is credibility equals E-squared, and it’s energy times evidence. You collect evidence like you did. That evidence makes you feel that energy of confidence and competence and ability. And then the energy feeds the evidence; the evidence feeds the energy.

So, it’s great when, like you, you have some pretty obvious evidence. Some of your listeners may be thinking, “Well, I don’t have any evidence. What do I do then?” And we can talk about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I’m intrigued. So, credibility equals E-squared, which is energy times evidence, and in a way they’re like feeding each other, it sounds like. You get some evidence and then you get more energy, you’re like, “Oh, yeah.” And with that energy, you might go ahead and discover some more evidence.

Heather Hansen
Yeah, you create more evidence with that energy, and you also look at things differently. So, I work with a lot of women who are returning to the workforce or switching jobs, but oftentimes returning to the workforce after having been home with kids. And so, they’ll sometimes say to me, “Well, I don’t have any evidence that I’m qualified for this job, or that my entrepreneurial journey is going to go well.”

And so, we look for evidence everywhere. So, for example, if you’re a stay-at-home mom and you manage the books for the house, well, then you’re good at managing money and you’re good with numbers, and you can manage books. If you have dealt with children, you’re probably really good at handling conflict. You’re probably really good at managing schedules. You’re probably really empathetic. And so, there’s all kinds of ways to take.

Another example is I was a waitress all through college and law school. The amount of transferrable skills that I could collect as evidence from waitressing, like I’m good with people, I keep things organized, I can think on my feet, I can be fast when I have to, I can manage difficult personalities in the kitchen. All of those things are evidence that I can do the thing that I want to do today. And it’s just looking at the things that you’ve done and playing with it a little bit to allow it to be the evidence you need to feed the energy and then collect more evidence.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued here, Heather, I think sometimes, when it comes to evidence, sometimes it’s a matter of the evidence is there, you just don’t see it, and you haven’t taken the time to think about it and look at it, reflect, collect, put it in one place, and go, “Oh, wow, I’ve got loads of experience and evidence.” And other times, I think you might go down that path and realize, “Oh, shoot, it really is in there.” How do we make a prudent distinction and not get sort of sucked into the mental traps as we’re playing this game?

Heather Hansen
I think that you want to find something. In my first book The Elegant Warrior I have a chapter called “Don’t fake it till you make it. Show it till you grow it.” So, there’s always something, there’s always some evidence. It might even be a scintilla of evidence but it allows you to build upon it. So, you’re right, you might have absolutely no experience as an entrepreneur. I didn’t.

In my work as a trial attorney, the cases were assigned to me. They just came in, I didn’t have to do a lot of beating the pavement, or cold-calling, or anything like that. So, when I started my business, I really didn’t have a lot of evidence that I would be a good entrepreneur but I had evidence that I knew how to talk to people, and that I was good at listening. And I knew that those skills were important skills for entrepreneurship, in large part because I read a lot of books about being an entrepreneur.

So, I was able to work with the facts to make them into evidence, which is what we do in the courtroom all the time. Sometimes you’re given really crappy cases, and you have to do what you can with what you have to make some sort of argument to the jury. So, with my clients, Pete, I will often say to my clients, “Pretend you’re the attorney arguing for the fact that you do have something that will make you good for this job. It might not be everything you need,” because we don’t want people out there, pretending they’re ready for things they’re not ready for.

But we do want them to believe in themselves enough to keep going, and that’s where this looking around and really, I tell them to play with the evidence. Look at it from all directions. And one of the main things that I teach people to do is, “How else can I see this? What is another perspective that I can see this thing?” And if you play with things enough, there’s often something there that will allow you to begin, set the foundation for building that mountain of evidence.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting, as I am conceptualizing this, I’m thinking of almost two different skills. And one is credibility, advocacy, persuasion, and the other is prudent decision-making. Because there are times when we ought not to convince ourselves to jump into something, and there are times that we ought to but we don’t because we’re scared.

And I think I’ve heard it before, it’s like, “Oh, I should really probably get an advanced degree before I do that.” And I’m thinking, “You really don’t need that at all. That is just one clever masquerade of fear and delay that you just don’t need to deal with.” And other times, it’s like, “You know, that is probably the prudent step that needs to precede your masterplan.” And so, Heather, how do we navigate that smoothly without deceiving ourselves?

Heather Hansen
Yeah, and I think that we really need to know what are the true qualifications. And it’s a little bit different for men and women. I’m sure that one of your guests has shared that, I think it was H. Packard. There was a study that showed that when there are certain qualifications for a job, if men only had a small amount of the qualifications, they would still apply, but women thought they needed all of the qualifications in order to apply.

And so, different people lean in different directions. Some people are going to apply for things when they have absolutely no evidence. Other people won’t apply even though they have all of the evidence. We want to be realistic about it. You want to sort of step back. And this is where you need to really weigh what the actual qualifications are. You want to talk to people who have done something similar to see how set in stones those qualifications are. You want to do your research.

You just don’t jump into anything, especially in the courtroom. You want to make sure you know everything that could possibly happen. One of the things that I teach my clients is, “You want to know all of the ways in which you could lose to make you more likely to win.” So, we want to be aware of the ways that we might not meet the mark just yet, that we might have more work to do, that we might have more things to make us as qualified as we need to be. And that’s part of the weighing of the evidence as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You’ve also got a concept called belief triangles. Can you speak about this and the other super cool tools?

Heather Hansen
Yeah. So, the belief triangle, we’ve talked about one part of it, and that’s the believing in yourself or believing in you. So, if you are talking about applying for a job, the employer has to believe in you that you have the skills and the experience and the education and the training to do the thing. That’s one of the sides of the triangle.

The other side is they have to believe you, and that means that when you make a promise, you will keep it; when you set an expectation, you will meet it. And when you can’t, and there’s times when we all can’t because the thing is outside of our control, that is your opportunity to have a huge multiplication in credibility because that is your opportunity to own it, to own that you couldn’t keep your promise, to own that you couldn’t meet your expectation.

There’s research that shows that leaders who say “I don’t know” to their teams learn more from their teams, and, ultimately, have more successful teams. So, that side of the triangle is making promises, keeping them, setting expectations and meeting them. But when you can’t, owning it and being willing to do that. It’s a mix of vulnerability and authenticity, and it’s extremely powerful.

And then the third side of the triangle is the side that people often forget. And that’s that people want to believe that you can help them. So, someone might say, “Well, this person is very qualified for this position, and I trust them when they set an expectation, I think that they’ll meet it, when they make a promise, I think they’ll keep it, but I just don’t think they get me and what I need, and how I need this job to be done.”

And that is probably the most important piece because people don’t really care if they can believe you and if they can believe in you if you’re not able to help them. So, that piece is really important and part that most people skip.

Pete Mockaitis
So, as I understand it, we have credibility in the sense that they believe in you, like, “Okay, you know what you’re doing,” and they believe that you’re truthful, you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do, and yet that’s still insufficient because they don’t believe you understand them. Can you give us some examples of that?

Heather Hansen
Or you have their best interest in mind. So, if we’re talking about, in DEI this happens often. Someone might believe that their employer is truthful. They might believe their employer runs a great company. But they might not believe that their employer sees them for who they are, and is going to support them and give them opportunities and help them, which is that he’ll believe you can help them.

so if I apply for a job, and I come in and I have a great resume, and I seem truthful, I’ll own that I don’t have this particular degree but I do have this thing, which is a transferrable skill, but the employer doesn’t feel as though I really understand their business and that I can bring my skills to their particular business, they don’t believe that I can help them.

It’s so important and it really comes down to one of the other Cs, which is compassion. I describe compassion as seeing things from another’s perspective, and then putting that into action. When you’re talking about believing that you can help them, you want to see things from the other person’s perspective, what they actually need out of the relationship, and to make sure that you speak to that to build that part of your credibility.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you give us some examples of scenarios in which this plays out and what that looks, sounds, feels like in practice?

Heather Hansen
Yeah, so one example is I do a lot of work with healthcare practices, and sometimes people will go to doctors, and these doctors have great CVs and tons of experience performing this operation, so there’s belief in you. Great. And the doctor says, “You know, I think I can help you but there’s a 10% risk of this, and there’s a 2% risk of this,” and the patient believes that.

But they, ultimately, don’t believe that the doctor is kind or empathetic, or understands exactly why they want to have this surgery. Now this particular patient, say, just wants to get back to playing with their grandkids, and all the doctor wants to talk about is, “Oh, you’ll be able to ski.” That patient doesn’t feel like this doctor can help them, and so, therefore, there’s a disconnect there.

Another example is I work with a lot of women who are high up in various technology companies. And if they are talking to their employees, and their employees have all of the abilities and all of the experience to serve them on their team, and they make a promise, they say, “I’m going to be able to do this,” and they do it by this date but they don’t seem to really understand what the leader wants and where the leader wants to go in the big picture.

And there’s someone who, no matter how much the leader says, “I’m an early morning person, and I need to have this meeting in the morning,” they continuously try to push for doing things in the afternoon. They don’t see things through their boss’ perspective. There’s a loss of credibility there. So, that last piece really takes seeing things through the other person’s perspective so that you can speak to that perspective as you build that credibility.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful. And I guess what I’m thinking about right now is carpet.

Heather Hansen
Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
When our first child became a toddler, we thought, “Well, we just need sort a bigger zone in which he can crawl around and fall down, and it’s okay.” So, we went to get some carpet, and as I was chatting, my wife, she’s big in the health and safety things. So, I kept talking about how, I was like, “Oh, we want something that’s really thick and cushy, and this kid can just knock himself over and we don’t even have to worry about it.”

Heather Hansen
Like a wobble meeple.

Pete Mockaitis
“And good and nontoxic.” And so, he kept interpreting my statement of nontoxic as environmentally friendly, and those are kind of different and there’s often a strong overlap. And so, I almost had to over-correct, I was like, “I don’t care if you plunder and harm Mother Earth heinously so long as my child isn’t harmed.” I do care about the environment, listeners, but I kind of had to over-correct in order for it to be… feel like I was being heard, and I felt a little silly because it’s not what I believe in my heart of hearts.

Heather Hansen
It’s a great example. That’s a great example, Pete, because if that salesperson had said to you, “I have a child,” or, “I have a niece and nephew, and I know exactly what it is that you’re talking about. I see the world from your perspective. You’re less concerned about the damage to the environment and more concerned about the damage to your child.”

“And I have been there, I understand it, and here’s the perfect carpet for you.” Now, they will have built that last piece of credibility.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And it’s interesting when you call it credibility. It feels right in terms of these three levers. Well, Heather, let’s hear your official definition of credibility, shall we?

Heather Hansen
So, I am a huge freak about words, go back to the reading, and so I always look at “What is the root of the word? Where did the word actually come from?” So, a lot of people in business like to talk about trust, and the root of the word trust is strong. And I think trust is fabulous and it creates strength in a relationship, and trust should be strong, but strength takes time.

Credibility, on the other hand, the root of that word is to believe. And so, I believe that credibility is building belief. And that belief makes the difference, and it’s not only what it allows you to advocate successfully, but, really importantly, it’s what allows you to turn the people around you into advocates for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s excellent, and it really gets you thinking in terms of it takes a lot of hard work to develop strong competence and expertise into you’d be responsive and own your commitments and follow through greatly. And, yet, it doesn’t take that much work to convey that you’re listening, you hear people, you relate to them, and, yet, it really is often missing.

Heather Hansen
It’s missing more. It is the thing that is missing most often. So, I’ll give you another example that’s probably the best example that I just skipped over. I have the curse of knowledge on this. In the courtroom. I want the jury to believe in me, to know that I am competent, that I am going to give them the proper evidence, and the proper way, and the judge don’t yell at me, and there’s not a lot of objections and all that stuff.

So, I want them to believe in me and I want them to believe me. I will purposely make promises in my opening that I know I can keep during the course of the trial so that they can say, “I can believe her,” but believe that I can help the jury. That means, Pete, I don’t dilly-dally with my witnesses. I know they want to get home. I know, for example, sometimes I’m in the middle of a cross, and it’s lunchtime, and the judge says, “Counsel, do you want to finish?” and I look over at the jury, and they’re squirming, and I say, “No, your honor, I’d like to take my lunch break.”

I am trying to help them. And, most importantly, I also try to help them with the way that I communicate with language. So, my case, as I mentioned, were medical cases, and because I was on the defense side, I always went second. So, if the patient’s attorney got up and started talking about osteomyelitis, I would see the jury’s eyes glaze over, and I knew that he or she was losing the jury. I would talk about bone infection because I wanted them to believe that I could help them to understand the case, that I saw the case from their perspective, not mine.

Osteomyelitis is a bone infection, but they’re thinking, “I don’t understand what a word he’s saying. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know anything about this stuff.” But when I say bone infection, all of a sudden, they’re like, “I can trust this lady, and she makes me believe in myself that I can actually handle this case.” And so, that’s that believe I can help them get through this case, and actually do what they have sworn to do as jurors.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really good. And it’s so funny, because as I imagine a courtroom, I haven’t spent a lot of time in them, thankfully, myself.

Heather Hansen
Yeah, you’re lucky.

Pete Mockaitis
Not that that’s not awesome for lawyers. But if you’re not a lawyer, you don’t want to be in a courtroom very often.

Heather Hansen
No, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it’s intriguing because you’re not at liberty to bribe the jurors, that’s pretty basic. And, yet, you, providing consideration for what word will they appreciate hearing, what is their food timing they would like, like these little opportunities you have to, in a way, become a hero to them, and they’re just going to like you, and that goes a long way.

Heather Hansen
It goes such a long way. And the thing is, it is the key to advocating because I am advocating to the jury on behalf of my clients. And because the jurors have that connection with me, ideally, when they go back into the jury deliberation room, if there are some people who aren’t so much down with what I’ve been arguing, they’re advocating for me. They’re saying, “Remember how Heather showed us this piece of evidence? And remember she said this about this?” That is what turns people around you into your advocates.

When you’re able to see the world from their perspective, and they believe that you can help them, they’re much more likely, your clients, your customers, your friends, your family, they will go out and advocate for you if you’re able to get this piece right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, you got me. I have the most random associations for you, Heather.

Heather Hansen
I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, right now, there’s a scandal rocking the chess world, which just sucked me in, because it occurred at the Saint Louis Chess Club, it’s like, “My buddy Brent…” shoutout to Brent, he’s a listener, “…he showed me that facility. I’ve been in there,” in which this guy Hans Niemann was allegedly accused of cheating, although they don’t have any hard evidence, and it’s hard to even imagine how that’s done in a live chess match which everybody has wanded down.

But a group of four women just showed up, this is were the Hans girls, “And we support him.” And I just wonder, “There’s a whole another story there. Like, who are these girls? Why did they show up? How did he enthrall them? And does being awesome at chess now mean that you have…?”

Heather Hansen
You’re going to have groupies.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Heather Hansen
Yeah, it’s interesting. And it’s sort of, in my keynotes, sometimes I talk about this, when I customize it, depending on the audience, because there’s a difference between raving fans and advocates, and it’s a small difference but it’s an important one. Because it sounds like they’re raving fans, or fans, right? But do they have the tools to actually advocate for Hans?

And I know a little bit about that story. I know Elon Musk has chimed in. I sort of have been keeping an eye on that as well. But I think that it’s important because you want to not only turn the people around you into your advocates, but you want to give them the tools to advocate for you effectively. So, if those women, for example, had evidence that they were presenting as they were standing outside the chess center, and talking to the reporters, and saying, “Here’s a piece of evidence that proves he couldn’t do those things,” then they would be advocates. But if they’re simply cheering him on, they’re raving fans.

And if you own a business, you probably have some raving fans, but are they going out and encouraging people to use your services, to buy your products, to hire you? And there’s a difference there, and it’s an important difference for those of you that are in business, or even for those of you who have jobs and you want a mentor or someone to advocate for you.

You’ve got to give them the tools to do that well. You’ve got to give them the evidence. You’ve got to say, “Look at this thing I’ve done. Look at this raving review I got from one of our customers or clients. Look at the ROI that I received in this work that I did for the company.” So, there’s a minor difference there. And I’m not sure whether Hans’ girls are making that difference but I think it’s worth being aware of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I think I find that story so fascinating because, for me, not that I passionately follow professional chess, but I played a lot of chess when I was younger, and I saw the Magnus Carlsen documentary, which was fantastic. I just kind of like the guy, it’s like, “Oh, that guy seems normal, and kind of like me, and dedicated to excellence.” And I just sort of liked him. And then it was interesting how I found myself so torn and wanted to do all this research on the matter because, to credibility, I was pondering, “Well, which one do I believe and why?”

And I was having sort of trouble teasing out the factors because I was really torn because I thought, “Well, statistically speaking, given their ratings difference, there’s a 7% chance the underdog would win just normally.” But it doesn’t seem like the Magnus that I’ve come to know from the documentary to just make accusations in an unfounded way, that’s pretty unprofessional, so it was so weird. I’m just sucked into it, like it’s a reality hit TV drama. And I don’t know if you have any commentary, Heather, on who’s being believed here and why.

Heather Hansen
I think that it’s interesting. Even the way that you just phrased it, Pete, it really shows a lot of things about credibility. Oftentimes, we start with what we want to believe, and then we collect evidence to support that thing. And so, if you, having watched that documentary, if you’re a huge fan, then it sounds like you’re a little bit more likely to believe him, and maybe looking at Hans with a little bit less belief, a little bit more suspicion than you would be if you were like me, completely new to the world of chess and just read about it in Morning Brew.

And so, we often do have things that we want to believe, or that we’re used to believing, and that we have a habit of believing. And because of that, we just keep collecting evidence to support that thing. And so, part of this, and you can make it into a game, but to look at, “How could I look at this differently? And where is there evidence to support that other thing?”

Listen, ultimately, Pete, I say this to people all the time and people don’t always like it but it’s true. In my cases, every single person who testifies gets up into the witness stand, swears to tell the truth, and then tells completely different stories, and it’s up to the jury to decide what is true. And that makes truth a little bit interesting because every single one of them believes, or at least do think they believe, they swore to tell the truth, believes that they’re telling the truth. And the jury decides what is true.

Well, you get to decide what is true for you, and you can do that by weighing the evidence that you collect. But you want to be sure that you’re aware that you have biases as you collect that evidence, and try to, if not be aware of them, even go beyond that and counter them a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very well said. And I think, for me, it was that there was a pretty good case to be made on both sides, thus, creating a real mystery. And then, in so doing, with the reality TV stuff joke, it’s like there is a tension and a curiosity that can suck you in. And that’s why there are so many shows about courtroom proceedings.

Heather Hansen
Yeah, because it’s all a matter of perspective, and how you see things makes a huge difference. Wayne Dyer had that quote, “Change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” But it’s really quite true. You might remember, I think it was in 2015, the white and gold dress. Was that a white and gold dress or was it a black and blues dress? Do you remember that meme on the internet? It was huge.

And people would fight about that to the death, “It’s black and blue.” “No, it’s white and gold.” And it really just depended on your perspective. Scientists, afterwards, did some research on why actually people saw it differently, and it had a lot to do with shadows and what kind of assumptions your brain and your eyes make based on your experience.

So, so many of our beliefs are based on our experience, and when we’re aware of that, we can start to think, “Is this something that I want to believe in? And if it’s not, how can I collect some evidence to counter it?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Heather, good stuff. Anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Heather Hansen
No, I think, listen, it’s something I could talk about forever. But, every day, you are building credibility in one way or another. And so, to be aware that you’re doing it and that you can do it effectively will make you better at it.

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

Heather Hansen
Yes. So, I was thinking about my favorite quote and I had to go with the one that’s sitting here on my desk. It is attributed to Viktor Frankl, though I don’t know that it’s clear that it’s from him. And the quote is, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I am big on this idea of choice, Pete, and so I love that quote because I think we get to always choose our response to things.

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

Heather Hansen
Yeah, my favorite study right now is out of Yale. It’s relatively recent, I’d say within the past two years. And it’s a study that shows that you can tell more about a person’s emotion from their tone of voice than their facial expressions and their body language combined. I love it for a number of reasons. I’m a little bit obsessed with tone of voice, in general. But I love it because it encourages people to do more listening. And listening is what helps you to become a stronger advocate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Heather Hansen
I think Golden, the one that I mentioned before, that is “The Power of Silence in a World of Noise,” that really had a huge impact on me. I am really focused on listening to silence and making space for quiet in my day as a result of that book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Heather Hansen
I like Insight Timer. I meditate. That’s one of the ways that I’m able to sort of create that space and able to respond rather than react. So, Insight Timer is a great app for that. And the other one that I like that a lot of people don’t know about is it’s called Marco Polo, and it’s a way to correspond with people. It’s like video text messaging, and I like it for a bunch of reasons. I use it with some of my coaching clients. We’re able to sort of go back and forth during the day and see each other’s faces and hear each other’s tone of voice as we talk about things. And I also like it because it’s a great way to talk to my parents and the people I love, and save those conversations forever.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Heather Hansen
For me, it’s getting up early. I know there’s a lot of people who are not morning people. For me, the first hour that I’m awake, when I meditate and I do my morning reading, and I enjoy my coffee before I work out and walk my dog, that hour is invaluable. And that habit started in law school, I would get up even earlier. I used to get up at 4:00 o’clock in law school because I knew that it was the time that I had before clients would start to need me. And now, it’s just my favorite thing about the day, and it’s one that I would not want to break.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Heather Hansen
Yeah, I think that the idea that you can turn the people around you into your advocates if you’re only willing to see things from their perspective and then speak to that perspective is really exciting for people because, first of all, it makes them recognize that they can be their own best advocate. And, second of all, they recognize that they don’t have to do it alone, and they can actually get people on board to be advocating for them when they’re not even in the room.

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

Heather Hansen
So, Heather Hansen Presents is the website. Hansen is spelt with an E-N. And there you’ve got links to all of my talks, to the consulting that I do, to the coaching that I do, my books, and to my podcast.

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

Heather Hansen
Yeah, I think I would challenge you today to start advocating for yourself, your ideas, your services, the people around you. Start to see how you do at asking for what you want in a way that makes people actually give it to you, and see how well you do with that. Because some people think that they’re good at it, and they’re not as good as they think they are. Others just don’t even try. So, no matter which of those groups you fall into, you will learn a little bit something if you try to do that today.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Heather, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much credibility everywhere you need it.

Heather Hansen
Thank you so much, Pete. Have a great night.

792: How to Handle Negotiations and Difficult Conversations Like an Expert Hostage Negotiator with Scott Tillema

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Scott Tillema shares powerful wisdom on handling emotional and tense conversations with ease and finesse.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Two powerful skills to help you connect with anyone 
  2. A handy strategy to get people to listen in closely
  3. What people want to hear during emotional conversations 

About Scott

Scott Tillema is a top communication keynote speaker, FBI trained hostage negotiator, and senior associate with The Negotiations Collective.  

He is a nationally recognized leader in the field of crisis and hostage negotiations, training thousands of negotiators across the country. Scott has developed a model for hostage negotiation, which is now being adapted by those in the private sector for use in sales, marketing, communication, and leadership.

Resources Mentioned

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Scott Tillema Interview Transcript

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

Scott Tillema
Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me today.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, my pleasure. I’m so excited to hear some of your negotiation wisdom. But I think, first, we have to hear a thrilling tale of crisis and/or hostage negotiation. Bring it home for us, Scott. No pressure.

Scott Tillema
Yeah, there’s all kinds of thrilling tales. And I think all of us are engaged in difficult conversations. And although not many of us will rise to the level of doing a hostage or crisis negotiations, we’re all having difficult conversations where we want influence. And one of the ones that sticks out in my mind, I was having a conversation with a man, who is holding a gun to his head, and saying that he wanted to kill himself.

And in these moments, you realize how critical this dialogue is going to be, and the words that you say and how you say them really, really are impactful. And I learned a big lesson in this conversation with him because I was trying to persuade him, I was trying to be influential in getting him to do what I wanted him to do, and that is put the gun down so we could have a very safe resolution to this incident.

And, unfortunately, after many hours of conversation, this man chose to pull the trigger, and that was probably one of the most impactful moments in my negotiations career where I really had to reflect upon the outcome of that incident, and say, “What could I have done better so during my conversation with him, he would’ve put that gun down and reached a safe outcome?”

And moments like this really drive me to be excellent at what I do and to be a great negotiator. So, that’s the moment that sticks out, to say, I can do better, I need to do better. And the challenge to everybody I work with and everybody I teach and train, to say, “If this is the level of consequence in my conversations, what’s the hesitation for you? Why not go out and be a great leader and be a courageous person in sales and marketing, and do these things and take these chances, and find the influence and be great at what you do?” because the outcome probably is not going to be as consequential as something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or certainly it’s highly unlikely most of our conversations will be as immediately consequential as in a person dies. Although, I think it’s quite possible that the conversations that we have, and the extent at which we are effectively engaged in them, can, over years or generations, reshape history for thousands, and not necessarily for like super CEOs but just like our children, our children’s children, or our colleagues and those they, in turn, touch. It might be a lower amount of change for one person, but with the ripples and multiplications, it may be quite substantial.

Scott Tillema
Very substantial. And I don’t want to diminish the work that people do in any field because you’re in a leadership role, you need to be having difficult conversations with the people that you work with and the people that you coach and develop. Because if they don’t succeed at their job, they’re going to be without a job.

And think about how impactful that is to that person, and the people that they support and their family. So, we know that the power of influence in conversations is really a life-impacting piece here that all of us, who work in the field of influence, and that’s many of us, I think that everybody out there wants to be more influential.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you reflected on that encounter, and you said, “What could I have done differently?” I’m intrigued, did you have a lot of training and experience? What did you conclude and that you could’ve done differently?

Scott Tillema
That’s a great question. And in 2007, I was trained by the FBI, and one of the cornerstones of FBI crisis negotiation training is active listening, being a great listener, and they teach the eight skills of active listening, and this is foundational. Most people in negotiations know or should know these eight skills, and this isn’t classified stuff. There are books written out there about this. This is stuff that anybody can learn.

But what I kind of took away from this is we have to be a little bit more broad in communication than just being great listeners because the reality is what we see is what we believe, and sometimes we have this side bias that we believe what we see and we can disregard the conversation if we see something to the contrary.

So, in my trainings, we do exercises that show that we believe what we see. So, as communication has evolved, we’re getting away from just this telephone conversation. And now, in 2022, moving forward, it’s very commonplace for us to engage in Zoom conversations or Skype or any type of conversations where we can see each other and experience each other, so it’s more than just being a great listener that we communicate through gestures and facial expressions and body language, and how we’re dressed, and what people can see in the backgrounds of our virtual conversations, and this all matters.

This is all very impactful to what people think and what people believe, and, ultimately, what they choose to move forward on. So, in addition to being a great listener, I really press people that we have to understand body language, we have to understand the expressions, and we’re putting on a show, essentially, to allow people to experience us through the visual in addition to being great listeners and having a great conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share some of the eight skills of listening, some tidbits that can be advantageous to your everyday professional?

Scott Tillema
Sure. The acronym to remember this is MORE PIES, and we could probably go into a five-day class on these eight skills of active listening, but just to touch on a couple that I think are really the most impactful – asking open-ended questions. And this seems so simple and so basic but when I tell people, “I want you to ask questions and engage,” we almost default to closed-ended questions because we’re interested in gathering factual information.

And our goal in these critical conversations needs to be dialogue. And I challenge people, “I want you to do this in three or four sentences, and then pass the baton back to your negotiation partner, and allow them to speak, and allow them to be heard. And we do that by asking great questions. And that’s a great one.

And when you couple that with emotion labeling, which I think is another really, really important step of active listening, now we don’t have to default to saying, “Pete, I understand.” The reality is I don’t understand. I haven’t lived your life, I haven’t done your work, I haven’t had your experiences, so, for me to say to you, “You know what, I understand,” that’s almost dismissive, and I would say it’s a bit disrespectful because how can I possibly understand you when we’ve only been having a conversation for a short period of time?

So, instead, let’s maybe go to an emotional label, and say, “You sound frustrated.” So, we label what I’m hearing with an emotion, “You sound really excited,” and then we couple that with an open-ended question, “Tell me more,” and allow you to continue that conversation so, now, not only am I connecting with the content of what you’re saying but I’m connecting with the emotion of how you’re saying it.

And that’s when people start to sense that, “Hey, I really get you. I really have an appreciation for what you’re saying, and the emotions that are generated by your situation.” So, that’s, I think, two of the most important pieces of active listening, but there are other great ones. Reflecting or mirroring back the actual words that somebody says. Somebody says whatever they say and they get to the end of whatever they’re saying, and we just repeat back the last two or three words, and that’s reflecting.

Pete Mockaitis
The last two or three words.

Scott Tillema
You got it. You’re a pro. Perfect. And what the amateur is going to do is going to say, “Yes, that’s exactly that.” And, if you do it with an upward inflection, we’re asking a question with a downward inflection, we’re affirming that statement, and then we’re going to go to silence, which is another skill of active listening, which I think is probably the hardest for people to master because we’re uncomfortable in silence.

So, I’m just going to let it be silent for a moment, and allow you to take in that moment and keep speaking, and give you the floor because negotiation is not about being right. It’s not about ego. It’s about reaching an agreement. That doesn’t mean I have to like you. It doesn’t mean that I have to trust you. It’s we’re going to reach an agreement that’s satisfactory for both of us, and that’s how we’d go about doing it, by being great listeners and engaging in some excellent dialogue.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, there’s some tidbits about listening. And then how do we become more influential? You talked about verbal influence. How do we develop that?

Scott Tillema
Yeah. So, understanding the first step, I see this as having four steps in being a great negotiator. And, for me, I see our goal is to create a bond with somebody. And so often, we have a goal, “I want to sell them this,” “I want them to do this,” “I want them to drop the gun,” and I challenge people, I say, “Your goal needs to be to build a bond with this person. And once you start thinking about connection, now we can start having a mental map of how to get there.”

And I see that through four principles working together in a circle. And some people see negotiations as a stairway that we’re working our way up, and I don’t see it like that. I see it as a circle that we’re going around and around, and these four principles are the influence and the bond that we are creating. And the first one is understanding, and we do that through listening, and we do that through studying body language and gestures, and make sure I have an understanding of what’s going on.

And so often, we get stuck on that, especially as high performers and the work that we do, we say, “Okay, I think I get it so now I’m going to go right into solving the problem.” And I think that’s the step that most people skip, especially if you’re really good at what you do, is, “I skip the understanding piece,” not that you don’t know how to be a good listener. It’s just that, “I think I know what the problem is. I think I know what the issue is, so I’m going to move on quickly.”

So, the second principle that I use is timing, knowing when to deliver your message. And I found this to be the strategy piece in these conversations and these negotiations, to say, “Okay, I have an understanding of what’s going on, but I want to quickly say whatever I need to say and give my pitch,” and sometimes we get this wrong.

And by getting your timing wrong, we can really miss an opportunity or, worse, put ourselves in a more difficult situation if we try to jump the gun and start selling too soon, or try to persuade somebody too soon. So, the second step is having great timing to what it is we’re going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And next?

Scott Tillema
Next is delivery. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Most people should be preparing for their negotiations, for their difficult conversation. And if you’re not preparing, let’s start there. But the people who do prepare, spend a lot of time focusing on the content of what they’re going to say, “So, I’m so worried. Here’s my talking points, bullets A, B, C, D, and I’m going to get through this, and this is what I’m going to say.”

But how often does somebody going into a really consequential conversation take time to practice their delivery, not what they’re going to say but how they are going to say it? And I’m convinced that this is much more important than the words we actually say. Now, I don’t want anyone to listen to this, and say, “Hey, I was just listening to a podcast with Scott Tillema who said I can say anything I want as long as I say it nicely, it’s cool.” And that’s not the case at all because words matter.

Words are how we frame the conversation so I don’t want to dismiss that piece at all. Words are really critical, but how we deliver them, and I’m talking about the rate, the rhythm, the pressure, the volume, the tone, all these different ways that we can manipulate our verbal delivery. This is really, really important on how people experience us. So, that’s a third big piece, is delivery. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, I love the way you listed several key variables there. Can you share with us some demonstrations and the impact of saying the rate, fast versus slow, or different rhythm patterns, and what kind of influence that makes on the listener?

Scott Tillema
Of course. When we get nervous, when we get excited, our rate starts to notch up and we start speaking quickly. And it’s been shown that people who speak really quickly are perceived as less trustworthy than people who slow down that rate. Now, we don’t want to speak too slowly because we’re going to lose people’s attention. And we have found that the attention span has shrunk significantly over many, many years, as we’re surrounded and bombarded with distractions and social media and everything else that we’re attending to.

So, when I do a negotiation in a crisis or a hostage negotiation context, I have a coach that’s working with me in real time, so they can sit here and analyze what I’m saying and tell me, “Hey, let’s slow it down a little bit,” and kind of give me that hand signal, “Let’s slow that down and allow the person some time to process what we’re saying.” And if we can slow down just a little bit, we’re going to be a little bit more trustworthy and maybe even a little bit more likable. So, that’s the rate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. And then, so next step, we talk about rhythm. What are the key rhythm patterns that we can look to and what are the impacts of them?

Scott Tillema
Yeah, everything I say feels the same way. You get into the groove, it’s going to feel really smooth, you don’t have to rhyme, but we want everything to be right here. So, when you are engaging with me, you have an expectation that you’re not going to get yelled at, that I’m not going to be getting excited, and now we’re going really, really…Everything is kind of right in this groove, and it’s not too loud, it’s not too soft, it’s paced just right, so you can feel comfortable opening up to me.

And I think that this is the same reason that there is a couch in the therapist’s office so you get comfortable. We’re creating a bit of psychological safety for you to say, “Let’s really discuss the important issues here,” because sometimes we disguise the important stuff with other nonsense, and we’re willing to talk about the things that are easy to discuss.

But, really, sometimes we need to get into the more difficult conversations, and I’m really not going to open up with somebody if there’s a chance I’m going to get yelled at, or if a chance that they’re going to just quickly dismiss me and move on. Everything is right in this zone here and I want you to get comfortable having this conversation that’s going to open up pieces of information, which goes back to our first principle of understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we talked about rhythm and volume, we mentioned not shouting. Any other volume insights?

Scott Tillema
I think that if you’ve listened to Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk, she talks about how we can use the body to influence the mind. So, taking this to the volume of what we say, if I become a little bit more quiet in what I say, it is going to force you to physically work harder to hear me. And it’s not very often that we find ourselves physically working really hard to hear someone. It’s only at the times that we’re listening intently, and those are the times that something is very important.

So, sometimes I’ll take the volume down a little bit, and that doesn’t mean speaking weakly or speaking without power. It’s going to force someone to listen very hard to what you’re saying. And now their brain may be convinced that this is something important, and now we’re getting into influence pieces because now they’re intently listening to what I have to say.

And we think the opposite when we want to be heard. We get loud, we scream, we get the bullhorn and we make sure that everybody can hear us, but this is intimate conversations. We’re one-on-one with people, trying to get them to go in the direction that we want them to go. So, I challenge people in coaching sessions, “Let’s take the volume down. Let’s come a little bit closer and see if we can engage them in a soft, intimate, intense conversation.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we talked about a few components of delivery and we’ve got that four-part building of a bond with the understanding, the timing, the delivery. And what’s next?

Scott Tillema
The last one is respect, that I think you can do everything right. But if we don’t come in with respect, none of the other pieces work. So, you can’t get an agreement on respect alone. On respect alone, you can learn to be really nice, and you can get walked on. You’re going to lose a lot of negotiations, lose some opportunities. But without this respect piece, you are not going to have this influence and this bond that you need.

And I think that this makes sense to most people, and say, “Yeah, I get that. I was raised to be respectful, the ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, Ma’am,’ ‘Yes, please,’ ‘No, thank you,’” and that’s all really good, and that’s something that I want. But I think that respect is about emotion and connecting with people’s emotion and their emotional triggers.

And we see such the opposite of this. If you check on Twitter or a lot of social media where people are just disrespectful of each other, and that’s emotional triggers for people. So, I talk about, within respect, I talk about pieces like fairness and autonomy. Are we being treated fairly? How do they see this? How do they see this conversation? What is the issue that they see? Because I know that I see it one way, but can I see it the way they see it? Are they being treated fairly? And that’s a huge trigger for people.

And I’ve had a lot of conversations with folks, to say, “You know, I may not be able to get you what you want but I can assure you that you’re going to be treated fairly,” and people really like to hear that. And sometimes there can be a sticking point because how I see fairness might be a little bit different from how you see fairness, and we can have that discussion.

But the second piece of this is the autonomy, “Are you giving me the opportunity to choose the outcome here?” And I think that I could probably pressure people into making the decision I want them to make, but, ultimately, I want them to carry out that commitment. It’s not just getting me to say yes, to get me to say yes. I need you to do whatever happens next.

And I’m going to try to guide them toward making the right conversation, but, ultimately, I want them to choose, “This is what I want, this is the outcome, this is the agreement that I’m going to enter into.” And if we can be respectful of fairness and autonomy, and have sprinkle in some empathy in here, we’re really going to be someone, who this, your negotiation partner, your conversation partner is going to look to, and say, “Yes, this is someone I want to agree with. This is someone I like. This is someone who I believe in. This is someone who I’m going to enter into an agreement with.”

And that’s the piece of negotiation where we find success, to say, “We’re going through understanding, timing, delivery, respect,” and this is how we build the bond. We’re going around the circle. We’re making this connection. We don’t listen to strangers. We don’t care what strangers have to say. But now that we’ve formed this relationship and this connection, maybe I can have a little bit of influence and nudge you in the direction that we need you to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so zooming out across the broad expanse of this topic domain, could you share with us some of your top do’s and don’ts that are particularly applicable for professionals? Are there any key words or phrases? Is there any way we could accidentally threaten someone’s autonomy or trigger them there, even though we didn’t mean to?

Scott Tillema
Of course. And when we do that, if we do that, again, we’re watching for changes in behavior. Are they pulling away? Are we seeing things outside of the baseline? Are we losing that dialogue? And let’s not be afraid to go back to that, to say, “Hey, I’m doing my best here. I sense that there’s a little bit of disengagement here. Is there something I said or didn’t say that maybe doesn’t sit quite right with you?”

And this is an important piece, especially with these high performers, to say, “What if I’m wrong? What if you see it differently from the way I see it?” And I think this is the importance of having diverse teams and diversity and all kinds of different ways because I want a lot of different pieces of input from people who think differently from me, to say, “Hey, maybe we have to take a different approach. Maybe this approach is wrong.”

And to approach someone and say, “If I did something wrong, let me apologize for how I just presented this. I sense that this was really unsettling to you or upsetting to you.” Or just inquire, “Is there something that happened that we need to go back and address?” That’s a great, great piece. And so often, we have this ego that gets in the way, to say, “Well, I’m not going to apologize to anybody,” “Well, I’m not going to be the one who’s wrong here.” That’s not what this conversation is about.

This conversation is about reaching an agreement with somebody, so let’s set the ego aside. It’s not about ego. Be willing to be curious. What another big takeaway, that so often we are so worried about talking about us, “And what I know and what I can do.” People aren’t impressed by that. They just aren’t. People are more happy to tell you about themselves and their work and their product, so be much more willing to listen than being eager to talk. Another important takeaway to be influential and do great things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Scott Tillema
I think that negotiation is probably one of the most important skills that people need to have to be successful in life because negotiation, really, it’s an umbrella for other skills like communication and influence persuasion, and all these things. And we have an inflated sense that we are really good at this because we communicate with people all the time, and we can point to examples in our life where we have found success.

But the people who are really good at this are humble to say, “I need to learn more, I need to be willing to examine myself and do better at this.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Scott Tillema
So, I don’t know if this is a quote verbatim, but one of the professors at Harvard, Michael Wheeler, he’s a long-time negotiation trainer, he talks about flexibility and adaptability. That we can’t say, “This is the way. This is the only way.”

So, be willing to step out of our comfort zone, be willing to take on styles that are uncomfortable to us, and learn things outside of what we already know because you might need that technique, you might need that tactic, so I really find the work of Michael Wheeler to be very impactful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Scott Tillema
I’ve got a number of books that I like on negotiation and influence. I think one of the older ones, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini outlines six principles of influence, and that is a cornerstone for anybody who’s in the business of influence or persuasion. We need to understand that. But another one is Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate by Dan Shapiro. He talks about five core concerns that trigger our emotions, and that we can use to trigger other people’s emotions.

Beyond Reason is a great book to pick up, cheap, easy read but really foundational for people who are engaging in meaningful conversations with others that really want to take the next step and understand the impact that emotions have in driving our thinking and decision-making.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Scott Tillema
Favorite habit is probably practicing my active listening skills. And I’ve been doing this for a long time, and that doesn’t mean that I’m good at it forever. It’s something that we can forget, and something that we can lose. And people ask me all the time in training, “Hey, Scott, how can I practice the eight skills of active listening?”

And the next time that you get a spam call, one of these people that’s trying to get you to do whatever, give them money and steal your credit card, I want you to practice the eight skills of active listening. Write down what these eight skills are, have them handy, and in three or four minutes, you should be able to get through each one.

And if you’re doing it with purpose and true intent, like you aren’t just going through a checklist, this person is going to engage you and you’ll get through the eight skills of active listening, give yourself a pat on the back, and then you can hang up the call and wait for the next spam caller in a few minutes, and do it all over again.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with listeners; they tweet it out and quote it back to you?

Scott Tillema
“It’s not about trying to get somebody to do something. It’s about creating a bond.” And that’s what I hear back from people the most because that’s not what we’ve ever been taught before. We’ve been taught to sell them this thing, or convince them of this thing, or get them to do what I’m telling them to do, and it just reframes the mind. It reshapes the mind to say our goal, our focus is on creating a bond.

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

Scott Tillema
Excellent. If they would like to hear a little bit more on these principles, I invite your listeners to check out my TED Talk, it’s “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators.” You type in hostage negotiator on YouTube, it’ll be one of the first talks that come up. It’s 18 more minutes of what we’ve been talking about here today, with a few more stories and a few more examples. They can visit my website at ScottTillema.com or my business site at NegotiationsCollective.com to learn about me and what I do and the services that we offer.

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

Scott Tillema
I would say that it’s important for us to realize that this is a difficult time for many people, that all of us have experienced anxiety, and loss, and trauma over the last two years. And I’m not sure that that’s going to change immediately. So, being mindful that there are people around us who are struggling, use these principles, use this approach and try to connect with somebody today.

And it’s not maybe in a professional level where you’re trying to sell something or try to make money. It’s being a thoughtful connecting human being with somebody else, and you’ll be surprised how impactful this approach can be, and that with all the struggles with mental health and suicide in the world, that being a great connector, being a great negotiator, being a great communicator, this can go a long way, and you are going to connect with somebody who will later reflect to you how impactful you were at a really critical moment in their life.

So, let’s be mindful that there are people out there who are struggling and we can use these techniques to connect with them and really lighten up what can be a difficult time in a lot of people’s lives.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, thank you. I wish you much luck in all your negotiations.

Scott Tillema
Thanks, Pete, for having me on. A pleasure chatting with you today.

791: Promoting and Sustaining Trust through Honest Leadership with Ron Carucci

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Ron Carucci reveals the four keys to cultivating a culture of trust and honesty in your teams and organizations.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why people don’t trust you even if you think you’re trustworthy 
  2. Two fundamental questions to up your leadership
  3. A powerful exercise to build your honesty muscle

About Ron

Ron has a thirty-year track record helping executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership — from start-ups to Fortune 10s, nonprofits to heads-of-state, turn-arounds to new markets and strategies, overhauling leadership and culture to re-designing for growth. With experience in more than 25 countries on 4 continents, he helps organizations articulate strategies that lead to accelerated growth, and then designs programs to execute those strategies.  

The best-selling author of eight books, including the Amazon #1 Rising to Power and his recently released To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose, Ron is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, where Navalent’s work on leadership was named one of 2016’s management ideas that mattered most. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes, and a two-time TEDx speaker.  

Resources Mentioned

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Ron Carucci Interview Transcript

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

Ron Carucci
Pete, so great to be back with you. I’ve missed you, my friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose is the latest book. Last time, we touched on your antique doorknob collection, so I think we need to revisit this.

Ron Carucci
Which, there it is.

Pete Mockaitis
I could behold it though the listeners can’t see it. It’s bigger than I thought it was. So, maybe, for those who didn’t hear you the first time, can you refresh the listeners on what that’s about and tell us if there’s any new developments?

Ron Carucci
So, I began making these jars years ago for other people, and, basically, they were people in my life who I felt were amazing at opening doors for people and helping people move over the threshold of the liminal space of a doorway.

And so, these are doorknobs that are dozens or hundreds of years old, there’s old hardware in there, there’s old hinges, there’s knockers, so all kinds of things to do with doors, that span hundreds of years. And if you think about the countless number of hands that have turned those doors open, that have passed through doorways, for me it’s a wonderful daily reminder that that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to make a way for other people. I’ve helped people in my talks over time. There are 7.2 billion doors in the world through which love, hope, and joy can pass. You’re one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you. Well, now let’s dig into To Be Honest. What’s perhaps one of the most striking, counterintuitive, surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made while putting this together?

Ron Carucci
So, it’s based on a 15-year longitudinal study of more than 3200 leaders, so we dug in deep, and we learned a lot. Some of it was very surprising. The most exciting part was that you can actually predict what conditions in which people will tell the truth and behave fairly and serve a greater good, and under what conditions they might be more prone to lie, cheat, and serve their own interests first.

One of the biggest findings is that honesty is not a character trait. It’s not some moral imperative. It’s not some sense of do good. Honesty is a muscle. It is a capability. It is something, if you want to be good at, you have to actually work at it, which is like going to the gym and building any other muscle. If you want your moral competence, your honesty competence to be effective, it isn’t something you can just assume that your good intentions will take care of.

In today’s world, we’re in a trust recession, and if you want to earn and keep the trust of others, you have to earn it every day.

Ron Carucci
So, it turns out earning and keeping the trust of others has far less to do with your good intentions of being trustworthy, and far more to do with working at your honesty muscle to ensure you’re giving people evidence and reasons to trust you.

Whenever I ask leaders the question, “Do your people trust you?” the reflexive response is almost always, “Well, why wouldn’t they trust me?” as though my good-hearted intentions to be trustworthy are enough. But the reality is, in today’s world where cynicism reigns supreme, we look around every institution there is and see trust in a freefall.

Today, leaders begin in a deficit of trust. You can go from being somebody’s peer and trusted, and just being elevated to being their boss, you are the same person and yet, in their eye, that you now have power, that you now have disproportionate levels of influence over their future, that you’re not one of them, starts you in the red. And you have to re-earn the trust you had as their peer, and most leaders just take that for granted.

Pete Mockaitis
intriguing. Well, Ron, I don’t want to get too much into the semantic wordplay game, but it’s funny, when you say honest, I think most of us would consider ourselves honest, and I assume that folks are being honest with me, and yet there is something of a gap in terms of whether I trust someone. I guess there’s levels and layers to it where I tend to think, “Well, I, generally, presume the vast majority of people aren’t straight up lying to me and telling me the opposite of what is true.” Is that fair in terms of like the state of honesty in the workplace today?

Ron Carucci
I would that it were that simple, my friend, but here’s a couple of problems. I think we’re in a world today where we have confused speaking the truth with speaking your truth. And so, I may tell you something that I firmly believe, and because I say it with conviction, it is my truth. I’m going to say it as if it’s the truth. I may be repeating heresy to you that I read on the internet somewhere, but if I believe it, I’m going to pass it on as if it’s so.

Pete Mockaitis
InternetHeresy.com

Ron Carucci
Secondly, so what we learned both in our neuroscience, we do a lot of brain science to understand how our brain processes our experience of honesty, and also in the initial research of our interviews, we used a lot of really cool AI technology to do some of the word text mean analysis. Honesty today is more than just not lying.

So, the definition of honesty, as the book title says, is truth, justice, and purpose. What that means is to be labeled as honest, you not only have to say the right thing, you have to do the right thing, and you have to say and do the right thing for the right reason. You may do less than that, and you might be labeled a good person or you might be labeled reliable. But if you want to earn and keep the trust of others, all three are necessary today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And that’s intriguing how, I’m thinking about, yeah, your truth versus the truth, quite a distinction. I have seen people say things with conviction, we’re at a party and someone was saying, “It’s not possible for media companies to be profitable just by the sale of ads. They have to engage in some other activities.” He said this with great conviction, I thought. Well, I own a profitable media company.

And so, he said it, he meant it, he believed it, he wasn’t trying to deceive anyone, and yet, I know that the statement he made was false. And in so doing, I did, I had less trust in subsequent statements he made. And I guess I could be a stickler…

Ron Carucci
But here’s the problem, Pete, the fact that he believed it to be true doesn’t make it true.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. I mean, what you say is correct.

Ron Carucci
But he would proffer it as if it were truth. And were you to disagree with him, he would say, “You’re wrong.”

Pete Mockaitis
What’s funny, I did. I actually…it was interesting, like my reaction, I was a little angry at him for having said that even though he had no poor intentions. And I guess it’s just sort of like, I guess the way I operate is, “If I’m uncertain of something, I will put my cards on the table.” Like, I would’ve given him a lot of grace if he said, “Boy, you know what, when I was working for this media company, there was no way we could’ve been profitable. We’re paying the writers and all the stuff, and we’d look at the bandwidth fees, given the small revenue we have, so, thusly, boy, I don’t know how it’s possible for any…”

Okay. All right, so we’re conveying similar sentiments and yet I was like, “All right. Fair enough, dude. That’s your experience. I understand that’s where you’re coming from, and I’ve got a different perspective to share with you.”

Ron Carucci
And would you not have been more drawn to, “I trust him, I’d engage him because he was being thoughtful”?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah.

Ron Carucci
Right? So, there you are. That’s a wonderful example of today in our dogma-proliferated world. We lose trust with chronic certainty when we confuse our truth with the truth.

Pete Mockaitis
Chronic certainty. Well said. And I’m thinking another time, someone was doing a very clever book promotion in which I could get a free copy of a book if I just pay the shipping charge.

Ron Carucci
You see it coming.

Pete Mockaitis
And then there was like an upsell video, in which he said, “Hey, can I send you some more training?” And I was like, “Okay, maybe.” And it’s like, “Well, right in the same box, I can give you my…” it was a CD set at the time, it was like $200 or whatever, and so I thought that was a clever move because you already have my credit card. I was already intrigued in the topic because I got the email and I said, “Sure, I want your free book.”

And then I was like, “Okay, clever move. All right, sure.” And then I remember they were not in the same box because I thought it was going to be…and it was not a pre-release copy of the book, which I thought it was going to be. It was piped through BarnesandNoble.com, and then the training CDs actually came separately earlier.

And it’s interesting because it’s like…and in that instance, I was more angry because it was like, “Okay, you’re not just mistaken. It’s like you knew darn well,” even though I still got the book for the cost of shipping, and I still got the trainings. It’s like, “You knew they weren’t going to be in the same box. This is part of your marketing strategy from day one to goose you and have one week at the New York Times’ bestseller list as you piped all these orders through these places.” And so, well, now I trust nothing this person says.

Ron Carucci
So, your examples are crystal clear, Pete, but those kinds of transactions happen to us all day long. And so, my scrutiny of you, and your scrutiny of those people, and people who are like them, because our brains process those experiences like little traumas so the imprint is thrust in our brains. And so, any time now anybody reminds you of the media guy or the book author…

Pete Mockaitis
The author guy, yeah.

Ron Carucci
..you’re going to hold that screen up and go, first of all, “Is it like them or not? And how much like them is it?” So, now, you have a new bar of what somebody now has to get past to earn your trust. Well, multiplied that by hundreds of transactions every day, they can go in either direction, and you see what it takes today for leaders to actually authentically show up in a way that does attract and keep, because the marketing guy had your trust for 20 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
He did.

Ron Carucci
And then squandered it. He exploited it and squandered it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Ron Carucci
And leaders do that every day with good intentions. They don’t realize the things that which people will withdraw their trust from you from. I had to give a client of mine feedback that he had lost his team’s trust because he got very defensive, saying, “I just try with them. I tell them what way things are. I go to bat for them. I advocate for resources for them. I tell them when they’re not working well. I tell them when they’re great.”

I said, “So, you’ve just listed all for me all the reasons you believe you’ve earned their trust, but trust is a currency. We all trade in different currencies. You believe they’re trading your currency when actually they’re not. So, it turns out that when you’re in meetings with your team, you tend to be a little bit impatient and you tend to let that be known through some sarcastic remarks. And when someone is going on a little bit longer than you wish they would, you cut them off.”

He said, “Well, okay, everybody has a bad day.” I said, “Well, apparently you have a lot of them and what you are telling people in those behaviors is you are not safe for them to be imperfect, that if their thoughts are not fully formed, if their arguments don’t align with yours, they shouldn’t speak. That’s what you tell them with those behaviors. That loses their trust. It doesn’t matter that you never intended for them to interpret those things that way, that’s what your behavior conveyed.”

And he was floored. And this is not a jerk, this is a good guy, a smart guy, a good leader, but here was a set of behaviors that he would’ve never equated with trustworthiness. But there you are, his team deciding that he was not a safe place, was not trustworthy of their candor, of their ideas, of their imperfectly formed views.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good notion. So, to trust someone or for someone to be trustworthy, it’s not so much…it’s not just, “I don’t think that you’re lying to me, but rather, I can trust you with my incomplete idea. I can trust you with a proposal which may or may not work.” So, I get that. The use of the word trust in terms of “What do you trust people with?” or, “What do you entrust to them?” can be minimal or maximal and, thusly, the term currency really plays out nicely, “Would I trust you with a few pennies or would I trust you with my life savings?” But rather than talking about monetary matters, we’re talking about kind of emotional, intellectual contribution matters.

Ron Carucci
And some people hold up the arcs of character, “I’m going to judge by your character to decide whether or not I’m going to trust you.” Some people use competence, “If I think you’re not good at your job, if I don’t think you’re awesome at your job, I may trust you less.” It may be your personality. You may have a different kind of personality than me, and I find if I’m an introvert and you’re charismatic, whatever, I may trust you less. But if you’re like me, I may trust you more.”

There’s all kinds of currencies we trade in. The key is to know what currency the people whose trust you want are trading in, not to assume that they’re trading in yours because you may squander a great deal of effort trying to earn trust you’re not earning.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also think that it can be quite segmented in terms of like, “When you start talking about marketing ideas, I don’t trust you because I think they’re kind of nutty. But when you start talking about financial accounting health things, like, okay, you’re solid, you’re all over that.” So, all right. Well, please, Ron, unpack this for us. If we want to be maximally trustworthy, what’s our path?

Ron Carucci
There’s four doors to go through, using our door metaphor. So, we found four conditions under which you can guarantee whether or not people will earn your trust. These were the conditions we found, both in individuals and organizations, and there’s actual statistical factors that go with each. So, the first one is be who you say you are. Our organizations make promises in their statements – missions, values, visions, purpose statements.

It turns out, those matter to people in terms of whether they’re embodied or not. And if you work in an organization where those things are for cosmetic purposes only, but if you ask people, “Is this your experience of the place?” those are not the words they would use to describe it. You are now three times more likely to have people be dishonest.

Pete Mockaitis
To be dishonest.

Ron Carucci
Yup, but if there is an alignment between the actions and words, and if your organization does embody those words, now you’re three times more likely to have people to be honest. The reason you raise the risk of dishonesty is you’ve now institutionalized duplicity. You’ve now told people, “Around here, we say one thing and do another, and so that’s okay.” So, your people will now go, “Okay, so I’m allowed to say one thing and do another.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Ron, this is hard hitting.

Ron Carucci
The same with leaders. If you’re a leader, you have advertised what you value. You may not have done it intentionally, you should have, and so people will look at you. And if you’re embodying who you say you are, they’re three times more likely to give you their trust and see you as honest, but if your say-do gap is more than one-to-one, you are telling people you’re not trustworthy.

Second was accountability. So, if the way in which you account people’s work, how you talk about their contributions, how you measure their contributions, is seen as fair and just and dignified, meaning, “I feel, when I walk out of my conversations with my boss, that however my work was discussed, including my shortfalls, was dignifying and fair, meaning I have as much of a chance of being successful as anybody else,” you’re four times more likely to have people be honest.

But if I think the game is rigged, if I think I’m being demeaned or a cog in your wheel or a means to your end, or I don’t have as much of a chance at being successful as other of your favorites, now you’re four times more likely to have me be dishonest because, now, for me to get ahead, I have to embellish my accomplishments and hide my mistakes from you.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say be honest, or be dishonest, again, we’re not talking about stating things that are the opposite of the truth, but rather shades, nuances, withholding, embellishing.

Ron Carucci
Any form of truthin purpose, any form of saying the right thing, doing the right thing, or saying and doing the right thing for the right reason. It’s any misuse of those three things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ron Carucci
The third was decision-making. So, if I walk into a room in an organization, virtual or otherwise, commonly referred to as a meeting, and I believe what’s happening in that room to be an honest conversation, that the person who’s presenting something is giving me the full scoop on what data they’re presenting, they’ve given me both sides of an argument, I believe they don’t have some hidden agenda, and I believe that were I to offer a view that’s different than the countering, prevailing views in the room, I’d be welcome to do that. Now, you’re three and a half times more likely to have me be honest because I can trust what’s in the room.

But if I walk into that room and I think it’s nothing but orchestrated fear, and the person presenting the data has spun it, has an agenda of what they want, is clearly guiding the room toward that outcome, and the last thing you want to hear from me is a point of view different than the one that you’re trying to shape, now you’re three and a half times more likely to have me be dishonest because the truth is now underground. And if I want the truth, I have to go get it somewhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
And here being dishonest might mean just keeping your mouth shut.

Ron Carucci
Keep your mouth shut. Go outside the room and collude with somebody about…

Pete Mockaitis
“Can you believe that BS?”

Ron Carucci
“And so, here’s what we’re going to do now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ron Carucci
And the last one was probably one of the most surprising, was cross-functional relationships. What happens at the seams of your organization? If you have prevailing border wars, the classic sales and marketing, supply chain and operation, R&D and innovation, HR and everybody, if those seams are not stitched well, and there’s no way for those complexity, which are usually healthy tensions to be resolved, you are six times more likely to have people be dishonest because when you fragment the organization, you fragment the truth. Now, all we have is dueling truths, “My truth versus your truth. My only interest now is being right, which means I have to go about proving you wrong.”

But if those seams are stitched, if there’s cohesion and coalescence across the organizational story, if people recognize that there’s value we create together that’s bigger than either one of us, and there’s a way for those tensions to be held in a healthy way to solve those conflicts, now you’re six times more likely to have people be honest with you because now we’re all part of a bigger story.

The sobering aspect of those four findings, Pete, is that the models, the statistical models, are cumulative. So, if you’re good at all four of those things, you’re 16 times more likely to have people in your organization, or in your presence, be honest with you. But if you suck at all four of those things, you are now 16 times likely to find yourself on the front page of The New York Times in a story you never imagined being in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Woo, Ron, there’s a lot of goodies here. I think the one that really hit home powerfully was at the beginning when you talked about institutionalizing dishonesty. And I could think of my first workplace was Kmart, and I remember we had these principles, and I thought to myself, “Oh, what a relief,” I’m so naïve, “Oh, what a relief.” I’m like 17 years old, don’t really know what I’m doing, first sort of job, it’s not a paper route, and I’m sure there’s going to be all sorts of ambiguous tenuous things, but I can look to these principles as my guiding light in the midst of this ambiguity.

I think I still remember the customers rule, teams work, change strengthens, diversity enriches, performance drives. It’s over 20 years ago. And yet when I saw, in our store in particular, not to throw shade on Kmart worldwide, when I saw these being violated, it’s like, “Oh, I guess not really. Okay.” Because I loved the idea of, okay, customers rule and I had the power to please, I was told in my training video.

Like, if they don’t have the sale 24 pack of Pepsi in stock, I can give them two 12 packs for the sale 24-pack price. I thought that was pretty cool, it’s like, “Ooh, that’s something I can do. I’ve got some power here,” and that was one of my favorite things to do, is write up the magic ticket, which says, “Hey, this is your new price for this thing.”

But then when they said, “Oh, don’t do that for these,” it’s like she’s got some sort of Pepsi dealer that’s got a special price, “Don’t do that for these things or these exceptions,” and they really added up. And you’re right, institutionalizing dishonesty, I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess we just kind of do whatever is expedient. I guess that’s how things really work here.” And that wasn’t a great feeling, and it made me kind of uneasy in terms of never quite knowing if things were right or appropriate.

And, thus, just sort of doing whatever got the job done without flagrantly, I guess, violating the law or causing risk to someone’s health and safety. But then elsewhere, I’m thinking about Bain where we had our operating principles, and they were real, and that was inspiring, and I was like, “Oh, this is what we do here. It’s like we’re open to the 1% possibility, which is that you’re wrong, and that’s okay. It’s okay for lowly associate consultant to challenge a stately partner and they won’t rip my head off. That’s pretty cool that that’s really how it works here.” So, yeah, the notion of institutionalizing dishonesty is a powerful phrase and really does ring true experientially.

Ron Carucci
when duplicity becomes a welcome norm, the offense of the hypocrisy causes what we now know to be moral injury. So, it’s not just exhaustion, it’s not just even burnout from the constant duplicity, we now know, we can measure it through neuroscience studies that it’s actually what we call moral injury.

Moral injury was first measured in people who were at war, people who were veterans and experienced or observed or were part of atrocities, and then throughout the pandemic, we realized, “Oh, healthcare.” Lots of moral injury there. It’s actually an imprinted trauma response similar to PTSD but not the same.

Well, when you’re in an environment of rampant hypocrisy, and the enraged part of you that feels trapped, that feels complicit, is actually imprinting like a trauma response. It’s called moral injury. People have often misdiagnosed burnout or exhaustion for what really is moral injury. And so, a rampant environment of saying one thing and doing another means that, “I will get my pound of flesh. So, if you’re going to be a hypocrite, watch what I can do. And so, I’ll start giving those price tags two for one, three for one, four for one. When my mother comes in, it’s going to be ten for one.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s good. Well, so this is really intriguing that these kinds of environmental cues have tremendous power in shaping the behavior of folks. So, let’s say that our listener is not at the top of the organization but somewhere in the middle, and they are inspired. They want to be as honest as possible and shape some good cultural vibes within their spheres of influence, what are some immediate actions folks can take?

Ron Carucci
That’s a great question. And I will shamelessly plug the book because I left no stone unturned. Every chapter ends with a long luxurious list of practical things we can all do right away. But, for example, let’s talk about this duplicity thing. Next time you’re together with your team, pull those things off the wall. Pick your favorite set of promises; the values, the principles, the mission, the purpose statement.

Pick one. Put it on the table and ask your team, “How are we doing with this? Is this what your experience is? Maybe the rest of the place isn’t, but I want to make sure that the experience I’m creating for us sounds like this. Where could we do better? If somebody followed our team around with a video camera all day long, could that video tape be used as a training program for these values? Or, would it be like, ‘Here’s how not do this’?” Just open the conversation. Any one of these is an invitation to a conversation.

So, when we finished the research and found the findings. I thought, “I don’t want to tell the failure stories. We’re all a little bit sick of Theranos. We’re all a little bit sick of Wells Fargo. We don’t need to rehash those painful moments anymore. I want to know who the heroes are. I want to tell the stories of people who are doing this and living this out in a way I’d be proud to emulate. I’d want them as my boss.”

And so, the book is nothing but a book of great heroic stories of people who are beautifully and inspiringly embodying these four findings in a way that we can easily emulate, we can easily take a book out of their playbook that they’ve lived a path for us. And so, the border war one, the cross-functional things. If I asked you, “Who is your they? Who is the person in some other department who your team has to coordinate with, or you think of them, you go, ‘Here they come, what do they want?’ and you’ve othered them, you’ve made them other, they’re the enemy, and they make your life miserable and all you do is talk about how incompetent they are?”

It turns out, not as surprisingly, you are probably their they too, and they’re having the same conversations about your team, which, of course, you think are unjustified and your team is just angelic and does everything right, and couldn’t imagine making their life miserable. What if you just reached out to that leader and said, “Here, let’s have coffee,” and said them, “Look, we know our teams are struggling to get along. How can I be a better colleague to you? What could we do differently? How can we create better? What’s one thing we can do to make this better?”

And any time I bring teams together to do what we call seam startups to sort of regenerate a seam, inevitably, as you begin to talk about what value they co-create together that they don’t create on their own, and begin to talk about how they do that, or how they struggle, you start hearing a crescendo of, “Oh, that’s why you do that? Oh, that’s why that drives you crazy. I didn’t know you needed that. Wait, that’s what you guys do? That’s your KPIs? Oh, my gosh, we measure them just to the opposite. No wonder I can’t stand you.”

People discover and re-humanize the other from being the them to now it’s a part of a bigger we. And, suddenly, things change. So, all of us can initiate any one of these things to be better. There are organizational injustices all around you, in your accountability systems, in your budgeting systems, in your resource systems, somebody is getting the short end of a stick, somebody is not valued the way they should.

Just ask yourself, “Who are the roles in your organization that are privileged? If you’re a tech company, are your engineers privileged? If you’re in a brand company, are your marketers privileged? If you’re in a growth company, are your salespeople privileged?” And it’s not that all work is created equal. All work is not equal. Some work is more important than others but not all people should be more important than others.

And if those privileges and those jobs are disadvantaging other people, that means those privileges are a problem and the playing field is not level, and you have the power to right those wrongs. Somehow, some way, who’s the bully in your organization that your team has to put up with, that you turn a blind eye?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Ron, so fundamentally, how do leaders earn and sustain their teams’ trust?

Ron Carucci
If you’re a leader, let me simplify your job. People come to work every single day with two foundational questions that they want to answer, “Do I matter and do I belong? Is my contribution important? Is it valued by you? And can I show up as who I am or do I have to hide part of myself?” Your job is to make sure that, every day, they never wondered if the answer to those questions is yes, because any time they spent doubting whether or not the answer is yes, is capacity they’re investing in hiding, in performing, in manipulating, in resenting, and that’s not capacity they’re putting into producing the results you want them to produce. So, take it off the table for them.

Make sure there is not a shred of doubt in how you care for them, and how you lead them, and how you guide them, and how you coach them, that they never wondered if they matter or do they belong so that the rest of their capacity can be devoted to performing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. Okay. Well, now I’m wondering about the shooting the messenger effect. It’s real and it really does make things difficult. And I guess we sort of talked about these four environmental organizational factors at work here with regard to contributing to or detracting from psychological safety. But if we’ve got bad news, and we’re in an environment that isn’t so welcoming of it, how do we even play that game?

Ron Carucci
So, let’s talk about both side of the equation here. Here’s a blanket statement that I can confidently say as my truth is the truth. If you are a leader and you don’t have somebody coming into your office, at least twice a week, telling you something that makes you uncomfortable, you can be 100% confident your leadership sucks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ron Carucci
That’s it. And if you think it’s because there isn’t anything to tell you that makes you uncomfortable, not only does your leadership suck, you’re stupid. But those stories are being told somewhere, and if they’re not telling you, you have to be curious about who they’re telling. You can be very confident that every night at the dinner table of the people you lead, you are being talked about. You are the subject of a story. If you don’t know what stories they’re telling about you, you should want to get in on the conversation.

Let’s start with the other side of the equation. Today, telling the truth has reduced itself to, if I just stood up the posture of a big middle finger, or a whiner, or a rant on social media, that’s literally speaking my choice or being the messenger. You have to deliver the message competently. You can’t just come in ranting, or whining, or complaining, or accusing, or, passively-aggressively, throwing somebody under the bus. You just need to show up with the credibility to say, “Hey, I have a concern. Here’s what it is. Here’s my suggestion for how to resolve it.”

And if you haven’t earned the credibility to do that before that moment, that moment is probably not the moment to do it then. What we know about competent courage, Jim Detert’s research, if you haven’t had him on your podcast, you want to get him. He wrote the book Choosing Courage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we had him.

Ron Carucci
And his research shows that the people who do this well are people whose credibility is already established, and there are things they do competently to bring in the bad news, to establish what to do about it, and to be heard. It doesn’t mean people won’t personally get defensive but there is a skill to it. I actually was told last week on social media, I’m still sort of wrestling with this, but someone said, “Ron is so good at what he does, he’s the only person I know that can tell someone to go to hell, and they’ll ask for directions.”

And I’m thinking, “It sounds like that was intended to be a good thing or a compliment.” I’m not so sure but I do work very hard to make sure that when I have to bring somebody uncomfortable news, a disconfirming news about how they see the world, that’s already going to make them uncomfortable, but at least I do it with care. I don’t pull punches, I don’t soft-pedal it, but I do it in a way that they know I’m not judging them, I’m not trying to shame them, and I will help them through this.

But withholding bad news from somebody is never kind. Leaders do it all the time when they withhold hard feedback from people, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings. It was just a one-off thing. They probably didn’t mean it.” Same with our bosses, we let them off the hook. Withholding feedback that could help somebody grow is cruel all the time.

Again, the competence includes timing. Barging into a room when your boss is in a meeting with their boss, and blurting out something they did that was terrible, probably a bad idea. So, timing, delivery, it all matters, but not doing it is never okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ron, anything else you want to make sure to say before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ron Carucci
If your own honest competence, your own muscle is important to you, I would invite you to just try one exercise that I give many leaders to do. The University of Massachusetts’ research says that, on average, we all lie about twice a day, give or take. Assume for a minute that includes embellishing something to your boss, leaving a piece of information out to your spouse, whatever. Think about the last ten days of your life, and think about, let’s say, 15 moments where you were not at your best, where you were not proud of who you were.

You could’ve been curt to a barista. You could’ve blown off your kids. You could’ve taken that slide out of a deck to ensure that you got your budget. You could’ve over-inflated accomplishments to somebody in a presentation about what you were doing when you spoke. Pick it. Little, big, whatever, no one has to see this. But what I guarantee you is if you look over those 15 moments over the last 10 days, you will see a pattern.

The moments that bring us to our dishonesty are not random. We adopt those behaviors because we believe that they serve some need or we wouldn’t do it. You have told yourself that these choices and these moments serve some purpose, “I will engineer a certain response,” “I will look a certain way,” “I will avoid a certain pain,” “I will appear to be a certain way.” And if you want to raise your game on honesty in order to make sure that, in fact, you are trustworthy, you have to, first, be honest about your dishonesty. You cannot be more true to yourself until you’re more true about yourself. And so, start with you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you, Ron. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ron Carucci
As my mentor once told me many, many years ago, “Nothing in life is revocable except death.”

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

Ron Carucci
At the Harvard University, they did this study on cafeteria workers, on looking to see how meaning in work happens, and they put cameras both on the person ordering their food and the people in the kitchen making the food. And when they could both see each other, the way the food got made changed. When, suddenly, people, in the kitchen, went from just frying eggs to, “I’m frying eggs for them,” the care and attention to detail and quality of what they were doing went dramatically up, meaning that no matter what task you’re performing, it can be meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’m wondering if this has something to do with why the scrambled eggs at the Waffle House are extra delicious. I could see them; they can see me.

Ron Carucci
Versus a buffet of golden brown.

Pete Mockaitis
Right there. All right. And a favorite book?

Ron Carucci
David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.

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

Ron Carucci
It’s Outlook. I live for Outlook, and I know how important it was to me because mine went down for two months, and people couldn’t figure out how to use the web version, and I was a neurotic mess.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. Any Outlook power tips?

Ron Carucci
Color code your calendar. That’s a cool tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite habit?

Ron Carucci
In the morning, when I have my coffee, I have a collection of mugs that, in my cabinet…

Pete Mockaitis
Doorknobs and mugs. Two collections for Ron.

Ron Carucci
And so, each mug is sort of attached to a person or experience in my life, and so I begin my day thinking about that person or thinking about that experience and those people, and just to sort of begin with a sense of gratitude and reminding myself that it’s bigger than me. My own story is bigger than just me. And so, I begin my day thinking about somebody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with folks, they tend to repeat it back to you, retweet it, Kindle book highlight it?

Ron Carucci
I think the “Honesty is a muscle” is the one people tend to sort of double-take on.

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

Ron Carucci
Please come visit. So one of the cool things we did was, I knew that when I was interviewing all those heroes, I wouldn’t be able to use everything they said but it was all worth it, so we videoed those interviews, and we did a TV series, and it’s called Moments of Truth. It’s a 15-episode news magazine show, in a news magazine format, and you can binge watch all 15 episodes at ToBeHonest.net or you can find them on Roku.

At ToBeHonest.net, you’ll also find information about the book, the research, there’s a webinar there. If you want to hang out with me, come to my firm’s website Navalent.com. We’ve got really cool free e-books, and videos, and whitepapers, and lots of cool blogs, and you can have us in your inbox every month and get our wisdom about teams and workplace and leadership, and all that kind of stuff. And please do follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter and stay in touch.

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

Ron Carucci
Don’t take trust for granted. Level up and say the right thing, do the right thing, and say and do the right thing for the right reason, and you will live a far more gratifying and purposeful life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ron, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you all the best and much honesty and trustworthiness.

Ron Carucci
Pete, always a pleasure. I was just wearing your shirt, oh my gosh. That could be the accountability chapter, we did identify it. I love it. Always a pleasure, my friend. Thanks for having me.

746: How to Foster Deep Connection and Influence with Zoe Chance

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Zoe Chance shares heartwarming, powerful, and practical advice for building relationships and getting people to say yes to you.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The one thing that motivates people more than money 
  2. How to exude more warmth and likability
  3. The one question that helps you get along with anyone 

About Zoe

Zoe Chance is a writer, teacher, researcher, and climate philanthropist. She’s obsessed with the topic of interpersonal influence and her science-based book is called Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. It is being published in more than 20 languages. Zoe earned her doctorate from Harvard and now teaches the most popular course at Yale School of Management (Mastering Influence and Persuasion). Her research is published in top academic journals and covered in global media outlets. She speaks on television and around the world, and her framework for behavior change is the foundation for Google’s global food policy. Before joining academia, Zoe managed a $200 million segment of the Barbie brand, helped out with political campaigns, and worked in jobs like door-to-door sales and telemarketing. She lives with her family in New Haven, CT.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you Sponsors!

  • Athletic Greens. Support your health with my favorite greens supplement. Free 1-year supply of Vitamin D and 5 travel packs when you purchase from athleticgreens.com/awesome. 
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Zoe Chance Interview Transcript

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

Zoe Chance
Thank you so much, Pete. Great to meet you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you, too. You, too. I’m excited to dig into your wisdom about influence and how we can be all more awesome at our job doing that. I want to hear about one of your first jobs, cleaning audiobook covers with a toothbrush. What is the whole story here?

Zoe Chance
This was my very first job out of college. I had a degree from one of the top liberal art schools in the country, Harverford College, and I was so excited to set the world on fire but it’s actually really hard to find a job when you don’t have experience, and the job I could get hired for was working in a factory, cleaning the covers of audiobooks with a toothbrush. And the benefit of that job, the upside was that you get to listen to audiobooks, which I enjoyed, but this was one day, Pete.

And then at the end of the day, my boss says, “You know, Zoe, you did a really great job, and I bet it won’t take longer than three months or so before I can promote you up to the mailroom.” And I just left with my spirit crushed and I’m so embarrassed I ghosted them and I just never went back.

Pete Mockaitis
So, like this is one day?

Zoe Chance
Yeah. It was such an ego blow as a new college grad to be like, “Only three more months and then you can make it the lowest rung on the totem pole of the mailroom.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m curious to know if they’re fresh off the factory line, why are they dirty enough to need a toothbrush cleaning?

Zoe Chance
You know what, Pete, you don’t want to know. They’re not fresh. Oh, sorry. No, no, no, they’re not fresh off the line. These were rented audiobooks. So, especially people who were doing long drives, like truckers and stuff would rent and return audiobooks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you like ketchup from the fries.

Zoe Chance
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood.

Zoe Chance
Hard jobs are so much harder than like… all blue-collar jobs, and I’ve had multiple, many of them are just so much harder than all white-collar jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear that. Well, thank you for sharing. And you have gone up a few ranks since the mailroom so you’re now a top writer, teacher, researcher when it comes to influence. So, I’m curious to hear what’s one of the most surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans when it comes to influence over the course of your career?

Zoe Chance
I’ve had a lot of surprises. One of the most surprising is that by reading these secret journals that students keep for my class, I’ve been teaching at Yale for a decade, and I teach the most popular class, and I’ve had hundreds of students share these journals with me in which they reflect on their insights and apprehensions and experiences with influence. What I’ve learned is it doesn’t matter how successful you are, almost everyone is uncomfortable with influence.

And this is also from conversations with executives and activists and politicians, almost all of us feel uncomfortable having to advocate for ourselves, to ask for what we want, and especially in some domains more than others, and this is even some of the wealthiest people on earth, sort of the first big thing is interpersonal influence is deeply uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating. Well, I was just talking to a master salesperson yesterday, Shane from a Kwame Christian’s podcast organization – shoutout – another guest on the show, and it’s so funny because I sure get the impression, he loves…he just eats up the interpersonal influence, and I don’t know maybe he’s the exception, you said almost everyone. Or, is it that those who love it are also uncomfortable with it, kind of like the nerves of public speaking and the thrill of the chase at the same time?

Zoe Chance
What I found is that most people, even if their whole job is influence, interpersonal influence, maybe they work in sales or lobbying or fundraising and are very successful at it and they love their job, but maybe it’s their daughter that they’re having conflict with and they feel really uncomfortable asking her to do her homework, clean the dishes, something like that. Or, it might be they’re uncomfortable…

I was talking to someone who is so wealthy, that he’s on lists of wealthy people, just last week, who was saying that in business it’s easy for him to ask, but when he goes to a restaurant, he would never send his food back because that makes him uncomfortable to create extra work for the people who are working at the restaurant. Many of us have comfort in work-type of domains but we’re uncomfortable in romantic situations. It’s hard for us to make a pass at someone or request something from our partner, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is intriguing. And, in some ways, I could think about if this wealthy person happened to be like a CEO-ish type role being a steward of the shareholders’ money, basically, is kind of like what you’re doing there, you can sort of feel emboldened. I’m just totally projecting into the role of a CEO, I don’t know.

Zoe Chance
I love it. Keep going. Keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll just speculate away. You can feel emboldened, like, “Well, hey, this is kind of like my duty. I’ll do the best I can for my shareholders and for my team whose bonuses are all tied into the share price, but sending my food back, I mean, that’s just for me. Like, I’m going to make their job harder just so that I can eat something a little tastier. Like, who do I think I am? Come on.”

Zoe Chance
Yeah, I think that you’re absolutely right, and I didn’t mean to be weird or secretive. So, the guy is Ed Mylett, who’s a motivational speaker and an entrepreneur. And I’m absolutely certain that what you’re saying about CEOs applies to most people where it’s easier for us to advocate for ourselves when what we’re doing is benefiting others. That’s what you’re saying overall, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And what he was saying, Ed was saying that he was uncomfortable in a situation where there’s no reciprocity and he can’t repay someone. So, in a business context, often we can say, like, “Hey, could you do this thing for me and I can do this thing for you?” But he’s saying, “What could I possibly do for the waiter? Or, definitely maybe I can tip them. What can I possibly do for the chef that has to remake the meal? Nothing, so I’m uncomfortable asking for that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Okay.

Zoe Chance
Well, can I ask you, Pete, if there’s some…and, obviously, you don’t have to tell us, but is there some area of your life that’s uncomfortable to advocate for yourself in?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. You know, it’s so funny, I feel…I hope none of my landlords are listening to this. We’re temporarily renting as we moved to Tennessee less than a year ago and we’re getting our bearings, and I also have an office space that I’m renting. And I’ve been on both sides of the equation in terms of as a tenant and a landlord, and I know, as a landlord, not that I lash out viciously at anybody, but as a landlord, I think of my investment in the property the same way as I think of my investment in like mutual funds or other things that are completely passive.

And so, as a result, every time a tenant has a request, which is totally fair and normal and reasonable and should be dealt with, I’m kind of irritated. And it’s not their fault, it’s my fault for, I guess, being selfish or just looking at it a little differently, like, “Hey, Pete, real estate is a little bit different than a mutual fund, so re-align your expectations or get your property manager to do more of the heavier lifting instead of bouncing these things to me.”

So, anyway, given that, when I’m a tenant and there’s something that’s a little off, like, “Oh, there are some ants here,” and it’s sort of like, “Well, I don’t want to inconvenience them about the ants.” And maybe it’s my fault because I should’ve done a better job of cleaning up my crumbs. There weren’t very many crumbs but there’s more than zero, and so I guess I’m at least partially to blame for these ants so I really don’t want to be like, “Hey, so take care of the ants.”

And I don’t know what I fear. Is it that they’ll be like, “Well, hey, stop being a slob with your food then we wouldn’t have an ant problem,” or, “Are you seriously inconveniencing me with your ant business? Like, don’t be a whiny little baby and smash the ants like a man”? I don’t know. But I am uncomfortable advocating for myself as a tenant to a landlord unless it’s really like, “Hey, straight up, your pipe is frozen and you need to know about that, so that’s what’s going on.”

Zoe Chance
That’s an amazing example. And just about anybody listening can relate to that on at least one side of the equation. And, yeah, it’s just so deeply human that we just don’t want to inconvenience each other, and also, frankly, we don’t want to be inconvenienced. But the frame of, “I think of my investment in rental property as like an investment in a mutual fund even though I am not a landlord” just makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Well, now you got me curious, how about yourself?

Zoe Chance
Oh, gosh, I was so uncomfortable asking for blurbs for this book that I’ve just written, and the person I was most scared to ask, I was scared to ask everyone because you are asking these incredibly successful people you admire to not just write something down for you and give you their super valuable social capital, but you’re implying that they should read this book that will take like 10 hours of their life for free. And, oh, my God, the person I was most scared to ask was Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “That’s Luke Skywalker, yeah.”

Zoe Chance
Luke Skywalker, and it was so hard to get the opportunity to ask him, and I got to have a half-hour Zoom call with Mark Hamill. And on this Zoom call, he doesn’t know why we’re having a Zoom call and he’s telling these amazing stories, and I’m so scared to ask that it gets to the half an hour and I literally haven’t said anything. He’s just been telling incredible stories and doing voices of like, oh, my gosh, he did Han Solo and The Joker. He’s a voice artist. And I was so scared, I haven’t said anything.

He was nice enough to stay on. I finally did ask him, and he very gently didn’t say yes, so I don’t have a blurb from Mark Hamill. But I think there was this just deep shame in asking for the most valuable thing from the people I most admire in the world, to ask them for so much time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so cool. Well, now I’m so curious, how did you get Mark Hamill to agree to spend a half hour with you?

Zoe Chance
So, I used every single social tie that I had, and the best thing that I had come up with so far was a friend who was the therapy client of Mark Hamill’s brother, but I was very uncomfortable using that. And then, actually, Mark Hamill posted a tweet. He’s an amazing tweeter and everyone should follow him even if you don’t like Star Wars. He posted a tweet saying that he was doing a charity auction for a Zoom call and it happened to be for my alma mater, USC, where I went to school, and they had given me a scholarship.

And I hadn’t actually ever donated money to USC so I ended up making sure that I won the charity auction and I gave $4,000 to USC for their scholarship fund so that I could have the Zoom meeting with Mark Hamill. And can I just share something that’s unrelated to this but my book?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it, yeah.

Zoe Chance
So, in my book, one of the messages that I talk about in the negotiation chapter is the idea of value-creation through three specific questions. And I know your listeners want to have tactical advice so this is a mindset of “How can I create value and long-term, lasting relationships that are fruitful on all sides?” So, a negotiation is just a conversation that leads to something more than whatever was on the table. It’s not just yes or no. There’s nothing complicated about a negotiation but most people don’t think of opportunities for negotiating because it’s just, “Do you want to do this thing, yes or no?”

So, the three value-creation questions, listeners, are, number one, “How could the situation be even better for me?” Number two, “How could it be even better for them?” And, number three, “Who else could benefit?” So, I have this opportunity to get to speak with Mark Hamill, and, already, so he’s one of my heroes. I’ve idolized him since I was three years old, and the movie came out, and it was my first movie. He’s been my hero. So, just getting to have this time is just beyond a dream come true. I’m going to ask him for a book blurb. We’ll see if that works.

I also want to see, “How could this be even better for Mark than me just showing up, random person, that he gets to talk to?” That’s not so exciting. So, I reached out on Twitter and to my Facebook friends, and said, “Hey, I have this opportunity to meet with Mark Hamill. I’m going to bring one person with me and, also, I want to bring him a video love letter. So, anyone who wants to send a 10-second clip of your message to Mark Hamill. He doesn’t respond to DMs, he’s very hard to reach, but we can send him a collective love letter.”

So, I curated this video of a whole bunch of short clips of people from all over the world sending love to Mark Hamill, just to have this be a more fun experience for him. And his wife was on the call, and she came and she watched it. It was so sweet. They loved it. And it was very hard to choose someone to bring with me but I ended up deciding, like kind of almost at the last minute, to bring a hero of mine, named Cass Sunstein who’s a behavioral researcher, who’s written a book called The World According to Star Wars.

I had never met Cass, and he posted on Twitter a link about his book and he tagged Mark Hamill. And I just reached out and I was, “Hey, Cass, I’m Zoe. I’m a big fan of your work. Have you ever met Mark Hamill?” He says no but he’s met George Lucas. And I said, “Would you like to?” So, I brought Cass Sunstein on this call with me, and he was working in the White House at the time on the Homeland Security team and another team doing creating awesomeness for Joe Biden.

So, Mark Hamill will be excited to get to meet Cass who’s written a whole book about him, and he’s coming in from the White House. Cass is excited to get to meet Mark Hamill. A whole bunch of us are excited to get to share our love with Mark Hamill, and his wife gets to come and see this beautiful montage that I’ve created. This didn’t come to the sort of tactically successful conclusion that I was dreaming of, of Mark saying yes to blurbing my book, although he said, “Send it to me and I’ll think about it,” and then he just politely ghosted me. It’s okay, Mark, I totally forgive you.

But it was such a win-win situation for everybody. It was fun, it was an honor, I got to actually now make friends with Cass Sunstein and we’re doing two events together next month, and it’s just great. So, I set up the situation so that it couldn’t fail. Whether Mark said yes or no, there was no possibility of failure. And I also had a lot of fun.

So, the value-creation question is to reinforce, “How could it be better for me?” I got to meet Cass. “How could it be better for them?” Mark gets to meet Cass and get this love letter. And, “How could it benefit other people?” It benefits Cass and the rest of everyone who contributed. So, that’s just one example of how we can create collaborative deals rather than trying to claim all of this value, and just use each other to tactically get what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And the notion of “How can it be better for others?” is cool in that it just makes it more fun and feel good both for you and for them in terms of, “Okay, yeah, and your customers are going to like this even more,” or, “And the readers of the blog or the podcast or whatever will dig it.” And so that just feels good in terms of not only are third parties being enriched, and, hey, that’s cool for them. It’s also, I think, really does good for your relationship there. It’s like, “Hey, we have partnered and collaborated to do something good for people,” and that just releases all kinds of feel-good, I don’t know, neurotransmitters, hormones in the body.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, those are really important. And the sociological thing that we’ve done is we’re moving away from transactional norms to communal norms where it’s really important in this that you’re not saying, “I will do this great thing for you if you do this great thing for me.” That’s another thing that’s fine. We can do that in deal-making, and we do, but to shift to the dopamine, oxytocin, great neurotransmitter situation where you have a relationship with this person where we’re not beam counting and horse trading is to just say, “Hey, how could I make this better for you?”

And there are some things that I could easily do, it’s something that you do, Pete, is posting all of these links for each of the podcast interviews that you have, and there’s no reason for you to do that but you’re just saying, “Hey, listeners can benefit from the links that I share. And all of the people who I’m linking to, they can benefit too. So, why would I not do that?” But a lot of people don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s true. It does take more work but I guess I just always think about myself in the listener’s shoes, like, “I want that thing but I don’t know where to find that thing.” And I’ve had multiple experiences of hearing something on a podcast, like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And so, I Google it for 20 minutes, and it’s like, “I got nothing. I want to know more about that thing but it’s nowhere to be found so I guess I’m done.” It’s rare that I’d have the gumption to be like, “Hey, podcaster, you said this thing and I need it.” Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Zoe Chance
And you’re making it easy for them to get that. And I have a whole chapter, well, half chapter, in my book about ease, because ease is the most powerful force of influence. If there’s only one thing that you take away, listeners, to this episode that you might do differently in your life is make it as easy as possible for the other person to follow through on whatever it is that you’re requesting or inviting them to do. Ease is more influential than motivation or price or quality or satisfaction.

And for nerds, there’s a metric that you can look up and maybe, Pete, you’ll link it here, there are Harvard cases and stuff that you can look at. Actually, for the link, there’s a book called The Effortless Experience, which is for real nerds.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice name.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, it’s great. And the metric is called the customer effort score. It’s basically a question that says, “How easy was it for you to do that thing that you wanted to do?” that one metric explains 30% of word of mouth and 30% of willingness to continue to do business with the company.

For customers who say it was very difficult to do the thing they wanted to do, there’s an 80% chance they’ll spread negative word of mouth. For customers who say it was very easy to do what they wanted to do, there is only a 1% chance that they will spread negative word of mouth, and that’s independent of the actual outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
That really resonates because I was refinancing a mortgage and I found a really great rate and I was excited about it. But then, oh, my gosh, this took maybe three months to get done and I kind of prompted him a few times and that really got him off there off their butts it seems, I said, “Hey, you know what, I just met a dude, Justin, like him a lot, he does mortgages. I think he’s hustling, I think he’s actually going to get this done, so I’m going to kind of switch over.” Like, “No, no, don’t, please. No.” So, that kind of got him into gear.

And so, even though I got my great rate and it’s working, I don’t feel great about them, and I have said bad things, it’s like, “Hey, man, I got a great price but they were really obnoxious, so I guess it was worth it, time, money, swap, but it wasn’t fun.”

Zoe Chance
You know what, Pete, so I just moved last year and my refinance was so difficult that I finally just took money out of my retirement account and bought the house in cash.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Zoe Chance
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Zoe Chance
That’s how deeply I feel your pain.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is potent and you get to that point, and I got to that point a few times, just like, “Just forget it.” And I always say, “Okay, Pete, let’s take a look. It’s been frustrating but just how many hours have you spent and how many more hours could you possibly have to spend, okay? And how many dollars are we saving? That’s a great ratio, Pete. That’s better than just about anything else you do in your business so, like, take another step forward and keep it going.” But I had to like coax myself multiple times to not just throw my hands in the air.

Zoe Chance
Right. You did the right thing. I did the stupid thing where I was just so angry, I couldn’t spend any more time on the refinance, and I’ve no idea how many thousands of dollars that ended up costing me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I appreciate your humility and your willingness to share. Well, so, ease, that’s a huge takeaway. Your book, it’s called Influence Is Your Superpower, we’ve already gotten a couple delightful nuggets. Is there sort of a core theme or big idea associated with the book you want to make sure to put out there?

Zoe Chance
The big idea of the book is that, in addition to make it as easy as possible, so if you just had one takeaway, it’s that. The big idea of the book is that what our goal should be in influencing other human beings is that they want to say yes to us. Our goal should not be that we get the thing that we’re asking for, that’s a short-term win, and the long-term win is that they want to say yes to us. They may not be able to, it might not happen, we might not get that thing in this moment that we want, but we’re building long-term relationships that are much more valuable over time. And I tell loads of stories about that.

The fear that we have about asking is that we will be making people uncomfortable and they won’t want to say yes to us, but when you have a good relationship with somebody, they want to say yes to you even if you’re asking them to come and deal with the ants or whatever that is. And you know that from the people that you have relationships with.

So, to make this practical, something that you can put into action, just focus, keenly, keenly, keenly on expressing warmth before you focus on anything else. The way our brains are designed, we have judgments of each other on two dimensions, which are warmth and competence. The warmth judgments happen first, they’re more powerful, and they’re stickier. This is especially important for us right now because we don’t get to spend as much time in face-to-face interactions when it’s easier to be expressing and perceiving warmth.

It’s actually hard not to like somebody that we’re spending time with if they’re being friendly to us, but, say, when we’re writing messages to each other, people tend to read less warmth than we intended into our written messages and they read more aggression or rank or insults than we intend. So, when we’re writing, especially we need to be very, very intentional about expressing warmth in our messages. It’s a good idea on all of our communications though.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Well, these are some big ideas that are hugely doable. And, Zoe, you do a great job of expressing warmth, and it’s interesting, because we were chatting just a few minutes before I pushed record. And it’s funny, I just thought, “Oh, well, she’s just so wonderful, wonderfully delightfully warm person.” That’s just who you are in your personality.

Zoe Chance
I am.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you got that going for sure, so you got that going for you. But, now, you got me wondering, like, “Hmm, so is this something that you’ve studied and practiced and mastered?” So, this is learnable. How do we do that?

Zoe Chance
Yeah, so it is absolutely sincere and it absolutely didn’t come naturally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Zoe Chance
I was so shy and nerdy as a child. I couldn’t communicate with anybody and that’s why I got interested in our whole field of communication. I had a theory that my voice was the same timbre as the ambient sounds of the universe, and that’s why people spoke over me and couldn’t hear me when I talked. That’s how nerdy I was.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I was thinking the totally opposite, “Thus, you have tremendous power.”

Zoe Chance
Oh, no. People literally couldn’t hear it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ambient like you’re just ignorable because it blends into everything else. Okay.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, exactly, just background noise. And so, I liked people but I didn’t know that you actually need to express your liking to people. I thought it was enough to just feel my liking of people. And it was through acting training and learning to emote and to express emotions that I was able to train myself to express the warm feelings that I do have in my heart.

Also, though, I’ve trained myself to like people more than I used to just naturally because I wasn’t thinking of it. You’re not always…just there are lots of things you’re doing in the world besides liking people. But when I was a teenager, my mom’s friend, Eileen, was married to a diplomat, and I wanted to be Eileen because she was so cool, and she threw great parties, she went to all these parties, she had cool clothes and jewelry, and her husband, the diplomat, knew how to drive like James Bond because, I guess, they train you to do that if you’re an ambassador.

Pete Mockaitis
Just in case you need it.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, you have to. So, they were the coolest people in our life. And, Eileen, I think I was like 13, and she said, “Zoe, all you need to do to succeed in life is learn how to find one thing to like about each person that you talk to.” And she had to deal with some very difficult, difficult to like people, and she said, “The way you do it is by asking them questions. And then if you can’t find something to like by asking them questions, you just look at them, and even if it’s just their earrings, you like that.”

So, what happens when you’re looking around in a world at the people that you’re interacting with, and you’re looking for things to like, is that you become very curious about them, you get to know them more deeply, and it’s this incredibly fun and pleasurable way to live where you’re just noticing and appreciating all these wonderful things about people.

So, again, it’s absolutely sincere. I’m not conscious of…actually, I’m really not very conscious of expressing warmth now, and I’m really not conscious unless it’s a difficult situation of trying to find something to like. I just get to do these things habitually, and that’s really important about all these things that I’m teaching in my book about influence, that it’s work to practice new skills but any new skill, through practice, becomes habitual, and then it becomes effortless.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so much there. So, we’re looking for something to like, and then, as sort of a mindset and an ongoing process, okay.

Zoe Chance
And then expressing warmth so that they know that you like them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, for looking for something to like, are there any key…? Well, one thing, it’s nice when you have a goal, “Okay, I’m looking for one thing,” so it’s not overwhelming. It’s like, “Oh, I can’t.” It’s like, “You can find one thing, okay.” And then you can default to a surface-level appearance-y thing if you have to, like earrings. Tell me, are there particular super questions that tend to surface stuff that you like? Or, I guess, does this often follow any predictable patterns?

Zoe Chance
There’s a really deep question that you can ask and if they will have the conversation with you, almost guaranteed that you’ll like them no matter what. And this is from my close friend, Lalin Anik’s TED Talk, and the question is, “What’s in your heart?” It’s impossible not to like someone who answers that question for you.

That’s not the first question, usually, that you ask people, but she, actually, in her TED Talk, shows a video where she just went on a street and she just asked strangers, “What’s in your heart?” and they shared it with her. So, it really is a question that you can ask of a stranger on the airplane if you’re actually flying these days. It’s a question that you can ask in a difficult conversation or an argument that can shift the course of the argument. This is my favorite question.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And I guess that can…that really has a lot of different flavors based on the context in terms of like “What’s in your heart?” As we’re talking now, what’s in my heart is I just want people to have the thrill of discovering some powerful knowledge they can use to make their experience of life and work all the more enjoyable, both from results that they’re creating, like, “Ooh, yeah, look at that thing I did,” as well as from just the pure fun and pleasure of doing so over the limited hours we have on this planet.

Zoe Chance
Pete, I felt that so deeply that I got actually tears in my eyes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, I’ve never met anyone that I didn’t like even more, even if I already like them if you asked them that question. So, anyone listening, what if you’re at the dinner table next time or a meeting with your team, and you just ask that question, “What’s in your heart?” It’s so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Zoe, if I may, what’s in your heart?

Zoe Chance
I’m feeling so surprised and so grateful to be having such a deep conversation with you right now. I was imagining that we’d be mostly focusing on very specific practical stuff that I’m happy to talk about always, but this is…yeah, it’s next level and I’m full of gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, shucks. Well, thank you. This feels very happy. And I think, though, those principles associated with expressing warmth, finding what’s something that you like, and then making things easy, are specifically and hugely valuable. And then there’s also very many different ways they can manifest and particulars.
Well, let’s dig into the ease a little bit. Can you tell us either do you have a specific checklist or series of tactics on how to make things easier or a cool story that illustrates a number of ways we can boost ease?

Zoe Chance
I have just a really simple example to give everybody the idea that you don’t have to make these things complicated, although what you’re focusing on is making it easy for the other person. And now that we’re talking about all these, I’m focusing on the lowest-hanging fruit here, and if you end up reading the book, you’ll see tons of strategies for more complicated things, like developing charisma, and negotiating, and stuff like that.

But for ease, I had a guy named Conor, who was in a workshop that I taught, who runs a speaker series, it’s a speaking business in Ireland, and he heard me say, “Make it as easy as possible.” Do you know someone named Conor who does…?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve met a Conor who’s from Ireland who has a speaking business.

Zoe Chance
Do you remember his last name?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve seen him speak like twice. He talked about, “Give it some gab, goals, attitudes, and behaviors, and beliefs.” I don’t know if that’s the same guy.

Zoe Chance
So, this Conor’s group, I think it’s called The Executive Institute but I have to look all of this up. So, anyway, Conor – love you – he went back to his team, and he said, “Listen, the way that our business makes a profit is to have attendees become repeat attendees, and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to come back. And what we’re doing so far is email outreach, just like everyone does, and we make the announcement and everything, we give them flyers, and then follow up by email.”

But he said, “How about this? Let’s put a flyer in everyone’s chair that just has checkboxes where you can check which talks you would like to come back to, and then we follow up by email to say, ‘Hey, you said you wanted to do this talk.’” And so, making that first step of expressing interest as easy as, “Just check the box and then drop the paper off,” they increased their profits that year from this one intervention by 11% for their company.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, with dropping some papers on seats, I mean, that’s huge. And I’m thinking about church, there’s this in Catholic churches in the US, there’s something called the Annual Diocesan Appeal in which the diocese, the grouping in a city or wherever, appeals to all the individual churches, saying, “Hey, support this stuff that helps the multiple churches and programs across the whole region.”

And so, it’s interesting, like I’ve seen it done so many different ways, where you say, “Hey, you’re asking for money, to make a commitment,” and I found, I don’t have the data at hand, but it’s just massively different in terms of if you just say, “Hey, you know, there are some envelopes over there, you can grab them on your way out or on the sides of the chairs and pews, and fill them out,” versus there’s one in every row, and, “I’m now going to walk you through what’s on the envelope.”

And, of course, it’s annoying for all of us and we don’t want to spend our time doing that, but effective in terms of it is unignorable, like, “Oh, yeah, maybe I’ll remember and I’ll get to that.” It’s like, “No, no, I’m making a decision now. I choose to give money or I choose not to give money now, and there’s no kind of, ‘Yeah, maybe later-ish.’” It’s forcing that, and I’ve heard that it’s striking, the results, in terms of what that does.

And now I’m thinking about apps and how I really love it, and it’s, frankly, maybe just laziness and toddlers and distractions, I really love it when I don’t have to enter an email address or a password to get going on an app versus it just goes. I like that a lot.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, and absolutely you use those apps more. Duolingo did studies to understand what’s the perfect level of effort to keep people engaged in learning the languages that they want to learn, and they published something that, essentially, said, the least effort possible. So, make it as easy as possible, and then people will come back. They thought that people wanted a challenge because we’re trying to learn something, and they found out, “Nope, just make it as easy as possible, the best thing you can do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I would imagine, once again me speculating on their behalf, you want it as easy as possible, but you also want to feel some progress. Like, if you made it super easy, like, “Oh, I tapped ‘Oui’ and ‘Bonjour’ 30 times. Okay, I haven’t actually learned anything but that was super easy.”

Zoe Chance
Yeah, they give you that sense of progress, they also make it fun. There are some little unexpected things that pop up. Yeah, they do a lot really, really well. So, something super weird that has nothing to do with our conversation except that it’s about Duolingo is that I just learned that when the Squid Game came out and got super popular on Netflix, Netflix was having such a big cultural impact with this one show that Duolingo’s request for Korean went up by 40%.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog.

Zoe Chance
Isn’t that so cool?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s wild.

Zoe Chance
And because it’s so easy to learn a language on Duolingo, that’s where everybody went.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. I feel like I should take a second look at Duolingo. It’s great stuff. Well, Zoe, this is so much fun, but tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear quickly about a few of your favorite things?

Zoe Chance
Yeah, one of the things that I encourage you to do, especially because you’re – this is to listeners – someone who listens to shows like this, as I do, trying to better yourself and improve yourself and succeed, you create so much work and so much burdens in your self-improvement that I challenge you, if you’re up for it, to do 24 hours of no.

The 24-hour no challenge is to say no to every single person who asks you for something for the next 24 hours. And it could be small, it could be big, professional, personal, maybe you want to say yes, maybe you don’t. The caveat is don’t ruin your life. So, if you’ve got a dream job offer, or your sweetie proposes to you, don’t be like, “No!”

And you can change your mind. You have the right to change your mind always, just like everyone does, but experience what it feels like to say no, and experience what it feels like to see how they react. And then if you want to then or later, next day, a year from now, you can change your mind. This simple challenge can be life changing and thousands of people that I’ve taught have found it life changing. And I don’t even want to give the takeaways because it’s something that you have to experience for yourself. So, whatever you think it will be like, I predict that you’ll have some surprises.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Zoe Chance
My favorite, favorite quote is from Pauli Murray. She’s an American feminist, black, lawyer, legal scholar, she wrote arguments for Brown versus the Board of Education, and yet, she faced such racism that even after doing that, she couldn’t get a legal job, and she worked as a typist for a white feminist Betty Friedan.

Pauli Murray said, “When my brothers draw a line to keep me out, I just draw a bigger circle to keep them in.” To me, this is the perfect description of what inclusivity means and how hard it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Zoe Chance
My favorite study, I really hope is true. We’ve talked about replications and this was just published in a book not in an academic journal, but it’s a study by Richard Wiseman who’s a psychologist in the UK who wrote a great book called The Luck Factor. What he did was recruit people who said they were really, really lucky, and people who said they were really, really unlucky, but it was in a long survey, and I had no idea why he was recruiting them.

He brings them to the lab, and he’s trying to study how does luck happen. When they come to the lab, he gives them a section of a newspaper, and says, “Count the photographs and then tell me how many there are.” So, the unlucky people look through the section of the newspaper, they count the photographs, and they come back and they say, “There are 16 photographs.” “Okay, great” and they move onto the next part of the study.

The lucky people who told him they were really lucky noticed the half-page ad in the section of the newspaper that says, “Mention this ad to the experimenter for a chance to win £500.” They were luckier. They were right when they said that they were luckier people. But my interpretation, at least, it’s not that God was making them luckier, but they were more open to opportunities around them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is so good. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Zoe Chance
My favorite book is called Love Does, it’s by Bob Goff. This is a Christian book, but when I first read it, I was not religious at all. And so, if you’re not Christian, I don’t think you’ll find it annoying. Bob Goff is the most audacious and inspiring asker I’ve ever come across. And for anyone who reads that book, go to the chapter called “The Interviews” and it will blow your mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Zoe Chance
I love my reMarkable tablet that I’ve been taking notes in during this conversation. I’m an absent-minded professor, and I use all these notebooks and papers, and lose my stuff, but I don’t lose it anymore, and I feel lost without it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do to become awesome at your job?

Zoe Chance
When I’m writing, I need to clear my mind before writing, and I’ve developed a technique that I call “My Nietzsche Journal.” Nietzsche, the philosopher, said that the purpose of being human is to become someone who does not deny, so to rid ourselves of self-deception. And when I’m sitting down to clear my mind, I just write a whole page of one-line prompts that start, “I do not deny. I do not deny. I do not deny,” and I just get all the stuff, all the junk, out of my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget that you share that people quote you on often?

Zoe Chance
Probably the ease one, that the bedrock principle of influence is that people tend to follow the path of least resistance.

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

Zoe Chance
Please come on over to my website www.ZoeChance.com. That’s Z-O-E-C-H-A-N-C-E.com. And there’s book, newsletter, other fun stuff, and silly stories and things like that. I would love to be friends.

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

Zoe Chance
I think I’ll just double-down on the 24 hours of no challenge but I gave them already because I don’t want to be heaping up more homework on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Zoe, this has been a delight. Thank you. I wish you much luck with your book Influence Is Your Superpower and all of your adventures.

Zoe Chance
Thank you so much. And I look forward to following your podcast so I can be more awesome at my job.