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Ida del Mundo

Jan 30

1028: How to Bridge Disagreements and Create More Win-Win Agreements with Robert Fersh

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Robert Fersh shares tried and tested strategies for de-escalating conflict and bridging disagreements.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to find shared goals to move past differences 
  2. The best way to deal with defensiveness 
  3. What to do when you fundamentally disagree 

About Robert 

Rob Fersh is a seasoned consensus-builder and has spent over 45 years bridging policy differences and moving public policy forward in Washington DC, working for Congress, in the Executive Branch, and in leading non-profits. He studied at Cornell University and Boston University School of Law. Rob founded Convergence Center for Policy Resolution in 2009 after directing a national anti-hunger organization. Rob’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. 

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Rob, welcome!

Robert Fersh
Thanks, Pete. Nice to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into some of your goodness here. And I’d love it if you could start us with a juicy, dramatic story of a super difficult conflict that you mediated and how you ended up resolving things.

Robert Fersh
Well, thanks, Pete. There’s a lot of stories to tell, but maybe the most dramatic is the one that opens the book that Mariah Levison and I have written called From Conflict to Convergence. And it was really my maiden voyage in trying to be a bridge-builder on big national policy issues. So, I had an idea back in the early 2000s that if we could only bring together all of the people’s disagreements that stood in the way of extending coverage to millions of Americans that didn’t have it, that there’d be an opportunity to potentially create a breakthrough, because at that time, 40 to 50 million Americans were estimated to be without healthcare coverage at any point in time.

And also, this was just a few years after, in the Clinton administration, an attempt to reform healthcare led by Hillary Clinton, failed miserably and divided the entire healthcare field, and people opposing and supporting their ideas. So, we actually pulled together, all the leading stakeholders on healthcare. And they agreed, left to right, that people ought to have healthcare coverage. The disagreement was how to do it.

So, we brought together the hospitals, the insurers, the pharmaceutical companies, consumer groups, unions, you name it, people who are all influential stakeholders in healthcare policy in this country, and we attempted to break this decades-old gridlock on how to cover the uninsured.

Well, this group met 12 times over two years in an attempt to try to break the gridlock on how to cover the uninsured. And, eventually, they came up with a series of ideas that formed the basis for expanding coverage to people in the United States based upon shared values. We had the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative foundation was at the table, US Chamber of Commerce, various unions and liberal advocacy groups and so on, but they all came together to design what became the architecture of efforts to improve healthcare coverage in the country.

And I think my favorite story out of that is, as I said in the book, there was a representative of the American Medical Association at the table by the name of Carla Willis, who was their chief economist, and she’d been very outspoken in early meetings trying to forward the ideas the American Medical Association had developed.

But I noticed, over this two-year period, Carla had gotten quieter and quieter. And, finally, at the 11th meeting of this group, where they actually looked like, that day, they would seal the deal on the design of how to cover the uninsured in a way that bridged the divides across the left and right, Carla came up to me at a lunch break and said to me, “Rob, you have ruined my life.” But she said it with a smile, and I responded in kind, and said something like, “I hear that all the time. How, in particular, have I ruined yours? I do have four kids after all.”

And she said, “I’ve been sitting here for the last two years. The AMA and I had come up with very thoughtful proposals. I thought I understood all the issues and all the different approaches and our ideas were best. Now I’ve been sitting here for two years seeing all these intelligent, well-meaning thoughtful people say things I never thought of, and I can’t see the world the same way.”

And in a sense, she was saying, even though the final proposals included some AMA ideas, she epitomized what we’re trying to do in this work, which is to have people who have disagreements on how to solve problems expand their worldviews, not relinquish their principles, but begin to see ways to have their underlying interests met in a way that might be different than what they’ve, you know, were positioning themselves to support, but in a way that did not sacrifice the principles and the values they had.

So, that was a pretty dramatic opening act for me as a bridge-builder to help pave the way for multiple pieces of legislation that expanded healthcare coverage in this country.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Well, that sounds amazing to hear anyone say that. That’s about as much as you can hope for, I suppose, when you’re doing this kind of work. So, that’s powerful. And can you share, what do you think were some of the core principles that made that possible?

Robert Fersh
Thanks for that. The essence of the work, and it’s interesting. Well, one of the participants at that table came from the Heritage Foundation. His name is Stuart Butler, very much someone who wanted private solutions, not so much government solutions. But having been born in Great Britain, he also believed in universal healthcare, so he was an interesting person to have in the room.

And here’s what Stuart would say, he said, “Look, I’ve been battling people for years on healthcare. And what was different about this process is that although we thought we knew each other, we really didn’t know each other. So, this process, which allowed us to understand the values, concerns, and interests of people underneath all the different positions they take, to allow people to go deep and to understand how they came to believe what they believed, and to feel a sense of shared mission, which they did have to solve problems was really important.”

So, some of the key elements of this process are to, A) at least have a shared vision, and there was that, and this group said, “We’re going to cover as many as possible.” That was agreed upon. No one said it has to be single-payer like Canada or Great Britain. No one said it had to be every last person but as many people as quickly as possible. The second piece was to build relationships across people so they understood each other deeply. And with that comes trust. Trust that the intentions of other people are things you can work with.

In most cases, people want the same things, disagree on how to get there. And that process actually demonstrated that building relationships with trusts could break through decades-old disputes some people in the room had with others. And many areas of common ground that were significant, even though disagreements remained, and, in fact, some of the ideas that eventually became law were not necessarily fully included in our consensus.

But what we did was to move the ball forward to get people much closer to the point where they were very near agreement on how to cover the uninsured in this country. And in fact, what we did design was what people call the architecture of what became the Affordable Care Act, even though the Affordable Care Act went a little further than what our group recommended.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that does sound novel, as opposed to how do we normally go at it when we have different viewpoints on a matter.

Robert Fersh
Yeah. So, what’s normally done, and I was part of this in the Washington culture, is that people who disagree get invited to all sorts of webinars and seminars, and people set them up for debate, and then everybody unloads about what they believe, and they may be polite or they may be impolite, and people then summarize what the disagreement was. But it’s pretty rare that people take the time to go underneath that to understand what drives people, what life experiences led them to believe the things they did, and to understand what their underlying interests were.

And this is an idea that Bill Ury and Roger Fisher and others, Bruce Patton, in Getting to Yes, distinguished a long time ago, which is the difference between positions and interests. Positions tend to be hard and fast ways that people want to solve a particular problem, but underneath that are your interests, your needs. And what we’ve done is, I think, allowed people to have a conversation which almost never starts about debating positions about how to solve a problem and getting underneath it all.

“What are your values? What are your interests? What are your concerns?” And when you begin to identify them, and there’s usually any number of pathways that can satisfy interests, and our goal, different than many other political battles or other discussions that go on, was to try to meet the widest range of interests, create the so-called win-win solutions for people.

Again, not necessarily requiring everyone to agree on everything, but to find wide swaths of agreement that have people leaving whole, feeling their needs are being met, and to understand that just for their needs to be met, other people do not necessarily have to lose, that you can set up situations where multiple people and multiple groups’ needs can be met. So, that is what distinguishes our approach from a lot of the normal give-and-take, and Washington, and the State houses and other places around the country.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s see, the United States health insurance coverage is among the most complicated things on the earth today. So, perhaps, could you give us a nice illustrative example of this positions versus interests, and going deep to unearth them, in perhaps a simple example that we can all understand, like, “Oh, okay, that’s a position, that’s an interest, and I can see how you’ve crafted a thing that’s meeting people that have almost the opposite, it seems, positions, are getting a win-win in terms of their interests being fulfilled”?

Robert Fersh
We have an issue in the United States, which is called long-term care, which is the non-healthcare-related services that you provide to elderly and disabled people who cannot take care of themselves. And we do have a crisis in that many people only rely on family members to take care of them, can’t necessarily afford coverage.

So, we were approached by a group of leaders in that field to convene a group. And the position of some people was that, “It’s got to be a private sector response. It’s got to be insurance. And that’s how we’re going to get home. Let’s keep the government out of it.” And then there were people who said, “You know what, long-term care is a terrible issue. It’s bankrupting families. The needs aren’t being met. Let’s move to some massive new government program, a la Social Security, tax everybody, create a huge program on how to cover people who face this crisis. It’s not everybody, it’s not even a majority of the public.”

And so, you had two very opposing points of view. One was market-based solutions only, and one was government-based solutions only. So, their positions were, “Yeah, for some people, let’s set up a new Social Security type of insurance for the entire country.” And the other people said, “No, let’s just tweak the private insurance system.” And so, we were at loggerheads for a while, and then we took a break, and other groups working on this, and helped design a study that Milliman, an actuarial group, and the Urban Institute did together.

And the study showed that private insurance is never going to make it happen all the way, and that there were some issues with going public all the way. And eventually these groups found a way to combine a mixture of public and private approaches to allow people to get long-term care coverage as they needed. These ideas are still panning in Congress, they haven’t yet moved forward, but there’s a lot of attention to it.

But underneath it all, people found, based upon studies and information they had, that each of their own solutions weren’t sufficient. And it set the stage to find compromises to take the best from private insurance to try to make that stronger, and to also have the government help take care of the catastrophic costs that make the private insurers more viable and also to provide coverage to people through the public as necessary.

So, I hope that was close enough to home to make the case for the distinction between positions and interests.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, there it seems like you had some progress because you had some independent research, which said, “Hey, see how neither one of you are really going to get where you want to go by doing just your position.” So that’s handy. Although, I imagine it takes a little bit of prep work in order to get folks’ hearts and minds to even be receptive to facts or research or data of any kind that is unfavorable to themselves. So, how’d you get there?

Robert Fersh
Well, this was a number of years ago before I think the loss of confidence in institutions and the debate about what’s facts and what’s alternative facts was as ripe as it is now. I think we honestly got there because people realized, in this particular debate, they were missing information. How effective, and with modeling, and again, by lining up two groups, one that leaned left and one that leaned right, to do the research that was trusted by people of all sides?

There was a sense that they wouldn’t be able to go further until they had more information. That’s not true in all the work we do. Some cases, people feel they have enough information and have enough agreement on facts that they can go forward even if they don’t agree on all the facts. So, in this case, I think people just felt frustrated that they needed more information. They got curious and they helped themselves design the study so that their various needs could be met and the questions they wanted answered could be met.

So that’s an unusual intervention but it’s also an important one, given what we have today, which is a lot of disagreement on facts, a lot of people feeling that the other side isn’t as honest or as forthcoming as they should be. So, to the extent groups that are coming together to solve problems can agree upon trusted sources or help put together facts that they can all rely upon, that’s an important step toward progress and agreement in any particular process.

Pete Mockaitis
And if your counterparts are not feeling curious and rather sort of dug in and solidified, or you yourself are not feeling curious, you’re solidified, dug in, what are some of your perspectives on how to stir up that helpful curiosity?

Robert Fersh
Well, I would say a lot of people enter our rooms where they’re sort of, maybe shoulders are hunched, their arms are crossed, they’re defensive. Many enter our room not in a collaborative frame of mind. To be honest, some come for defensive purposes. We did a huge project on K-12 Education, where we had the current president of the National Education Association, she was vice president then, and a woman on the West Coast who ran a conservative foundation, who was known as a critic of teachers’ unions and a supporter of more computers in the schools, which some people thought would take some teaching jobs away. And especially she was an advocate for school choice.

And the woman on the West Coast, who was a conservative, basically said she came to the table not thinking much would happen. She’s a woman of action, didn’t believe in gabfests, as she kind of called them, and too much talk and not enough action. But when she got in the room and began to hear people as human beings and create relationships that weren’t just about debating the issues, breaking bread with people, hearing their life stories, I think it opens your hearts to understanding other people.

So, part of the way I think to foment curiosity, if you will, is to have people feel a connection to each other and to take an interest in each other. Beyond that, I think the process itself works that way. If you bring together people who can interact in goodwill, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get tense, it doesn’t mean there aren’t fierce debates at times, but who begin to see that they share values and they share goals, which is how we start out, and oftentimes they develop some principles by which to guide it, then people have a greater propensity to get curious because they’ve come to the table because they agree there is a problem that needs to be solved.

And once they begin to also open their hearts, the way Carla did in healthcare, to see that they didn’t have all the answers, that no one perspective or no one individual has all the wisdom, and they get that, and that happens almost automatically, when people are in the room and there’s skillful facilitation of conversation across differences, usually, it tickles something inside of them to want to learn more, not just to oppose blindly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, could you perhaps walk us through maybe a step-by-step, in terms of, okay, we got two folks, they have wildly different positions on a matter, and we want to have some of those delightful breakthroughs, transformations, feel goods that you’re describing on the other side? It seems like we’ve got a couple principles to work with, with regard to shared vision, shared values, as well as coming to some personal connection pieces and understanding the human and the what’s underlying stuff. But could you share with us, maybe, as much as it’s possible, a generalized framework or step-by-step, “When you got conflicting positions and want to find some convergence, here’s step one, step two, step three”?

Robert Fersh
I mean, the first step is to clarify, “Is there a shared goal to begin with?” It’s very hard to have people work together if they don’t have a shared goal. But the fact that they share a goal, even if they disagree on how to get there, is a very important starting point for people to come to the table.

So, at least, and even that, Pete, begins to build a little bit of trust that you’re not at odds with someone about how the world should look. You just disagree on how to get there. So, having a shared vision, a shared goal is a very important first step for people who seem to be in disagreement.

After that, as we’ve talked about, having them get to know each other a bit, having them understand each other’s values, their own life stories, what led them to believe what they believe is really important, and beginning to assemble some basic guidelines or principles by which they could potentially agree on, even though they continue to disagree.

So, we had a project on economic opportunity and mobility where we had the Chamber of Commerce and we had unions at the table. But they developed a principle that said, basically, if you work full time, you should have a life of dignity, and basically not live in poverty.

Robert Fersh
And yet, underneath that, there was disagreement because people on the left, in particular, wanted more higher minimum wages, in fact, a big national minimum wage, and the Chamber and other business leaders said, “No, that doesn’t work for us. Too many regional variations. Too much difference.” But they also signed on to the principle that if you work, you shouldn’t be living in poverty or should at least be living in dignity.

And that meant that they also, if they weren’t going to do that solely through putting the costs on the employer, that they would be open to governmental changes, including things like the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Care Tax Credit, other things, because to adhere to that principle, they needed to do something besides just saying no to the minimum wage, and so there was some movement there.

So, to review now, have a shared goal, begin to build relationships of trust, begin to understand each other’s underlying values, and then engage in a conversation where you begin to go deep on the issues themselves, and ask people to keep a mindset of curiosity, ask them to keep a mindset of giving others the benefit of the doubt, develop a mindset where, in some ways, you internalize that.

Even as smart as you may be, or as well-informed as you may be, just develop a little humility that you may not know everything, and you begin to engage people in respectful conversation about different ideas that help meet the goals and the principles you’ve already established. And our experience is that, when this is well done, people can then push each other’s thinking to a higher level. As William Ury said to you in his podcast, he said, “We don’t have enough conflict.”

And I don’t know if I agree with that fully, but my point is that conflict can push thinking to a higher level, and bringing out better solutions than any one party had to begin with, and that’s our experience. So, that’s the basic process to try to promote relationship, promote trust, promote curiosity, engage in respectful dialogue where you don’t ever attack the person or their motives.

You have ground rules by which you observe confidentiality. You allow people to make mistakes knowing it’s not going to go out of the room. And you try to listen in a way that really leads to constructive results and the full expression of different points of view as people push each other’s thinking to a higher level and become attuned to understanding how they might meet each other’s needs.

There’s an acronym in our book called OPTIONS, I never quite get it right. But it’s really “only proposals that meet others’ needs succeed” is the thrust of it. And when the whole group, whether it’s two people or other people, become committed to not only meeting their own needs, but seeing that their needs can be met and others’ needs can be met, you have an opportunity not only to solve problems better, but to create relationships that radiate over time constructively.

People leave our processes often working together better for years to come because they now see each other and understand each other at another level.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. And when it comes to the understanding of individuals at a deeper level, with regard to, “Why did you believe…?” or, “How did you come to believe that thing?” and understand who they are as people, are there any super powerful questions or exercises or activities that you engage in that helps unlock some of this interpersonal magic?

Robert Fersh
There are sort of two key questions you can ask when someone else is talking is, basically, “Did I get that right?” and, “What am I missing?” So, you can internalize that. Using curiosity is a hugely important tool. And as I often kid, curiosity is not well expressed when you say to somebody, “I’m curious, how the heck could you ever come up with that point of view to solve the problem?”

But if you can ask authentically curious questions of another person to learn, not to debate, to hear them out. You can always debate. You can always walk away later. You can always disagree vehemently. But if you can develop enough personal relationship, where it’s sort of natural, you get curious. Often people develop bonds of affection in the room, even though they used to be sworn enemies. Some of them go to ball games together or call each other up when they want to make sure they’re not just hearing from their own side in a way that blindly misses the other points.

So, this is the practice of curiosity in a skillful way, where people begin to see that they can, despite they’re maybe being upset about what they’re hearing, go to another gear, go to what Bill Ury calls the balcony to kind of look at this more dispassionately, and not to get triggered by what the other person says, but committed to wanting to learn something. So, that’s a very important skillset for people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, a poor question is, and that’s not real curiosity, is, “How the heck did you come up with such a stupid point of view?” Could you give us some illustrations of what a few good, quality, authentic, useful, genuine, curious questions look, sound and feel like in their verbiage?

Robert Fersh
It would be something like, you know, someone says, “I think the only way to provide healthcare coverage is to go Canada as its single payer, and everybody’s covered, and the costs are down, and so on.” And you could respond from the hip saying, “You know, that’s not an American way. It’s going to stifle innovation. It’s going to give the government bureaucracies too much,” you know, you could go after them that way.

But you could simply say, “Okay. What has been your experience with that particular approach? And why is it that you favor that? And is it something related to your own personal experience? Or is it more a philosophical point of view? Please, I’m very curious about how you came to that set of beliefs and why you believe that.”

And if you just ask that authentically, you’ll learn something. You may still disagree with it totally, but you won’t simply just go into a pitch battle of government, not government, private sector, not public sector, whatever. You begin to get into what we call complexifying an issue, and that’s really important to begin to disrupt a little bit the sort of tightly held views people have.

Again, not asking them to compromise their values or their principles in any way, but to see the issues a little more complex once they fully understand how reasonable people could take that view. And that’s kind of how, because I’ve done this work the last 25 years or so, I go through life now. Whenever I read an article that I either immediately disagree with or agree with, my first thought is, “Let me read something that’s the opposing side there. I’m sure there are reasonable people who disagree. I’m sure this isn’t the full answer.”

And if you can internalize that, at any given moment no one has the full answer and there’s always something to be learned, then that’s an important move forward in your mindset to be a collaborative problem solver.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that notion a lot, the complexifying, because I think the human brain tends to like and prefer simple. We tend to like clear-cut, black and white, “But, of course, this is how it is.” And yet, if, in fact, reasonable people do have a differing point of view, then there is naturally going to be some complexity there.

And if it feels simple in your brain, then perhaps it is indeed the case that you are missing something and there is some complexification that is necessary for you to enter into in order to get to that place of understanding, “Oh, okay, so that’s why you think that.”

Robert Fersh
So, Pete, that’s exactly right, but let me also, for your listeners, because I think these ideas apply to businesses and nonprofits and philanthropies, and certainly on the academic campuses, widely. But I also want to make clear there, and this approach we move forward, doesn’t mean you necessarily talk to everyone about everything all the time. Sometimes there is not time for leaders to make decisions by consensus. You can have so-called death by consensus, drive itself nuts.

And there also are people in groups who are so ideological, so wed to certain ideas, or may have some views that are so extreme, whether that be on race or other things, that they cannot necessarily come to the table, cannot open their heart. And you got to that a little bit to begin with. So, that’s where you have to have a shared goal. If you don’t have a shared goal, like I used to say, not that I would ever have been called upon.

I wouldn’t have suggested that Martin Luther King sit down with the then, you know, I think he was the sheriff or that law enforcement officer, Bull Connor, in the South. If what King wanted was integration and economic opportunity, and he was facing a segregationist and there was just no room, then you can’t necessarily pull people together when people are so extreme or so convinced they have the full truth.

On the other hand, I would also say to you, that really tough issues, when you know there can’t be agreement, you can still use these processes to form relationships of trust and do some things that are just adjacent to the disagreement. So, I have good friends who worked on the issue of abortion. And one friend had convened a bunch of people who are anti-abortion and pro-choice, and it was understood to begin with that, on the fundamental issue of when a woman would have a right to choose, there would be no agreement.

It was a position of deep religious belief on one side, in particular, but also a deep principle-belief on the other. But these people were convened at a time when bombings were going on in abortion clinics and people were dying and tensions were running high. And the idea was to understand each other. And in the case of my colleague, Mary Jacksteit, as I understand it, she brought together these people on the auspices of Search for Common Ground.

They began to understand each other. They began to understand that principled people could stand on either side, and that, at least at a minimum, they stopped demonizing each other as inhuman or not in touch with the fundamental needs of others. And then, in some cases, they actually found they could work together on things they shared, like teenage pregnancy prevention, and better foster care and adoption systems should be brought to terms.

So, even though they didn’t reach agreement on the fundamental issue of abortion per se, they were able to develop respect for each other, and live more civilly with each other, and not live as if they’re at war with each other, and then define areas they could work on together, which they thought were socially positive. So, I think that contributes to a more civil and effective society, where we can bridge those divides, even if it’s not solving the entire underlying problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s a cool example in terms of, perhaps, indeed, the foundational viewpoints may be irreconcilable, like, “This is a human being in the womb,” or, “It is not.” It’s like, “Okay, well, I don’t know what we can do with that when we have the opposite views. But maybe there are some other shared goals that we can rally around,” and away you go.

Robert Fersh
So, we talked earlier about values and shared goals and listening and trust, but beyond that, when we do our work, we urge people to do their homework. And that’s true if you’re in a business or otherwise. Make sure you understand who the key players are, who you need to include, and get the best possible answers. And we’re all for inclusiveness of all the voices that are important, not just influentials and experts, but people with lived experience.

So, mapping, what we call mapping the terrain, understanding who believes what to begin with is really important, and doing your homework to understand who you need to convene. Then comes what I’ve already said, nurturing trust in the room, and we do that through a series of exercises. Never start by debating people’s positions, but to understand each other.

And then it’s really important that everybody be heard and really deeply and listen to respectfully. And that’s what we reinforce that by what some of us call ground rules where you don’t go after people’s motives, and you give people equal time or as much time as they need to be heard and so on. And then with skillful help often, but this can be done within organizations, you ask people to begin to generate what we call options for mutual gain. And that’s really an important part of the process. Yes, continue to forward things that are in your interest.

I’ll tell you one quick story, which may surprise people, when I did my maiden voyage on healthcare in 2000, really, 2003 to 2006. We had an executive from a major pharmaceutical company, and there were people in the room very skeptical of pharmaceutical companies, writ large. But this gentleman, who was one of the top officials of this pharmaceutical company, earned the trust of everybody in the room by making, I believe at the opening, making a statement that says, “My company has a huge interest on how we cover the uninsured. I know there’s 40 or 50 million people in the country without insurance.”

“But let me just say on behalf of my company, let’s have a conversation about the best way to cover people. And let me worry about later, what that does to the financial underpinnings of my company. But I really want to have a conversation in which we’re part of a community trying to solve the problem in a way that does the most good for the most people. And if we need to fight it a little bit or demur or we need to tweak it, let’s come to that later.”

But he set a tone there, and this, I think, is a sign of great leadership that said, “I’m open. I’m not going to be defensive. I want to listen. I want to learn. And, hopefully, we’ll come out with solutions that work for everybody.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that principle a lot in terms of the deferring, it’s like, “Yeah, you all know I work for a pharmaceutical company, and we’re going to have to go ahead and maximize profits for them shareholders. That’s sort of what we do, but we’ll figure that out later. For now, let’s see what the theoretical ideal is that we can all sort of move toward.”

And, yeah, you know, you may, afterwards, need to do some negotiations, some give and take, some horse trading, whatever, to make that workable for all of the parties. But to start with an initial goodwill commitment to get somewhere, and then finetune later, I think, can be very helpful in many contexts.

Robert Fersh
Yeah, and again it’s, in this case, I think, in light leadership by this individual, who seemed to be a very wise man. Let me tell you just another story. The first project, pretty much, I ever did at Convergence, was on nutrition and obesity. And it was interesting because we had difficulty assembling a table. We got a table of public health and consumer groups and some major food companies.

And about a week before the first meeting, which was pretty highly charged because a lot of these people had already been in prior discussions. As one food company executive said to me, “I’ve never been in discussion with the consumer groups where they didn’t walk out in protest against big food.” And he represents a big food company.

So, we assembled this group, and about a week before the first meeting, a leading voice on the consumer side wrote a blog or an op-ed basically saying, “You know, those of us who want to diminish and fight obesity and diabetes in this country, need to stay pure to our principles. Of course, we need to talk to food companies because they’re part of it, but let’s make no mistake. Their interests are,” exactly what you said, Pete, “is to maximize shareholder profits, and so they can never be full partners.”

So, fast forward, so immediately, my inbox filled up with notes from outraged food business people who were coming to the table, saying, “Is this guy really coming to the table? Does he understand how insulting that is that we can’t be part of a solution like we don’t share goals to diminish obesity and diabetes?”

So, we convened people who were very highly charged in the room, and for a while pretty tense. But eventually, as we went around the room, I’m not here to blindly defend all food companies. Some are better than others in terms of their public spiritedness.

But one after another, food company representatives said, “You know what, we do have obligations to shareholders. On the other hand, we’ve got employees. We have family members. We have people who have lost limbs to diabetes and people who have terrible health problems. And we have healthcare costs for our companies that go up because people’s diets aren’t so great. We can’t unilaterally disarm selling our products and just take away all our profits.”

“But if we can make it so that serving healthier foods could be more profitable and marketable, then we would love to join as partners with other people, and we’d also love it if consumer groups would stop attacking us every time that we try to do the right thing. Because whenever we do it, you’re just skeptical and you come after us.”

So, what happened was, over the next 36 hours, there was a remarkable level of frank dialogue about what were the needs and interests of companies, and what were the needs and interests of consumer groups. And, eventually, within a year or two, we did come up with a series of recommendations. But by the end of that meeting, the leading voice for the food industry, representing an umbrella group, said that she had learned a lot, and that she really hoped to be able to work together with the group.

And the fellow who had written that op-ed that had stirred people up said, “You know what, I’m not conceding anything at this point, but this conversation is going to make me think afresh about how to partner with the food industry. And I look forward to doing that.”

So, this is about what it does when you understand and you complexify, and know that, just because someone works in a corporation doesn’t mean they’re evil and selfish. And if someone works in a consumer group, doesn’t mean they don’t care about the thriving of corporations that help make services and goods available to people in this country.

And to the extent we can complexify their views of each other and make them a little less ideological in an honest process, not by lecturing them, but just by learning and experiencing, you open doors for levels of collaboration that normally are not thought possible by a lot of people who think that we are divided everywhere into us and them. And that’s not necessarily true.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, in our last couple of minutes, could you share any top dos or don’ts for folks who are looking to be awesome at their jobs and thinking about some conflict things?

Robert Fersh
Well, I think the top do for me is, no matter where you sit in your job, you can be a collaborative leader, whether you’re the boss or not. You can always be a voice for saying, “You know what, this is a tricky problem. Let’s get everybody who’s got a stake in the outcome in the room, let’s try to listen, let’s try to push for ideas that work for as many people as possible.”

I had the great honor of working with Stephen Covey quite closely for a number of years. He was the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and probably the greatest promoter of the term win-win, which some people dismiss, I think, too easily.

So, I think, developing a mindset of, “For me to win, others don’t necessarily have to lose, that no one person or group holds all the answers, that there’s always something to be learned. And if I can learn to be curious, then I think there may be ways to get through things that are really important.”

I think the don’ts, are to check your ego at the door. Make sure that you’re as centered as possible, that’s another do. When you’re interacting with other people, take care of yourself, and make sure that you are not as reactive as you might be when you’re meeting people who disagree with you.

So, don’t take the bait. Don’t get reactive. Do be passionate about your views, absolutely. But don’t make the assumption that just because someone disagrees with you, that they’re not a good person, don’t have good values, don’t have important things to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, thank you. This has been enriching, and I wish you much pleasant convergence.

Robert Fersh
Thank you very much, Pete. A great pleasure to be on. If people want to know more about our work, please look at the book, From Conflict to Convergence. And also at Convergence, we’d love to have people involve with us. We are doing problem-solving ourselves, and then we have a whole new learning lab where we are.

And the book is part of that where we’re trying to inspire and equip people to be collaborative problem-solvers. And we have an online training program coming on in the next few months, where I think people who really want to pursue this can, in addition to reading the book, find ways to collaborate more effectively no matter what they’re station in life. So, thank you for this opportunity.

Jan 27

1027: The Mindsets that Inspire Teams with Paula Davis

By Podcasts No Comments

Paula Davis shares best practices for keeping your team engaged and motivated.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why to shift focus from performance to people 
  2. How to keep your team connected and motivated 
  3. The tiny noticeable things that improve team dynamics

About Paula 

Paula Davis JD, MAPP, is the Founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute, a training and consulting firm that helps organizations reduce burnout and build resilience at the team, leader, and organizational level.

Paula left her law practice after seven years and earned a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the author of Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being & Resilience and Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team. 

Her expertise has been featured in numerous media outlets including The New York Times, and Psychology Today.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Paula, welcome back.

Paula Davis
Hello, it’s so good to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear you talking about Leading Well, and mindsets for engaging, retaining, and inspiring folks. Could you kick us off with any of the most surprising discoveries you’ve made when it comes to what it really takes to engage, retain, and inspire colleagues these days?

Paula Davis
One of the things that really surprised me was actually seeing the data around when companies take, not only at a performance focus, so looking at numbers and metrics and quarterly earnings and all of that, but also layer on sort of a people focus side, so combining that performance and people focus, the great business outcomes that come from it. So, really amplifying the business case was one of the things that I wanted to do in this book because I think it’s a piece of the puzzle that’s oftentimes left out when we’re talking about some of this human-focused psychology stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what kind of performance boosts are we talking here?

Paula Davis
So, we are talking about much lower attrition rates, sometimes cut in half. We’re talking about higher earnings. We are talking about, 4.3 times more likely than the average company to maintain top-tier financial performance for an extended period of time. And one of the pieces of the puzzle that I think is really important is that, because I hear from a lot of professional services firms, in particular, and other companies who say, “We’re meeting our numbers. We’re doing really, really well. We got lots of money rolling into the company. Like, why should we switch? Why is taking a performance focus so wrong?”

And the answer is it’s not wrong. But what the research talks about is that, in good times, you know, companies that perform financially well, those financial performance-focused companies do great, but when it comes to down times, when it comes to, say, the period of time during the pandemic, what have you, companies that have that balanced approach, that really add that people side to the equation, tend to go through the rough patches in a more smooth way. They take less bumps.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you perhaps paint a picture for what that looks, sounds, feels like in practice in terms of, “All right, this is what being in a company that has the hardcore financial performance focus feels like in terms of the vibe, and the messaging, and the experience, and infrastructure, all the stuff,” versus what a more balanced place feels like? And maybe share a story for how that plays out in practice.

Paula Davis
Sure, yeah. And so, what was interesting is the research that I just talked about found that only 9% of the companies that, this was a McKinsey report, researched actually fell in that balanced approach. So, we’re not talking about a lot of companies here. And one of the companies that I think comes to mind for me is one of the companies that I talked about in Chapter 3 of the book.

It’s a really large healthcare organization that has taken kind of its mindset around recognition and appreciation and has really codified it in some unique ways, not only within the organization but they’ve actually elevated it, that notion that, “This is what we’re going to do. This is one of the values that we’re going to really, really hit hard and kind of walk the talk about.” They’ve elevated it all the way up to the C-suite and board level strategy.

So, very rarely do I hear a company that either read about or that I’ve worked with actually say, you know, like, “Some of this well-being motivational engagement stuff is actually baked into the highest of the highest-level strategies that we’re thinking about.” And so, clearly, looking at this concept from a dollars and cents standpoint, right, because it’s part of the entire financial strategy that we’re looking at for the company, but that it trickles down throughout the organization in a number of different ways.

So, they have a Making Moments Matter platform where they are able to send these recognitions and appreciations to each other via a platform of technology that they have in the organization. They have a yearly event where they actually nominate people at every single level from around the entire system. And they have different categories of folks who are finalists, or what have you, and they pick somebody who, out of the entire organization of 50,000 plus people, most truly espouses these values, and then they honor them at a dinner.

And so, there’s just all these different ways that they have decided to take this one particular piece, this human piece of the puzzle, and actually build it in a number of different ways. And they actually have told me that they see this as their most, from an economic standpoint, valuable retention tool and talent attraction tool. And they can tell that when the people in the organization are truly kind of walking these values, they see better outcomes with their patients in a whole host of ways. So, that’s the best example I can think of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can we zoom in into like a Making Moments Matter type thing? Like, if I were there in that organization, like what would be happening as we do this stuff?

Paula Davis
Say, you had a wonderful interaction or encounter with a colleague, or you noticed somebody who was really walking the values of the organization, you could put a little message into this platform, and that would register and it would go not only to the person, but it would go to the person’s manager, and I think it might even go one level above that as well.

They’ve collected multiple millions of these individual sorts of appreciations and recognitions, and just talking about how that has really just helped to build a really strong cultural fabric.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, I like that so much. It sounds really good. I read the book The Fund by Rob Copeland, which was talking about Bridgewater and their unique computer stuff and culture. And, at least the way he writes it, it sounds like a nightmare, like just a miserable place to be from Rob Copeland’s perspective in the book, because it was sort of doing almost the opposite of that in terms of like everybody was continuously tracking and ranking and rating and scoring everybody on all of these competency dimensions, they called it their baseball cards.

And so, there’s always sort of like this looming threat of, “Oh, someone could ding me for behaving in such a way,” and then others would pile on and you’d see your real-time, I guess, status, score, baseball card figures plummeting relative to the other people in the organization. It sounded horrendous, as Rob Copeland told it. And this is like the opposite. It’s like, “Here are some cool stuff that went down. Hooray! Let’s celebrate you publicly.”

Paula Davis
That does sound horrendous, and I didn’t dig into this, but I think you bring up a really good point, or he brings up a really good point, certainly, is that I think when you’re talking about making moments matter, or taking time to appreciate someone, or highlight something that they’ve done well, or recognize them, whatever word you want to use, I think that really has to be done authentically. And that’s I think one of the things you got to watch out for, I think, with any type of platform like this. It’s not about, like, “Ooh, I’ve got to get to 20 by the end of the week.” It’s about making them the most authentic that you can.

But I think that most of us zoom through work with our heads down, just, you know, we’ve got so much work to do, we’re just trying to get through the day, and so we’re at zero. So, kind of finding that balance between nothing and a race to get to a certain number.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s funny how these things naturally come up in our brains in terms of, “Oh, wow, that was a really cool chat I had with Paula. That was great.” And then they do, they fly right out of our brains as we rush to finish the next thing that needs to be done, oh, so urgently. So, if you have an institutionalized system process methodology by which these things are captured, and you just know, “Oh! I know just the place to park this fun pleasant thought I had. Here we go!”

Paula Davis
And because I think a lot of organizations have, the recognition policies. So, like, “At five years we’re going to send you a something or at 10 years we’re going to send you something.” They have sort of codified ways to express appreciation and thanks but they don’t necessarily support or talk about or think about or highlight, like, everyday day-to-day practices.

And so, I talk about how important it is to start to kind of go in that direction because it kicks the door open to something much more deep, a fundamental human need for us to know that we matter. So, that’s whether we are at, you know, talking about our families, whether we’re talking about work, whether we’re talking about our communities, we want to know that we’re making an impact on some level, right?

And so, mattering is about both those moments of appreciation, but it’s also about those moments of achievement where I also know that I’m contributing something. I’m contributing something and other people are noticing or affirming or telling me that I am having that level of impact.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, the research is backing this up and, boy, 9%.

Paula Davis
A lot of room for improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess if we find ourselves in an organization that’s doing some nice stuff this way, I guess we should feel grateful because it’s apparently rare.

Paula Davis
Based on, certainly, that one research report from McKinsey, yes. In fact, I think they found it was 55%, which was the bigger category of the quadrants, so four quadrants. I think it was about 55% who actually didn’t show a high level on either category, not outperforming on the performance side and not outperforming on the people side either. So more than half are just kind of, you know, “Here we go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s some cool research. And would you say that’s the big idea behind Lead Well? Or how would you articulate the core thesis?

Paula Davis
Well, I think that’s definitely a piece of it. I think the big idea behind it is, I think wanting to let the world of work, and particularly leaders know, that they’re really driving the conversation when it comes to the fact that we’re looking at “Work has changed. And how has work changed? And why has work changed? Because that’s happened, what do we have to, how do they, how do leaders have to be thinking differently about that?”

If we want to continue to have or see good outcomes, if we want to sort of reverse this trend of burnout, if we want to reverse the trend of, we’re at an all-time low level at least for the last 11 years of disengagement, things that we keep seeing come up consistently over and over are taking root. And if we’re going to go in a different direction with that, how do we do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we talk about change, what would you say is the most pronounced change difference that the worker, let’s say the knowledge worker, is experiencing now as compared to, say, 15 years ago?

Paula Davis
So, certainly, I mean, we can’t avoid the conversation about AI, right? I think that the explosion of just new technology and new ways of thinking about doing work and really, honestly, potentially, being at a point where we might see some of those lower-level tasks, eventually at some point, potentially, be consumed by technology and other things, I think is much more realistic than it was 15 years ago.

I think, certainly, the outcomes associated with the pandemic, and I know we’re largely beyond that or however we want to word that, but I think, psychologically, what a lot of people and a lot of leaders don’t understand is that we’ve carried the effects of going through something so traumatic for a lot of people and cataclysmic for a lot of people with us.

And we’ve really, I think, very intentionally, started to look very differently at “How do I want my life to unfold? How do I want my world of work to look? How do I get both of those two things to integrate? And if I am not seeing a workplace that’s going to be supportive of my well-being and supportive of some of the human-centered aspects of work that I feel are much more important now, I may seriously consider going somewhere else.”

So, I don’t think we really– I mean, 15 years ago was when I stopped my law practice and I started down the path toward this work. We weren’t having these conversations at all about wellbeing in work. And so, I think the fact that that’s amplified has been a huge change as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, that’s intriguing, the COVID pandemic impact. It’s so funny, I think back to 2020, it was like another lifetime.

Paula Davis
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d heard that people don’t want to make any movies or TV shows set in that time, it’s like, “We all just want to forget that happened. That’s not entertaining in the least to return to such memories.” And so then, is there any cool research or data saying, “Whoa, here’s something that feels very different in 2025 as compared to even 2019”?

Paula Davis
Well, I think one of the pieces that helps explain why people feel so differently now because of that is something called post-traumatic growth. So, I think a lot of folks are familiar with the term post-traumatic stress disorder. Less people, I find, are familiar with the term post-traumatic growth. So really understanding that when we go through life’s big adversities, when we go through life’s big challenges and traumatic experiences, most of us will take a look and go, “I do not want that to happen again. I wish this thing hadn’t happened because it kind of changed things completely for me.”

But what we oftentimes find is that humans do come out the other side at some point and they share some characteristics. They talk about a renewed sense of connection. They really, really amplify the importance of their relationships. They really want a sense of meaning and some deeper sort of connection involved in their lives, and it’s not something that they can just erase or have go away. It’s sort of like a permanent shift in how their world has changed.

And so, I think that that helps to explain why a lot of people have come out of this now really talking about how “I would like meaning at work, and I would like to have a little bit more indicator of my impact,” or, “I do want a workplace that’s going to support my mental health and well-being. And if I don’t get those things, yeah, I might stay for a while.”

But, I mean, I don’t think our workplaces, our leaders really want to have their teams be thinking about how they’re going to be plotting their next choice of where they’re going to work. We want our workers to feel engaged and motivated and staying. So that has been a big piece for me to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us then, what are some of the top mindsets and practices and cool stories that show them in action, come to life, to give us a picture here?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so the first one, and I sort of alluded to this already in the story that we were just talking about, but it’s called “Prioritizing Sticky Recognition and Mattering.” And so, this chapter honestly really changed how I have looked at my friendships and my relationships with my family, and certainly my relationship with my eight-and-a-half-year-old, “Am I telling her enough?” Because I think a lot of times, we just assume that people know, like, “Hey you’re in my universe and so all is good to go.”

But, like, really amplifying that sense of showing people their impact, and then blooming that fundamental human need to matter, I think is really a cool starting place, and really low-hanging fruit for a lot of organizations. But then I talk about also the need to amplify what I call ABC needs. So that’s a lovely combination of autonomy, belonging, and challenge.

So, we need a sense of, in our lives, in our world of work, we need a combination of “Do I get to choose my own adventure?” That’s how I think about autonomy. “Do I belong? Do I show up to a place where people care about me and my leader has my back, and I know I’m part of a group that is doing something well? And do I feel challenged? Am I able to grow and sort of build my skills within my current world of work?”

And then workload sustainability. So, this was one of the hardest chapters for me to tackle, but I felt like this book would be incomplete unless I did, because unmanageable workloads are one of the, if we’re looking at the root causes or sources of disengagement and stress and burnout, by far and away has been the number one unmanageable workload that I have seen with all of the groups that I have worked with. And so, trying to unpeel all of that, getting into what makes for a more sustainable workload, was a big piece of the puzzle.

The fourth one is building systemic stress resilience. So, to deal with all of the uncertainty, and the challenge, and the change, and the setbacks, and the obstacles, and the stressors, we have to not just be thinking about resilience at the individual level, but how do our teams become more resilient and how can we fortify organizations to become more resilient?

And then lastly, I wanted to talk about values alignment and practices associated with leading in a meaningful way. Certainly, with the generational conversation, I think that notion of values alignment and meaning has been pushed to the forefront. And values misalignment is also another one of the core drivers of chronic stress and burnout and disengagement. And so, it’s that whole kind of piece, puzzle pieces together in terms of the mindsets that I want leaders to be thinking about.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say workload sustainability, I’m curious, what do we know in terms of what makes a workload sustainable or unsustainable?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so basically it comes down to really two big buckets, and I decided to write about one of the buckets, and it’s really about better processes, procedures, and teaming practices. So, if I’m going to get my arms around building more workload sustainability, I got to figure out, like, “Why do we have so many open projects? Why are we doing so many things that are draining money?” and trying to get my arms around just even sort of where all of that is coming from?

And then the other piece of the puzzle, is recovery. Like, “Are we making enough time to really stop and pause? And what does that actually mean and look like in our day-to-day, in our week-to-week, month-to-month?” It’s not just the taking a vacation once every three years, that doesn’t do it.

So that notion, though, of really starting with leaders trying to dig in and just see, like, “What do we have? Why do we have so much? Why are we not focusing on certain things? Do we have Band-Aid initiatives going on where we’ve got so many open projects, but we don’t have the funding or the people or what have you to actually finish things and push them through, but they remain open?” So, there’s a lot of first steps, or kind of digging that leaders really need to engage in.

And then it becomes, “How are your meeting practices? Do you have information that’s located in places where everybody has access to it? Are people really clear about their roles and responsibilities? Do teams understand how we’re supposed to communicate with each other?” So, it gets back to a lot of very basic sort of teaming practices, very basic procedural things that I think when they’re done with more intentionality, can then start to help us understand how we can bring workload back into more of a sustainable realm.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a quantity, a number of hours or projects or something by which we can start to see, “Ah, this is where a workload begins dipping into the unsustainable level”?

Paula Davis
That’s the hard part because it’s so subjective, and I talk about this a lot associated with my burnout work, too, is that when we’re talking about an unsustainable workload, what’s unsustainable for me may be very different for you. What was unsustainable for me when I was 25 looks very different than what it is right now when I have an eight-and-a-half-year-old and a whole host of other just life obligations that I have to attend to at this age.

And so, I think it’s a fluid, subjective thing to be thinking about, and that’s why it can be so hard, I think, for leaders to really wrestle with “What does this mean?” because for one team in one department, it may look one way, and for a different team, it may look completely different. And so, you have to take it on kind of a team-by-team, case-by-case basis. So, there isn’t like a hard and fast metric. Like, I can’t say, “It’s seven projects for you, and three projects for you.” It’s totally like team and industry dependent.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about things in a similar light in terms of if what you’re doing is fascinating, riveting, engaging stuff that lights you up at your core and resembles play, it’s almost like there’s no limit in terms of like, “As long as you can, like, eat and exercise and sleep and see your loved ones, you might be able to bang out a massive number of hours.” And yet, if it feels like drudgery, then maybe even 20 hours a week is too much.

It has been sort of my subjective experience, and as I look at stories of like, I don’t know, I think about like hackers, it’s like, “These folks are just cranking away at their computer for hours upon hours upon hours,” and yet, it’s fun, fascinating, interesting, and juicy for them, because it’s so cool, “I’m learning, I’m exploring, I’m discovering. Oh, my gosh, this thing worked! Wow, I did not expect that to work! Oh, I made a discovery! I should probably share this with the world so that the world becomes safer! And I’m contributing to that and making a little bit of a name for myself.”

And yet, at the end of the day, they’re still seated, tapping on keys, looking at a screen, whereas another person can be doing the same distributed across dozens of inconsistently interrupted projects that they don’t really care that much about how they work out to be, and feel tremendously stressed, burnt out, flustered by the matter.

Paula Davis
Yes. And so, that’s an interesting example, but I think it goes back to the power of knowing and understanding the impact that you’re having and the impact that you’re making. And do you feel that C in the ABCs, right? Do you feel a sense of challenge and growth? Do you feel like you’re able to learn new things? Do you have people who are around you who can show you the ropes and help you get from point A to point B or wherever it is that you want to take in terms of the next step in your career?

And it’s interesting what you were just talking about, and I don’t know that you’ve talked or thought about it through game theory, but one of the small kind of strategies that I talk about in that particular part of the book is sort of adding gamification thinking to some of your work, for leaders to kind of introduce gaming concepts and practices.

So, when you think about playing a game, or like, for me I just inherently go to video games, part of the reason why they’re so consuming and they’re so enticing and you want to stay with them and it’s hard to break away from them is because the objective is really clear, “I have to get to level 20,” or, “I have to rescue this particular person.” So, there’s a clear end point, and there’s clear goals along the way, and while you’re going and trying to achieve that particular goal, or whatever getting to the next level looks like, there’s all sorts of phenomenal feedback cues.

There’s bells and whistles, and the point total gets higher, and you’re getting such immediate feedback that you’re on the right track or that you’re doing the right thing or that you’re not doing the right thing, so you can course correct. So, it’s the same types of concepts that can help leaders think about, like, “How do I build some of that into helping people still stay engaged and have fun with the work that they’re doing?” because a lot of us aren’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And so then, what are some of the coolest ways you’ve seen folks implement some of these principles, these gamifications into normal professional work life that have been fun and effective?

Paula Davis
One of the companies that I talk about, it’s actually a really big law firm that I talk about in the book. I don’t think we oftentimes think of like law firms as being, I certainly don’t, as having been in that world for a long time, as being ultra-forward thinking when it comes to these types of concepts.

But a big law firm that I talk about in the book really has created sort of this, almost like this separate sort of leadership education for their lawyers, and they actually give them titles. So, normally you’re just an associate, and then you’re a partner. But they actually give them new titles as they ascend through different pieces of this leadership academy.

And so, in addition to the titles, they get one-on-one coaching so they’re getting, I think, some of that more strategic feedback about how they’re doing and how they can continue to get better at each level. And there’s also, I believe, like a notification or something that goes out to the clients as well. This is an indicator to their clients that, “Hey, the lawyer who you’re working with is now ascended almost right into the different, the next level of the game of sorts, and here is the wealth of talent that they continue to bring.”

So, again, I don’t know that they or I were looking at that through the gamification lens, but you can see how, when you start to build sort of larger scale intentional programs like that, you can have those types of game theory sort of built in or used as a way to explain some of the beneficial outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I would love to get your viewpoints in terms of, let’s say we’re in an organization where, unfortunately, not a lot of these cool best practices are at work, but we have our little sphere of influence in terms of a team, or even just a couple direct reports, or even ourselves. Any pro tips on how we can take advantage of some of these principles to make some good things happen?

Paula Davis
I think that the best place to start, and certainly where I advocated in my first book too, is with your team, with a team. And even if your team is just you and two other people, that’s a team. I think sometimes we think that teams have to be these really large entities, and that’s certainly not the case.

And so, I think starting with some of the best practices to implement some of that sticky recognition and mattering, just because the outcomes are so strong with that. So, that’s just simply, you know, one of the researchers I interviewed for that chapter said, “Sticky recognition and mattering lives at the day-to-day moments in your interactions.”

So those 10-minute moments when you’re walking down the hallway with someone or you’ve just patched into the Zoom and it’s a few of you just kind of hanging out, what do you say? Like, do you interact with somebody? How’s your day? How’s your family? What’s going on? What has your attention right now? Just sort of, I think, getting back to relearning how to see people when we’re so consumed by our work in technology, I think, is a really important starting point.

And then, one of the things that kept coming up as a thread in a lot of the successful companies and people that I interviewed was this notion of just, like, I call them Seinfeld meetings because Seinfeld was a show about nothing. And so, it’s these one-on-one moments to talk to people really about nothing, purposely without a business outcome associated with it.

So, again, just spending 15 minutes every other week just checking in on someone and asking them, “What has your attention right now?” can be hugely beneficial. Just talking to each other about just best teaming practices, “Are we all aligned together on how we’re communicating with each other, about how we see our team, about what the end result is? Are we all clear? Do we all have clear guardrails about where we’re supposed to start and where we’re supposed to end up?” So, again, I think some of these human practices in combination with some basic teaming practices, I think, is always a winning combination.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And could you share with us a cool story of a team or organization that really just put these principles into practice in a beautiful, illustrative, transformational way?

Paula Davis
One example that I mention is, it’s really a framework, so it’s less, I think, about a company, although there’s a few companies that are implementing this. In the Work Sustainability chapter talking about it’s called the US Bank Guidelines, where US banks’ in-house teams of sorts, have really intentionally thought about, “How do we want to create relationships with our outside vendors, our outside counsel, the outside people who we work with, and our internal folks that’s going to be supportive of intentional delegation; that’s going to try and minimize the fire drills and the urgency; that’s going to honor and respect communication practices and work-life integration boundaries and things of that nature?”

And so, talking about the different sort of principles that they have, that have become these guidelines that do just what I said, talking to them about how they’ve started to implement those, both internally and externally with the people who they work, have certainly been eye-opening. So, I think a lot of where we’re at right now with some of this is we’ve got to just try it.

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

Paula Davis
So, I think, for me, one of the big takeaways from the book is that this comes down to this being leading well. It comes down to what I call tiny noticeable things, or TNTs, that are a combination of a little bit more human stuff and a little bit more team stuff that together, I think, become a really powerful source of motivational fuel for folks.

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

Paula Davis
One of my favorite quotes is “Between what is said but not meant, and what is meant but not said, a lot of love is lost.”

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

Paula Davis
One of the research papers that I found really fascinating talked about how, and this is just kind of an interesting way that they were able to measure a team’s heart rate synchrony. And when teams’ heart rates were in sync, they, I think it was like more than 75% of the time, made good decisions together.

And so, it was really indicative of psychological safety and trust. So, I thought it was just really interesting look at some of these things from a physiological perspective and see how when heart rates were more in sync, there was more trust and better decision-making among teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Paula Davis
I love Brigid Schulte’s latest book is called Overwork, so I’m obviously digging into all of the things work-related about how we can do work better and make work better. I keep coming back to, over and over again, Kelly McGonigal’s book The Upside of Stress.

Because I have spent so much time in the burnout space, I think, really, taking an interesting look at “What is stress meant to help us do?” It’s meant to help us connect. It’s meant to help us find meaning, and that a meaningful life is a stressful life on some level, and so that reminder is helpful.

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

Paula Davis
Yes, there’s a skill that I talk about with that sticky recognition and mattering piece called a thank you plus, where so if you don’t say thank you very frequently, this could be at work or outside of work, start there. But the plus piece is to add the behavior or the strength that you saw that led to the good outcome.

So, it can be as simple as saying, “Thank you so much for summarizing the reports. The way that you did that helped me find the key takeaways quickly, and it made my life a lot easier and the conversation with my clients simpler.” Just that extra little smidge of peace really resonates with people. And so, I oftentimes will have people trying to practice a thank you plus to me or emailing me and calling out the fact that they were trying to do a thank you plus or mentioning that to me in some way.

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

Paula Davis
They can go to my website, which is StressAndResilience.com, or they can find me at Paula Davis on LinkedIn.

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

Paula Davis
I would say just don’t forget about the fundamental human need that we all have, to just make sure that we’re making an impact in our world, and just being really keen to share that with people when you notice it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paula, thank you.

Paula Davis
Thanks so much, Pete.

Jan 23

1026: How to Stop Saying Um and Become Super Articulate with Michael Hoeppner

By Podcasts No Comments

Michael Hoeppner shares fast ways to improve your speaking with innovative physical exercises.

You’ll Learn

  1. The key reframe that transforms your speaking 
  2. How to break the habit of filler words 
  3. The simple trick to clear enunciation 

About Michael 

Michael Chad Hoeppner is the CEO of GK Training and is on a mission to help people speak well when it matters most. With nearly 20 years in the field, Hoeppner has taught at Columbia Business School and coaches thousands of professionals around the world.

His corporate clients include three of the top eight global financial firms, one third of the AmLaw100, two of the four US professional sports leagues, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, and multinational tech, pharma, and food and beverage companies.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome.

Michael Hoeppner
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into some of your wisdom that you’ve packaged in your book, Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. We love all those sorts of things. And it’s funny, as we’re chatting, I’m going to be so self-conscious about saying “um” in this whole conversation.

Michael Hoeppner
You know, I am not the “um” police, to be clear. So, I promise you, I’m turning that off, that awareness right now. But, truthfully, the point of the book, of course, is not that you can never say “um.” The point is, they should not skyrocket when you’re thinking more about yourself and less about your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I was going to kick us off by asking if you could share a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made from many years of training so many folks on communication. What do us, humans, need to know about communication that we tend to not know?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, it’s a simple idea, which is this, we think, all too often, that talking is all about thinking. Like, if I have smart ideas and I think of smart stuff, I’m going to say smart stuff, and it’s simply not true. Speaking is physical. If you put your hand on your throat, and you say, “Communication is a physical art,” you’ll feel your hand vibrate. If you pound on your chest a little bit, “Communication is a physical art,” your voice changes.

So, the idea communication is all about thinking, messes us up badly. And instead, what we should do is use physical tools and use kinesthetic learning to get better at speaking.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, I love this idea a lot. And this is a bit of a theme that’s come up a few times in different domains, in that many solutions are not thinking or cognitive-based in order to get to. And here you’re saying that communication is not about thinking but it’s a physical art, like pumping iron, or dancing.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. And the thing that’s so liberating is, just like pumping iron or dance or any kind of physical or athletic discipline, you can build muscle memory and get better very, very quickly by doing the right exercises.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with regard to communication is not about thinking, it sounds, maybe if I could distinguish that a little bit, I suppose the formulation of that which we intend to communicate is a thinking activity. Fair enough?

Michael Hoeppner
Totally fair.

Pete Mockaitis
But the actual projection, performance, delivery of those ideas, that prior preparation, is a physical art.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood.

Michael Hoeppner
I mean, we all can relate to that idea of, if I have all these great ideas and then I open my mouth and they all tumble out in a completely disorganized jumble, and then as they do, I become chronically self-conscious about that, and that self-consciousness actually makes the whole job more difficult.

So, I’m not suggesting we don’t need our cognitive faculties to think of smart stuff to say. What I am suggesting is that if you completely remove the physical part of it and just remain in the cognitive category, you are absolutely shortchanging yourself. And the fastest way to improve is by addressing the physical.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you mentioned fast improvements. Could you tell us a fun story of a client who made some fast improvements and what that before, after, and journey looks like?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, for sure. I’ll mention the one, I actually write about this in my book, I changed a woman’s career in four hours one time. Now, that sounds like I’m bragging and advertising about myself. That’s not the case. What determines if people improve and improve quickly is much more them, what they bring to the situation, more so than what I do, and this woman was ready to learn, and she came in completely brave and ready to jump in with both feet.

Now, “feet” is the operative word there, and I’ll tell you why. She thought that she had a problem with blushing. She had stage fright. She would begin speaking, and instantly she would turn bright red, and this self-consciousness about her blushing was absolutely intolerable. So much so that she would begin to brush her hair back from her face over and over again, putting her hair behind her ears, but what she was really doing was trying to hide from the audience how red her cheeks were.

And so, she would fall into an absolutely compulsive habit of doing this with her hands over and over again. As she did this, she would become so self-conscious, she literally could not even think of the next word in a sentence because all her brain was occupied with was, “Don’t blush, don’t blush, don’t blush, don’t…” You get the idea. But I said feet earlier. The miracle was this. We didn’t focus on blushing. We didn’t even focus on hair smoothing with her fingers.

What I noticed right away was that she constantly shifted her feet back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, almost as though she was looking for somewhere to stand that was solid ground. So instead, I simply put my hands on her feet, and, in fact, I even went further. I tapped the top of her feet as though I were putting little thumbtacks through her feet into the floor. I made her feet anchor into the ground. And, all of a sudden, when she did that, it unlocked a virtuous cycle in which her delivery tools, meaning how you say stuff, not just what you say, her delivery tools totally transformed.

Her breath slowed. Her mouth opened. Her spine got longer. Her hands opened up and got freer, and, all of a sudden, her body began to operate in a way that set her up for success. She calmed down, the cheeks didn’t blush, and she could actually think of a next word to say, and we did this for about four hours. She built a brand-new muscle memory, and she literally got over her stage fright in four hours.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, the feet. And I recall, when I was nervous with interviews, back in the day, I found that when I planted both my feet firmly on the floor, I just said to myself, “Ground,” or something, that just sort of made me feel solid. And I don’t know, I thought it was maybe a me thing, but maybe you’re finding some universal insights here, Michael. What’s up with the feet?

Michael Hoeppner
Well, your body is evolutionarily designed to do some things. I mean, think about the sacrifices, in terms of evolution, we had to make to be able to stand on two feet rather than four. They’re massive. If you do martial arts, do you stand all crisscrossed and slouched over and constantly move your feet? If you’re learning a dance step, do you constantly shuffle your feet? No. We are built to have a stance in which we’re stacked as tall as we can, anchoring our feet into the floor so we’re balanced, so we can do all kinds of things, like even have our hands free to implement tools, and our voice unlocks very powerfully when we are as tall as we actually are.

And your feet being grounded is the first foundational step of that. So, it’s not just you. In fact, folks out there who are listening, the next time you’re giving a speech or any kind of presentation in which you’re standing, see what unlocks when you just ground your feet into the ground, just like Pete is talking about doing.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think you can even ground your feet to the ground when you’re sitting and it does something.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, you’re exactly right. But I’ll add a layer to it. Anyone who’s ever taken a yoga class and heard the yoga instructor talk about your “sits” bones, that’s if you sit on your hands and you feel this kind of bony part of your pelvis, that’s the bottom of your kind of hip girdle, would be one way to think about it.

Here’s the sentence, “Those are the feet of your torso.” I’ll say that again, “Those are the feet of your torso.” So, even if you’re seated, you can think about those anchoring into the chair just as your feet would anchor into the ground.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re talking about tiny adjustments and posture, I think I’ve also noticed the… in college I took one modern dance class just to keep enough credits to keep my scholarship, was actually a really cool experience. And we talked a lot about “pulling up,” which for a while, it took me a while to say, “What are we talking about?” And we had to read a whole article entitled “What does it mean to pull up?” which was actually very useful.

And so, they suggested imagining, like, a rope attached to, I think it might be called the suprasternal notch. Am I using these words right? Like, in the middle of your chest, like above your nipples, like right in the middle, if they were to cleave you in two, by maybe four or five inches above the nipple line, like you could feel a little notch. And I have found, sure enough, that when that area is, like, hunched just a little, versus it’s truly elevated as though a rope were pulling me upward, it’s like night and day in terms of the alertness or the with-it-ness. Michael, can you explain this much better than I’m doing now?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, I’d be happy to try, all right, for sure. Look, yes to that adjustment, and I’m even going to add another one. Imagine you had another string on your back. So, think of yourself almost like a marionette, a puppet, and you have one on both sides, and those strings are gently pulling you up so you almost can feel that full circumference of a circle around that widest part of your chest.

Now go even further, because in the chapter on posture in the book, I actually give a different image, which is imagine your head is a helium balloon and it’s gently floating up to the sky, and your spine is a long string on the end of the helium balloon, and you’re getting taller and taller and taller, not through muscle effort but through ease and release and grace. This is important because the way we learn posture is dead wrong. We hear all these conventional wisdom phrases like, “Sit up straight,” or “Pin your shoulders back,” or “Pull your shoulders back.”

Now, the problem with all of those things is they actually fit in a weightlifting class. Your spine is not straight, so you should not endeavor to sit up straight. Your shoulders should not be pulled back or cranked back because that’s using a bunch of muscles that are about building muscle strength rather than what posture should come from, which is balance and alignment.

Now the reason this feels so miraculous to you when you do it, I mean, first of all, there is a bit of just an endorphin rush from using our body in big physically expansive ways, but as it applies to speaking, if you’re not being as tall as you are, your diaphragm does not have as much room to drop down and push your guts out of the way so you can actually take a full, big, deep, relaxed breath. So, very often when I coach people on posture, the first thing that happens when they begin to be as tall as they actually are is they yawn.

And the reason it’s not because they’re tired, but the exact opposite. Because for the first time in that day, all of a sudden, their diaphragm has a space to actually drop down. What happens? Their lungs begin to inflate with air automatically, and they go into a yawn, and the whole body relaxes and releases a little bit. So that’s a tiny bit of an explanation of some of the things you might be feeling when you allow yourself to have that taller, released posture that your body is craving.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot with regard to the helium balloon floating situation and it’s not a matter of muscles, because I was just about to say, Michael, sometimes it feels like when I’m standing up really straight and my posture is great, I’m getting tired. Is there a certain set of strength training exercises I should be doing in order to improve? And it sounds like you’re saying, absolutely not. Just change the approach to your posture.

Michael Hoeppner
There is no strength training. Who has the best posture in the whole world? Once they’ve learned to sit up, put a baby on the ground, and watch them balance flawlessly. Anyone who’s had a young kid, call it zero to two years old, you plop them on the floor and you cannot believe how they can stay balanced like that the whole time. Here’s another image for it.

Remember holding a broom on the tip of your finger? You put the bottom of the broom there and you keep the thing perfectly aloft by moving your hand around, and the stick is completely straight and the head of the broom, which is much heavier, by the way, stays totally vertical because you’re working to keep it in balance. That’s how our posture works, from balance and ease and release. It does not work from muscle effort.

So, if you’re walking around the world, trying to pin your shoulders back, or essentially treat your day like a physical therapy session, you’re going to get exhausted. The wrong muscles will be recruited. They will get exhausted and fatigued. You will collapse, and then what happens is even worse. Then the voice in your head will kick in and begin to critique you, like, “Ugh, how do you have terrible posture?” “Ugh, why can’t you fix this?” “Ugh, why don’t you stand up straight?” “Ugh, I’m so tired,” “Ugh, it’s not worth trying to change it. Ahh…” then you collapse. So, instead, embrace release, breath, freedom, balance, and see what changes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. So, are there any other key prompts you recommend in terms of getting our bodies in a comfortable groove that is excellent?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. Well, here’s another one. Unlock your hands and let them talk. I’m not suggesting that you, need more hand gestures. That’s not my point. My point is, I bet you make more hand gestures in real life than you realize. And then you go into high-stakes presentations or board meetings or client situations and, all of a sudden, you have a bunch of garbage in your head, like, “Don’t make distracting hand gestures,” and you completely restrain your gestures. But in real life, your hands have a story to tell, too, and they want to speak.

Now, the reason this is a problem is not because I actually don’t care all that much about what you’re doing with your hands in terms of gestures, but I do care a lot about how free you’re being with your overall communication instrument. And when I see people constrain their gestures, very often what they do, too, is constrain their breath, constrain their jaw, constrain their enunciation, constrain their vocal variety, and soon they speak like a tremendously diminished version of themselves. So, let your hands actually do what they want to do, which is help to emphasize and tell your story.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Okay. Well, so we talked about body stuff a fair bit, which I think is warranted given your notion that communication is not about thinking and it’s a physical art. So, tell us, when it comes to the actual words that we’re using, you’ve got some perspectives in terms of conciseness, articulousness, enunciation. Can you work us through approaches to improve these domains?

Michael Hoeppner
So, let’s take conciseness first. If you’re trying to be briefer with your remarks, say better stuff in fewer words, in other words, as opposed to just telling yourself one more time, “Keep it brief,” or “Keep it simple,” or “Take a 30,000-foot view.” Instead, pick up a stack of LEGO blocks, or any other stackable objects, and go through your content, but say one thing at a time.

And at the end of each idea, in silence, place down a LEGO block. Pick up the second LEGO block and say the second sentence, or second idea, and at the end of that idea, in silence, kind of like where the period might go, at the end of the sentence, click the LEGO block into place on the previous. Pick up a third one. Say the third idea. At the end of that idea, in silence, again, kind of like where the period could go, click that one in place with the previous. And slowly but surely, thought by thought, sentence by sentence, create the tower of your communication.

Now the reason this can be so dazzlingly effective for people is that, in that moment when you’re doing the activity of clicking the LEGO in place, something miraculous happens. You’ve given yourself a moment to pause and to think, and maybe even to breathe. So, you’ve given your brain the two things it needs to actually think of smarter, briefer stuff, which is time and oxygen.

This is how great impromptu speakers have built the discipline to speak. They share just one smart idea at a time, and at the end of that smart idea, they consider, “Do I need to say something else, or am I done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And in the process of actually stacking these LEGO blocks, it sounds like we may come to some realizations, “Oh, I don’t need that at all, or that at all. I guess it’s shorter than I originally planned. How grand.”

Michael Hoeppner
In fact, I can’t say who, but I’m working with a political candidate who is running for office. This particular candidate typically goes on way too long when answering questions. So, we’ve been working with these LEGO blocks relentlessly to get answers down to 30- or 45-second sound bites. It’s a very fast way to do so. Now, you can’t stack LEGOs in real life, but if you practice this, what happens is, very quickly, you build that muscle memory of tolerating thinking time between ideas, and very soon, you don’t need the LEGO blocks or the stackable objects at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Michael, help us out with this muscle memory notion. I think some of us fear silence because of any number of dimensions, but when you mentioned a political context, I’m thinking about, oh, man, when you have multiple guests on a news show or a debate stage, it just feels like, “Oh, if there’s a split second of silence, someone’s going to grab it.” So, how do we think about these environments or even just the mental state and associations and emotions we have with the discomfort of letting there be that gap between our sentences and our thoughts?

Michael Hoeppner
It’s a big question. So, opposite of conciseness, I’m going to give you a thorough answer, okay? Because there’s a bit of a multi-step process I’ll offer here. The first is to recognize what the highest priority is. Most people are not on a Sunday morning political food fight talk show. Most people are living their lives, and the much bigger error they make is not having comfort with silence. So, recognize which the bigger one has in terms of a payoff for you and focus on that.

Next, this is a tool that’s so useful, The Wall Street Journal did a little piece on it. To build some comfort with silence, particularly when asking questions, you can do a simple thing, which is draw an invisible question mark with your finger at the ends of sentences, imperceptibly, where no one can see this, either just gently in a tiny microscopic way on the side of your leg, or if you’re remote, on a video call.

Why? We talk past the ends of questions all the time out of a sense of discomfort, and we don’t want to live through that silence. But if you actually shut up when you ask a question, guess what might happen? The person you’re asking the question might say something useful. I mean, think of that in a sales or a negotiation situation.

So, this idea of tolerating silence is not just crucial for being brief or being concise, it’s crucial even just in the reciprocal activity of having a conversation. Those are thoughts about building that muscle of tolerating the silence. But we can also get into how to avoid being interrupted if you want to. You want to go there?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it, yeah.

Michael Hoeppner
So, the first thing is, throw out that garbage advice of never have it be silent because you might get interrupted, because it might make it more likely you get interrupted. Why? Well, if someone hears that I’m talking to a person who never shuts up, no matter what’s going on, there’s never a single bit of silence, it actually encourages me, “You know what? I better get my voice in the conversation because I’m never going to if I don’t, so I’m just going to interrupt them midstream.” They might feel more inclined to interrupt you because they never see an opening.

And if you’re talking without ever giving yourself a moment to think about what the heck you’re saying, there’s a good chance you’re saying kind of dumb stuff. So, if you say dumb stuff, people are more inclined to interrupt you because they think, “No, I have to contradict what you’re saying.” So, contemplate that it might be making the possibility or pattern of you being interrupted worse.

If you’re afraid of being interrupted, instead, work on what’s called laddering, and, supposedly, Margaret Thatcher studied this to try to figure out how to make sure that her political adversaries would not interrupt her. And what it means is that you build, using all five Ps of vocal variety, not just pace, all five Ps of vocal variety, you build your way through a bit of speaking so that people recognize you’re not done yet, and I’ll do this in one sentence so you can see it.

Laddering would be a tool in which you use ever-accumulating vocal variety to let your listener know that you have not reached the end of your sentence. Now I’m doing it in a very exaggerated, absurd way, but you hear my point. You can show people you’re not done speaking yet with the adamance and forcefulness with your speech, and it doesn’t have to be by talking as fast as humanly possible.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you said there’s five P’s. What are the five P’s?

Michael Hoeppner
Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what do you mean by power and placement?

Michael Hoeppner
Power is volume, that’s loud and quiet. And placement means where the sound is placed in the body. So, as an example, if you have a friend with a really nasal voice, the placement of their voice is primarily in their nasal passages, and that’s where the sound is amplifying. Our voice amplifies throughout our body. So where is it placed?

Now the key thing with all of these five P’s is to, for the most part, use more. More variety. Because, typically, when we’re in a fraught communication situation, we contract and use less.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, different placement would probably imply a different pitch, but it’s possible. So many P words. It’s possible to have different pitches in the same placement.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, you’re right about this. You could disentangle them from each other, but they’re incredibly hard to do so because they work together organically to create emphasis and drama and surprise within what we’re saying. If you don’t believe me, just imagine trying to get a dog interested in a stick that they’re allowed to chew, but not the cell phone that they have found, and imagine yourself comparing those two things for the dog.

You would use all five of your different dynamics of vocal variety to make one thing  seem really cool and exciting, and one seem really boring and silly and uninteresting. They work together, these five pieces.

Pete Mockaitis
I like the dog example. I think you’d also use a small child.

Michael Hoeppner
I have a 10-week-old golden retriever puppy right now, so dog is front of mind. That’s what’s going on. But, yes, it works for kids too, for sure. And, by the way, if you want a quick way to unlock this, try an exercise I call “silent storytelling.” And all that means is you have to speak, but exaggerate every single part of your speaking except for your voice. In fact, put yourself on mute and think of this like lip-syncing.

Mouth the words, move your hands and your gestures like crazy, allow your face to be terrifically expressive, but do it without any sound. It’s as though you’ve been muted on a TV. Do it for a minute or two, and then, all of a sudden, let your voice back into the equation, and you’re going to hear, all of a sudden, so much more expressivity come out of your voice because you’re moving your body in a much more dynamic way. It’s a very quick hack to unlock a lot more vocal variety for people who struggle with at times being more monotone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, we talked about conciseness, then we had a fun little detour through some five Ps. How about articulateness and enunciation?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, let’s look at both. Again, I’ll jump right to something very tangible and very practical you can do. There’s an exercise in my chapter on articulateness called finger walking. And in case you’re just listening, what I’m doing is walking my fingers forward, choosing each and every single word that comes out of my mouth.

Now, I invented this exercise originally with a balance beam, or a piece of masking tape stretched along a floor, and would have clients walk along this balance beam choosing every single footstep. But then, of course, I wanted to find a way to make it instant for people, even if they didn’t have room to move around, and you can do the same activity walking your fingers forward.

Do not get hung up on “Am I choosing word by word or syllable by syllable?” Instead, simply focus on walking your ideas across the table. And if you don’t know what to say next, pause your fingers, consider what you do, and then slowly take your time to commit to each word you’re sharing. Now, the reason this can be very powerful for people gets at the title of the book, “Don’t Say ‘Um’.”

The way to be more articulate is not to obsess about all the worthless words you’re saying, like, kind of, sort of, um, but rather to be laser focused on which words you’re trying to choose. So, the exercise of finger walking brings your attention to, “I’m going to actually take the time to choose my words.”

Pete Mockaitis
And the idea, as we do the finger walking, is that each finger-fall, footfall, step, if you will, corresponds to one word that I’m saying.

Michael Hoeppner
Well, listeners, I’m sure you could just hear that Pete was practicing just now. So, thank you for practicing, Pete. It’s not quite that rigid. If you do it for a few minutes, what you’re going to discover is that it doesn’t actually correlate to every single syllable, nor each and every word. What begins to happen is the activity helps you choose words or phrases, but it forces you to actually choose those ideas, as opposed to just opening your mouth and letting words fly out. So, practice it a little bit. You’ll develop your own rhythm, and it doesn’t have to be quite as rigid as you’re talking about.

A different way to think about this is, imagine you were a ballerina, or your hand was, and the ballerina is trying to tiptoe through a field of tulips and not disturb a single flower petal. That’s the kind of specificity I’m talking about with your fingers. And what happens, like magic, is you become that specific with your language, too, and it unlocks what I call linguistic precision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so we’re sort of physically and visually representing, with our own bodies, a rhythm or groove between speaking and pausing.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes, thank you for that synthesis. Here’s the crucial thing. You won’t have to finger walk for the rest of your life. If you try it right now, by the way, it’s challenging. But it’s challenging on purpose. Because you may right now be very accustomed to just opening your mouth and letting a bunch of words fly out, fully 40% of which are not that useful. So, it forces you to really, almost obsessively, think about, “What the heck am I actually saying?” Well, you don’t have to do this too long, and, all of a sudden, you will have a much greater awareness of choosing words and ideas than just kind of free-form letting them fly out of your mouth all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And in the process, we’d naturally say fewer words and have more silences, is my experience right now, and it sounds like your assertion is that’s totally fine.

Michael Hoeppner
To a point. To a point. It’s going to feel a little bit too rigid at first. A little bit too much. What I’m suggesting is this is a radically different way to learn a behavior. Most people try to get rid of filler and useless words and be more precise and articulate by doing the advice of the title of my book. “Don’t say ‘um.’ Don’t say ‘like.’ Don’t say ‘kinda.’ Don’t say ‘sorta.’ Don’t talk too fast.” A whole bunch of thought suppression. It doesn’t work.

So, this is a different way to learn. You practice this a little bit, you bring a hyper-awareness to which words you’re actually choosing, and this uses what’s called embodied cognition. You’re learning with something besides just your brain. You’re learning with your body. You do this a little bit a few minutes each day, very quickly, you’re going to build some muscle memory with linguistic precision, and you won’t have to walk your fingers at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, this slow, halting, extra pause thing going on, as I’m being more linguistically precise, is almost a bit of an awkward intermediate stage that will, in time, with practice, disappear, and now I’m just artistically fluently precise at a good pace without those awkward silences and pauses.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, absolutely. Now, in my experience, in 15 years of coaching this exercise, this exercise is like a magic bullet, transformative for about 60% of people. Forty percent, it is legitimately too complex. It’s too much of a cognitive load. It actually kind of throws them off. But I will say something about this book that no author anywhere has ever said. I don’t care if you read the book. I really don’t. I do care if you read one chapter.

So, find the area of communication that has historically been a bugaboo or a challenge for you and get better in that one area. This exercise may not unlock precision or articulateness for every single person, but there’s chapter after chapter, so, yes, practice it. Yes, it may be awkward at first, and even if it doesn’t work, there are other sort of arrows in the quiver, to use a metaphor.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s hear about enunciation.

Michael Hoeppner
Enunciation is the only category in the book that I offer a tool for that I can take no credit, because the tool is something I learned from an amazing voice and speech teacher named Andrew Wade, but he learned it from someone, who learned it from someone, who learned it from someone. And the first historical example of this goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. So, the principle here is you practice speaking with an impediment. Yeah, go ahead, what?

Pete Mockaitis
Like, do I put pebbles in my mouth, Michael? Isn’t that a choking hazard?

Michael Hoeppner
Hey, look at you, knowing the historical reference.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes, pebbles in the cheeks. Oh, shucks, exactly. No, it is not a choking hazard if you do it correctly. We’re not putting pebbles in the cheeks. You’re using one impediment that you put in between your teeth. A good thing is a slice of wine cork, that’s what I learned from Andrew Wade, but you have to hang on to the wine cork on the side to make sure you don’t inhale it. Easier is the end of a toothbrush, or even your pinky finger, neither of which are choking hazards, obviously.

And all you do, as I’m doing right now, is you put the impediment in between your teeth, and then the task is you have to make every single word totally clear even with the impediment in between your teeth. Now it looks silly. But you know what else looks silly? Basketball players dribbling with ski gloves on. Competitive swimmers swimming with extra baggy, two or three pairs of swim shorts. Sprinters running with a parachute, dragging behind them. Those people look silly, too.

It’s not silly. You’re doing the exact same thing. You’re building stronger muscles by making the physical activity more difficult. And by doing this, all of a sudden, all the muscles of enunciation, because they are muscles, get stronger because they have to fight past an impediment. Then you remove the impediment and, voila, your enunciation is better.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Michael, this is so much good stuff. Tell me, anything else that’s really good and juicy and powerful you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Hoeppner
I just want to make sure that people get this really clear sense, “Wow, there’s almost a tool for each of these things,” and there is. And the point is, you can treat yourself like the communication athlete that you are and use some of these innovative approaches to build some new muscles.

And with that, I want to just quickly mention the first two that we didn’t get to for posture, in the book, but also in real life, if you don’t have the book, make a paper crown, and imagine you’re walking around with a crown on your head and you’re a regal monarch. And for grounding your feet, in the book, I actually have a page where there’s two silhouettes of footprints. You can stand on the book and keep the pages adhered to the floor.

So, for each of these places, you might feel like you have challenges in your communication life, there are ways to approach it, and physical, innovative ways that can create change very quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Now with the crown on your head, I’m thinking about a recent trip to Burger King with my kids and the Burger King crown, and those things stay on pretty good even when we’re bobbing it all over the place. So, is there some nuance to how I do the crown exercise?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. Well, the nuance there is there’s a bit of imagination that has to happen. Put it on and then challenge your kids, or whoever you’re with, walk around, allowing the crown to give you the regal bearing of some legendary monarch.

If you’re with kids, make it a game. See who can stand as tall and walk as elegantly and regally as a monarch. And you’re going to notice very quickly what that unlocks is the exact kind of posture we were talking about earlier. Not posture from muscle effort, but posture from ease, grace, height, and balance.

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

Michael Hoeppner
There’s two quotes, and I’m going to mangle them a little bit, but it’s more important people remember the idea than even the quote. One is Buckminster Fuller, “If you’re trying to change something, don’t try to fix the old model. Invent a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

And the other quote is from Teddy Roosevelt, which is something like, “The best reward in life by far is doing work worth doing.”

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

Michael Hoeppner
We use that system of five P’s I mentioned to look at politicians’ speeches, and it turns out, pretty straightforward, politicians who use vocal variety are evaluated by their audience as more authentic. Politicians who never use vocal variety are evaluated as inauthentic. And in politics, being labeled inauthentic is like the kiss of death these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Michael Hoeppner
I’ll tell you what I’m reading currently that I like the best. I don’t know about favorite book ever, but currently it’s Moby Dick, and part of the reason is it has the most dazzling piece of brevity. The first sentence is three words long, and two of the three words are monosyllabic, “Call me Ishmael.”

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

Michael Hoeppner
My favorite tool, in terms of software, is Otter it’s an app that does a bunch of transcription. And part of the reason I love it so much is it’s really good at notating what you’re saying, and I love to explore the dynamic of how humans speak versus how they write, and how our language is different in those two different sorts of processes. And so, very often, I like to actually write some stuff by first talking it out, and Otter lets me do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, I want to get your hot take on this, there is a real difference between how we speak and how we write. And where I find it most pronounced in my life, hundreds of times over, is in bios because bios are written, and then I speak parts of them. And so, when there is a – what is it called? – a dependent clause, like, “A graduate of Harvard Business School, John does blah blah blah.”

And so, I feel like that was made for writing and not for speaking, so I feel silly speaking it, even though we understand when I’m doing a bio, I’m going to be reading something that’s been kind of provided and edited, but I feel off and I change it. So, it is. Yeah, what’s going on here?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. First of all, you’re doing your guests a real favor by changing it real time, because if you notice when you just said that, you even took on kind of a game show host voice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Michael Hoeppner
You said, “A graduate of Harvard Business School.” So, it’s very difficult to read overwrought flowery language that really is made for writing, it’s very difficult to read that without any degree of mockery, because it sounds ridiculous when we say it out loud. So, you’re doing your guests a favor by translating that for them real-time, it sounds like, perhaps, sometimes even.

What is going on here is, of course, they’ve looked at this, is that our brains are even stimulated differently based on how we’re using language, and the activity of writing is fundamentally different than the activity of speaking. And yet we think they’re identical. I’ll give you a quick tool for this. This is, in fact, in the book. It’s called out loud drafting. If you want to get better at writing speeches, things that you’re going to say, come up with content that’s then eventually going to be spoken out loud and make it better, use this tool, out loud draft.

As opposed to picking up a keyboard and tap, tap, tapping away to start. Nope. Stand up, walk around, record yourself so you have the transcript, in case you say something genius, and then talk it out, real time, on the fly. First time might be bad. That’s okay. Do it again. Second time it’s still bad. Do it again. By the third time, it’s going to be better, and then you can go to the keyboard and write some stuff down. But only once you’ve done that, because then the writing is going to sound much more like how people talk anyway.

This is a tool I use in politics all the time so that speeches sound like direct first-person address as opposed to “Recited talking points that cover every single bit of policy that I need to in order to get elected.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that’s dead on. I guess you said politics, I’m also thinking about sales copy. I’ve heard a great phrase I liked, which was, “Join the conversation occurring inside your prospect’s head.” Yeah, that is what I find persuasive, at least when I’m thinking about buying something, is that. And if it does sound flowery, elevated, like a grand essay, I’m less persuaded in terms of thinking, “Oh, this is awesome, and I want it, and I need it.”

And then I find, like I was looking at a top strategy consulting firm’s website writing about their experience with different cases, and I was like, “The purpose of this website is to get a C-suite executive to hand over millions of dollars for a consulting project. I don’t think you’re doing it right.” And I feel a little bit arrogant saying that, like, “I mean, who am? I’m not in that business of selling super high-end corporate consulting services.”

But I don’t think even highfalutin executives speak to each other that way and read about your omnichannel solution enablement, and go, “Oh, yeah, that’s what we need. Call the guys at BCG ASAP because I’m fired up by what I’ve read here.”

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think this leveraging omni-channel stuff would just be so much more compelling in terms of, like, “Our clients have seen 30% increases in leads from their websites, apps, and direct mail.” I go, “Oh, those are three different channels and that’s a result I find very intriguing. Maybe I should talk to these consultants.”

Michael Hoeppner
That’s right, “Because I know what a website is, I know what an app is, I know what email is. Okay, great. Sounds brilliant.” Now this is a really important point for your audience, in particular, because this is not just about website copy. I see this all the time. Imagine this scenario. You’re in a board meeting. Someone’s going to present on something, okay? They’re sitting in a chair. They’re being introduced by someone else, or someone else finished up a presentation, and they’re going to hand the baton off to the person who’s going to go speak.

The person sitting in their chair is speaking like a human, chit-chatting with her neighbor, talking about something, diving into the discussion. They stand up. They walk to the front of the room. They even say something else casual and normal to the person who’s handing it off to them like, “Okay, thanks so much. Appreciate that.”

And then instantly they’re going, “We’re going to consider a leverage strategy, multi-part,” and they, all of a sudden, begin speaking like someone completely different as they’re reading off their slides, reading off this overwrought script that they’ve written, and, all of a sudden, the person we’ve seen two seconds before is replaced by a robot.

Communication is communication is communication. Your job is to say words that are meaningful to your audience and to focus on your audience in all these different situations. And it’s why I think, partly, that idea of public speaking is so confusing because whenever you’re speaking, it’s probably in public, unless it’s a private conversation with like a lover or a spouse or something like this.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And so then, I’m thinking about what’s the ideal time and place for flowery language?

Michael Hoeppner
First rule is you have to know your audience. So, I consult and coach in politics a lot. Most of the time we’re trying to find the simplest language there is and speak in monosyllables and even better use vivid language. That means nouns that are images and action verbs. But that’s because the audience and also the channel they’re going to receive this in, very likely they’re going to see a 30-second soundbite and that’s it. So that’s the first rule, know your audience.

But the second is, and now I’ll use a big word to emphasize a point, the platonic ideal, going back to Plato, the platonic ideal would be that you actually do both things. Now I mentioned Moby Dick earlier as the book that I’m reading. I mentioned that first sentence, but if the entire book was three- to five-word sentences, and all the words were monosyllabic, no one would still read Moby Dick.

Two sentences later, after that “Call me Ishmael” deadly simple sentence, Melville writes an 87 word-long sentence that features big words like “methodically” and “hypo” and these sorts of things. So, the ideal is that you can actually do both. Use soaring, big, complex rhetoric that verges on poetry, and also deadly simple blunt messaging.

And, as usual, one of the best at this ever was Martin Luther King Jr. and you can see this all through his speeches. This back and forth and back and forth between complexity and simplicity. The complexity gives your audience the credit that you actually think they’re smart, which you should. Audiences are smart. And on the other side, those simple phrases show them that you are a visionary leader who can identify a simple goal and deliver on that.

Now, that’s a lot to achieve in like a boardroom presentation or something, but people get bad coaching a lot of times too, of like, “Dumb it down. Keep it simple, stupid,” that kind of stuff. The best you can get to is that you actually do both, and those are the speeches that stand the test of time.

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

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, well, first, the URL for the book is really simple, DontSayUm.com. If you want to reach out to me, LinkedIn is usually the best. That’s just Michael Chad Hoeppner at LinkedIn. And then the company that I lead is called GK Training, and again, that URL is very straightforward. GKTraining.com.

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

Michael Hoeppner
If you have the book, read one chapter, the chapter you need. If you don’t, there’s a free chapter at DontSayUm.com. I’m going to keep it free because people need this. It’s called Navigating Nerves. So, a challenge there is read that chapter and discover how actually your approach for navigating nerves might be totally counterproductive, and give yourself a new tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, this is fun. Thank you. I wish you many meaningful communications.

Michael Hoeppner
Thank you so much, and the same to you.