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854: Mastering Your Surprise Career Super Power: Notetaking with Anh Dao Pham

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Anh Dao Pham shares pro tips on developing the most underrated skill that makes a world of difference: note-taking.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why note-taking is a powerful differentiator
  2. The four-hour investment that ends up saving hundreds of hours
  3. How to synthesize your notes for maximum impact

About Anh

Anh Dao Pham, VP of Product & Program Management at Edmunds.com, has successfully led technical projects for two decades at start-ups and major corporations. In her book Glue: How Project Leaders Create Cohesive, Engaged, High-Performing Teams, Anh vividly brings compassionate, positive, nimble leadership to life, demonstrating with actionable guidance, the power of caring and connection to inspire outstanding results.

Anh lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles, California.

Resources Mentioned

Anh Dao Pham Interview Transcript

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

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you so much for having me back, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat, and I think this may be the shortest follow-up interview we’ve ever had with a guest because you teased note-taking. I asked, listeners said, “Yes, yes, yes” numerous times, so we’re back, we’re talking note-taking, and I’m excited.

Anh Dao Pham
I’m excited, too. I’m always thrilled when people tell me they’re excited about note-taking because I always feel like I’m such a geek when I talk about it, but it is such an important skill so I’m so delighted that some of your listeners were interested in this topic, and I’m hoping that we give them what they want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. And I thought we might start with, I know you use jingles to celebrate and commemorate things, any recent jingles that have tickled you and/or your teammates?

Anh Dao Pham
I haven’t written a jingle recently but I did write a very short “Roses are red, violets are blue” for you here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy.

Anh Dao Pham
Just two, just so that…a couple here. First,

“Roses are red, violets are blue
Hello there, Pete,
I’m happy to see you.”

I thought it was nice for us to be together again, so thank you for that. And then the second for your note-taking crew,

“Roses are red, violets are blue
note-taking is awesome
And so are you.”

So, hopefully, everybody gets excited at this point about note-taking.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And heartwarming. All right. Okay, Anh, you mentioned in the last conversation that note-taking is your superpower. Can you tell us what’s super about it and why should professionals spend time working on this skill?

Anh Dao Pham
Well, note-taking has a ton of advantages. I feel like it’s one of the most underrated skills that we just don’t ever think about investing in. And, for me, it’s been so important to my career that I’d call it the cornerstone of my career. It’s like that one skill that, whenever I talk to people, I say, “You really have to think about note-taking,” and they’re always like, “Yeah, yeah, Anh, that sounds great but I may be not that interested.” But, to me, there’s really a few different benefits.

The first is people’s perception of you, and this is something that I don’t think people think about, but if you’ve, in particular, been in any sort of leadership position where you’re facilitating a meeting or having a discussion with people, and they see you taking notes and you’re typing, and you type slowly, their perception of you is not that you’re necessarily the smartest person.

And this is something that I feel like goes unspoken, but if you watch somebody typing, and they’re like pecking at the keyboard, you might perceive that they’re not as intelligent as they actually are. And that’s, I don’t think, an accurate representation in any way but it does affect people’s perception, in particular, if you’re facilitating a meeting and you’re taking notes slowly, and you’re slowing down the entire meeting.

Their perception of you is not that great. And so, I think mastering good note-taking is important just to make sure that people have a certain amount of respect for you when you’re doing your job if you’re taking notes.

The second is, at least for me, note-taking has been something that’s really made my learning process efficient. So, one of the things that I do, I do religiously in all of my meetings, is take notes. Whether or not I’m going to publish them or not, I take notes. And, for me, it just crystallizes my learning on things so it’s a part of my learning process.

And I started taking notes when I was in college. I was a math major and I was pretty lazy in summary cards. You don’t think of mathematicians as lazy but we kind of are. We’re looking for the most efficient way to do things, or maybe we’re advocates of efficiency is a better way to put it. But I was also a very slow reader. I just couldn’t go through textbooks. And anytime I was studying for a course and you had to read multiple chapters in the textbook, I just couldn’t get through that material.

And I had stumbled upon an article about note-taking, and they said, basically, if you take notes in some sort of structured format, then it improves your recall ability dramatically. And so, what I did was I just started taking notes in outline format, which is like a really traditional way to do it, in all of my lectures, and it was so effective when I was in college that I actually stopped buying the textbooks, like I didn’t read them.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, I went to lectures, I took good notes, and then I reviewed the notes, and most of the time, the professors would cover the material that was needed from the textbook in their lectures. And so, if I took good notes, I didn’t actually need to purchase the textbook anymore. So, after a couple of quarters, I just stopped altogether, so it saved me a ton of money, and I did well in those courses. I did pretty well.

I was at UCLA, and I got a pretty decent GPA coming out of college. So, it was really, really effective for me and has, to this day, been one of the reasons why people often compliment me on my memory. They’re always like, “You have such a great memory.” It’s like, “No, actually, I just spend a lot of time processing the information through note-taking, and that crystallizes my learning in a way that I feel like other people who were not participating as much, will have that as an advantage.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And in your book Glue, on the chapter about note-taking, you mentioned that when you are consistently taking notes and sending them out, you’re really effectively cementing the impression of being a subject matter expert to those that you’re sending the notes to. Can you tell us about that?

Anh Dao Pham
That’s right. Absolutely. I see note-taking as a way to actually get informal power, and so I tell people that information is power. And when you capture information and you send it out and distribute it, you start to become seen as a subject matter expert on the information that you’re putting out there. There’s a misconception that you capture information and some people will capture information and hoard it as a source of power, but to me it’s actually the opposite.

If you think about, let’s say, reputable newspapers or content sites, the reason that people see them as an expert is because they put their content out there. And then when people think of a topic or a question, they know where to go for that information, and note-taking happens in the same way. So, if you’re the person who consistently is taking notes and then sending them out, and they’re good notes, then the people will start to see you as that person who knew this information, publishes information, and a place that they can go to get the information.

And that shifts the dynamic from somebody who’s just sort of a bystander in a meeting to somebody who actually holds information and is somebody who has a certain amount of power and influence in the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now my brain is going to Bob Cialdini who endorsed your book. Kudos.

Anh Dao Pham
He’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s one of my favorites. We were delighted to have him on the show when we finally got him. So, anyways, I’m thinking about the tools or principles of influence – reciprocity. I’m just thinking about how many times folks have been able to miss meetings either because they just want to save some time, or they really had some other obligations going on, and they were able to look to your notes to really save the day.

And so, I’m thinking, over your career, you’ve done that for many people many times, and I would hope that that gives you a little bit of sway when it’s time for you to ask for some help or some favors or some assistance.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, I would agree with that a hundred percent. The principle of reciprocity, I cannot even say that word, reciprocity is another thing that I talk about in the book, and also think a lot about in my career. And the interesting thing about that principle is that it’s not about giving something to get in that specific moment. It’s about establishing a pattern of giving and giving that benefit to other people so that at the time that you go to them at a later date, they actually are able to reciprocate and to provide something back to you because they’ve had that good feeling from you if you’re giving them something.

And I get this all the time, “Oh, I miss the meeting. Thank you so much for the recap. I was able to catch up.” In fact, oftentimes, the notes are way more efficient than being in the meeting. In particular, if you don’t need to be an active participant in the meeting to have the discussion but you need to understand what the outcome is, the notes are tremendously helpful.

I’ve had times before where, as an example most recently, one of our legal team members was asked a question, and he was searching through all of his documentation for anything about a particular discussion, and he said, “The most helpful information I found was actually from this recap that Anh took.” And I went back and looked at the notes, I was like, “I don’t remember this discussion at all. I’m so glad that we wrote it all down.”

And office settings often, in particular when you’re moving very fast, there isn’t a lot of things, there aren’t a lot of people who actually document things. And so, when you start doing that, it becomes often the system of record for whatever the discussion was that happened, and it helps all the people thereafter, either in the moment because they missed it, in some sort of a reminder capacity, like, “I can’t remember exactly what we talked about. I remember we covered this at some point.” Or, even very much later, like through this legal inquiry, some indicator of what was actually discussed and why we did it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, shifting gears now into the how, you mentioned that in some ways, just your sheer typing speed is foundational. Can you speak to that?

Anh Dao Pham
Yes, typing speed is extremely important. Actually, out there, there are studies that talk about note-taking and how taking notes with a pen and pencil is actually more effective in terms of your ability to remember things. I actually believe that that’s kind of bunk but there are studies about that. I think the active, actually, taking information and then participating in it, that actually crystallizes things.

If you’re in an office setting, I would argue that typing is the equivalent of doing that pen and paper activity as long as you’re actually participating. But in order to be able to participate, you can’t be slowed down by your own skill to capture the information, so typing speed is extremely important. And I always tell people, if I notice them not typing as fast as I think that they can, to spend some time investing in themselves in that typing speed.

We always have people complain about how they don’t have enough time in their day, and if you spend a lot of time actually responding to emails or reading things or writing memos, this is a place where you can actually improve your efficiency significantly, and it doesn’t actually take that much investment. When I actually started typing, I was in high school, actually my transition from high school to college, and I attempted to go and get a job at a temp agency.

And at the time, I think I was around 18 or so. I got tested for my typing speed, and I came in at something like 40 words per minute. I’d never actually put in a concerted effort to improve my typing speed. And the people who were helping with the hiring said frankly to me, “Hey, this is just not going to cut it. Nobody is going to hire you for a temp position if you don’t get this typing speed up.”

And at the time I went home, and I happen to find a really old spiral-bound typing speed book that my mom had used when she was younger. And I picked it up, and I did a handful of drills, and I think I spent maybe three or four hours or so just doing a handful of drills. And then a couple days later, I went back and took the test again, and my typing speed was up to 60 words per minute.

So, it wasn’t actually that big of an investment. And if you think, if you currently type 45 words per minute and you can increase your typing speed to 60 words per minute, that’s like a pretty significant improvement in your efficiency, and it doesn’t take that much to invest in yourself to get that typing speed up. So, I feel like everybody should take a moment to do that if they haven’t already.

It’s funny, because when I say this or when people read the book, they’re like, “I went and tested myself, like right after I read that chapter.” And they’re always reporting their typing speed to me, I was like, “Great. Great. Do that.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Thank you.” You’ve seen a lot of these unsolicited reports. Well, you’re bringing some fond memories back. I remember I found a transcriptionist and he was so gung-ho. I think it was in one of those contractor platforms, like Fiverr or Upwork or something, and he said, “I’ve already started on it, and you can see.” And then he showed the Google Document which he was transcribing quickly, I was like, “Okay, there you go. That’s impressive.”

As well as he had a video in his portfolio, he was like, “Look at me on TypeRacer.com,” which is a website I’ve been to, to see, “Sure enough, you can type very fast.” And that’s impressive, and not just when you’re hiring a transcriptionist but for any number of roles. And I think there was an episode of “The Apprentice” back in the day.

I think maybe Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, why I remember this, maybe because it left an impression. He was typing so slowly, I was shocked.

Anh Dao Pham
And didn’t it affect your perception of him?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it did, and I already knew, like he’s a fraudster criminal, and it made it worse, and he can’t type fast. So, it makes an impression. I just want to mention, so right now, AI is so hot right now, and the ability for automated transcription to occur. What are your thoughts on that? Does that make it less important to be able to type quickly?

Anh Dao Pham
No, I think that, at the end of the day, typing is a way of processing information, so it depends on what you’re trying to use it for. Like, as an example, if you’re going to transcribe a podcast and you’re putting it out there because you want the content out there, then I think there’s absolutely no harm in doing some sort of automated transcription. You’re not actually trying to learn the material or do something with it. You’re just trying to make it available.

But, for me, the main reason I like to do note-taking or that I practice it religiously is because it does help me learn. And so, if you’re taking advantage of a tool to do that work for you, you actually lose out on the benefit of processing the information. When I think about typing and taking notes, the reason that it helps improve your memory is that you’re processing information multiple ways.

So, let’s say you’re in a meeting and you’re taking good notes, you’re listening to the information that’s coming in, and then you’re participating in the meeting, so, obviously, you’re likely there because you have some role to play. So, you’re participating in having some discussion, that’s like two ways, “I’m listening. I’m talking.” That’s another way to process the information.

And then if I actually write it down, I’m processing it a third way. So, all in the span of a one-hour meeting, I’ve now triple-processed the information. And it’s not just about writing the information down, but if you actually take the time to reorganize the information or write it in your own words, then you’re processing it another time. So, you’re like taking in the information and then outputting it in a way that is in your own words so that you can confirm that understanding.

So, all in that span of time, if you’re using your fast note-taking abilities and processing all this information, that information is going to get crystallized in your brain in a way that other people who are just listening or just speaking and not taking in all those different activities at the same time are not going to have to their advantage. So, that’s why you’ll come out of the meeting and learn this information so much more quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s say we have invested just a few hours in our typing speed, and it’s gone way up. Cool. Tremendous return on investment there. So, then let’s zoom in. We’re in an actual meeting, we’ve got our laptop, and our fast typing skills. I’m wondering if folks, right from the get-go, are thinking, “Is this even appropriate for me to whip out the laptop and be clanking away? Is this something that’s going to be distracting, annoying? Is this just more for junior people?” Can you talk to us about any resistance folks might have in the moment?

Anh Dao Pham
It’s really funny because I used to work in a startup called Opower, and at the time, I was the first person there who was a program manager. I was director of program management, and I was in charge of hiring other people for my team. And when I put out the job description, we put out an exercise. And in the exercise, it was just a handful of questions that the job applicants had to answer in advance. And one of the questions I’d put on there was, “How fast do you type?”

And the funniest thing about that question was it was the most controversial and telling question on the pre-application. Some people would write back, and the answers were so funny.

Pete Mockaitis
“It shouldn’t matter how fast I type.”

Anh Dao Pham
Exactly. Like, we did. We actually got responses like that, like, “This is not an admin job” was one of the responses, or, “I’m a hunt and pecker,” which was so funny to respond that way, but people were actually offended about this question, that they felt like it was beneath them. And, to me, that’s really telling when it’s like you should have the humility to do this work if it needs to be done on your project. So, if you’re thinking you’re above that, in any job, in anything that makes you better at your job, you should be willing and want to do.

And so, I feel like if there’s an ego there about it, you’re just shooting yourself on the foot by not taking advantage of this particular skill or this opportunity to do that. But I do see resistance because there is a certain amount of ego with it. Now, I would say, though, that most of the time the ego is coupled with a lack of skill. So, it’s like, “Why would you push back on it if you could do it?” It just seems like an odd combination. So, we do see some of that resistance.

Now, in the scope of actual meetings, and I come from a project management background but now I also do product management work, and I’m on the executive team, and I still go into meetings and take notes. And you would think, like, “Hey, as Anh moves up in her career, she’s going to do this less.” It’s like, no, actually, I’m not because, again, I think it becomes a very valuable resource, it’s important for my learning process, and people really appreciate it. So, why wouldn’t I continue to do that?

And people have come to know that I do this. They will rely on this skill, sometimes maybe too much, but they’ll rely on this skill, and this is something they can count on with me if they’re not able to attend a meeting, it’s like, “Hey, are you attending? Could you share your notes with me?” That’s like a huge benefit for them and it’s something that I think I’m always going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. And no one has ever said, “Hey, cut it out,” or looked annoyed, like, “Ugh, your keyboard noise is such a distraction and annoying us, Anh.”

Anh Dao Pham
No, actually. And I do have long nails so I do clank a little bit on the keyboard. Now, if I’m in a meeting or on a Zoom or something, and you can hear the clanking, then I’ll mute myself so that it doesn’t happen. The only thing I would say is if you’re maybe on a one-on-one situation, and you’re sitting there, staring at your computer while you’re taking notes, or you’re concentrating so much on that, that’s not a great situation.

Some of those smaller form meetings, you might want to pay more attention to the conversation, or you might at least give a prerequisite or preamble before you actually start taking notes, like, “Hey, I’m going to be taking notes, but the reason I’m taking notes is because I’m listening to you so intently, and I want to make sure that I’m capturing this information.”

So, you can give that up front so that people know that that’s important to you for the purposes of this meeting. I’ve actually participated in interviews with companies before where the interviewer, it was just me and him, and he said, “Hey, this is a part of my process, so just know when I’m staring intently into the camera, I’m taking notes and it’s not you. It’s because I’m really trying to listen and make sure that I captured everything.”

So, I think you can phrase it in such a way, with whoever you’re meeting with, to let them know that this is an important part of the process, and that’s why you’re doing it, and that should cut out any hesitation for you taking on that task.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we got the typing speed up, hesitations are behind us, we’re in the moment, what do we actually do?

Anh Dao Pham
So, there’s a couple phases in the book I break this down on note-taking. In the very beginning of a project, oftentimes, you’ll start a project and not actually know what’s going on. And so, if you’re in a meeting and you’re trying to facilitate and you’re trying to take notes, sometimes that’s very difficult. And so, I call this phase the fake-it-till-you-make-it phase.

And the idea here is you’re listening intently, you’re asking questions when you don’t understand things, but you’re trying not to slow down the discussion or the meeting. And so, one thing you can do is if there are things that you really need clarification on, you can sort of jot them down. Sometimes I’ll create my own private note section, like, “Note to myself: Ask about this later because I don’t want to slow this down.”

But in the span of the meeting, what you want to do is try to capture the most salient points, the most important things, and there’s really only a couple of categories. One is, “What are the key decisions that are being made?” And then, two is, “Are there any sort of follow-up items or action items? And who’s going to be responsible for those?”

And in a meeting where you don’t exactly know what’s going on, and sometimes maybe they’re even using jargon that you don’t fully understand, the most important thing is to write down accurately what is being stated. And if you’re unsure, you can always prompt somebody, like, “Hey, I heard this word. It sounds like a decision was made. Is that true? If so, can somebody just restate the decision for clarity?”

And when you do that, it actually helps the meeting because, oftentimes, people will say, “Okay, great.” They’ll have a discussion and they’ll seem to have come to some sort of consensus, and then they’ll move on, but nobody actually stated the decision at the very end. And sometimes when you do that, and prompt, like, “Hey, I heard a decision or I think we made a decision. Can somebody state that?” It will actually clarify that maybe something was missed or maybe somebody had a slightly different understanding of the decision, so you’re actually helping the process by asking that question.

And then once it gets stated in a clear enough way, you can say, “Okay, so I heard this is the decision,” state the decision, and then write it down. So, you’re sort of capturing the most important things. And that, to me, is sort of the fake-it-till-you-make-it stage. And if there is jargon that is being used in that state where you don’t fully understand what they’re saying, you just make sure to repeat back, “This is what I heard you say. Is that right?” And then write that down in the way that they said it.

It’s not as important in this phase that you understand the notes as it is that the people who are in the meeting understand the notes and what’s next. And so, there you just want to capture exactly what they said, and a note to yourself to learn and understand it later. And then you can follow up with the person, ask those questions to make sure that you fully understand what you’re sending out. Don’t send out things that you don’t understand. Capture them and then make sure you understand them before you send it out because that’s how you’re going to get the benefit, ultimately.

So, that, to me, is like really the first phase. And then, over time, what you want to do is sort of graduate to a more, I’d say, mature note-taking phase where you’re then sort of going through the process, participating in the meeting, and then taking notes but organizing the information as you’re going along. And when we talk about note-taking, people ask me all the time, like, “Well, what’s the secret?” I was like, “Well, I don’t just take notes. I’m actually participating and then I’m summarizing the information in my own words.” And there’s a lot of benefits to that.

The first is really that when people speak, it doesn’t always make for good notes. If you capture everything verbatim, there’s uhms and ahhs, there’s pauses, there’s twists and turns, they might repeat themselves five times. It doesn’t make sense for you to write everything that everybody is saying. What you want to do is capture what the point of that discussion was. So, take a moment to sort of rephrase it for yourself in the most concise way, and then type that down.

And then, as you’re going through the meeting, you’re participating. And if you have read my book Glue, there’s actually two chapters next to each other. It’s the note-taking chapter, and then the next chapter is about synthesis. And I think, when you’re doing really successful note-taking or good note-taking, you’re actually practicing both skills at the same time. And so, note-taking is sort of the act of writing down the information and organizing it, but how do you actually organize the information? And there’s a few different ways to do it, through different techniques of synthesis.

And the simplest way of synthesis is to actually just try to sequence things. So, if somebody’s describing a process or a plan to do something, you’re kind of like sitting there and trying to write these things down in order. So, as people are talking through it, it’s like, “Okay, we needed to do step one.” “Okay, great. I captured that.” Then, suddenly, they’re talking about step two, and then it’s like, “Oh, well, actually, there’s something that needs to happen before that.” So, then you sort of reorganize that information and sequence it in a way.

Think of it as like I talk to my mom about recipes that she cooks for Vietnamese food, and sometimes she gives those steps in all different orders. Like, she doesn’t have anything written down because a lot of Asian cooks don’t. They don’t have recipes. They just kind of feel their way through. And when she conveys the information to me for how to cook something, I step back and go, “Okay, I heard you said this, this, and this,” and I’m like writing those down as if they were instructions that I could follow later. And that is a way to sort of synthesize the information.

So, when you’re taking good notes, you’re doing that. You’re not sort of just capturing anything as it comes along because then your steps may not be all out of order. You’re actually synthesizing them into something that’s useful and structured. And that, to me, is sometimes hard to do, but if you practice it over time, you get really good at it.

And when you’re doing it as well, it also helps you identify if there are gaps. So, in the book, I give an example about cooking chicken pho. It’s a recipe, and my mom’s giving me these instructions, and she says, like, “Hey, you’ve got these vegetables, you need to chop them up. And then you need to do X, Y, and Z.” And at the end, after I write it all down, I realize, “I didn’t do anything with these vegetables that I chopped up. What do I do with them?”

But if I didn’t sequence the information out, I wouldn’t necessarily realize that the vegetables didn’t go anywhere. And so then, it’s like, “Hey, mom, I missed the vegetables. Where do they go?” It’s like, “Okay, well, you add them at this point in time.” It’s like, “Okay, let me slot that in where it needs to happen.” And so, that active synthesis really helps you make sure that you fully understand the information.

So, when you’re capturing the information and then, ultimately, sending out, that it’s like 100% accurate, and you’ve helped identify potentially gaps in the information that you’ve plugged in as a part of that discussion.

Pete Mockaitis
So, sequence is fantastic in terms of, “How do I do this thing?” and in the course of a meeting, we say, “Oh, we should do this.” “Oh, but first I guess we got to do that.” “Oh, but that’s really going be contingent on this.” And so then, that really is super value added in terms of we had a jumble of discussion, and then what’s coming out the other side is, “Oh, here are the six steps. One, two, three, four, five, six. You made it look easy, Anh. Cool.”

So, that’s one style or approach of synthesis is sequence, chronology. Are there any other key frameworks or schemas that are handy when it comes to synthesizing?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, another active synthesis that I describe in the book is I call it inference. And so, this is like a really simple technique where you try to collect multiple pieces of information, and then you try to extrapolate another piece of information out of that. So, one of the mistakes that you’ll make maybe early on when you’re even participating in meetings, regardless of whether or not you’re taking notes, is you just take statements at face value.

So, it’s like, “Anh’s going to go on vacation this week. Pete has Anh scheduled for a podcast this week.” Those are two pieces of information. Now, if you’re not thinking about them, you just write those two pieces of information down, but if you’re thinking about them, you realize, “Anh’s on vacation this week, and Pete’s got a podcast. Well, Anh’s not going to make that podcast and we need to reschedule it.” There’s an extrapolation that happens.

And sometime those seems super obvious but, when you’re in a meeting, and when you’re in a lot of meetings throughout the day, oftentimes people are only participating and thinking about their one piece of it. So, I might only think about my thing, you might only think about your thing, and nobody’s connecting the two dots together.

And so, the act of inferences take those pieces of information, and then if you dare extrapolate and make another statement, a conclusion based off of that, just to make sure that you understand what the result is. So, maybe in this specific example, we say, “Oh, Anh is not going to be there for the podcast so we’ve got to reschedule it.” And I might say, “Oh, no, no, no, Pete is so special that I’m going to come out of my vacation and I’m going to take this call with him so that I can be on this podcast.” And you’re like, “Okay,” and all worked out.

So, the extrapolation was incorrect in that statement, but we clarified something that was really important that everybody missed and nobody said it out loud.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun.

Anh Dao Pham
And so, to me, that’s a great skill and it’s really simple. The one thing on that skill that you have to be okay with is getting things wrong. And I think in note-taking, in general, or any sort of synthesis, you have to be okay with getting things wrong and having people correct you, and it’s not until people have corrected you enough and you got it right in the way that you’ve written it down, that you know that you understand the material, so you have to get pass that, but I think the benefits are huge.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I think that can, over time, expose some themes and patterns in terms of, “Oh, okay, this person will make vacation exceptions for super important things,” or, “Does not ever want to be interrupted on their vacation.” And so, that’s a very narrow extrapolation or theme or pattern recognition.

And then, in a way, it’s even helpful for the individuals in terms of, “Oh, here’s how I’m communicating, and here’s what’s often missed. Okay.” And you mentioned that when you are taking your notes, what you want to record, the most critical things such as the decisions made and the action items, who will do what by when. To what extent do we want to share the key considerations of those decisions?

Because sometimes those conversations are quite meandering, and then they landed on a decision. And sometimes they’re quite clear, “Oh, this critically hinges upon four key inputs.” So, how do you think about note-taking in these environments?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, I’d say it’s kind of an elevation of note-taking. So, if you’re in the beginning, and you’re still just trying to keep up with the Joneses in your note-taking, then it’s fine to capture just the most salient points, meaning the key decisions and the action items. I think that’s like the minimum that you really want to capture in order for your notes to be useful to others.

But once you progress to being able to extrapolate and organize information in your note-taking, and, ideally, doing that in real time because you’re participating, then you do want to be capturing the why. And I think that is one of the biggest things that helps you actually remember the material, is understanding the why.

It’s very difficult to just understand or remember words verbatim unless they’re maybe in a song, or the alphabet, or you have some sort of moniker for them. But when you actually understand the underlying reason, you don’t actually have to necessarily understand or remember the outcome. You can kind of reason your way there, if that makes sense.

A similar example from memory was when I was in high school, I took the Calc BC test to see if I could get credit for my Calculus course. And our teacher had covered this concept called the trapezoid rule, which is a way to calculate the area of a particular shape through an integration, or through an integral, and he explained how it was actually put together.

So, when you actually do the trapezoid rule, basically what you do is you take a line of the curve, and then you split it into trapezoids, and then you add all the trapezoids together, and that’s how you actually come up with the total are below the curve. This is like me super geeking out on the math side of things. But when I got to the AP test for this calculus exam, the first thing on the test was this trapezoid rule, and I remembered coming out of it, and everybody was, like, “Oh, my gosh, does anybody here remember the trapezoid rule? Like, how could you possibly remember that?”

And it’s like, “Well, I remembered how he explained it to me. I remember that you had to actually create trapezoids, and I know how to calculate the area of a trapezoid so I just kind of was able to derive the formula as I was going through.” And I know that was such a geek example but it stuck with me so much because I remember, like, “Well, because he explained the why, and I understood how it worked, I didn’t actually have to remember the formula at the very end.”

And so, to your point, if you’re going through and you’re having these conversations, if you can capture the why, participate in the why, then you may not even need to remember the outcome because if somebody is asking, you can say, “Oh, well, I remember we talked about this and that, and this was good. And so, the conclusion must’ve been this.” And I think that that’s very powerful as well to have that information so that you can reason through those things.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really good. And I find that when I don’t have an understanding of a why, or the why is just nonsense to me, I have a hard time remembering anything associated with the conversation or anything there. So, that’s really insightful.

Anh Dao Pham
It’s like your brain almost discards the information. It’s like a superfluous piece of information, you’re like, “That didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit into the puzzle pieces of my brain, so I’m just going to kind toss it out.” And then once you truly understand that, whether or not you agree with it is a different question, but if you at least understand the reason that got you there, then, typically, you’re going to remember the answer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then any tips when it comes to shorthand, organization, or sending them out, or platforms?

Anh Dao Pham
I mostly advise people to use the tools that are most easy for them to use. You want to use what’s most comfortable for you. So, this is like a really simple example but at my office, we used to have computers in the room, in the conference rooms, for our meetings, and then you could also bring your laptop and plug it in.

And one of the things that I would do pretty regularly is I would bring up the conference room with a computer, and then put my notes documents up on the screen so that people could see it, but then I would actually take notes from my laptop. So, it was just projecting the information through one mechanism and taking notes from my laptop.

One time a person asked me, “Why do you do that?” I was like, “Well, I type much faster on my laptop because the keyboard is the keyboard that I practice on. The keys are a certain height. I’m just more comfortable there.” And it’s such a small tip but if you are much faster on your laptop, then go ahead and use that as advice.

And, similarly, if you’re very familiar with a particular word processing program, if you much prefer Word or Google Docs or something like that, use the mechanism that you think is going to be the fastest and easiest for you to use. Then if you send them out, you might want to translate them or post them somewhere in a shared document, depending on what your company uses, but I’d say when you’re at least capturing the information, use the device and tools that are most comfortable for you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And when you mentioned your book, when you send them out, you want to do so as promptly as possible.

Anh Dao Pham
Yes, you do because, honestly, things move so fast that the information may be invalid or have changed over time. So, if I sit too long sometimes on a recap, sometimes people have completed the action items and they’ve already come to slightly different conclusions. So, you want the information to go out as timely as possible, and you want it to be timely and accurate and concise if possible, and to get them to the broadest population that you can that’s relevant to them.

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

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say the only thing that I wanted to reiterate is I think that, again, note-taking is a very learnable skill, and it’s one of the things that people don’t pay attention to, they don’t think about investing in, and I think that there are so many different benefits if you just invest a little bit more in yourself, that you’ll have. This is in your arsenal for the rest of your career, and reap those benefits.

And I feel like the only thing you need to get over is, if you don’t type very fast, and don’t practice this skill often, just to let your ego get out of the way, and spend a little bit of time, and know that it’s going to benefit you over the course of your career.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Anh, we spoke pretty recently but you mentioned that you did prepare some additional favorite things. So, lay it on us, how about another favorite quote?

Anh Dao Pham
So, recently, I was reading a book called Be Water, My Friend by Shannon Lee. It’s a book about the philosophies of Bruce Lee. And my favorite quote from the book is “The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.” And maybe this goes along with that sort of theme of getting out of your own way. One of the things that they talk about in the book is there’s a proverb about a person who is meeting a Zen master, and he’s talking about something, and his Zen master is trying to give him feedback but he’s not listening to anything.

And so, the Zen master takes tea and starts pouring it into a cup, and then the cup starts overflowing, and the person says, “The cup is overflowing. It can’t hold any more tea.” He’s like, “Well, how can you learn anything if your mind is already full.” And I love that quote because it reminds me, if I’m sort of struggling with something, maybe it’s because I have a preconceived notion or something, my mind is too full that it can’t receive the information to understand the truth.

And I feel like when I get stuck, I’ll often think about that, like, “Is there a way that I, again, could be looking at this differently or sort of letting go of some particular assumption or reservation that I have in order to get out of my own way?”

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

Anh Dao Pham
Have you seen the TED Talk by Derek Sivers: How to start a movement?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think I have long ago.

Anh Dao Pham
It’s one of my favorites. I think it’s a two-minute TED Talk, really, really short. And what I love about it is it’s entertaining as well as it packs a punch of a message. And, basically, he shows a video of a person who’s sort of like dancing like a crazy person on a hill. It’s a hill with a bunch of people who were sort of sitting, maybe it’s like a picnic or a show or something.

And there’s one person who gets up, and he starts dancing. And then after he’s dancing for a period of time, then one second person gets up and starts dancing. And then just a few minutes later, all of a sudden, people swarm together and start dancing together. And he says, “Hey, we’ve started a movement.”

And the interesting thing about this is he says people think about leadership as the first person who actually started the movement, but, actually, it was the first follower who was the most impactful because the first follower joins that leader, and the quote is, “Without the first follower, the leader is just a lone nut.”

And I love that because it stresses the importance of being not necessarily the person who’s typically designated as leader, but a leader in a different capacity. And, in a way, I think note-taking is kind of similar to that. Sometimes you’re offering support in your role, and when you offer support, it offers a different kind of leadership. And the first follower is actually the person who helps create the movement. Without the second person, there never would’ve been a swarm of other people.

So, if you haven’t seen the TED Talk, I highly recommend it. It’s not exactly a study but the message packs a powerful punch.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Anh Dao Pham
I was thinking about different books. I read books in all different genres. And kind of in the note-taking theme, I actually have two favorite books on the topics of writing, and these were books that I read when I was writing Glue. The first is On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and it’s a book about writing nonfiction. He actually talks, too, about if you’re writing in business but you’re not a person who’s aspiring to be an author, how important it is to be able to express your words concisely. And I found that it was just such an impactful book, not long at all, but just packed a great message.

The second book on writing is Stephen King, an author that I’m sure everybody is familiar with, called On Writing. It’s more about writing fiction, but I think both of them just teach you that there are so much more to learn in the craft of writing. And while note-taking isn’t the same as writing a book, I think it just reminds you that there are ways that you can always improve on what you’re doing, and something that you’re doing every day on a daily basis in your jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Anh Dao Pham
It’s funny because I’ve been saying, “I really like typing so I like to do everything electronically,” but my favorite tool is actually Post-Its, Post-it notes. I love Post-it notes. When I have lots of tasks that I needed to do, I’ve got lots of Post-it notes all over my desk. In fact, you can see when I’m really busy because I’ll  have lots of Post-it notes everywhere.

But I use them for facilitating meetings. If you’re doing sort of any in-person discussion, or any sort of brainstorming, or clustering exercises. I love all of that. If you’re doing timelines, it’s easy to plot things out in a timeline. Or, in a case where you maybe don’t want to take notes or you have the luxury of having people in person, and you want to sequence information. This is great. You can write a Post-it, you can move them around. It’s wonderful. I love them so much that people will joke sometimes that I must’ve invested in 3M.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Anh Dao Pham
I read a lot. And I feel like people forget that they can read to get information. Probably not your listeners. I think maybe they do like to read, and you have a lot of guests who are authors, but one of the things I find so beautiful about today is that you can learn about almost anything you want to learn about because there are so many resources out there through videos, through blogs, etc. But I love reading books. I feel people gravitate now to online content for a lot of things, or short-term content, but I feel there’s nothing better than a really well-put together book.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you’re known for?

Anh Dao Pham
Outside of being a lover of note-taking and a lover of Post-its, in the book and the other things that we had talked about in the last podcast I did, people do talk to me a lot about this idea of not having to have a project plan when you’re a project manager. The other thing that I often get asked about is this methodology I introduced in the book about project management called CALM. And it means closely aligned, loosely managed.

And it’s a way of managing projects without managing them as hands-on, as typical project managers might. Through alignment and setting clear goals, and then giving people ownership over their respective tasks rather than trying to dictate and control everything. So, I get asked about that a lot.

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

Anh Dao Pham
I’d love it if folks could contact me through my website. It’s www.GlueLeaders.com. In there, you can find, again, all the links to any information about my book, this podcast when it’s available, as well as the last podcast that you had me on, Pete. So, thank you so much for the opportunity. And, yeah, if you’d like to reach out or have any other questions about note-taking or anything else in the book, I’d love to hear from you.

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

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say, at least with respect to note-taking, just try it. Just try it and, again, practice. It takes a lot of practice, and practice doesn’t actually make perfect. I feel like, as a person in my career, I’m almost looking for a way to progress, and I never have finished progressing. And so, I’d say practice and continue to strive to make yourself better because I think everybody has the capacity to do more and better as long as they put their minds to it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anh, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and many good notes.

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you. I hope your listeners really enjoy this note-taking, and I’d love to hear from them. Thank you again for the opportunity, Pete.

829: How to Write so People will Read with Casey Mank

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Casey Mank shows how to make your writing more effective by making it simpler.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why writing matters tremendously—even when you’re not a writer
  2. How to make your writing more powerful in three steps
  3. Why people aren’t reading what you write—and how to fix that

About Casey

Casey has taught in writing classrooms for over 10 years, most recently at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and School of Nursing and Health Studies. She has taught writing to professionals at organizations including Kellogg’s, MasterCard, Sephora, the Aspen Institute, Viacom Media, the EPA Office of the Inspector General, the PR Society of America, the National Association of Government Communicators, and many more. Casey serves on the board of directors at the nonprofit Center for Plain Language and is proud to have helped thousands of writers get to the point and reach their audiences with greater impact.

Resources Mentioned

Casey Mank Interview Transcript

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

Casey Mank
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about writing well. And I learned that even though you do a lot of great teaching of writing, you don’t actually like writing. Is this true and can you elaborate on this?

Casey Mank
This is true and I also think it’s really important I try to tell people this as much and as often as I possibly can, actually, because I think one of the many misconceptions about being a good writer is that good writers are the people who love writing, that it comes naturally to you, you’re born with it, it’s an art, it’s a gift, it’s an inborn talent.

So, sometimes people will say, “Oh, well, you must just love writing,” or, like, “You’re a writer,” and I’m like, “Who are they talking about? Are you talking about me? I don’t love to do this. Writing is hard. It’s not fun to write or edit.” So, I think it’s important that people know, even though I teach this stuff, I think I’m pretty good at it, I can be effective at it, I don’t enjoy the process of writing stuff. I, too, find it kind of hard and unpleasant.

So, it’s important to us to always teach people that writing is something that can be very quantified and very strategic and just about getting the job done. And, in fact, I think writers who are able to see it that way, are often much more effective. Sometimes when I meet people in the course of my work who say, “Oh, I love writing,” those are the people that want to include a lot of extra flowery language and end up with bad business writing, ironically. So, that’s what that means to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Casey, I really love that and find that encouraging because there are times in which I have writing that needs to be done but I am not feeling it, and so sometimes I will procrastinate because there are times that I do feel it but noting that, “No, it’s okay for this to be hard and unpleasant. That’s that.”

And I don’t remember who said it, this quote, was it David Allen or someone who says, “I don’t enjoy the process of writing but I very much enjoy having written,” like you’ve accomplished that thing, and you’re beholding the final product, you go, “Oh, nice.” And so, that’s a good feeling.

Casey Mank
Absolutely, yeah. And if people like writing, that’s great, but I want the people that don’t like writing or never feel motivation, to also know that they can just do it in a workhorse way and it can have great results for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, inspiration landed. Thank you. And can you tell us, in a business context or for professionals, just what’s at stake as to whether one writes fine, okay, versus masterfully, like in the top one, two, three percent of business professionals? How much does it matter?

Casey Mank
Absolutely. So, the important thing to know about writing is that we’re all doing it, and we meet a lot of people that might say, “Oh, I’m not really writer. I’m not in a writing role at work,” but it doesn’t matter what your job is at work, at some point you need to put the things you’ve done and communicate their value in writing.

So, if you are a researcher and you have to write a report, if you’re a salesperson and you have to send sales emails, like, even if that’s not what you think of as your main job, at some point you’re conveying the value of the work you do in a written format. So, actually, when people read the way that you described what you do, if you’re great at what you do, you’re the best, but your writing isn’t very good, they tend to judge your competence if you don’t know you on how you describe what you’ve done.

If you don’t know you, and they’re just reading this like lackluster description of what you’ve done or what you’ve produced, and the way you express yourself isn’t clear, it’s not confident, whatever, they’re thinking, like, “Well, I bet this person isn’t great at their job.” And that might not be true, but actually it’s like fumbling in that last mile when you’re conveying the results of all your great work can be huge.

Pete Mockaitis
That is very well said. I’ve heard it said that there’s research suggesting people judge the effectiveness of a leader or professional who’s leading a meeting based on how well that meeting is going, just because that’s what’s visible, it’s like, “Okay, there you are leading the meeting, this meeting is going poorly, you must not be good at your job,” which is maybe fair or unfair based on any number of dimensions.

Much like with the writing, I find that there’s a number of Amazon products, I’ve had this experience, where I see something, it looks pretty good, it’s like, “Oh, okay, this looks like just what I need. Okay, that’s a good price. Oh, it looks beautiful. Oh, it’s got 14,000 reviews and they’re averaging like 4.7 or something. Okay, this looks great.”

But then when I see that the English is off, it’s like it’s not quite right, and it’s like nobody would say it that way.

This is about a Renpho Cordless Jump Rope. It says, “With a cordless ball, a rope jump can easy to change into a cordless model imitating skipping with a real rope without actually needing to swing a rope. The low-impact equipment offers people who don’t have a large room to work out a way.”

It’s like, okay, there’s a couple moments in there, it’s like, “That’s not right and smooth as…” And so then, I begin to wonder, “Well, if things are fuzzy here when you’re trying to sell me, like where else have they cut corners in terms of like the manufacturing, or the safety, or the quality, or the durability?” When that may be a completely unfair judgment, it’s like, “Hey, this was written by someone in China, maybe his English is not their native language, and they did their best and it wasn’t too bad,” but I’m like, “Hmm, I don’t know about this jump rope anymore based on what I’ve read here.”

Casey Mank
Absolutely. Doesn’t it make you feel like the person who wrote that has never seen a jump rope in their life?

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe.

Casey Mank
And you start to feel suspicious about their expertise about jump ropes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it does. And so, I guess that can be fair, it can be unfair but, nonetheless, it’s a reality in terms of people are judging us based upon the quality of our writing, whether it’s in an email or a PowerPoint, it’s there, and so, okay, I’m with you. We got to take care of some business.

Casey Mank
That’s absolutely right. Yeah, and whether it’s true or accurate or not, it doesn’t matter. You’ve already created that impression in that person’s mind, and their ideas about you, their expectations, their perception of your personal brand, it’s really in a split second that that stuff can happen when they’re reading what you’ve written about your work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so then, you’re on the board of an organization with a really cool name, the Center for Plain Language. Tell us, what is this organization? And what is plain language? And how do we do that?

Casey Mank
That’s right. Well, so our hope as plain language experts, and I will happily tell you more about it, but our hope would be that the name that we give to anything would be completely self-explanatory. So, what do you think the Center for Plain Language does?

Pete Mockaitis
I think they work with people and organizations to facilitate more plain language being used in documents and websites, etc.

Casey Mank
That’s exactly right. That’s what we do, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m really down with that vision. Likewise, Casey, I want to put you on the spot, what do you think the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast is about?

Casey Mank
I think you all genuinely have a really plain language title for your podcast because it instantly tells me that it’s going to be, when I listen to it, it’s going to teach me how to do my job better. And then, if I dig into the details a little bit, I would start to find out how exactly that’s going to happen, but it’s very self-explanatory, which we love in plain language.

Pete Mockaitis
I do, too. I do, too. So, is there a bit of a process in terms of certain steps or best practices by which you arrive at plain language?

Casey Mank
Absolutely, yeah. So, you want to start out when you’re writing anything, and plain language really did start with a lot of government writing, a lot of sort of manuals, legal documents, things like that, but I believe it can be applied to anything. So, start out with whatever document you’re crafting, you’re going to think about not yourself, not your organization, not the information you want to include, actually. You’re going to think about the person who’s going to use this document.

So, yeah, get to know them, we start with them. Think about the person who’s going to use this. Think about exactly what they already know, what their top questions are, and what they need to do. So, whatever you’re writing, I don’t care what it is, what do they need to do once they read it? How are they going to use it? And then, you design your document. There’s a lot of best practices that we get into around how things look, how usable things are, how easy they are, and then, of course, the readability.

So, plain language people tend to think it’s going to be about, like, short sentences and easy words. That’s only half of it. The other half is actually a lot of UX design, so making documents really easy and fast to use. And I’m happy to direct your listeners to where they can learn more of all those best practices but then the key to really close the loop on all of this is you made some assumptions about your audience in the beginning, you tried your best to do great design, very readable writing.

But at the end of the plain language process, you must test your assumptions. So, this is really like the key piece that most people want to ignore, they’re like, “Well, I thought about my audience. I think I know what’s going to work for them, and I think I did it,” and then they kind of like hit send on their document, hit publish on their document, but in plain language content, you have to test before you finalize.

So, you get a couple people, you show the document to them, you say, “Read this,” then you take the document away from them, and you say, “What did you just read?” and they explain it back to you, and you get invaluable information from that. You make changes based on what they missed, what they misunderstood, what they thought was the most important thing but it wasn’t what you actually wanted them to focus on. You make changes and then you actually finalize. So, that’s kind of the plain language process in a nutshell.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, and I think you’ve absolutely nailed it in terms of the final step. I think it’s taking me a while to get here, Casey, but I’m firmly here now. There’s no substitute for that. It is irreplaceable. It is mission critical when it counts. Like, if you’re writing, the thing that you’re writing matters and you want it to have an impact as opposed to, “Hey, this is a joke,” a joke to some friends. Even then I probably want to have an impact, I want them to laugh, but if they don’t, it’s like, “No big deal.”

But I remember just recently, I was writing an Evite invitation for our son’s baptism, and my wife went in there and she said, “Oh, I think made me think that, and this made me think that,” and then so she changed some things. And I think it takes a bit of humility to understand that that is absolutely necessary. It doesn’t mean that I’m dumb or wrong.

And, at the time, I think I was looking at a lot of other editing things in my life, and I was actually just so grateful, I said, “Thank you, honey. This is exactly what has to happen, and there is no other way.” I kid you not, I said those words to her, and she’s like, “This is kind of dramatic, Pete. Okay, sure, no problem.” So, yeah, it just has to happen.

I think that about when I’m looking at instructions for things, like how to build a piece of furniture or a toy assembly, whatever. I do, sometimes, have that reaction, like, “Did you actually test this with anybody? Because I don’t think I’m the only person who would find that very confusing, and I’m assembling this all wrong and feeling great frustration that I have to then undo it, and then redo it again the opposite way.”

Casey Mank
Absolutely. I can’t emphasize enough, there’s no substitute for that. Whatever you think you know about other people’s reaction, you don’t. They’ll always surprise you. And this doesn’t have to be expensive. There are really expensive and elaborate user-testing focus groups and stuff that you can do with the help of an expert, but you can also just pull in, like, your cousin, your mom, somebody down the hall from you at work.

My business partner has several siblings and we have them test sometimes the worksheets and stuff that we use in workshops, and they’ll say, like, “Oh, I really noticed this,” or, “I really was distracted by this,” and we’re like, “What? That? We weren’t even thinking about that when we made the worksheet.”

And so, it’s like you can’t get around your own bias as the author of all the stuff you know and all the stuff you want to happen, so, yeah, it’s invaluable but it doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. It can be informal. You can just ask a friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you mentioned there are some principles that make all the difference in terms of readable writing and the user experience dimensions. I’m guessing it’s kind of like the visual type stuff.

Casey Mank
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you lay it on us here in terms of what are some of the biggest principles that make all the difference?

Casey Mank
Yeah, absolutely. So, if I had to pick, I’ll do maybe like a big two for each of half of this equation because I think two things is always enough for people to learn and remember, in my opinion.

So two big ones for the information design piece, which, you’re right, that’s all about how things look, how easy they look at a gut reaction. So, when people first interact with a document, they’re not beginning by actually reading the language. They’re looking at it as a whole and they get a really, like, instantaneous impression, just like a gut reaction, “This looks easy,” or, “This looks hard.”

So, one of the fastest things you can do to make any document look a bit easier to your reader, which invites them in and makes them think, like, “Yeah, I can deal with this document. It’s not going to overwhelm me,” is just to put more empty negative space on the page. So, you don’t want to hit people with walls of texts. My own personal, if I’m editing something and I see a paragraph that’s going over about four lines on the page, I start to get nervous because when paragraphs get longer, what people do is they just skip the second half of the paragraph.

They read the first line, they think, “I think I’ve got it. I think I know what’s in here,” and they just skip it. So, unless you’re perfectly comfortable with that information being skipped, which is okay, that’s a choice you could make as an editor, but if you’re sitting there thinking like, “No, they will read this,” I have bad news for you, they won’t. They’re not going to read a super long paragraph in most cases.

So, that’s one of the quickest things you can do, is just break up your chunks of information into smaller pieces so they don’t look so visually overwhelming to the reader. And then the other one I would do at the kind of visual level is bottom line up front. I don’t know if you’ve heard this acronym before, the BLUF, it stands for bottom line up front.

Whatever it is that you came to this document to tell your readers, you need to get it really near the top in almost every type of business writing or utilitarian writing. So, this is really different from the way we learn to write in school, it’s also very different from what we learned about good storytelling, so we’re not leading people on. We’re not raising their anticipation and then leading them on a journey of discovery, and then telling them the takeaway at the end.

In plain language writing, it’s like, “Here’s the takeaway. Here’s what you’re going to find in this document.” There’s no mystery. There’s no unfolding of a piquing the curiosity and then taking them on a journey. You’re just telling them what they’re here in the document. And then, actually, if they want to dive into the details and the background and how you got here, that stuff comes after, and they can read it or not. So, thinking about kind of flipping that on its head.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, do we want to use this in all contexts? Or, if we’re about to say something super unpleasant or controversial or that we anticipate our audience is going to vehemently disagree with us about, do we want to still do the bottom-line up-front approach?

Casey Mank
So, there’s a lot of different scenarios I could imagine for this, but my first instinct in a blanket kind of way would be I would do a BLUF there and say, “I’m about to give you some difficult feedback,” and then maybe you can…like, I’m not saying you would start your communication with just like, “Your presentation was horrible,” not like that.

But I would let them know immediately. Say, they’re opening an email, a message, a memo, whatever, they’re going to see, “I’m about to give you some feedback, and we can talk about it more.” Don’t make them think, like, “Oh, wow, why is Pete emailing me today? Maybe he just wants to say hi,” and then they’re like going into the experience not knowing what’s about to happen. Let them know why you’re here right up front. That’s what I would say for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s a story on the user experience. And now how about sentence readability?

Casey Mank
Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s a ton of things that you could avoid and cut out of sentences to make them easier. If people want to go down that rabbit hole, you can check out PlainLanguage.gov. It’s the government’s free resource on plain language, and there’s many things you can do at the sentence level. But the biggest two that are going to impact reading difficulty at the sentence level are sentence length and complexity, and then word choice.

And I think the word choice piece is probably the one that people expect, they’re like, “If I’m using these big difficult words, these jargony terms, that’s going to be hard for people,” but they don’t always remember that just the length and complexity of a sentence’s structure is the other half of the readability formula. So, those two things together will impact the most.

And I think that’s especially useful for people to keep in mind if they must use some difficult terminology because a lot of writers that I work with, they’re like, “Oh, I have to use these science terms, or these fintech terms, or whatever it is. I can’t get rid of them so my writing will never be easy.” But you can still make your sentences shorter, more declarative, more simple, and that will offset the impact of having to use some of those big words or specialized jargon.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what kind of sentence lengths are we talking about? Like, is there a rule of thumb in terms of these many words is getting long?

Casey Mank
Sure. So, after about eight words, sentence comprehension tends to start dropping off. Now, that’s a very short sentence, so we would never recommend that every sentence be eight words but you actually want to think about how much of the meaning of your sentence can people find in those first eight words. That’s one thing we teach people. Is the main noun and the verb of a sentence happening within the first eight words?

And then think about at least varying your sentence length. So, can you throw people a couple of eight- or ten-word sentences in the mix in between long sentences, so it’s not just long sentence after long sentence?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m curious about sometimes it feels like is the word appositives, hmm, that feels fancy, from English class, if there is a phrase that’s hanging out there? So, for example, if I were to say, “Casey Mank, board member of the Center for Plain Language, suggests using sentences around eight words.” Like, that appositive phrase “board member of the Center for Plain Language” in my brain it almost feels bucketed together as one thing. But does that count? How does that count in our word count within sentences?

Casey Mank
Sure, yeah. So, in that example, you are throwing a block in between the subject and the verb.

Pete Mockaitis
I did. Guilty.

Casey Mank
So, yeah, even though it might seem short, your reader’s brain is unconsciously looking for that structure, “Casey Mank recommends…” whatever you said I recommend in that example, and that’s what they’re looking for. And when you put extra words in between the subject and the verb, you do create complexity that readers who have a lower literacy level, maybe English isn’t their first language, they can get a little bit lost there.

So, again, the recommendation in plain language isn’t that you never have a sentence like that with the appositive, as you described it, but rather that you don’t have tons of those, that you vary it up sometimes. So, yes, in answer to your question, you are making it more complex by including that because you’re separating the noun and the verb, so some readers will trip over that a little bit. And you could make it into two sentences, “Casey Mank is a board member at the Center for Plain Language. She recommends…” whatever you said that I recommend.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love that notion of the two sentences. I remember when I took the GMAT exam, there’s a section called “Sentence correction,” and most of those sentences were long and nasty monsters. And I kept looking for the option, “Split this terribly difficult sentence into two sentences.” There never was an option. It was more like, “Which one is technically correct? Ah, got you.”

And so, yeah, I think that’s often one of the best solutions. Can you share with us any other common fixes that just solve for a whole host of sins?

Casey Mank
Yes, so there’s one other one that we really like. So, breaking things into two sentences is number one. In fact, when we get to the grammar section, that is literally number one. That’s what we start with because it solves a lot of things, like you said. Another one, if you want to get a little deeper into sentence structure, would be try to steer away from starting sentences with caveats or exceptions, which is really common in business writing.

Like, if you start to look for it, you’ll see it a lot where people will say, “Not only is this A but it’s also B.” And that little added structure, things like that, or, “After considering all the factors and…” whatever, like, including all that background information at the start of a sentence, that is really difficult because you’re actually delaying when your reader can get to the main subject and verb of the sentence by a lot.

And we have some great examples of this. I wish I had brought one because if I try to think of one on the spot, it’ll be a train wreck, but it’s like you’re asking people to hold all these relationships in mind when they don’t even know what to apply the relationships to yet. So, in plain language writing, you want to start with the simple statement and then build the exception on after that, because it’s easy to apply an exception to something but it’s harder to keep an exception in mind as you’re waiting to figure what it will apply to. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Very much. Very much. Okay. And so, then we got our principles, the word choices. Tell us, are there ways that we quickly measure this? Is the Microsoft Word Flesch Kincaid readability the thing? Or, how do we assess whether or not, broad scale and automatically, our sentence length and complexity is too much or our word choice is too complicated?

Casey Mank
Absolutely. So, plain language folks in particular have a complex relationship with those readability formulas because none of those formulas are perfect, and they don’t kind of replace your human good judgment. So, some plain language specialists really like them. Others feel like they oversimplify things too much.

Sometimes, like if you’re using a Flesch Kincaid tester, and you take out the period at the end of a sentence, it will change the reading. But for a human reader, it wouldn’t really change the experience of like seeing a bullet point that had a period versus no period, something like that. So, they’re not perfect. We love them as, again, not a be-all-and-end-all of readability, but just as a way to get some kind of objective measurement or feedback.

We often show them to writers, we’re introducing them for the first time, and they’re maybe really shocked to find that their writing at like a postgraduate level in a document that, because they are a specialist in whatever industry or niche they’re in, they think this is just like a normal document, but it’s actually incredibly difficult for someone in the general public to understand.

So, we love them for almost the shock value of writers getting to see what level they are truly writing at because they often don’t know. And then just as, again, to see if the edits that you make are making a difference, it’s nice to see that number go down from, like, grade 12 to grade 10, and say, “Okay, I did make a difference with my edits.” Because sometimes you’re moving things around in your writing, and you’re like, “Is this getting better or worse? I can’t even tell.”

So, we do like them. We use them. There are a ton of other tools I can recommend if you’d like to get into that now.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please do.

Casey Mank
Sure. So, we do love Flesch Kincaid, and, as you mentioned, you can enable that in Word.

WebFx.com is another one that we really like for that. You can test texts based on a lot of different readability formulas. It’s really good. There are two other tools that I’ll recommend. These are all free, by the way. One is the Hemingway app, so it’s a style editor. And important to note, it’s not a proofreading software, so don’t assume that things are correct if they’ve been through the Hemingway app. It’s only showing you style elements but it’s really good at catching lengthy difficult sentences, and it will also give you a grade level as well.

And one other that I really like is called the Difficult & Extraneous Word Finder, that’s the name of it. I know it’s kind of a silly long name. The website looks like it’s still from 1990 but it actually still works. And it actually tags the words in your document based on how rare they are compared to most people’s core vocabulary.

And that part is okay but what I love about that tool is actually the long-word finder because it can just help you notice, like, “Wow, that’s a big word. Is there an easier alternative that I could swap in?” So, those are some automated tools that we like.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those are handy, beautiful tools. And now I want to ask about tools along the lines of Grammarly and into the future of artificial intelligence, GPT-3, Jasper.ai. Like, what do we think of all that?

Casey Mank
Yes. So, people often ask us, “Is Grammarly putting you guys out of business training writers?” No, we recommend Grammarly to all our clients. We recommend it in all our workshops as like a final polishing step because Grammarly is really sophisticated now. It can catch a ton of typos, misspellings, wordy sentences, stuff like that.

And what that means to us, this is our take, you can spend less time on proofreading, which a machine can do, and you can save your human brain power for the more strategic questions, like, “Who is the audience for this? What is actually the call to action that I want them to take? How am I going to get them to that step? How is this affecting our relationship?” Those are questions that I still think they’re best suited for a human brain.

The AI question is an interesting one, “How much of that stuff those programs will be able to take over in the future?” But, for now, proofreading, I feel 100% confident, outsourcing a lot of the proofing and the nitty-gritty edits to something like Grammarly. And, by the way, the free version is great. You don’t have to pay for the paid version. Hemingway app can tell you a lot of those things, if you want to use that as a workaround for style.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, then talking about the full-blown artificial intelligence stuff for a moment, I’ve played with it and I’m impressed at what it produces, although it’s not accurate, it doesn’t have any concern for truth or facts, yet it can mimic styles pretty well, I found. And so, I’ve just been scratching my head a little bit, like, “What is the place of this in my writing life? Maybe there’s no place at all, or maybe it’s just to get some opening inspiration to get the wheels turning a little bit.” How do you think about it?

Casey Mank
Yeah. So, I think one thing that could be helpful or interesting there is that people get really stuck staring at a blank page sometimes, not if you have to send an email necessarily but I’m talking more about if you’re writing some sort of content, like a blog or something. You might just be sitting there, staring, like, “I can’t get started.” And we try to teach people ways to just get out of their own way and get a terrible first draft because that’s the thing you need. You need a terrible first draft, and then you can edit.

Actually, all of our writing workshops, it’s a little misleading because they’re actually editing workshops. It’s about how to make something better. It’s not about how to get a terrible draft on the page because, really, you kind of just have to do that. So, I like the possibility that it could produce a pretty terrible block of text for you, and then you could come in. And maybe it would help with some of that writer’s block.

But, on the flipside of that, one concern that I would have is, there’s a really terrible temptation, and we see this a lot with ineffective business writing, workplace writing, to if you have an existing document, and you’re writing something new, and you think, “Oh, somebody already wrote some messaging on that. Let me just copy and paste it. Yay, now I’m done.”

But often, because you’re repurposing it for a different audience and context, it’s not good, it’s not going to work, it’s not going to be effective, and the temptation to copy and paste leads to a lot of bad writing. And when we look at it, it’s like, “Well, who’s the audience? What are you trying to get them to do? Okay, why is this here?” And people will say, “Oh, well, it’s there because it was on the original copy that I got, the source material.” “Well, it would’ve been better if you just started over with the current audience and context in mind.”

So, it worries me that it would encourage people to just say, like, “Look, I have something,” and then the temptation to just kind of keep it and not start over as much as they need to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. That reminds me of when you ask Siri a question, and she doesn’t really have the capability of giving you an answer, but she’s like, “I found this on the web.” And it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s kind of related to what I’m asking, but it isn’t really the answer.” And so, yeah, I do see that a lot in terms of like the lazy business writing, it’s like, “That’s not really an answer, but it’s tangential to an answer.”

Like, I asked someone, “How do I know that you’re actually going to pay a claim, insurance company, if push comes to shove?” And they say, “Well, we’ve got a great financial rating.” It’s like, “Well, that’s good but that’s not really the answer.” And so, I think a lot of business writing seems to fall into that zone of, “It’s kind of relevant to what we’re trying to do here, but it’s not really a bullseye that we’re going for.”

Casey Mank
Absolutely, the temptation. If you’ve got something, the temptation to copy and paste it is so strong but usually does not lead to the outcome that you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us a little bit about the audience response tone approach. How does that unfold?

Casey Mank
Absolutely. Yeah, so first I have to give a big shoutout to Prof. David Lipscomb from Georgetown University, who is the inventor of the ART tool, which we use. And the audience response tone tool helps you think about that big strategic piece. We start all our workshops, all our coaching sessions with it, and I can tell you that people always want to jump over it.

I’m asking them a question, it’s like, “Who’s going to read this? Who are they? What are they going to do?” And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” “Come tell me if I have a comma splice here.” And it’s funny, like people always want to dive into the editing of the actual content, but if they don’t take…it’s like slow down to speed up a tiny bit and actually think about, “Who will read this? What will they do with it?” If you don’t get those things right, it doesn’t matter how polished your text is, it’s not going to create the impact that you want it to.

So, the ART, I mean, going through the pieces, we hope it’s pretty self-explanatory. So, you already said the piece is audience, “Who is this for?” We encourage people to think as in depth as they possibly can about one reader, so not a crowd of a thousand people, but just one person, even if they’re a representative reader.

And, Pete, you actually do this amazingly well on your booking page for podcast guests. I noticed this. I wanted to bring it up. You say, “Imagine our ideal listener,” and you kind of have this profile for like, “She’s this mid-career young woman, and she’s interested in these topics.” And maybe that person exists or maybe she doesn’t, but I could see her reading that description that you put there. So, that’s so much better than just saying, like, “Listeners from Apple podcast.” That doesn’t help you. Yeah, that doesn’t help you tailor the content.

So, doing something like that, really getting in the shoes of the audience, thinking. I like to ask two questions about the audience, “How much do they know your topic?” You can say nothing or you can say everything, but just know how much they know. And then, “How much do they care?” because people who really care are more motivated readers. They’re willing to put in a lot of effort to make their way through a difficult dense document because they deeply care about the information. People who don’t care will not put in any effort. So, if you don’t spoon-feed it to them, they’ll just delete it, not read it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Casey, I love that so much, and you’ve just answered a mystery I’ve been wrestling with for a while, which is, “How are so many top-selling books about chess so poorly written? How is this even possible?” It’s possible because the person who aspires to improve at chess is highly motivated, more so than I am. It’s like, “This is hard. This is a complicated read. I’m doing something else.” And so, I haven’t advanced as much.

But that does explain much. And then you can find that in all kinds of domains, like people really want to get good at options trading, so they’re reading an options trading blog which is very difficult to read. And, yet, if the folks are thinking about all the dollars they could be printing up with their enhanced options trading skills, they’ll put up with it, so I really like that. Thank you.

Casey Mank
I love that example, yeah. So, I love that example of the chess book. I can only imagine how difficult those are. I can only imagine what that’s like to read. But it’s written by someone who loves chess, and it’s read by someone who loves chess, and both of those people are in agreement that they’re going to put in the work to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Casey Mank
So, that’s great. That’s great. But most of the people we’re communicating with in the workplace are not an aspiring chess master. They’re like, “What do you want right now? Why are you in my inbox? I don’t have time to read this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Casey Mank
So, thinking about how much, yeah, thinking about how motivated your reader really is to put in effort. So, that’s the A piece, the audience. The response, you can think in a couple different ways. What are they going to know once they’re done reading? How are they going to feel? And then what are they going to do?

So, important to note that not everything you write has a do piece. Sometimes you truly are just giving FYI, educating people. You’re maybe trying to change their feelings about something but there’s nothing you want them to do when they finish reading. But if there is something you want them to do, “Click this link,” “Donate money,” “Sign a petition,” “Pick a meeting time,” that’s when it becomes really important to make it as easy as humanly possible for them to do that thing because there’s a great chance that they’re going to give up if it becomes hard or confusing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the tone?

Casey Mank
Yup, the tone piece is going to be specific to the audience and the response. So, this isn’t just, “What’s my tone in general?” It’s always context-dependent, which is why it comes last. So, for this particular audience that we’re talking to about this particular topic, and the exact response we want them to do, what’s the tone that’s going to move that audience to that response? So, it’s not just like, “What’s a good business tone?” It’s, “Today, right now, in this document, what’s the appropriate tone?”

We usually ask people to pick three or four adjectives to describe the one. At first, it’s hard to get people to be creative and go beyond, like, informative, clear, professional. Okay, I hope everything you write is informative, clear, and professional. That’s the baseline, but what else? What else can we pull out around tone? And that becomes useful later when you’re editing because you can read every sentence you wrote, and ask yourself, “Is this sentence,” whatever you’re doing, “Is it enthusiastic? Is it cordial? Do I sound expert and do I sound warm?”

You can really kind of filter your entire document through that tone if it’s specific. But if it’s just, “This is going to be professional and clear,” like, it becomes harder to actually make editing decisions based on a vague tone. And last thing about that is it makes it easier for other people to edit your work and give you feedback on your work if you can tell them, “Here’s the audience, here’s the response I want from that audience, and here’s the tone I’m trying to hit. Do you think this document will have that impact and meet those three things?” rather than if you just hand someone you work with a document, and you say, “Hey, is this good?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Casey Mank
Yeah, you’re not going to get helpful specific feedback from them. You’re just going to get them fixing that one semicolon in the bottom paragraph, which isn’t what you really need, so.

Pete Mockaitis
I really love it when…this is, I guess, my sense of humor. I’d like to apply just wildly inappropriate tones to different bits of writing. Like, I saw a cigar catalog once, and it had a lot of things, like, “Winner, winner, chicken dinner. These won’t impress the mucket-y mucks in the boardroom, but under a buck of stick, it’s the perfect yard guard.” It’s like, “Who is this guy talking to?”

And it just cracks me up, and then I just try to imagine taking that tone and putting that on, I don’t know, this podcast, like a podcast episode description for Casey, like, “Wait, what is going on here?” It just feels weird. And, yet, if you’re in the mood to kick back and leisurely select a cigar, it might be perfect.

Casey Mank
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I think that’s good. Well, maybe you can tell me, Casey, I guess the tone that I want is I want folks to feel inspired by a sense of transformative possibility when they read a podcast episode description, like, “Oh, wow, that sounds awesome. I want to know that.” Click play. I guess that’s in the audience we talked about in terms of professionals and such. So, do I just want to use the word inspiring for tone? Or, is there a copywriter word I want to be using for this?

Casey Mank
No, I love that because it doesn’t have to just be a single word, because, crucially, the most important audience for this audience response tone thing is you’re just using it for yourself. This isn’t like a public-facing thing. It’s just the art for you to get on the right page. So, if you want to say to yourself, every time you write the description for an episode, “I want people to feel like, ‘Yeah, I can do this at work,’” that means something to you, and you can use it.

And I imagine you could give that to a colleague, and say, like, “Here’s the vibe I want. Does it come across?” I had one person I work with, one writer, who said, she’s writing an email and people had ignored her instruction several times. And one of the tone things that she told me she was shooting for is, “I’m drawing a line in the sand.”

Now, that is not a single adjective but it meant something to her, it definitely meant something to me, and we kept that in mind, “I’m drawing a line in the sand.” So, if there’s something like that that works for you to think about the tone, I think it’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Certainly. And if it’s just you, the writer that you’re thinking about, then you can say whatever you want. And then, I guess, we do, whoa, it’s like this is so meta, in writing the creative brief itself for your collaborator, you would also be thinking about that audience as copywriter or teammate and their response and tone.

The audience as a copywriter, the response is, I want them to say, “Yes, that sounds like a sweet job I’ll take.” And the tone is, I don’t know, “This should be a lot of fun.” So, cool. Well, Casey, boy, this is exciting stuff. I can dork out forever. Tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Casey Mank
Sure. One writing problem and writing piece of advice that I see a lot and I would love to give people is, you know, because people know what I do, sometimes people in my personal life, my friends and family will say, like, “Hey, help me wordsmith this. I’m about to send something important.” It could be a text, an email, a job application, whatever. Like, “Help me wordsmith this.” And I’m like, “Okay. Well, what are you trying to say?” And they’ll say something to me verbally, and I’ll say, like, “Why don’t you say that?”

And I think people are often disappointed because when they come me, they’re like, “Wordsmith this with me,” and usually I’m just like, “Well, why don’t you just say that?” And I think when people sit down to write, especially professionally, like workplace writing, especially for things that might be important, they go into this weird zone where they just start reaching for all the big words that they know, and like jamming them into sentences, and you get people sending messages, like, “I would love to actualize an opportunity to network with you.”

Like, if you took someone who was really confident and far along in their career, they would send that to someone as, “Hey, let’s chat.” Like, people who actually really know about a topic and very confident, they’d say, like, “Hey, would love to chat.” But people who are right out of college, are like, “I would love to actualize this opportunity to discuss with you,” and nothing signals that you are not confident more than, like, jamming sentences full of big fancy words.

So, I would love to kind of curve that impulse in people. Something weird happens, like they’ll say it beautifully out loud, and as soon as their fingers touch the keyboard, they just kind of like make it weird with all these big words. So, I would love to flag that for people. And start noticing if you’re doing that, stop it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that sounds…actualize opportunity, that really resonates. I’ve gotten a number of emails that folks wanted to explore the potential of creating a collaborative partnership with me. It’s like, “I don’t even know what you mean.”

I think the default responses is just, “I don’t know what this is,” and then move to the next email. And I think that’s sort of an unfortunate reality in terms of when clarity is missing, often the response you get is just no response whatsoever.

Casey Mank
Absolutely, yeah.

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

Casey Mank
Sure. So, this is attributed to Elmore Leonard, who was a novelist and a screenwriter. He did Westerns. And he said, “I like to leave out all the parts that readers skip,” and I’d like to adjust that a little bit for people, which is like try to leave out more of the parts readers skip. I think leave out the parts readers skip, it might sound kind of daunting, but can you just, like, do a little better. I always try to tell people that. Just kick out a few more of the fluffy pieces. So, leave out the parts readers will skip.

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

Casey Mank
Yes. So, we draw really heavily on research from the Nielsen Norman Group, and one of my favorite couple things that people could start with there, I mean, you could read everything on the site and you’d probably emerge as an amazing communicator on the other side of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds worth doing.

Casey Mank
It’s great, yeah. Take a deep dive, but if you want a couple things to start with, I would recommend “The Impact of Tone on Readers’ Perception of Brand Voice,” which is just it really shows some interesting research about how tone impacts people’s reactions to what they read. And then the other one would be “How Little Do Users Read?” It should really get you in the mood for that, like, don’t include stuff that people are just going to skip over.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Casey Mank
Sure. We have a bunch on writing that we often recommend, Letting Go of the Words by Janice Redish, who is a plain language educator, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, Brief by Joe McCormack, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. And then, not a book, but, again, PlainLanguage.gov, free government resource on clear communication. We recommend that almost more than any book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a favorite tool you use regularly to be awesome at your job?

Casey Mank
So, just the ones that I recommended already would be my go-tos: Hemingway editor, Hemingway app; Grammarly, of course, which we do like and we do co-sign people using people, especially in your emails, it can just fix those typos for you; Difficult and Extraneous Word Finder. Those are pretty much the big writing tools that we like to recommend to people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Casey Mank
Sure. So, I do productivity habit that I don’t think it came from anywhere else. It’s my own thing. You’ve probably heard of like Pomodoro, which I think is 25 on and five off. But when I have a task that I’m deeply procrastinating on, I like to start out by doing five minutes on and five minutes off, which people have said to me, like, “That’s not enough time on.” But it really helps me get into something at first if I think, like, “I’m going to do this for five minutes,” and then I get to watch Netflix for five minutes, because I feel like you can do anything hard for five minutes.

And, usually, what ends up happening is I get into, like, making my PowerPoint or something, and the alarm goes off, and I just snooze it, and I’m like, “No, I’m rolling now. I want to keep working on it.” But for the first, like, getting into something that feels too big or difficult, five minutes on, five minutes off can kind of like get me moving. So, that’s my method.

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

Casey Mank
Yes. So, one that has come up in workshops is, like, “If you’re saying everything is important, you’re saying nothing is important.” And when it comes to writing, that can manifest in a couple different ways but one is, like, if you’re bolding key information and you’re just, like, bold an entire paragraph, you’re no longer emphasizing something.

Or, if we’re working with someone, and we say, “Okay, you really need to figure out what’s most important, and then delete the other stuff,” and they just say, like, “No, everything is important. I need the reader to read every word.” Well, that’s not going to happen, so if you’re saying everything is important, then nothing is important.

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

Casey Mank
Probably connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can email me casey@boldtype.us, and I love to get bad writing of the internet. So, if you are just, like, going about your day in your life, and you see something really poorly written online that’s public-facing, please send it to me. I can use it as befores and afters in my workshops.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Casey, I suppose we should’ve asked, what is Bold Type? And how can you help us?

Casey Mank
Oh, well, okay. Not the bottom line up front at all, huh? So, my company, Bold Type, as you might’ve guessed from everything we’ve talked about, teaches workplace writing skills. That’s the only type of training we do. We do workshops on plain language writing, obviously, email writing, how to edit your own writing, how to give other writers feedback on the writing that they have produced, how to be better at getting feedback on your writing, presentation, PowerPoint writings, and we do some executive coaching as people are moving into more writing-intensive roles at work and things like that as well.

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

Casey Mank
I do. For the next week or so, could you try to cut every email that you send in half? And I know that might sound hard, but think about if you’ve ever been asked to write a professional bio for whatever you’re doing, and someone says, “I need a 50-word bio,” and you have to, like, cut your bio down. After you’ve done that, it’s actually hard to go back to the longer bio because you realize, like, “I didn’t need all of this.” So, every email you send, can you take out about half the words? You probably can. That’s my challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Good. Well, Casey, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and good writing.

Casey Mank
Thanks so much, Pete. This was really fun.

819: How to Stop Avoiding Conflict with Sarah Noll Wilson

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Sarah Noll Wilson shows how avoidance harms work and relationships.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The many consequences of avoiding conflict
  2. The key to overcoming avoidance
  3. How to train your body’s fight-or-flight response

About Scott

Through her work as an Executive Coach, an in-demand Keynote Speaker, Researcher, Contributor to Harvard Business Review, and Bestselling Author of “Don’t Feed the Elephants”, Sarah Noll Wilson helps leaders close the gap between what they intend to do and the actual impact they make. She hosts the podcast “Conversations on Conversations”, is certified in Co-Active Coaching, Conversational Intelligence, and is a frequent guest lecturer at universities. In addition to her work with organizations, Sarah is a passionate advocate for mental health. 

With 15+ years in leadership development, Sarah earned a Master’s Degree from Drake University in Leadership Development and a BA from the University of Northern Iowa in Theatre Performance and Theatre Education. When she isn’t helping people build and rebuild relationships, she enjoys playing games with her husband Nick and cuddling with their fur baby, Sally.

Resources Mentioned

Sarah Noll Wilson Interview Transcript

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

Sarah Noll Wilson
Thanks for having me. I’m really excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. Well, I’m excited to hear about Don’t Feed the Elephants!: Overcoming the Art of Avoidance to Build Powerful Relationships. But, first, we need to hear about you and your fondness for accordions.

Sarah Noll Wilson
Some people picked up baking during the pandemic, I picked up playing and collecting accordions.

Pete Mockaitis
Collecting. How many do you have?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Eight.

Pete Mockaitis
How much space does that take up in the home?

Sarah Noll Wilson
A lot because they’re not small, and they come in these big suitcases. I didn’t intend to buy eight. Three of them are actually broken, so I need to find homes because accordions are quite fragile.

Pete Mockaitis
Who would even like a broken accordion? Any takers?

Sarah Noll Wilson
There’s a market for accordion pieces. But, yeah, I had my grandpa’s accordion, and I always wanted to learn it, and then never had the opportunity. And this is actually the story, I wanted to cheer up my young neighbor whose birthday party got cancelled when everything shut down, and so I serenaded him from his front yard. The six-year-old was not into it. He was just like, “What’s my weird neighbor doing?”

And then, through a random chance on the internet, I got connected with one of the world’s best accordion players. He gave me some lessons during the pandemic, and then I got a frozen shoulder, I couldn’t play for a year and a half, and now I’m back.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Okay. Kudos. And so, what makes the accordion special and fun when you’re playing it?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, that’s a really beautiful question. The instrument is incredibly complicated because you have three different components you’re thinking about. You have the keyboard on the one side, you have the base notes which are organized in a different order, it’s chromatic or by frets, and then you have the bellows. And so, one thing that I love about playing is somebody with ADHD, it’s really hard. And as a business owner, there’s very few tasks I can do where my brain can totally focus on one thing. And because of the complexity, it’s very much a point of self-care for me.

Also, it’s just fun and quirky, and people don’t expect you to pull out the accordion. And the other thing is it became a place where my parents and I bonded virtually, so they loved to hear me play. And so, when I play, I think about them, so there’s like an emotional component to it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, there’s a lot to that notion associated. It has sufficient complexity to completely absorb your thoughts, and, thusly, it’s self-care. And I’ve been seeing a lot of people saying things, because I got so into this at Chess.com and cheating allegations, like, “What’s this Chess.com all about?”

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it just sucked me into this whole world. And that seemed to be a theme for a lot of people in the pandemic, was with chess, it’s like, “Oh, well, this absorbs all my thoughts and I’m not worried about all this stuff because I’m thinking about, ‘How the heck can I checkmate this guy in three moves? Is that even possible?’ Wait, let’s try this. Let’s try this.” And then the brain is completely consumed with the puzzle.

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, I like to think of it as a snow globe that finally gets to settle, and you just get to focus on one thing. And the problem is, as I’ve actually gotten better because I’m taking lessons from somebody who knows how to teach a beginner because my friend, who I met, was like teaching me music theory on the second session. I was like, “I just want to know what to do with these buttons.”

But, one night, I was playing, and I was playing a song, and I stopped, and I looked over at my husband and I was like, “Hey, you know, I was thinking about something with the business X, Y, Z.” He’s like, “Oops, time out. Time out. You’re not playing complicated enough music if you’re thinking about business at the same time.” And he’s like, “I just want to make that observation.” But I can see that with chess because that’s not just as simple as, “I’m making a move and now I’m waiting.” You’re looking at all the possibilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. All right. Well, let’s talk about your book Don’t Feed the Elephants! Tell me, did you make any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries about conflict and avoidance when you were digging into this?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I love that question. When I started out on this path, I always lovingly say I’m a card-carrying member of the conflict avoidance club. I grew up in the Midwest, I grew up from families of conflict avoidance, and I was really interested in, “How do we have the conversation?” and there are so many great books out there about things you can say and things you can do.

And the thing that I started to notice in my journey of experimenting and trying to figure this out is that there wasn’t a lot about, “How do we name and notice the avoidance?” Because what I was seeing is that there were people who had, even when they had the tools of how to have the conversation, they were still avoiding it.

And so, that took me on this trajectory of, “How do we get really curious about the avoidance so that we can push through that and then have the conversation?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I want to talk, absolutely, about how that’s done. Maybe we could start with a little bit of why. Is avoidance okay?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it working for us?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
How do we decode that? Like, what’s at stake here?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, sometimes it is appropriate. And we have to understand that if we’re avoiding, whether we’re conscious of it or not, it’s because we’re coming from a place of protection. We’re protecting ourselves, maybe we’re protecting others, which is still protecting ourselves. Maybe we’re protecting our power. Maybe we’re in a place of protection.

And one way I like to think of avoidance is through sort of the lens of there’s aggressive passive-aggressive avoidance where I’m stonewalling, where I’m throwing the grenade as I leave the room. And in those situations, it’s like power over the situation. I’m trying to cause a reaction and then leave. Then there’s fearful avoidance. I’m afraid to be hurt. I’m afraid I’m going to be retaliated against. I’m afraid I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings. And then what does that mean about me?

But then the third one that I like to frame it up is this conscious avoidance or disengagement. And maybe I might avoid a situation if I truly know that I’m not safe. I might avoid a situation because, I mean, we’ve all had moments where we go, “That’s just not a battle I want to pick right now.” Maybe my energy is spent somewhere else. Maybe it’s a relationship that’s not as important to me, and I go, “You know what, it’s just…”

But the difference is conscious avoidance, from my perspective, is if aggressive avoidance is power over, fearful avoidance is feeling powerless, conscious avoidance is like power from within that I’m making the choice not to engage, and I’m coming from a place of acceptance rather than fear or resignation. And so, I think that’s important because sometimes, when people are getting excited about this work or other people’s bodies of work of, “How do we have the conversation?” they’re like, “Got to have the conversation. Got to free the elephant,” and they get really aggressive about it, but sometimes it might actually be safer and better for us to not. But I wanted to come from a place of choice instead of a default.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes sense, as oppose to, “That’s just too much. I’m overwhelmed. This is scary. Avoid. Eject. Evacuate,” instead of that just being like exactly automatically where we go. That is one of several options at our disposal, and we will thoughtfully conscientiously choose what works best for us. So, now, tell us, what is at stake or what do we stand to lose if our default setting is to avoid conflict? Like, we are chronically consistently avoiding conflict, what will be the implications, consequences for us?

Sarah Noll Wilson
So much. There are implications of our connections with others won’t be as deep or as authentic. We can cause harm to relationships that we won’t realize. One of the ways I think about it is that the comfort we gain in the short term doesn’t always outweigh the damage in the long term. I’ve seen organizations where when they are a culture of “harmony” or “niceness,” a lot of problems are underneath the surface.

Actually, I just had a client recently who said, “You know, when we don’t speak it out, we always act it out.” I loved how he said that. And so, that could be relationships, high-quality, deep-trusting relationships, that can be from an organization perspective. We can be losing out on creativity and innovation and better ideas, that psychological safety, but also on a personal level if we’re avoiding.

For some people, we also could be sacrificing ourselves in the process of not setting boundaries, of not being clear about what we need, not being able to communicate that. And that can erode your relationship with yourself and your relationship with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, plenty is at stake there. Then tell us, how do we overcome that avoidance? How do we find the courage? What’s the process?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. So, the tools that we’ve put together, the framework we use, and I always say this as a disclaimer, if you will, that humans are complex, and relationships are complex, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Even if you and I have a really great relationship, maybe you’re stressed about something, like you’re in a different headspace, or you’re “hangry”, or you’re focused on something else.

So, I always say it’s all about, “How many tools can we have at the ready so that we can bring it out?” So, one of the things that I recognize in the conversations and all the work that I was doing with individuals, and even in my own experience, is that a lot of times, the reason, one of the reasons we were avoiding is because we’re thinking of the conversation as a confrontation.

And I think that, “How do we prepare people and how can we think about this situation differently so we can diffuse the heat for us?” So, what I lay out in the book, and what I firmly believe in, is that one of the ways that we can approach these conversations so that we can have more courage is through curiosity.

And the reason that curiosity is so important is a couple of things. So, one of the things I noticed as a pattern is that when people were frustrated in a situation, they often just say frustrated and didn’t really understand exactly why they were frustrated. And what we know about relationships is that if there is a conflict, if there’s a disagreement or tension, it’s usually because a value of ours is being stepped on or a need is not being met. And so, people weren’t going to that level.

The other thing that I observed is that people would rarely get curious about the other person. They’re just busy being mad at them and not considering their perspective. And then, finally, because we’re talking about multiple humans and relationship with each other, it was really hard for people to get curious about the role that they played.

And one of the things we know also about curiosity is that in order for us to be curious, that activates our higher-functioning part of our brain, which calms down that primitive amygdala brain that will get triggered when we’re feeling threatened in a situation. So, our approach is we call it the curiosity first approach.

And so, it starts with getting curious with yourself, and that could be asking questions, like, “What am I feeling? What do I need in this situation? What information do I have, don’t I have?” When we’re talking about work in particular, and we’re struggling with someone, this comes up a lot when we’re working with managers, is, “Is it a preference issue or is it a performance issue?” because sometimes we confuse the two, that, “I think you’re not performing well because you’re not doing it how I would want to do it.”

And so, it’s just taking a little bit of time to slow down to unpack, and go, “What am I actually feeling? And why am I feeling that way?” And so, here’s what it can look like in practice. I was working with somebody. This is like a classic story that I think just demonstrates it so beautifully. He was a manager, and one of his team members would interrupt anytime he’d have a conversation with someone in the area.

So, she would shout over the cubicle walls and interrupt, and it just drove him nuts, and he’s like, “I have to tell her to stop.” And I said, “Yes, you do. But, like, what is it about that? Like, what value of yours is being stepped on when she’s doing that?” And he thought about it for a moment, and he went, “I think it’s disrespectful.” And then I invited him to get curious about her, because I said, “Clearly, she doesn’t think she’s being disrespectful.” I said, “What value of hers do you think she’s honoring in this moment?” And he was like right away, “Oh, shoot, she thinks she’s being helpful.”

And so, now they can have a very different conversation around needs instead of just, “Don’t do that.” So, phase one is get curious with yourself, and then it’s get curious about the other when it makes sense. And the reason I say it like that is because we always say curiosity is an invitation, not a prescription.

For example, I’m not going to ask somebody who’s experienced harassment to get curious about their harasser. Like, that’s not going to be the ask. And then when we’re going into the conversation, “How can we approach it from being curious with them?” And there are some strategies we lay out there. So, it’s very much anchored in, “How do we get clear about what’s going on, get clear about what I’m feeling, get clear about what’s the impact I want to make on this conversation?” And then enter into it as a conversation instead of a confrontation. That’s a lot of information I just summed up for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I appreciate it. And I like it that it’s, okay, curious, curious, curious in terms of the running thread through it all. And so, that’s easy to remember as opposed to, “There’s nine key principles, Pete.” And I guess I’m wondering, even before we can get to that place of higher-order emotional, intellectual, wise, calm processing…

Sarah Noll Wilson
Thoughtful, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
If we’re just angry, it hurts. Like, is there sort of like a stop, drop, and roll, or CPR, or First Aid before we get into these wise thoughts just to be able to get a grip to be able to go there?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yes. And for us, it’s being able to notice and name in the moment when we’ve been triggered, and to build up that muscle to be like, “Oh, I am frustrated right now.” Because, you’re right, you can’t jump to that when that amygdala is triggered. We’re not getting curious. And so, for us, that’s why a lot of our work is on helping people understand our biological stress reaction so we can start to see those in the moment, so then we can name it, because I firmly believe in what I’ve observed is when we can see something and name it, then we can choose to change it.

And so, some strategies. One, when you notice you’re getting emotionally triggered is deep breathing is really effective. And I always love to explain why because we know breathing is helpful in a stressful situation, but it’s literally because our organs are massaging the vagus nerve, it’s the longest nerve in our body. And when we can massage that, that actually kicks off chemicals to calm down that sympathetic nervous system response, that fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flock response, and so deep breathing is really powerful. And what I love about breathing is it’s free. And if we’re lucky, it’s always with us.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I am a subscriber to the Breathwrk app, so I like all kinds of breathing things. Tell me, any finer points when it comes to deep breathing in terms of nose, mouth, counting, pace, diaphragm, or just any kind of deep breathing is just fine?

Sarah Noll Wilson
I think any kind of deep breathing is fine, but if you’re noticing you’re particularly emotionally triggered, for me, personally, I love the four-four-four just because it’s really simple. I’m going to breathe in for four counts, I’m going to hold it for four counts, and then I’m going to exhale for four counts. And, again, we can’t get to that higher thinking if we don’t realize that our brain has been flooded, and that can be tricky in the moment.

Because the thing, sometimes when we hear people, it’s like, “I want to be able to have these conversations and not react,” or, “I want to be able to have these conversations and not have the other person react,” and it’s really important for us to understand that that stress reaction happens so fast. Our amygdala can flood our brain in 0.07 seconds. It happens so fast. So, the goal isn’t to remove the reaction. The goal is how quickly can we notice it so then we can work to try to recover, so we can show up more intentionally.

I can go on and on about the amygdala. It’s my favorite.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. Well, 0.07 seconds, whenever we have a precise number, it makes me think you know what you’re talking about, Sarah.

Sarah Noll Wilson
You want a couple others, right? Like, the chemicals will peak in 18 minutes but it actually can take up to 24 hours for cortisol, adrenaline to be metabolized, which is why I’m not a fan of, like, “We have this tough conversation. Let’s figure out the solution.” I’m like, “Nope. My brain isn’t there yet.” I’m very pro go-to-bed mad, which, like, bucks every piece of advice you get on your wedding day. But to go to bed consciously, intentionally, to say, “I’m not in the headspace right now. I need to give this some time for this to clear up. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, we talked about sort of First Aid or CPR as the deep breathing in the moment. I’m curious, any prudent self-care strategies during the 24 hours following the flooding?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, I think that that looks different for different people. So, I’m a big, big believer in figure out your personal manual, if you will. So, for me, I know that going for walks and getting physically active is really helpful in helping me, like, settle that brain a bit so that I can access the higher-functioning parts of our brain.

And, again, I’m just speaking from my experience, so physical activity can really be valuable. Depending on your situation, some kind of physical touch can be really valuable and calming. And one of the things that I wanted to just, like, talk about for a moment, because I think meetings after the meetings get a bad rap. We’re all like, “Oh, we got meetings after the meetings.”

But, biologically, typically the first stress response we have is what we call a flock response. We flock to another human to be like, “Am I crazy? Did that just happen?” And sometimes that can be unproductive. If I’m just coming to you to vent and to ruminate, that can be unhealthy and unproductive. But sometimes it can be a healthy response, to say, “I need to talk to someone else about this to get perspective, to help me kind of navigate my emotion so I can get to a place on the other side.” So, if you have people with whom you can talk to, that can be really powerful, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, we talked about the self-care, and we talked about the deep breathing. And when it comes to these levels of curiosity, are there any super questions you find to be particularly effective in surfacing that positive curious mojo?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. I think, for yourself, one of the most important questions is, “What do I need in this moment?” We don’t often, and this has been my experience with the work that we get an opportunity, I feel like we get a front-row view of humans and teams, that we don’t often think about it. We’re just mad, or we’re just frustrated, or we’re just scared, or whatever the case might be. But, like, “What do I need in this moment?”

So, that, one, it takes the pointing of the fingers away from someone else, to, like, “What do I need?” So, when I think about getting curious with yourself, I think that’s a really important question. I think a hard question that is equally important is, “What role am I playing or did I play?” And there might not be an answer to it, but a lot of times we likely have contributed to a situation, and so that’s valuable.

When I think about the question that I would want to ask about someone else, and when I talk about getting curious about someone, the goal isn’t to fill in their story or to make assumptions. It’s just to remind ourselves that they have a story, that they have a perspective on this. And so, I love the question, “What makes sense to them?” because sometimes what can happen is, when we are emotionally triggered and put into that protective state, we can jump to judgment, like, “They’re an idiot. I don’t understand why they would do that.” But we all are walking around behaving in ways that make sense to ourselves.

And then when I think about getting curious with, I think, again, one of the questions that we don’t often think about, we’re just like, we ramp up for this conversation, we’re feeling the apprehension or the nerves, or maybe we’re feeling the fight, whatever it might be, is to ask yourself, “What impact do I want to make with this conversation? What’s the impact I want to make on you, on our relationship, on this moment, for me? Because maybe my impact is I want to set a boundary, which means that in order for me to do that, I need to be maybe more courageous. Maybe I want to repair so I need to be more empathetic.”

And I think that we kind of just like go into the conversation and we don’t think about, “What’s the impact I want to make?” Not that you can totally control it. You can’t. The other person gets to decide the impact, ultimately, but it can calm us down. And what I love about that question is that, at the end of the day, I can’t control you and your reaction but I can control how I’m going to show up.

And so, for me, if I’m going into a particularly heated conversation, and I’m talking about this, like, I’ll calm but, let’s be real, my heart races and I’m stressed the night before and thinking about it. But sometimes, even if the result isn’t what I hoped for, I always want to leave knowing I did my best and I showed up as intentionally as I could.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Sarah Noll Wilson
So, those would be the three questions.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. And if it’s not us but someone else who’s avoiding conflict and we really do have to have that conversation, or so it seems to us, any pro tips for engaging that person optimally?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. So, when I hear that, I think, like, a situation where, “You two clearly need to talk, like you need to stop talking to me.” But then I want to talk about how you could bring it up in a team. So, I’m a big fan of, “It sounds like you need to have a conversation with this person. What can I do to help?” And then leading them through. That’s what I love about the curiosity first approach, is you can use it for yourself or for someone else.

So, if they’re coming to you and they’re all fired up, “Yeah, like I can see you’re mad. What’s the need that you have right now that’s not being met? Yeah, I can see that. What information do you think they’re missing that might be valuable?” or whatever the case might be, but encouraging. And there are times when, and I’ve had situations, and I’m sure I’ve been guilty. I’ve been guilty of this, but there are times where maybe someone’s talking to you about a situation, and it’s the third or fourth time. And at some point, that’s when there’s, from my standpoint, a loving push of, “I can see this is still bothering you. This is the third time you’ve brought it up with me. I’m actually not the one that can change this situation.”

And so, one of the practices that I love that’s from Marshall Goldsmith’s work in his book Triggers is in any situation, we can accept it, we can adjust it, or we can avoid it, and so navigating that. If it’s a situation where I feel like I’m sensing, like, “I think we need to talk about this,” then I’ll just approach that, “Hey, can we talk about that meeting and what happened?”

I’m a big fan, especially if it’s one to one, of coming at it from a place of, “I want to hear your perspective, and I’d like to share with you mine,” because I wanted it to be an invitation for a conversation instead of just, “Hey, I want to tell you how terrible you were, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But to just say, “Hey, would you be open,” I also love that language, “Would you be open to talking about that meeting? I’d like to hear your perspective, and I want to share with you mine.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you used one of my favorite phrases when you talked about, you said you liked that language. And I would like to hear some of your favorite words and phrases in the course of these conversations that seem to be really handy, and maybe some words and phrases that are troubling and ought to be avoided.

Sarah Noll Wilson
Anything that’s always, never.

Pete Mockaitis
Always, never, should, but.

Sarah Noll Wilson
To avoid, yeah. Any you, “You do this,” and “You always do this.”

Pete Mockaitis
“You always should never…”

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, those are juicy. Some phrases that I like to have, and it depends on the situation. Okay, so let’s talk. One of my favorite phrases to use when someone is getting heated, because, again, there are times when I will fight, and there are times when I will get into a full freeze mode. I love the practice of honor the emotion but coach the behavior.

And what that looks like is, “Hey, Pete, it’s okay that you’re upset right now. What’s not okay is you keep interrupting me.” So, you honor the other person’s emotions, but you’re setting some boundaries on what’s appropriate for us to talk about. You know, I’m also just a big fan of “Tell me more.” I think that, so often, I don’t think, I know this from, like, observing conversations day in, day out, is that sometimes we think we know what the other person means, and just like double-clicking, or that’s such a corporate phrase.

But just getting curious about, “Okay, when you said transparency, what did that mean to you? Or, how would you define that? Or, what would that look like in our relationship?” Because a lot of times, you know, there’s Judith E. Glaser, she’s a researcher that built a body of work, Conversational Intelligence, and there’s a study that she referenced that it’s something like nine out of ten conversations miss the mark.

And some of that is because we think we understand each other, “Oh, yeah, you said this, and I said this, and I know what that means to me, but I don’t actually clarify what that means to you.” When I’m working on a team, I love using language of observation and then an invitation, “I want to make an observation. I feel like we’re dancing around X. What do other people think?”

“I’m on the balcony right now,” that’s language we use, “I’m on the balcony right now, and I want to make an observation that we haven’t heard from half the group, and I’m curious about what we’re missing out on because we’re not hearing those voices.” So, I love an observation because it’s not as strong as just an accusation, and it invites people into the conversation in a safe way.

Something that’s a practice that I wish I would love to see happen more. Oh, wait. I have two more. I’ve got like a whole slew of them. This actually comes from my colleague Gilmara Vila Nova-Mitchell, and it’s asking for a do-over. So, when a conversation doesn’t go well, and you know it, you just go, “Oh, I, like, stuck my foot in my mouth, and I want to repair it.” Sometimes we’ll just leave it and linger and hope it goes away, and we pretend that it didn’t happen.

But she uses the language of, “I’d like to do a do-over. And a do-over isn’t so I can reiterate my point of view into over so I can show up more intentionally.” And I think that can be really, really powerful when you’re trying to repair, because courage isn’t just when things are in conflict. We need courage when we’re trying to repair or heal a relationship. I think one of the hardest things to do is to really honestly apologize when you’ve hurt somebody. That can be really, really hard.

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

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, I think the thing that people are so much more capable than I think we give ourselves credit to be able to hold steady. And so, what I always lovingly say is practice won’t make it easy but it might make it easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I was about to ask for a favorite quote. That might be one. You got another?

Sarah Noll Wilson
I do. I do. That’s not mine. That’s my quote. My favorite quote is from the author, Minda Harts, and she wrote the book Right Within, The Memo, and the quote is “Nobody will benefit from your caution, but many can benefit from your courage.” That is on my mind and heart every single day in my work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Sarah Noll Wilson
Dr. Tasha Eurich, her book Insight, I love the study on self-awareness that they did that basically showed that roughly 90% of people think they’re highly self-aware and only about 10-15% are. And I think that’s valuable for us. I like to think, instead of thinking, “I’m self-aware.” Now I think, “How might I not be?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Sarah Noll Wilson
The Waymakers by Tara Jaye Frank, and it’s clearing a path to equity with competence and confidence. I think it’s a really excellent book that offers tangible practices on how we can show up differently for those of us who are committed to pursue equity and inclusion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Sarah Noll Wilson
A tool that I like in my conversations, and this comes from the work of Conversational Intelligence, is understanding that all conversations dance in the space of transactional, positional, or transformational. And once I understood that, I could show up very differently of knowing what the moment and the relationship needed.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I know what transactional is. What’s positional and what’s transformational?

Sarah Noll Wilson
So, positional. So, if transactional is an exchange of information, telling, selling, yelling; positional is advocating and inquiring; and then transformational is sharing and discovering.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good. And a favorite habit?

Sarah Noll Wilson
The one I’m working on building is sleep because it’s the domino that everything else falls from. So, for me, it’s doing things to have really good sleep, and playing the accordion. That’s also one of my favorite habits.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I recently became aware of Crescent Health, does sleep coaching. That exists now. Fun fact.

Sarah Noll Wilson
That’s so interesting. Love that. Can I add that to my list? It’s the linchpin of mental health for me.

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

Sarah Noll Wilson
Two. “People don’t fear change, they fear loss.” And the second one is, “You don’t get to decide if you’re trustworthy. The other person does.” Those are the two that I hear the most.

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

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, they can come to our website SarahNollWilson.com. My name is on the site but the team is behind it. Or, if you want to connect personally, my DMs are always open, so I’m very active on Twitter and LinkedIn, and I’d love, love to hear from folks.

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

Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. Notice. See if you can notice and name the emotion or reaction. See if you can do the CPR we were talking about, and take a deep breath and to then make an intentional choice. So, see if you can catch the amygdala flooding, or hijack, sometime this week.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sarah, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck with “Don’t Feed the Elephants!” and all your adventures.

Sarah Noll Wilson
Thank you.