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Sep 24

1183: Using Body Language to Strengthen Likability and Relationships with Joe Navarro

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Former FBI agent Joe Navarro reveals how to adjust your body language to connect better with those around you.

You’ll Learn

  1. The small gestures that greatly impact your likability
  2. How to maintain appropriate distance and eye contact
  3. The one expression to avoid at all costs

About Joe

Joe Navarro, MA, served as an FBI special agent in counterintelligence and counterterrorism for twenty-five years. A recognized global expert on nonverbal communication, he is the international bestselling author of What Every BODY Is Saying and Be Exceptional. He consults for major corporations and governments worldwide. 

Navarro has been featured on the TODAY Show, CNN, Fox News, and other major outlets, and he lectures frequently around the world on human behavior and influence. He lives in Sarasota, Florida.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Joe, welcome back!

Joe Navarro
Good to be back. Good to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, you, too. Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off with a high-stakes story where body language played a key role.

Joe Navarro
Well, how about one where nuclear “go codes” were missing and we had to find who was the culprit.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds almost too good to be real, like Jack Bauer style.

Joe Navarro
Unfortunately, it was real. Unfortunately, seven nations were imperiled by this. This is during the Cold War period, and we come to find out that all this secret material is missing.

The US Army does a great job, narrows it down to one area and one individual that was involved. They finally arrest him, but we come to find out he had a co-conspirator. And that co-conspirator, even though he agreed to talk to me, I was an FBI agent at the time, said, “I’m not sure I want to get anybody else in trouble.”

So I said, “Fair enough.” So we got the army to give us a list of everybody that would have had access to the codes. And then, on a three-by-five card, we put the names of each individual, and then I just said, “Look, I don’t want to know if they’re involved. I just want to know if you know them and did you like them?”

And so I held the card up and then I watched his eyes. And, of course I hadn’t written any books on the subject, so he didn’t know what I would be looking for. But on two cards, his eyes squinted, and I was sitting about the distance between here and the screen, and his pupils constricted.

And just based on that, we requested that these two people be interviewed that we didn’t know were in any way connected. And as it turns out, they both confessed. So there. That happened in 1990, and it’s in the court filings, and pone of them went to jail for 36 years. So true story. And it was all based on body language.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Joe, you’ve really raised the bar for every guest ever when I ask a question about a story. It’s, like, “If there’s not nuclear launch codes and decades in prison at stake, then I’m going to have to move on.”

Joe Navarro
Yeah, pretty much. Look, I always tell people, it was luck, I happen to be at the right place at the right time. And I was that weird kid who, all my friends in high school were playing with baseball cards and exchanging baseball cards, I was writing down the things that I observed with body language and it paid off years later, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, it continued to pay off. Your latest book, it’s called Mastering Connections: Build Stronger Relationships with the Science of Body Language. That sounds real nice because most of us will not be in the position of interrogating someone in a legal matter. But I think all of us want stronger relationships.

Can you tell us just how much of an impact can this body language knowledge make in having stronger relationships?

Joe Navarro
I think what the first thing we have to realize is the mistaken assumption that texting and writing and direct messages is connecting. All that is is signaling.

Connections have an evolutionary perspective. We evolved to communicate first and foremost nonverbally. Our first language is nonverbal. That touching between the child and the mother in traditional societies, even the smell begins to shape. And how often we touch and how we look at each other begins to shape that connection.

And in modern society, we tend to think, “Oh, well, you know, I sent him an email message,” or a text message. And then we see the high amount of individuals that feel lonely, feel depressed, the extraordinary number.

I saw a number the other day that young people entering universities, as high as 36% of them, which is an astounding number, feel depressed or anxious, and so forth. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we’re not connecting the way that we should. And if we’re going to connect, then we should do it the right way, which, to a great degree, has to do with how far we stand with each other.

How do we look? Do we stare at each other or do we gaze? How often do we touch each other on the arm and so forth? I just, three days ago, four days ago, I had to attend a funeral.

And once again, it was a revelation of there’s not much you can say but how we revert back to that, our first language, which is, you know, arm around each other, hugs, holding each other’s hands, you know, big men weeping in each other’s arms, very tactile.

And it’s just a reminder that this is our first language, and it’s the way we show love and empathy and everything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. And I think that’s a great reminder that texting doesn’t get it done in terms of our relational biochemical, bodily beings for getting the connecting stuff happening.

Joe Navarro
Yeah, you’re exactly right. I mean, we are mostly chemistry. And, you know, one way to look at it is texting, it’s immediate. You can signal very quickly and so forth, but how often we ask, “Well, what did you mean by that? Were you…?” you know, we have to include an emoji. We have to do this and that.

And, I think, to a great extent, where oxytocin is released when we are in each other’s presence and we feel comfortable and there’s touch and there’s kindness in how we look at each other, versus dopamine, which, “Oh, I got the message. Oh, this is great.” And then you have that little dopamine high.

But then we see people in a clinical setting just crash, and so they’re constantly looking for the next dopamine high, which with algorithms now, you can be fed for hours constant little hits where, maybe, you interact and so forth, but it never achieves what oxytocin does, which is this profound feeling of contentment and joy and happiness and trust.

Pete Mockaitis
So just so that we are on the same page with regard to this oxytocin and connecting stuff. Texting, instant messaging won’t do it. Will live video exchanges do it? Or is it strictly an in-person kind of a phenomenon?

Joe Navarro
Well, that’s a profound question, Pete. I think virtual environment can do a lot, and it does. And almost 90% or maybe more of the calls that I now get or do, I prefer this environment even over a phone call because I get to look at the other person. It helps you with things like turn yielding.

It helps you with things like, “Oh, he’s pondering what I just said. Did I use a word he didn’t understand?” It allows you certain things. I think it has its place. And going forward, we’re always going to be, I think, now and into the future, well into this virtual environment.

But I have to say, at the same time, we can look scientifically at people who are truly connecting. And we see several things. From the Grant study, which I know you know is in the book, the largest study, it continues since the 1930s at Harvard, which looked at people and connections and so forth.

One of the things that stands out is best predictor of success in business was not IQ, was not where you grew up, was not where you went to school, but your ability to connect with others. And in doing so, you got promoted, you got invited to meetings, you got invited to play golf and all those things.

But the other thing we found is that, and young people don’t think about it, but older people do, is yet you will live longer. Longevity is one of the greatest benefits from that.

But it’s also those people who could connect at a very tactile level also tended to have happier marriages. There’s the occasional touch of the hand, there’s the rub of the back, there’s the caress, there’s, you know, the way to look at someone.

For instance, if I wanted to increase face time with you, one of the easiest things I could do is just tilt my head. And by just inclining my head a little bit, we know from studies that my company has done when I was working with attorneys, people will stay with you longer.

So there are immediate benefits to being present, and we haven’t even begun to study how our body chemistry influences each other. We now have research, and it’s solid research, where the amount of stress that we carry on ourselves, right, in the form of chemistry, will actually influence other people around us.

So if you’ve been in an angry situation and you have a lot of cortisol and it’s literally being exuded by you, it actually will affect the other person in the room. Conversely, if you’ve had a nice time, if there’s a certain amount of pleasantness and so forth, that is felt also. And our animals feel that.

I’ve seen animals alert on people. And you say, “Well, where does that come from?” Well, they’re picking up things that, subconsciously, we pick up on, but we tend to mask it. So there is definitely the benefit of the tone of voice.

On a screen, we don’t see the elasticity of our skin. We don’t see the subtle changes of colors when you say something that’s exciting to me. We don’t see the pupillary dilation of, “Oh, wow, that’s…” right? We just don’t see that.

I was just at a conference three months ago, and one of the questions that I was asked was, “What about AI? What’s going to happen with AI?” And my answer was that, “At this moment, we humans don’t even know how many neuroreceptors we have.”

We know that we can see, we can hear, but we know from scientific studies that some people are picking up other things around them. So we don’t even know what these neuroreceptors are.

Pete Mockaitis
What are they picking up? What kind of things are we talking about here?

Joe Navarro
Well, it can be anything from… we see this, for instance, when we study people who, suddenly, go blind and they begin to pick up on movements, they can sense, somehow. I don’t know. That’s what we don’t know.

We don’t know what the neuroreceptors are, but they sense, better than chance, “Somebody’s behind me. Something moved,” all sorts of things. And so my argument was AI, eventually, we can train it to do quite a bit, but we don’t even know what we’re picking up.

And the studies that now have been done with smell, there’s quite a few studies that I’ve looked at where the chemistry that we give off is influence not just the person in front of you, but a whole group of people. AI can never replicate that. It’ll be impossible. So it’ll be an interesting time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you tell me a little bit about some of the most eye-popping science with regard to our stress is picked up by others, it’s impacting them, it’s affecting them? But, like, what is the nature of the impact, of the effect?

Joe Navarro
So I don’t have the experiment details with me, but, in essence, it’s this. They take what are called two naive groups, people that live in a house, let’s say, or an apartment, they don’t know what’s going to happen, they don’t know what’s going to go on.

And then we take one person and they are subjected to an extreme amount of what we call positive stress. So maybe they’re a skydiver.

So there’s a little bit of stress, and it’s sort of positive stress. Mountain climbers are notorious for this. And then we take another person and we subject them to a different kind of stress, the kind of stress where there’s arguing and there’s a lot of animosity.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. We take their T-shirts and we place them into a house or into those two apartments without letting anybody know. They’re just hidden there. And the people inside those residences, the ones where all that cortisol is at, become more stressed.

They get a little less patient. They tend to be a little bit more aggravated. So they are, without knowing what’s going on, they’re picking up on this cortisol. And part of the equation in this, and I think of my career is, you know, I’m thinking about the times I was on a SWAT team.

You come off of a SWAT operation, high risk, it already takes you two hours to mentally calm down, but you’re taking your clothes off, and I’m putting it in the laundry. You know, “Did that have an effect on my daughter and my wife and in other members of the family? And did that contribute to stress?” The scientific paper says it actually does.

And those are the kinds of things that we’re now finding out about. There’s all sorts of things. So we’re barely starting to understand all of the neuroreceptors that we have.

I’ll ask you something, Pete. Have you ever heard the term umwelt? It’s a German word, and what it refers to is, for instance, a pit viper, a snake, their umwelt is composed of the heat sensors. They sense the world around them by vibrations and heat.

Certain birds will only see in ultraviolet light, which gives them a broad spectrum to pick out very specific flowers and so forth. The human umwelt, we think of is, “Oh, we can hear, we can see, and we can smell,” and that’s actually only partially correct. Our umwelt, well, we can enhance it, obviously, with binoculars.

But our umwelt is actually much broader. We just do not understand it in its totality yet. And in the future, when we tap into that, I think it’ll change many of the things that we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Well, that’s fascinating stuff, an interesting future. I’d love to zoom in to the here and now a bit. You gave us an awesome tip with that head tilt in terms of folks then become more willing to engage with you or curious or hang on to what you have to say a bit longer. Share with us some of these other cues and things that really boost likability and connection.

Joe Navarro
Just the simple, you know, touching. This is the mentalist, that just touching this area while you’re listening to somebody.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, the chin area?

Joe Navarro
Like, you’re thinking, you’re pensive, it takes you from, “Oh, Joe has an agenda,” to, “Oh, Joe is pondering my agenda,” which makes you more likable. So the head tilt makes you more likable, the fact that I’m listening to you.

Now you have to be careful because if you start doing this, you know, and then it becomes one of these where your hand slips, and that just shows you’re not interested. So degrees matter, but just a little bit of pensiveness.

Reacting to words. For instance, you say something interesting and I react by arching, flashing my eyebrows and going, “Oh, yeah, that’s…”you know? I don’t have to say anything. I just like, “Wow!”

So there’s a whole repertoire of things that we can do. One of the easiest ones is to lower our voice. You say something, I say something, and we’re doing it up here, but then I change the pitch and I go, “Wow, Pete, yeah, that’s really interesting.”

And the fact that I changed the pitch positively affects the other person. That is very attractive to the human brain, and it’s universal. So those are a few of the things.

I know you can’t see it. We were talking earlier about the feet, but if you’re in the hallway talking to someone and you just want to increase a little bit the amount of face time, just by crossing your legs while standing so that you’re slightly off balance, if things are going well, usually, the other person will mirror that.

But one of the things that it does is it conveys, “I want to stay a little longer,” and more likely than not, the other person will stay a little bit longer just because crossing your legs is a high-comfort display.

We only do that when we’re comfortable. We never cross our legs and are off balance if there’s anything in front of us that we’re not comfortable with. So very simple behaviors to just increase a little bit of face time.

Now, obviously, if you’ve got somebody that’s got to catch a plane or they got to go, as you said, their feet immediately point in the direction of that gate and it just says, “Hey, I got to go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Well, so the theme here seems to be, or maybe a couple themes, is each of these signals convey, “I am interested in you, and I think what you’re saying is interesting, valuable, intriguing. I care to linger in your presence, in your midst.”

And so it’s, like, all of these things that make us likable seem to be the things that are putting good vibes toward the other person. It’s like, “They like me, therefore, I like them, and they are likable.”

Joe Navarro
Yeah, “They like me, and I like them,” and so it’s back and forth. In psychology, there’s a way to describe that, in saying, “Is this experience positively valenced or is it negatively valenced?”

In my book, I talk about comfort/discomfort. And so, the more things that we can do to make them positively valenced, right, if we were to meet in a hallway, yeah, I probably would be leaning against the wall.

I would probably be asking a lot of questions about, “How did you get started in this? I mean, how long have you been doing this? And, like, when you get up in the morning, how do you know what to ask?”

Because, you know, as an FBI agent, I know that I have to satisfy the statute, you know, “Did he enter the structure with the intent to commit a felony?” So I would begin to structure my questions out of curiosity about you, which we’ve known since 1926, and, you know, how to make friends and so forth, is we like to be asked questions.

So the totality of it is, “Was it positively valenced?” And then always thinking, you know, “The next time I see Pete, I want him to remember it as something positive.” Now here’s what’s interesting. Our brains have two hippocampi, the hippocampus, we have two of them.

Everything negative, pretty much, goes in there and it goes immediately in there. But here’s the trick, or the rub, it stays in there for a very long time, sometimes for decades. And so anytime we meet someone or we spend time with them, we want to put as many of those positive traits in there as possible because the hippocampus will retain everything negative.

And that’s why, when I ask an audience, “How many of you have had a bad handshake?” I mean, I’ve seen people just shoot that arm right up and can remember when they were bullied 20, 30 years ago, that’s because of the hippocampus.

And so the brain prioritizes the negative so that we can avoid that for survival. And so anytime we meet with each other, what we want to focus on is those positive things.

Pete Mockaitis
So we store the negative a lot longer than the positive.

Joe Navarro
Yes, which, by the way, is why you can’t get rid of post-traumatic stress. And you say, “Well, can’t you just think of something?” But, no, PTSD lasts for so long precisely because we have not just one, but two hippocampus. And so it retains all those negative events and you just can’t take a pill. That’s not how we evolved.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so to that end, what are some things we should avoid doing in our body language?

Joe Navarro
I’ll give you a list of the ones that stand out from surveys that I do in my classes. Number one is violations of space. Over and over, women will tell me that the guys stand too close to them. And so then the question is, “Well, how far is too much?” Well, culture determines spatial needs, but so do personal needs.

One of the tests that I do, and it’s a fun test, usually after lunch, when everybody is tired, I say, “All right, everybody stand up. Okay. All right, pair up.” I say, “Okay, find the perfect distance that you could maintain for a 20-minute conversation.” Of course, there were some young people there that said, “What do you talk about for 20 minutes?” Well, that’s another topic. It’s like, “What?”

You know, I’m thinking of the three- and four-hour spy interviews that I did, and they’re trying to figure out a 20-minute interview. I said, “Okay, find the perfect distance. Okay, everybody found it? Okay. Now I want everybody to bend your thumb so that you have this, okay?”

“And now I want you to walk forward that distance, which is about between an inch and a three quarter of an inch.” So each pair walks forward about an inch. And you should see how people begin to freak out. They start to giggle and get uncomfortable. And it’s like, “Hmm, I don’t know.”

And then you realize, just an inch or an inch and a half can make the difference between, “We’re going to have a long, comfortable conversation or one where I feel my spatial boundaries are being violated.” And that’s how sensitive we, as a species, are to our spatial needs.

So I always say, “When you come in, shake hands, fingers down, not forward, it’s not a gunfight. You don’t want to have your finger in someone’s erogenous zone here in the wrist.”

Pete Mockaitis
The wrist? Okay.

Joe Navarro
Yes, you don’t. Never. So always fingers down, gentle squeeze. Nobody is impressed with vice grips. And then take a step back so that everybody is comfortable. And then, over time, you will self-adjust. But don’t go into a fixed position that is violating each other’s space.

And now you’re guaranteeing the minimum amount of time because we know what we feel like when we’re violating space. So that’s the number one complaint that I get that, nonverbally, we do wrong.

The second one that I often hear about is that the person either is staring too much, or not making any eye contact, or looks away, there’s all sorts of things. And one of the things we have to realize is that, especially in the business world, we now have more and more people entering the workforce who are actually on the spectrum of autism, and they will make less eye contact.

And so we have to make adaptations and not feel like, “Well, this is strange or weird. He didn’t make eye contact with me.” We just have to accept. There’s a lovely man, he’s in Europe, really a lovely human being. He always attends my training, but he is on the spectrum.

And he waits in line to come and shake my hand, buy my books, and say hello. But he just can’t, you know, and it’s okay. It’s okay. You just have to adapt to that reality. So we can look at each other too intently.

I’ve had women say, “Well, I mean, this guy was just scanning me like he was a radar over the horizon trying to look at my boobs and this and that.” And you have to be respectful that way. Or you’re talking to someone, and this is one that I hear from a lot of senior executives.

They’re talking to someone, they’re talking about something important, and they’re giving priority to their smart watch or their smartphone. And they just find that really distracting.

And so, one of things that we now tell people to do is, “Put the device away. Let them know that you care so much about them that you’re, in fact, going to put the device away. That it’s just us. And they feel even more valued.”

And then someone said, “Well, what if I’m really expecting an important call?” Then front it. Then just say, “Listen, my wife is going to call me or text me if something happened to her,” and people will understand.

But this relentless need to constantly be looking at this at the expense of others, we just, we don’t abide by that. Because these are valued people and the minute you take your eyes off of them, you’re not contributing to that positive experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Well, I’m curious, with this eye contact, too much, too little, do you have a rule of thumb or a guideline that’s close to just right for most people?

Joe Navarro
Well, because I travel all over the world and culture factors in, you know, if you get on the subway in New York, and study after study shows that you can only stare at somebody for about 1.22 seconds. Literally, one second point two-two.

Other parts of the world, the Middle East, Latin America, if you do business in Dubai, I’m getting ready to go to Doha, Athens, a lot of parts, different parts of the world, you have four, five, six seconds that you can look at someone.

And then you go to the Nordic countries, and it’s very limited. It’s very limited eye contact. So I tell people, “Just be aware of where you’re at. Just engage with a person you’re looking at, but don’t be staring at somebody,“ because in some places around the world, it’s offensive.

And, you know, every culture acts differently. Businessmen that I coach, and they’re going to Latin America, you know you’re going to go to an office and you’re probably going to, before anything happens, after introductions, you’re going to be served coffee.

And then you go to other countries, Germany, Austria and so forth, and you almost jump into business immediately without those niceties. And so you have to remember is what is preferred locally.

In the United States, we don’t have a need to, for instance, offer our pedigree. And yet, there are parts of the world where, before you talk about business, they want to know about you and your family, where did you go to school. They want to know about your values. And that’s just something that we don’t really do in America.

So, yeah, I’m a big proponent of knowing what country you’re going to, what culture. And even within the United States, I remember covering the Havasupai Indian Reservation along the Colorado River, and there’s other Native American groups around there, and just learning their culture about how they greet each other.

For instance, on a lot of the Indian reservations, I would ask, “Well, which way did the car go?” And you would expect somebody to, you know, point with their hand, but they point with their chin. They’ll go like this.

And so you just factor that in. You know, when in Rome, you do as the Romans. This works great for them. It’s a great way to signal direction. They do it with their chin, and you just get used to abiding by the culture that you’re in.

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

Joe Navarro
Well, you know, take a look at the book and think about the most important connections that you will make, and then ask yourself, “Would I be considered a high school level, graduate level? Or would I be a tier-one person at making connections?”

And I think what you’ll find is we can all do something a little better to make those connections just a little nicer and a little bit more significant. Something as simple as take a piece of paper, write them a hand note, not typed, slap a stamp on it, and mail it to someone, and you’re going to make their day.

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

Joe Navarro
I think my favorite quote is rather impertinent, and I’m trying to think if I should share it because it was from Mark Twain. But he said, “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It annoys the pig and it wastes your time.”

And the message was that spend your time with people that care. Don’t waste your time with those that will never appreciate it.

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

Joe Navarro
I think one of my favorite experiments, and it’s one that anybody can do is the still face experiments, and those experiments done in the early ‘80s where you smile at someone and then look away, then come back, smile again.

But on the third time you just hold very still, which is one of the worst things you can do on a virtual call. You must never hold still. And watch what happens. With children, it’ll drive them to cry. With adults, they get very nervous when they see a still face.

And it’s a reminder that we evolve to exchange signals, not to just sit there like on a virtual call, which is the worst thing you can do on a virtual call.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So on a virtual call, I don’t want to have a blank still face, even if all I’m doing is just listening to what they’re saying.

Joe Navarro
Absolutely not, because your brain is picking up, subconsciously, all sorts of signals and a still face is seen as one less trustworthy but, even worse, it’s seen as a threat. That’s the research.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, boy, you got me thinking about the TV series “Dexter” now, and just like, you know, or what. Yeah, I mean, if you think about, like, really freaky psychopath characters, that is one of their go-to moves.

Joe Navarro
Exactly. And, you know, the still face experiments, you can go online and look at them on YouTube, and you say, “Why wasn’t I taught this 20 years ago or 25 years ago?” And you realize, “Oh, my goodness, how many times have I sat there? I’m sixth in line to be interviewed on a podcast, and everybody else is holding still,” and it’s the worst thing you can do.

Pete Mockaitis
So what do I do instead? I just try to, like, smile or tilt my head or…?

Joe Navarro
Smile, tilt your head, nod, ponder, touch the face, anything but not remain still. Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Joe Navarro
Herodotus, “The Histories” by the father of history. I’ve now read it, I think, three times. But the 780 or so pages I’ve read are just wonderful, yeah.

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

Joe Navarro
I would just go to JoeNavarro.net or just Google my name. For some reason, it’ll pop up with my website, and there’s all sorts of goodies there. I have free bibliographies, and hundreds of articles that I’ve written that are available for free.

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

Joe Navarro
My final call to action is one that I gave at JP Morgan a few months ago, and I said, “By close of business this week, send a letter, not an email message, send a letter to someone who helped you along the way and thank them profusely, because you didn’t get here by yourself. And please do so.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Joe, thank you.

Joe Navarro
No, thank you.

Sep 21

1182: Connecting More Powerfully in an AI-Driven World with Gina London

By Podcasts No Comments

Gina London discusses how to hone in on your presence and purpose to distinguish your communication.

You’ll Learn

  1. The one communication skill AI still can’t replace or replicate
  2. How to train your brain for more confidence
  3. The habits that undermine your credibility and presence

About Gina

From Farmland, Indiana, to boardrooms around the world, Gina London has spent her career helping people find their voice. Founder and CEO of Language of Leadership, Ltd., Gina is an American entrepreneur based in Ireland, a dual U.S.-Irish citizen, and a trusted advisor to leaders across nearly 60 countries.

A former CNN correspondent and Emmy-winning journalist, she now coaches executives, government leaders, and high-performing teams on communication, leadership, and influence.

Gina is an adjunct professor at University College Cork, a columnist for The Irish Independent, and author of Amplify You: How to Power Up Your Connections in an AI World. As AI gets smarter, human connection is the essential skill that sets us apart.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Gina, welcome!

Gina London
Hi, it’s great to see you. Thanks so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about getting amplified, and congrats on the fresh release of your book, Amplify You: How to Power Up Your Connections in an AI World. Could you start by sharing with us one of the most surprising discoveries you made while putting this together?

Gina London
Well, when I started this whole journey, because I work as a communications coach and trainer and speaker, I think the thing that continually stopped me when I first moved in from being a broadcaster and a television journalist into strategy communications and transferring the skills is that it is a transferable skill. Because I thought, “Well, this is something everybody does. And what can I bring to this?”

And one of my friends who actually worked for the BBC when I was at CNN, she said, “Gina, you forget what the rigors of 24-hour news have done for you in terms of your story-crafting and your vocal presence and the energy that you bring on camera is something anybody can learn for themselves, but most of them don’t, unless they have.” Like, you’re going to a gym, you’re not going to just watch a YouTube video and then pick up the trap bar and do it properly. You need a coach to help you.

And so as I was writing this, I thought, “I want to give fundamental but essential skills in a way that’s easy to apply and habit-stack one on top of each other in an incremental, developable way. So I can give people this guide book that they can use to help them power up their connections and their humanness, especially when we got all this AI stuff making us feel somehow very replaceable.

I want to help people to say, “No, these are the tools that anybody can develop.” But it does take some effort and it is a skill. So I’m surprised that we’ve got it all out here, but it goes from the way you talk to yourself, the way you talk to others, the way you show up, and then put it all together in some behavioral techniques. And I’m pretty proud of how comprehensive it is. So I’m really delighted that it’s out in the world now.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, yes. Well, congratulations.

Gina London
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share with us a cool story of someone who, indeed, amplified themselves, they started from a spot where they figured, “I needed some help,” and then what they did and what the result was?

Gina London
Yeah, I’m so grateful because I did start writing this column. I write in the Sunday Independent newspaper here in Ireland, and it’s on leadership and communications. And so I got a note from someone who had read the column.

He was the CEO of a big engineering company here in Ireland, but he was also, he’d acquired a new company in the UK and he was also requiring something in North America. And as these acquisitions were going through, he was going to be doing a roadshow to meet with the employees.

And he said, “Gina, I’m very aware that I’m a big guy, I’m a serious guy.” And as I was watching him when we were having our initial discovery call, I said, “Yeah, and you’re an intimidating guy. And if you’re coming into my new company, and I’m an employee, I’m going to be questioning, ‘Am I going to be made redundant? Does this guy really care about me? What is happening to my job?’”

And so I put him on camera, doing this, “Welcome, and here’s the vision,” discussion that he would do normally. And then we played it back and I said, “Now I want you to do it again and I want you to smile like your face is feeling like it’s going to crack.”

And the big guy, Steven, says, “Well, I don’t do this happy-clappy stuff.” I’m like, “Just work with me a little bit on this.” And we played that second clip back and he watched it and he said, “You know what? I could smile even more.”

And that’s where that light bulb moment is where someone sees how others see them and they realize it’s not fake, it’s not manipulative, but it is an effort. And if you’re unaware of what you look like when you’re communicating, well, that’s the first step to building your awareness.

And then the second step is let’s have a desire to amplify, not change you, but let’s start taking more control of these things. So it’s not just about smile more, but it’s about, “Are you aware of the emotions of what you’re saying? Have you chosen words that are connecting with your specific audience? Do you have more control over the vocality to support those words? Is it energetic? Is it confidential? Is it thoughtful?”

And then, “Do you have the face and the body and the gestures and all of that integrated so you’re creating a real compelling, connecting,” and in this case with my guy Steven, “reassuring communication experience?”

So it’s reminding people that communication is not just a transfer of information, it’s creating an experience with the big giant caveat that this is not manipulation and then fake and exploitation when you have mutually beneficial goals in mind, and that it’s heartfelt and driven by your values. So we get into that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Gina, I like that so much. There’s so much goodness there. And so I like the way you said it with regard to amplify, you know, you’re not some other creature. You are you, amplified because you’re not aware of how you come across. And that is just eye-opening for people all the time when they see themselves on video.

I’ve taken a video of friends that said, “Hey, watch out, you keep doing this thing where you’re stroking your tie.” He’s like, “What? No, I’m not.” It’s like, “Oh, wow, that’s so weird.” You’re shocked. Like, you can’t believe it until you behold it. And he was like, “Oh, well, there it is. Okay. That’s a thing that’s happening. Wow!”

Gina London
Exactly, because we have these patterns and habits of how we’ve been communicating up until now. Most of us are on default. And so we don’t know. Maybe we might have been told, “Hey, you ramble,” or, “Hey, I don’t know what you’re saying,” or, “Hey, I can’t actually understand you because you mumble.”

But then most of us stop right there and think, “Well, that’s just how I am. That’s just the authentic me.” And I want everyone to understand that your self-acceptance and your self-development do not have to be at friction, that you can still be who you are and you’re a great human being and you’ve come as far as you have you’ve come.

And you can also layer on some more intentionality of how you think about the other person, how you prepare for presentations or even just a one-on-one or a casual conversation.

This stuff matters, and I think it really matters more than ever because we are becoming more and more dependent upon Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT to help us in our written words. But if we don’t sound like we write, or we don’t write like we sound, that means we probably haven’t taken enough control of who we are.

And I think it’s really important for us now to be irreplaceable as humans. So human-up your skills, folks. And this book, I think, comes at a really great time.

Pete Mockaitis
Human-up your skills, yes, indeed. When you mentioned amplifying your facial expressions, your body language, your gestures, your vocal tone, and thinking about the emotions associated with what you’re saying, that is the telltale sign for me with regard to, I’m thinking about YouTube.

And if you’re watching something, maybe there’s no face and it’s just visuals, or maybe there is a person. But, like, that’s how I tell that it’s AI and, apparently, I don’t know, maybe the comments are fake, too, but it seems like it appears that many of these people, the comments, are completely unaware that this is not a human being in front of them.

But that is what does it for me, it’s like, “No, that person is saying something sad but they don’t look sad. Their tone of voice isn’t sad. Like, that person is saying something really surprisingly, powerfully insightful, but they don’t look like they’re saying it. It’s just wrong.” And so that’s what does it for me.

And what’s funny is a lot of humans are doing this, too, just before the land of AI. It’s like, “Wait, you’re saying something that’s, like, really a big deal but you don’t look like you think it’s a big deal? So now, I don’t know, is it a big deal or not? Or did I misunderstand you? What’s going on?”

There’s, like, a confusion inside of me when there is an incongruity when things don’t match up, assuming I’m paying enough attention. That’s another thing. It’s, like, maybe because it’s incongruous, it’s boring, and I don’t care, or I was like, “Well, whatever.” And so I’m not even paying enough attention to notice that it doesn’t match up.

Gina London
You are so hitting on the incongruity and the lack of attention span that people have these days. So in the incongruity piece, I have an illustration in the book of a three-legged stool: words, voice, and your body.

And in the body part, I would also include your clothing and your wardrobe choices and your grooming and those sorts of things because it’s all giving that impression of who you are to that audience.

But what we’re talking about is a lot of people, especially in business, more formal settings, like my CEO guy, they’re focusing on the words, but they haven’t learned how to integrate and connect the voice to the emotion behind those words. They haven’t necessarily picked words that are warm or that can be reassuring or connecting in the particular situation to that audience as well.

And then the body language piece, as I was mentioning, if it doesn’t look energetic or urgent or sensitive, there is that lack of balance, and that three-legged stool doesn’t stand as well if one leg is the only one that’s really engaged.

And with your point about the attention span, it’s not that everybody has to be super dramatic, it has to be jazz hands or whatever, but you do have to have that sense of, “I’m in real time with human beings. I’m seeing you. I’m hearing you.”

And this is the experience that is going to make them wake up for six seconds and not go back on their phone or get out of their thoughts and listen to you because you know the sense of urgency, you know the enthusiasm, you know the passion, and you have worked at yourself to be able to bring it so you’re not some slick, impersonal, overly polished and artificial AI slop. We got to ratchet this stuff up.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well said. I dig that a lot. Now, when we talk about these emotions, and I think that’s great in terms of them being a focal point to tie this together in terms of the theme, you know, the dress and the appearance and the intonations and the body gestures.

The emotion is the theme. Like, “Is this serious? Is this sad? Is this exciting? Is this inspiring?” I think some people might say, “You know, Gina, we’re just talking about facts. It’s like, ‘Hey, here’s the report of what happened over the last month. Here are the numbers. Here are some charts with the numbers. They’re just facts. So where do the emotions come into the play here, Gina?”

Gina London
Yeah, exactly. And this goes from one of my very first times I was ever going through TV anchor training, and they do have that. I went into some little studio in Texas with this coach and we were reading from a teleprompter, or I was reading.

And he was reminding me, and this was really important, and I use it with my clients all the time, too. It doesn’t matter what it is you’re delivering. Those numbers mean something not just for the shareholders, but maybe for your job or your bonus or the path of this company.

What are the hopes, dreams, and fears attached to those words? And because I am a positive communication coach, I’m not about being someone who preys on fears, but someone who reassures around fears. But be aware that there’s emotions to those words.

And so that doesn’t make you be overly theatrical or giving fake energy, but it does help you ground yourself. And what is experiencing, what the people who are hearing those seemingly just factual numbers experiencing?

I work with senior leaders who are giving their quarterly reports to the board, or their earnings reports to their shareholders, or they’re doing a town hall to their employees. People want to feel a connection. They want to know that they’re aligned on something that they can work toward that’s going to feed their family.

And I don’t care what topic it is. If it’s worth speaking about, it’s worth speaking about from the heart. And it’s not, by the way, I know we’re speaking in the US here, or I’m coming from Ireland and you’re in the US, but it’s not, “I am American.” It’s not an Americanist thing. It’s a human thing, because no matter where I go, people are wanting to be seen, to be heard, to be valued.

And if you’re the person who’s presenting whatever it is, you have that opportunity to either make more of a connection or be neutral. And there really is no neutral. Neutral is usually read as distracted, not interested, not caring, phoning it in, and none of that is going to build a connection or build trust.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like what you had to say with regard to the fear and reassuring. And we had another anchor on the show, Erica Mandy of The NewsWorthy, who was delightful. And whenever I’m listening to her short audio news program, which I think is swell, she does do that reassuring thing, and it feels good.

Like, if there’s bad news, she’ll own it and convey some emotions, like, “We do have another school shooting to tell you about, you know, last night….” She’ll sort of lay it out there, and like, “Yeah, this is sad. It’s concerning.” And it feels like she’s there with you as opposed to just saying the words.

Like, ‘Here is a thing that transpired.” It’s like, “Well, no, it’s actually heartbreaking and very troubling that this has happened yet again.” And so we’re feeling some of that emotion, but also in a reassuring way, like, “Oh, and our news anchor is freaked out, too.”

Gina London
Right, you’ve got to be able to know the goal and assume the role within the right parameters. If you’re in an anchor position, you can’t fall apart. You shouldn’t probably fall apart and start crying on air.

That said, if you were just dispassionate and just reading the words on the teleprompter, then the people listening or watching you are, “Do they have any emotional investment to it at all? No, they should because they’re human.”

Likewise, in the corporate world, if your sales numbers are down, somebody is upset about that. And if you’re too mean or not caring enough, you’re probably demotivating your employees.

And so it’s really important for people to know that you can set the energy, you set the weather with the tone of your voice, with the eye size that you give as you’re speaking. I had an accounting conference that I was the facilitator of a couple of years ago, “Ooh, accounting. So talk about numbers.”

But there’s still amazing people who are doing those numbers. And the president, as I was spotlighting the different speakers and facilitating the panel and the thing, at the very end, he came on stage and he had prepared remarks, and he said, “I’m going to take a page from Gina, and put my pages down.”

And he actually put them over on the podium and he walked to the front of the stage. And so he spoke from the heart. And I’m telling you, every single person, and that was nothing he’d ever done before, right? And every single person in that conference stood up and gave him outstanding ovation because it was such, for him, it was a big leap.

Now, for somebody who’s more practiced or they’re maybe more of an extrovert, this wouldn’t seem like a lot. And that’s what I think is so important about my book is that it takes anybody where they are, and these little things that might seem like not a big deal can bridge a gap between yourself and an audience in a positive way, which is what this is all about.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear what you have to say about confidence. Listeners always want more of it. They ask about it. They re-watch episodes about confidence. So how do we have more of it, Gina?

Gina London
Confidence is the outcome after you learn and can apply the techniques of best practices of communication. You don’t first think into confidence and then exude it. You realize vocal projection shows authority, “I will learn how to give more volume.”

Anybody, whether or not you’re a self-described introvert, extrovert, anywhere on that scale, you can learn to project your voice. Don’t rely on a microphone, number one. Number two, posture. Walking into a room with a slow but meaningful pace is going to affect a look of, “I belong. I’m comfortable. Looking out at the people in a room, I can make eye contact.”

Those little tools, when you know that you can do it and you’re practicing it and you’re actually doing it, that’s going to change your feedback loop of how people receive you. So the first position is you’re going to learn some of these techniques.

You might feel like you’re doing the big smiley crack thing like Stephen was when he was doing his presentation practice. But when you start to see how people react to you, it’s going to reassure you and reaffirm that.

So that changes that feedback loop of how you speak, how you walk, how you look, how you engage. That’s going to result in more head space for real-time decision-making around the content that you’re wanting to share or the conversation that you’re going to have.

And that makes you feel more confident as a result. So it’s an outcome. The actions inform the emotion, not the other way around.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. So I’m not so much hearing it’s so much a matter of mindset or belief or self-talk. Is that in the mix at all for confidence?

Gina London
Yes, of course. So my book has three main sections: say it, look it, be it. And the say it part starts with how we talk about ourselves to ourselves. So, absolutely, I mean, the first person that you talk to in the morning and the last person that you talk to at night, even if you have a partner or you’re doing a little prayer, it’s still you.

And I think that’s really important is to… we have a section, I have a section, “How do you interrogate the words that you use to talk about yourself with yourself? Are they words that you own and that you truly believe, or were they maybe words that were put there by someone else?”

And if that was someone else that put it in there like a coach who said, “You don’t work hard enough,” or, in my case, a teacher who said I mumbled, are those things that are serving you? Are those things that you want to hold on to? Or, they’ve taken root because they were planted in by someone else?

So we go through that whole interrogation process because I do want you to have positive self-talk. I do absolutely encourage you to embrace the growth mindset that you can develop and amplify yourself. And that is okay.

The same way you develop a better tennis serve or a golf swing or a piano or violin, it’s the same application for how you become a more intentional communicator, an intentional human being.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, in your pitch, I understand there are some communication habits that quietly undermine credibility and executive presence. Uh-oh, Gina, what are these and how do we stop them?

Gina London
Well, I’ve already touched on one, and that is the soft speaker. It’s not that if you’re an introvert, you have to be yelling all the time. But it is that a stronger voice, it’s going to be able to contribute in a busy meeting more than a soft voice that people over-speak.

So I certainly do want everyone to feel more comfortable hearing their voice hit the back of the room. It’s not about diaphragm breathing or anything super technical, but it is about matching the breadth of your voice along with that word is going up the top of your mouth, roof of your mouth, back to the back of that room.

And that’s going to help you when you say things like, “I have something I’d like to add here,” as opposed to inside, eating those words, “I have something I’d like to add here.” So that undermines your authority.

Your ability to reach out and try to network within an organization is also something that’s really important. Don’t think that your work is going to be the thing that’s getting you the attention or the promotion. You also need to work visibly, and that includes reaching out to people that might be two layers above you.

Not to say, “Hey, pick me, pick me,” but, “I see you,” or, “I’ve read about you,” or, “I saw you on this Slack meeting or something, and I’d like to know more about you. Could I have a 10-minute virtual or real coffee with you to learn your story because I find you inspiring, I find what you do interesting?”

People really gravitate to being asked for advice or sharing their story. So networking is a corporate-y word for just building relationships, but proactively building friendships and learning how to take more control of your voice would be the two things that I would encourage anybody to start being real intentional about.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m really digging your perspective on the emotional theming of things. And so in my mind’s eye, I’m seeing the How We Feel app, which divides the universe of emotions into pleasant and unpleasant, and high energy and low energy, and then within each of those 36, so a total of 144 possible emotional flavors there.

How do you think about the palatte or the landscape of emotion? Do you keep it broad in terms of, “Hey, these are kind of like one of the five-ish kind of core things on the menu”? Or do you get precise, like, “This is wistful versus bittersweet”?

Gina London
Well, that’s a fantastic question. And I want to also go back and say I’m digging your use of the word diggin’, by the way. That was really fun. And that’s where I think everybody has a palette.

So I would certainly not be someone that would say, “Let’s go through and I want you all to be able to see the same palette of colors the way that I want you to see the way I see them.”

I would encourage you to think more broadly because, when we get into wistful and we get into the, I mean, I think that’s a lovely nuance and I love poetry and I love literature, so I would certainly like that.

But to make it easier when someone is trying to power-up or human-up themselves from maybe never considering it, I don’t want to get into lavender versus violet because I think someone might have a hard time with, “Is it blissful? Is it wistful?” But I do want you to think about the hopes, dreams, and fears. So I break it into three.

And I do also use the visualization of when you’re speaking even a straightforward presentation, there are probably sections within that presentation that are more serious, more uplifting, something to be aspirational about.

And so I encourage people to look at their script or their presentation or their report, like a conductor would for an orchestra. Where are the parts of that presentation that you need to have your voice get a little slower to show some seriousness, where maybe you want to power it up because you’re telling an energetic story of victory or maybe one that’s more disappointing?

When you feel yourself in the emotions of the words, a lot of us can naturally change those, but some people can’t. So I don’t think you need to get into the subtlest, more microscopic, precise nuances of how you would describe the emotion, but I would like you to have the general understanding of where you are taking that audience at a particular time.

And if you are delivering some difficult news, I also would encourage you, “Can you give them a little bit of hope towards the end?” because we don’t want to just be left with our emotions flat on the floor. We want to be feeling like there’s some reason to keep going for some reason.

And if you’re a leader, or even if you’re a colleague presenting to other colleagues, I think keeping that in mind is also going to help you have the words in a particular order and have your voice and your body language and your facial expressions connecting to those emotions while you go on. So you are creating a journey.

Does it have to be extremely nuanced? No, but you should be aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it. You should also be reading the room, because if you are delivering information, information, information, boring, boring, boring, and the eyes are starting to glaze over and you continue to steamroll through that, you have already lost them. If you think it’s boring for you, it’s completely boring for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well said. The symphony orchestra conductor picture, I think, is super handy because, if you think of a great conductor, they really do, with their whole bodies, convey not just the tempo, like, you know, one, two, three, four. But, like, the mood, the vibes, the feels of the piece, and they’re quite distinct in terms of, like, the slow, sad part versus the fast, exciting part, all those dimensions with the pacing and the volume.

And I think, when you imagine yourself in such a role, it also feels rather empowering in terms of, “This is the art that I seek to create and the emotional journey movements of this piece of oratory,” not to get too highfalutin about it, but it does. It puts you in a good head space, I think, to really consider more dimensions than words, words, words.

Gina London
Than just the information, yeah, because you know, like any of us right now can think about, “Who was that boss that we really liked to listen to? Who was that teacher, that professor that really made the lecture come alive? Who is that person that you can think of right now that you think is a captivating speaker, if it’s a celebrity or a politician or whoever?”

More than likely, they have worked on this stuff. They think about, “Where is a place where I can put some energy in what might be a straightforward, otherwise, presentation or a report or an update?”

I was working in Switzerland last month with a chief medical officer of a big medical device company and very facts, very scientific, all of this, but I said, “You’re saving people with cancer. Is there a story that you can tell?” And I said, “Just give me someone’s first name.”

He got into this whole story about Christopher and what they were able to do and how it made him feel and what his family did. And this is from a very scientific sort of logos-minded, not ethos-minded guy. And it was captivating.

I said, “Now you can pick that little story as an example in an earnings update, in a town hall. You can do that stuff.” And what I’m driving at here is freeing people up to bring more of them, their human selves, into what might be an, otherwise, very dry, factual operations report.

It changes the way people receive you. And people do have shorter attention spans. They do want to connect with people in a work environment, wherever. These types of human skills, you can use them in so many different places. And I think it’s just really important for people to get excited about this and not feel like, “Oh, another set of rules.”

No, it’s you crafting oars for your little boat that’s already out there floating in the river of life, folks. What can you do? You can construct oars or paddles or maybe even a motor and a sail, and you can take more control of how it goes and how people interact with you. And I do find that really exciting.

It’s not just for, “Oh, she’s a natural,” or, “He’s a natural.” It’s a developable skill. And there are tools that you can put into your toolbox. And then depending on where you’re going, what the communication event is, and everything is a communication event, everything is worth trying these things out, changing those feedback loops, and then you’ll become more confident and more comfortable as a result.

And that’s really the keys that anybody can take. But they do have to take them, they do have to explore them and make them applicable for themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot, and this is sort of the theme that’s coming up with regard to you keep your professionalism, well, in certain contexts. You keep professionalism and the emotions and it’s winning.

What comes to mind is so random, but it was a snippet from an earnings call. It was Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two Interactive. And he said something to the effect of, “Things are shaping up to be a blockbuster year fueled by the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, arguably the most anticipated entertainment release in history.”

And I thought, “Dang!” because, here he is, and earnings calls tend to be among the most boring and staid of contexts. And yet, I thought he did a fine job of saying something that’s pretty exciting, “Biggest entertainment release in history. Whoa!” within the same context that fits of, you know, professionalism, earnings call.

And if it was purely, like, reading a transcript, that would feel very weird, “The most anticipated entertainment release in history.” Like, it doesn’t sound like you’re anticipating it that much, bro.

Gina London
Exactly. If you’re going to use words that are superlative in nature, then why not link that with an energy in your voice? And if you are on video or people can see you and face to face, make that face match that, too. So back to the whole incongruence thing, it’s not off balance like that little three-legged stool.

And that’s where I encourage people to power up your language. If you have corporate lexicon that you have fallen into that trap of way of speaking, look at those words again. Does it mean anything to you? Does it say anything to a brand-new employee that’s just coming out of college who doesn’t know your corporate lingo?

If not, then change it, warm it up, make it have meaning. Don’t think that everybody knows what you’re saying because you’ve been saying it a certain way for so long. And if you are saying it with a complete lack of emotion or a complete lack of vocal intensity or energy, you are replaceable.

I’m sorry to say that that transcript can be written by ChatGPT or Claude now, sent out there, and probably read by some voice gen that’s going to sound really slick and have no soul. So if you have a soul, this is a chance to really make it shine and connect to the other souls in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
“If you have a soul, now’s your chance to make it shine.” I like that a lot. And with the professionalism, I think some people maybe have a little bit of fear of, like, cutting loose or getting too emotional. Like, it’s not Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch, you know, in terms of like, “I’m so excited about this release.” It’s not that, but there’s genuine human emotion present within that professional package, and that’s winning.

Gina London
Exactly. And that’s one of the things that one of my first sections is all about the FAQs, “Well, Gina, what if I’m an introvert?” “Well, Gina, doesn’t this sound like it’s fake or exploitative?” And I answer all these questions.

And one of those things is, “Well, but I can’t just be overly animated, and, well, you’re telling me to do all these things all the time.” Like, “No, I’m telling you to be situationally aware. Don’t jump up, up and down on Oprah’s couch, unless you’re Tom Cruise, because you can, I suppose, do that if you want. But know the guardrails of your situation. But do push the boundaries a little bit.”

If my accountant president had stuck to the script and just stayed behind the podium and held on to both sides of that podium and looked down and just read like he was prepared to do, he never would have had that connection.

And I think this is the wonderful, as we said before, free opportunity for anybody to explore the range of you. You probably have, when you’re with your family or your friends, you’re at a sporting event or something, you’ve probably got that energy version of you.

So don’t switch it off just because you walk into work or you’ve turned on your Teams or your Zoom meeting for that business sales call. You can still bring your humanness to those things.

I worked with the chief technical officer for Pernod Ricard for a number of years, and I can share that because he’s on my LinkedIn page. But Pierre-Yves was very by the book. He was a native French speaker.

He was now, because their company was doing a lot of AI to help promote their market, their marketing and their sales funnels, he was in charge of a lot of that. So he was being asked to speak at a lot of English language native conferences where he not only had to work on some enunciation so he could be more easily understood, speaking in a second language, but he also didn’t want to just be getting too technical on the AI stuff.

He wanted to use stories and even shared more about himself to have that connection with the audience. And we had such a wonderful time that his assistant, who would be putting in our coaching times, even said to him, “I’m so happy when I get to put in another time that you’re working with Gina because I get to see how you progress all the time.”

And that’s really rewarding because people can amplify themselves while still being very true to themselves. And I think that’s the important thing to remember, too. This is not changing you. You are already a fully formed human being, but it is amplifying you, and these are some of the tools that you can use and they’re available for anybody.

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

Gina London
I think one of the most important conversations I’ve had is about conversations, and it’s with the wonderful woman who wrote the foreword to my book, Susan Scott. So she wrote a book called Fierce Conversations. And her foundational premise, which is true, is that our conversations are our relationships.

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

Gina London
Well, I also have the privilege of having Dr. Wendy Suzuki, she’s the head of the arts and science program over at NYU and she’s an author herself and a neuroscientist. And years ago, when I was working in the White House, and President Clinton was there, and this is the only thing that he taught me and nothing else to share.

But there’s a little technique of putting your thumb here on your palm, turning that palm around and putting a pressure on it, and it helps you go from reactive, maybe your face might be leaking something or the nerves might be coming up when you’re getting a difficult conversation, to keep your face and your voice in check.

And I asked Wendy if that, I said, “Is that a placebo or is that a valid thing?” She says, “No, no, no, this actually helps you go from the amygdala point of the trigger response, very emotional response, more into the prefrontal cortex.”

And so I don’t know if it was actually an experiment or a study, but it was validated by one of the top neuroscientists, and that makes me really happy because I’ve been transferring that and teaching that to my clients as well, as a way to keep yourself grounded when you’re feeling like, otherwise, you might leak some emotions that you don’t think are going to build your credibility or that connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. So this sounds like an acupressure move, and Wendy Suzuki, she’s a guest on the show, so she must be right.

Gina London
She is. Of course, she is.

Pete Mockaitis
She has the imprimatur of How to be Awesome at Your Job. So let’s review. I grab a palm, one hand, and with my other hand, I put my thumb firmly in the dead center of the palm and put some pressure on it?

Gina London
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do I hold it for a while or…?

Gina London
Do I hold and how long? And does it make a difference if it’s my left thumb to my right? No, the idea here, really, is to give yourself that reminder that you are communicating even if you’re not saying a word.

So it’s usually used, I use it when I’m going on a stage or I’m in a panel or in a debate of some sort where I’m maybe getting a question that I’ve not expected, or maybe a client is asking me something that is out of scope, and I need to prepare a good response. I want to keep my face composed. I want to keep my pace slow and even.

So this just helps me remind myself to keep that game face on so that I can focus my brain matter not on the emotions and the cortisol that’s coming up, but on how I construct, “How can I purposefully go into my toolbox of techniques and land an answer that is going to continue to build that trust and that credibility going forward?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Gina London
In the business sense right now, I’ve read a lot of them, but I really keep going back to The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stainer. And I loved his book because it’s short, simple, and, most important for me, easy to apply.

Pete Mockaitis
Fabulous. And a favorite tool?

Gina London
Well, I won’t lie and say that I don’t use any of the AI bots. I’ve not gotten familiar with Claude. I do use ChatGPT. It’s become a real easy way to write quick emails. And I think, sometimes, when you’re doing, for example, my daughter has just gone off to college, and all the type of getting her into housing and all the follow-up that you do with student administrators and things, that can be a little bit emotionally charged.

So you can give that prompt. The ChatGPT tool doesn’t have any of that emotion that it’s caring about, “Which word should I use?” then it spits out something. But what’s really important, when we talk about this kind of a tool, and this is inherent, of course, in the book and for our own communication as well, is to not settle for the first thing that they come up with.

Look for, “Are those words that you would use? Would you sign off like that? Is it too flowery? Is it not warm enough?” Use it as a skeleton, but you put your own flesh on those types of things. I think that’s really important as more of us are using AI agents.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Gina London
Favorite habit for me is making my bed.

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

Gina London
The fact that you’re communicating always, either by default or by design.

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

Gina London
You would go to my website, GinaLondon.com, or if you’d like to buy the book straight up, we have, obviously, a way that you can buy the book from my website. Or you can go ahead and buy it at any of the online places that you would purchase a book because it’s everywhere now.

And, certainly, if you want to follow me on any socials, I’m over on TikTok and Insta and my favorite place, though, is LinkedIn because that’s where a lot of the business and professional conversations are happening and I love to be there.

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

Gina London
Don’t think that you have fully arrived. When you get complacent about your communications, that’s when you start to slip. Your caring needs to constantly be cultivated. The same way I won’t get up and not make my bed, I also won’t get up without thinking about, “What’s my self-discipline? How can I add value to someone else? How can I help someone else?”

So one thing I think, also, is really important to remember is that when you’re feeling self-conscious about yourself, your communications, maybe your career path or whatever it is, the best way to heal that is to get more others-focused. So the more others-conscious you can be, the less self-conscious you’ll be as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Gina, thank you.

Gina London
Oh, it’s been a pleasure. Absolutely enjoyed it. I was digging the whole experience.

Sep 17

1181: Finding the Hidden Networks that Multiply Opportunities with Ethel Mickey

By Podcasts No Comments

Ethel Mickey reveals how the everyday relationships we foster, both in and out of work, shape who gets ahead.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why networking by the books leads to nowhere
  2. Why certain “time-wasting” interactions are actually critical
  3. The right and wrong ways to build visibility

About Ethel

Ethel Mickey is a sociologist who studies why inequality persists in workplaces that claim to fix it. She is an assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino and a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. Her research—and her book Networking to Nowhere—reveals how everyday workplace relationships quietly shape who gets ahead in tech.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Ethel, welcome!

Ethel Mickey
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to chat with you. You had a very intriguing pitch. And I want to know, right at the beginning, why do some people seem to get opportunities effortlessly while others seem to do the right things but struggle to get ahead? What’s going on here, Ethel?

Ethel Mickey
Well, my argument in my new book that’s out, Networking to Nowhere, is that we really need to look at the ways in which people are networking, engaging in their relationships, both inside and outside their companies, and thinking about “How are opportunities flowing through relationships in ways that are often invisible but can create really unequal outcomes, specifically thinking about for women compared to men?”

Pete Mockaitis
How does that go down?

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, so I’ve become really frustrated by how much career advice aimed at women, essentially, boils down to them needing to do more. So they should network more, they should speak up more at the table, find more mentors, promote yourself more.

And so the puzzle for me, I really wanted to know whether women weren’t really doing enough or whether there was something else going on. So what I’ve done, I spent several months inside a software company doing research, and I saw that opportunities often travel through, like I said, these relationships that are largely invisible.

So who knows about a current job opportunity? Who gets recommended for that job? Who had someone willing to advocate for them? And I got to thinking, you know, “Maybe women don’t need to network more. Maybe we need to understand why the networking they’re already doing doesn’t produce the same opportunities.”

And as a woman myself, I recognized some of these dynamics in my own career. I could see how easy it can be to internalize this message that you just need to network harder, when the more important question may be whether you’re being included in the relationships that carry opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, the relationships that carry opportunity. That does seem like it could certainly be a missing key if you’re doing some networking stuff that doesn’t seem to be materializing into outcomes, results, opportunities that you’re after.

Could you give us a few examples just to paint the picture of what are we talking about in terms of these exchanges and these relationships where opportunity is flowing and others are missing out on?

Ethel Mickey
So I’m going to talk about a few people from my research. All of the names that I use are pseudonyms to protect their identities and maintain confidentiality. But let me talk to you about Heather. She’s a white woman. She’s been working in the legal department of this software company for about six months.

So she’s relatively new, she’s just starting out her career, she’s in her late 20s, and she does aspire to move up into management, but she realizes that she’ll probably have to leave the company, her current employer, in order to move up the ladder. And this we see is common practice in tech as well as other industries.

So when I asked her in our interview, “How do you approach networking?” she takes several minutes to rattle off all of the events that she regularly attends, the various professional groups she’s involved with, and she tells me that her idea of successful networking is to go to the event, make three connections, and start three conversations on LinkedIn afterwards.

So it’s this very kind of pragmatic, logical approach. She has a game plan and she sticks to it through all the events that she goes to. She also tells me that she volunteers, she’s on the board for a community nonprofit, and she views this as an extension of her networking because she’s meeting people in the local community.

And Heather is not alone. A lot of the women I talk to attend conferences, trade shows, seminars, meetups, and express this idea of the power of the potential of networking events, this kind of you-never-know attitude, that if you happen to have a chance encounter with the right stranger, that that person is going to propel their careers.

So, Heather, by all accounts, is following all of the conventional networking advice that were given, but she, at the same time, as we continued talking for over an hour, could not point to a single encounter at any of these events that led to a concrete opportunity for her.

So I want to compare Heather to Chris, who’s one of her colleagues at the same company. He works in the HR department. He’s in his 40s, also relatively new to the company. And he came to the firm after being laid off from his previous employer.

So he tells me he hasn’t had a real job interview in over 17 years. And I found this fascinating, “What do you mean you’ve been working in tech and you haven’t had an interview in 17 years?’

And so he tells me, for his current job, that he was hired through a Barstool interview. And so what does that mean? He said he asked his buddy who he knew that worked at the company to grab a drink with him. His friend not only coached him on the application, but also put in a good word with the hiring manager.

So Chris went through the formal route to apply for that job, but by the time he accepted the offer, the company had elevated the title and pay level of the original position. So we see here two different approaches to networking with two different outcomes.

And the point, I want to be clear, is the man isn’t doing anything wrong. The point is that she was working harder at networking, Heather, that is, but he was benefiting from relationships that already existed rather than trying to tap into these potential, maybe, relationships that you could meet at hypothetical events.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that makes sense. But I think there could be all sorts of corollaries in terms of how folks want to. It’s funny, people have mentioned, “Oh, you want to grow your podcast? Well, be a guest of the podcast. That’s what you got to do. Sure.” And so that is a winning approach, yes.

But it’s all about, “Well, how well does that podcast audience fit your podcast audience and how large that podcast audience?” Because you may very well be a guest on 50 podcasts and see very little benefit, versus you could be on one podcast and it’s just, like, quadruples listenership.

Or people will apply to 400 jobs on LinkedIn Easy Apply, and they say, “Oh, shucks! You know, the market is brutal. I applied to 400 jobs and saw nothing.” And others will, you know, have a dozen conversations and say, “Oh, cool. I got three interviews. All right, we’re cooking here.”

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think when we’re talking about the most valuable connections that we have, it’s people with access to opportunities. And so even if people, women, men, are engaging in these strategies to try to edge out the competition and get ahead, if they’re located in these places, in their workplaces where they don’t have visibility, they don’t have access to folks that have the best information or the ability to put you on a high-status project, then all of your efforts are sort of moot.

And so understanding the ways in which your workplace is organized, where you fit in that workplace, and how to then kind of broker relationships across your immediate circle can be really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so tell us then, if going to the networking events and setting a goal and meeting three people and having a follow-up and adding them on LinkedIn is not the way, tell us, how do we do effective networking that brings about the opportunities?

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, so the networking, I find, that actually changes careers doesn’t really look like networking. It comes from these relationships that already exist. So we can think about, you know, reconnecting with former colleagues.

Former colleagues can speak to not only your personality but your performance. So how were you as a colleague? How did you manage deadlines? What were you like to work with? These are some of the most valuable connections that we can have, professionally speaking.

Volunteering for cross-functional work might not feel like networking. It actually might sound like a waste of time if you’re getting asked to do something that’s not part of your immediate job description.

But thinking about building relationships outside of your immediate circle, outside of your team, gaining that visibility, building relationships with people who you’re working alongside and might vouch for you down the road, I think, that can be a really useful strategy.

And the people in my research that do that kind of cross-functional work, it’s typically the men that I see doing this, are able to better position themselves for leadership when it comes time for a promotion, And I think also helping other people before asking for help.

And so thinking about investing in a relationship, not networking events. Investing in people and thinking about, you know, don’t wait till you need a job, don’t wait until you want the promotion, but stay in touch with with former coworkers. Cultivate relationships with people who have visibility across the organization and really don’t assume that great work speaks for itself.

So making sure people outside of your immediate manager or supervisor knows what you’re contributing. A lot of this, too, can happen through more informal gatherings. So I see in a lot of what I study that it’s a quick conversation over coffee. It’s grabbing lunch.

It’s going to a ball game after work where people are able to, kind of, more casually say, “Oh, this is what I’ve been working on. Here’s kind of a puzzle that I’m troubleshooting. What ideas do you have?”

And so if invitations to those kinds of informal gatherings aren’t coming your way, what are some ways to create your own opportunities to build relationships? So sending out invitations yourself, or organizing a lunch group, starting a cross-team discussion group, whether that’s in person or online.

So some of these are are ways that we can think about the right way to network, which, as you notice, I said nothing about events and conferences.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it’s intriguing because, in a way, I can, hey, I love going to events and conferences myself, and it’s a different feel, you know? I mean, you are meeting people and you are broadening your horizons.

But, in some ways, it’s a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder, to really get enough of a connection, a vibe, a shared understanding of another human that you encounter, even if you are cutting loose, you know? You’ve got a session, then you go to a dinner, and then there’s cocktails afterwards.

Even if you had a few good hours with folks, which is kind of as good as it gets, really, in my experience when it comes to relationship-building at conferences, it’s kind of hard for them to have a real sense of, “Boy, you know, Ethel is just awesome to work with. Boy, she is so sharp. She has a gift for this.”

Like, it’s hard to get to that point with people in those contexts. And that’s what I’m hearing, what I’m picking up from what you’re saying is, and that’s really what the impression that we need to leave folks with for opportunities to flow our way.

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, and I also enjoy conferences. I just got back from a really big one in New York City. And I see a lot of value in going there and exchanging ideas and presenting my work to an audience who ask really smart questions.

And so there’s a kind of engagement that can happen in these settings that is super valuable for us, professionally. But I will say I don’t approach conferences hoping to find the connection that will make or break my career.

And, you know, I’ve talked to people who are hiring at conferences. It didn’t really matter. They didn’t quite remember that five-minute conversation where maybe we exchanged business cards or connected on LinkedIn.

But I don’t want to devalue conferences altogether. To tell a story from this last conference I was at, there was someone who came up to me after I presented, and we had a very quick exchange, and they were very excited about the work I was doing, and there was some overlap thxre with our ideas.

And I said, “You know, follow up with an email to me and we can keep the conversation going.” And, you know, this person did follow up and wrote a really thoughtful email to me. It was clear they had read some of my research, which is like the biggest form of flattery, but they were asking smart questions that made me think differently.

And you know what? I’m going to remember this person now. And there was an opportunity that came up just recently, and I couldn’t do it. And I put this person’s name forward because they seemed like a good fit.

So there is a way to work the conference, but thinking about maybe the steps that happen afterwards or how thoughtfully you’re engaging with these kind of one-off chance encounters might be something to rethink.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, please, share with us your favorite moves you’ve heard of people doing in terms of really developing these relationships that make things happen for you.

Ethel Mickey
So I distinguish between two types of networking in my book. And the one that we’ve really been talking about I call strategic networking. And this is really doing it by the book. So everything we’ve been talking about, like the conferences and making sure you collect a LinkedIn contact after the conference, really thinking more of a quantity over quality approach.

But I want to distinguish that between what I call strategic socializing. And this is where folks, and I find that it’s typically men that do this. But strategic socializing is where you kind of blur the professional and personal relationship. So you’re thinking about building friendships with the people you work with, maintaining those friendships, socializing with them outside of normal work hours.

So some of the primary ways in tech that guys especially would be connecting and building relationships is through things like sports, whether that’s fantasy sports leagues, going to sports games, also video games.

They had video game leagues, they’d go to Marvel movies together, ski trips, golf outings, a lot of these things that kind of seemed what the women would actually describe it as a waste of time, like, “I don’t have time to do all of this, and I don’t want to hang out with my coworkers after work.” But the men would say, “I’ve met some really smart people that have opened up doors for me through these opportunities.”

So if we’re thinking about like the different types of networking, that’s sort of the categorization that I put forward and think about, you know, “How do we leverage some ties that we already have, reconnect with folks that maybe have gone dormant? And think about is there something we can do to connect on a personal level?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really interesting perspective – the perception of an activity as a waste of time versus not. Because, in a way, it’s very misleading because a networking brunch sounds so productively effective and important as a thing one should do, like, “Ooh, yes, yes, I’m looking to expand my network. And this is an event for this explicit purpose. This is a great match. Let me go.”

As opposed to playing video games together sounds like, you know, we’re just goofing around, and I guess, in one way, you are. But in another way, the extra relaxed, diffused nature of such activities, it makes it feel all the more like real friends, you know?

Ethel Mickey
Like, authentic.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about, yeah, real friends versus deal friends, or friends of utility versus true friends. It’s, like, if you’re doing a thing together, it’s almost like part of our lizard brain is just like, “I must like this person. We are friends. We belong to the same tribe, community, posse, grouping. We are bonded by this thing more so than we were both at a networking brunch together.”

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, I think what you’re talking about, it’s like part of human nature. And there’s a whole wealth of social science research that shows that we gravitate towards people who we view as similar to ourselves.

So that could be shared interests, like, “Oh, you like golf? I like golf. You like video games? I like video games.” It could be identity-based. So when we walk into a space, you know, perhaps I’m seeking out other women, I’m seeking out people who I view as at my same age or career stage.

I’m a working mom. I love to connect with other working moms. And this is just part of how we are as people. We bond really quickly when we can swap stories, exchange experiences. It fosters this sense of ease pretty immediately, trust and communication.

So none of this is inherently bad. In industries like tech, where we see who holds the leadership positions and the power is drastically skewed towards one group, if the men are just gravitating towards other men, then we get this situation where all of the information that’s happening over these kind of informal golf outings or hitting up the bar after work just kind of circulates in the same circles.

And so women continue to be excluded and are left out of these interactions and they’re left out of the information loop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, if anyone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, “Oh, my gosh, this is happening in my world,” tell us some of your favorite tactics, moves, events, invitations that you recommend folks proactively rock and roll.

Ethel Mickey
One thing I do caution women against is believing that they need to network exactly the way men do. Men’s networks often develop organically through workplace cultures that have historically centered men, as I’ve been talking about. And so simply copying these behaviors doesn’t necessarily produce the same results.

One of the biggest takeaways from my research is that women shouldn’t just try to network more. They should intentionally cultivate a community of strong ties. So I encourage people to think of building a career ecosystem rather than just a contact list.

And think about every relationship doesn’t have to do everything for you. I think we put a lot of pressure on finding a mentor that can, you know, solve our whole career and figure everything out for us.

But, you know, maybe you have one person in your ecosystem who’s a sounding board. Another might be a sponsor for you. Another might introduce you to people you want to collaborate with. Another might simply be the person that reminds you you’re not alone in your workplace.

And so together, these relationships, this collection of relationships, can create resilience for us. And if the informal networks don’t naturally include you, don’t network harder. Build your own circle of trust.

So we see that women absolutely benefit from building relationships across the company that I studied, including building relationships with influential men. But what my research also taught me is that having a strong community of other women provides something different, and that’s a reliable source of peer mentoring, honest feedback, and advocacy.

So that doesn’t replace your broader network, but it makes it much easier to navigate some of these dynamics that we’ve been talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
Within this ecosystem, can you lay out a few of these key roles you want to try to fill out?

Ethel Mickey
Sure. So, you know, I could talk a little bit about my own circle that I have built. And, you know, I have a group of women at different career stages that I regularly stay in contact with.

So we’re not talking about a lot of people here because you want the touch points to be more frequent. So there are folks that I have that are reviewing the work that I’m doing. They’re reading a research paper, they’re talking through an idea with me, and they’re really, like, my ideas person.

I have women at other career stages a little bit ahead of me who will write letters of recommendation and serve as a reference for me. They’ll open doors for me when they can.

And then there are other professional relationships I have that do, you know, kind of merge into friendships where it’s, like, “I need advice and you know me as a whole person outside of just the work I do. And can you advise me based on what you know about me?”

So we can kind of think about, you know, building this team, like a board of advisors, if you will, that each have their own different roles and different areas of expertise when it comes to supporting you.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say group and team and board of advisors, are they talking to and knowing and meeting each other, or rather it’s a collection of individuals that your relationship is with each of them individually?

Ethel Mickey
That’s a great question. And I hope I’m not throwing too many metaphors out there. It could be both. I have both. I have a group that I meet with kind of bi-weekly, and it’s a writing group, it’s a check-in group, it’s an accountability group, and we all know each other and we all support each other.

But then I certainly have other folks on my board of advisors, if you will, who aren’t part of that circle, but I’ve connected with them through other jobs or through other research teams. And we stay in touch and it’s more of a one-on-one relationship.

I think, in most cases for people, these relationships will be one-on-one. But we see that a lot of companies have affinity groups or ERGs, employee resource groups. So these might be ways to think about, “How do I build this kind of ecosystem within structures that are already in place?” in your company.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to know, do you have any favorite ways you like to reach out? We talked about mentors. And so some folks suggest, “Don’t come on so strongly,” like, “Will you be my mentor?” But rather, you know, ease into it, like, “Hey, I’d really value your input on this thing.” So how do you imagine making the approach, building these relationships and understandings?

Ethel Mickey
You know, maybe I’ll tell a story about someone else that I interviewed from the tech company, and he was an engineer. His name was Rohit, he’s an Indian man in his 40s, and he had a really successful trajectory pretty rapidly. So he got promoted, I believe, within just four months.

And so when I asked him, you know, “What do you credit to this rapid acceleration?” he talked a lot about these little projects that he would take on, often as favors, taking things off his boss’s plate. So he didn’t consider his boss a mentor yet but he was being very strategic about building personal relationships with high-level people.

And he was thinking about, you know, “How can I take something off of your plate, be useful to you, you get to know me, you get to see the kind of work I can do beyond my job description?” So he was building visibility, building connections, building a positive reputation as a helpful person.

And when he got promoted, his manager said, “I couldn’t think of a better person than you.” And not only did he get the promotion, but they built this relationship that was built… it eventually became built on reciprocity where they were exchanging information, they were leaning on each other to complete tasks and hit their deadline.

So that could be a way to think about maybe not something we think of as networking, but by going that sort of extra mile, it creates that visibility and those connections that can turn into something more.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like what you’re saying there with regard to the taking on little projects, doing favors, being proactively helpful. And you said the very thoughtful email message you got, in which that person had read your research meant a lot to you.

And I’m thinking about, I think, Tim Ferris had some tips in terms of, if you want someone to mentor you, like, take massive action on whatever they recommend, like, “Oh, hey, thanks for that book recommendation. I read the entire thing and here are my summary notes.”

And maybe that feels over the top but it could also send the message, “Oh, wow, when I share some advice, input, perspective with this person, they really run with it. This is sort of a good use of my time.”

And so I’d love to hear more about what are some of the moves in which you apply effort that dazzle and delight someone you’re trying to build a relationship with?

Ethel Mickey
You know, it’s interesting that we’re talking about mentorship because I actually think this is bleeding into sponsorship, and sponsorship can arguably be more effective or important, especially if we’re thinking about trying to network to climb ladders, right?

So there’s networking that we do if we’re looking for a new job and we’re thinking about “Who’s outside of our company? How do I know more people in the industry?” But I also write and think a lot about how networking is just part of the everyday work we do because work is so relational, especially in an industry like tech where work is structured around teams.

A lot of times, evaluations are done by peers. So we’re thinking about building relationships and reputations in our own companies to survive. And so when we’re thinking about sponsorship, it’s not just having someone guide you. It’s having someone who will say, “I know her and she’s excellent.”

And I find that women often do have mentors, but men are often more likely to have sponsors. And so, you’re asking for examples, like thinking about becoming known before you need something.

People remember generosity, they remember competence, and they remember reliability far longer than those one-off networking conversations. And I would encourage people to be really careful about what kinds of projects they’re taking on or what kind of extra work they’re doing.

So to give you some examples, there was one woman I interviewed who was really aspiring to become a VP, and by all accounts, she was entirely qualified for it. She had been at the company longer than almost anyone I had met.

She was a director. She had all of the credentials. And she was taking kind of the same approach to these little extra side projects, but the work she was doing was, like, really invisible.

She wanted to train new hires and create curriculum for them. And so what ended up happening was she was spending more time with very entry-level people, which she viewed as a waste of her time. And so I repeatedly heard women express disappointment over the lack of credit or lack of visibility that they needed to further advance.

Some women took on planning the company retreat, and that’s important, but it’s not going to be visible in the same way as pulling off a last-minute favor that your boss needs to hit a deadline that he’s going to report to the executive team.

So I do want to caution like what kind of extra work are we doing and being really thoughtful about it, but also ensuring that credit is being given to the work we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s come up in a previous conversation about, you know, promotable work versus not.

Ethel Mickey
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so you can be a super friendly, helpful team player who pitches in and assists with all kinds of things. And that is, hopefully, noticed and appreciated. But depending on the people and the personalities and what folks really value, it doesn’t get you anything but more remorse when they fire you, you know? It’s like, “Oh, I feel really bad firing them but I’m still going to fire them during the layoff season.”

Ethel Mickey
Well, I always say if you do that grunt work really well, you just get more grunt work, right? Because they’re like, “Oh, you’re so good at party planning, like, you should plan the next one.”

And it’s like, well, then you get into this cycle where you’re stuck and you’re not doing work that you find meaningful. It’s not getting you positioned to move your career in the way you want.

And, you know, I saw this a lot with women who were engineers and highly technical, and they kept getting pushed into more people management jobs and roles. And these weren’t necessarily jobs that they wanted or were trained to do, but they kept getting asked to, “Hey, will you will you manage this person? Will you mentor this person?”

And before they knew it, they were, you know, either a project manager, a product manager, and they were kind of looking around, like, “How did I get here? Like, I want to be a developer, I want to be an architect, I want to code things, and now I spend my day managing personalities.”

So we do have to be, yeah, mindful of the types of tasks that we’re being asked to do and what we agree to.

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

Ethel Mickey
So I think that I want it to be clear that understanding some of these dynamics that I’m talking about isn’t discouraging, and, particularly for women. I know your audience has a lot of women who are navigating careers, and I hope that the information and that my research can be liberating in the sense that, once you realize that careers are built through these trusted relationships rather than constant self-promotion, you can spend your time much more strategically.

And for leaders, those who are in a position to maybe serve as a sponsor or serve as a mentor, this can be a reminder to really think about and take a look at who’s getting included in those informal interactions. Who do you just kind of automatically gravitate towards? And maybe is there someone that’s been inadvertently pushed to the sidelines?

So thinking about who gets included in those interactions where trust and opportunity are built. So understanding how opportunities actually flow can allow us to invest our time differently and, hopefully, more effectively.

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

Ethel Mickey
So my favorite quote is from Grace Hopper, who is, or was, a trailblazing computer programmer, and she said that, “The most dangerous phrase in the language is we’ve always done it this way.”

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

Ethel Mickey
So I want to talk about Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties.” And so folks in sociology, but also management, know about this research, which shows the value of our weak ties. These are those one-off connections that can often create new kinds of information.

This idea, if you talk to a friend of a friend, you might have access to different information than if you talk to your best friend or a close family member. You’re kind of expanding your network in those ways. And I bring that up because what’s fascinating is that my research found a little bit more of a nuanced picture.

So these weak ties might help you access information, but many of the jobs and promotions that I observed actually came through these trusted relationships that we’ve been talking about. That’s people who are willing to put their own reputation on the line by recommending someone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ethel Mickey
One of my favorite books is by a sociologist, Lauren Rivera, and it’s called Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. And this is just an excellent, well-researched book that shows how hiring an elite industry.

She looks at banking, she looks at law firms. It’s often much more social than we admit. So it’s not just about credentials, it’s about, “Who is a good fit? Who is familiar to us?” We’ve talked a lot about who’s familiar and how that can create trust.

But when that’s used in hiring, it has profound implications for inequality. And my own work extends that conversation by asking, you know, “What happens after people get hired? So how do relationships inside workplaces shape who’s getting opportunities like promotions and recognition?”

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

Ethel Mickey
So this might seem kind of cheesy, but my calendar. You know, relationships don’t maintain themselves. I try to keep track of birthdays. I schedule reminders on my calendar to check in with people who matter to me, professionally, every few months.

So that board of advisors that I was talking about, I have calendar reminders to send them a note, see how they’re doing. And, you know, I also find voice notes remarkably effective at keeping in touch. They feel more personal than a text or an email, but it’s not as big of a lift as a phone call or hopping on Zoom.

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

Ethel Mickey
I’d say the goal isn’t to know more people, it’s to know people well enough that they’d confidently say, “You should hire her.”

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

Ethel Mickey
So my website is EthelMickey.com.

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

Ethel Mickey
Think less about expanding your network and think more about strengthening the one you already have. Don’t measure your network by how many people know you. Measure it by how many people have seen your work and would enthusiastically recommend you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ethel, thank you.

Ethel Mickey
Thank you.

Sep 14

1180: How to Communicate Like a Pro in the Age of AI with Matt Abrahams

By Podcasts No Comments

Matt Abrahams explains the pitfalls of outsourcing your communication to AI—and how you can use it to enhance your communication instead.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why polish is no longer an advantage—and what is
  2. The many ways AI can hurt or help your communication skills
  3. How “Costco credibility” helps you win more

About Matt

Matt Abrahams is a leading expert in communication with decades of experience as an educator, author, podcast host, and coach. As a Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, he teaches popular classes in strategic communication and effective virtual presenting. He received Stanford GSB’s Alumni Teaching Award in recognition of his teaching students around the world. 

When he isn’t teaching, Matt is a sought-after keynote speaker and communication consultant. He has helped countless presenters improve and hone their communication, including some who have delivered IPO road shows as well as TED, World Economic Forum, and Nobel Prize presentations. His online talks garner millions of views and he hosts the popular, award-winning podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart The Podcast. 

His previous book Speaking Up without Freaking Out: 50 Techniques for Confident and Compelling Presenting has helped thousands of people manage speaking anxiety and present more confidently and authentically.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Matt, welcome back!

Matt Abrahams
I am thrilled to be back with you. We had such fun last time. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, thank you, and kudos on all your success in terms of the book and your podcast. It is just blowing up and you’re appearing in big arenas digitally, and so I just think that’s so cool. So kudos, the good word is getting out and you’re getting out some more good word with an updated edition of your book.

Matt Abrahams
Thank you. Yeah, it’s all exciting. The goal is to help people feel more comfortable and confident communicating and it’s always great to have conversations on the topic.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so Think Faster, Talk Smarter. We’re coming out with a fresh edition and, apparently, this AI business is fairly consequential when it comes to communication.

Matt Abrahams
I’ve heard. I’ve heard. Do you find you use AI to help you in your communication?

Pete Mockaitis
Selectively. I use it a ton for research and I love that. I cannot tell how many times I’ve said, “Show me human randomized control trials on the impact of X on Y,” because I was like, “Get right to the real science of the stuff,” as opposed to, you know, what random influencers are saying. And then follow up questions.

So I think that I’ve been having too much fun using AI for research. And with communication, I do it pretty sparingly. It’s usually, like, I’m really kind of stuck, “I want to make this email. I don’t want to be rude, but I want to be kind of assertive.”

But the blunt answer is like, “Hey, this is our agreement. Read it,” you know? But, “What’s the nicer way to say that?” So I find it helps when I have some emotional hang-ups with my language to just be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s just the easy words to use. Yeah, go ahead and do that,” you know?

Matt Abrahams
And I think that’s a wise way to use it. Use it as a check on tone, as a check on vocabulary, again as a partner, not necessarily as the drafter and originator of the information.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’ve heard that said very well. And we had Jeremy Utley, understandably.

Matt Abrahams
Ah, Jeremy is a good friend and a colleague. He’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, he really nailed it. I don’t remember if this is his words, or if this is from Brendan at The Leverage Class. We’ll put links to all of this stuff, to think of AI as a sparring partner instead of an oracle, or a teammate instead of an oracle. And that’s been very helpful.

Matt Abrahams
Yes, that’s exactly right. That is Jeremy’s language for sure. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So that’s handy. So that was one of the reasons you thought, “Hmm, a fresh edition of this book is warranted already,” because it’s not that old. But lay it on us, in terms of your view of AI and how it’s impacting communication and professionals.

Matt Abrahams
Right. So AI gives us an opportunity for all of us to be perfect and polished in our communication, and that’s a problem. That’s a problem because it brings to us what I’m calling an authenticity crisis, where we never truly know if what somebody says is their own thought process, is the result of that, or if it’s something AI created.

If you think about it, communication is the end stop of a whole bunch of thinking that happens. Critical thinking is important and critical in our communication. And if we can never truly know if what somebody is saying is theirs, then we’ve got an issue of authenticity.

So much so that companies are requiring in-person interviews again because we want to make sure no Cyrano de Bergerac is going on, people looking at the screen or getting advice in their ears. Universities like where I teach are bringing back blue books. You and I both remember putting pen in the blue books to answer questions because we’re just not sure.

So we need to, I believe, in a world of AI where polish and perfection are just a few keystrokes away, being able to demonstrate that we’re human and we have thought through our information is critical. And I believe, while AI can be incredibly helpful in being a sparring partner, in helping us think through our audiences, in testing our reflexes around certain types of communication, we want to make sure that we avoid just relying on it for all of our communication.

And there are things we can do to signal that we are actually human in our communication. And that’s really what this chapter, the new chapter about AI is all about.

Pete Mockaitis
And this signaling, I’m imagining, is more sophisticated than removing em dashes.

Matt Abrahams
It is a little bit more sophisticated. If you think about it, I believe that in a world of AI, the ability to speak in the moment, on your feet, and be responsive in an agile, appropriate way is the thing that will set those who are expert apart from those who aren’t.

And so there are things that we can do to signal that. So, for example, we can connect what we’re saying to our life experience. So I could say, “You know, when I think about the answer to your question, it reminds me of a time when…” and then we tell that story.

Or we could, in our communication, tell how we are feeling in the moment, like, “That question really makes me ponder or question this approach.” And it is through those little tells and reveals that we actually show that we are thinking in the moment, that this is us live processing.

And that makes a difference because it allows us not only to demonstrate proof of human and proof of thought, but it’s endearing and connective instead of just rote recitation that many people are relying on.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right. And I like that so much because that’s very simple, clear, and direct and the AI doesn’t tend to share with us its emotional reaction because it doesn’t have emotions, nor does it share its personal background history stories because it doesn’t have those either. And so that’s very simple right there.

And I think you really nailed it with regard to our live conversational exchanges, quite an impact in how folks judge us because if we look at any number of artifacts, whether that’s documents, reports, spreadsheets, whatever, it’s like before, I mean, we even see this in our business with the hiring for podcast production services.

Before we say, “Okay, well, we’ll ask all these questions, and if they can answer them, then they must be pretty smart.” And then now it’s like, “Well, we can’t do that anymore. It’s because they can just get those answers readily.” And not because the test has been published somewhere, but because ChatGPT can handle it, no problem.

And so you’re right, if the artifacts aren’t telling the story that I’m highly competent, then one of the few things we really have left is the live conversation in which we’re showing off how we think and what we can do.

Matt Abrahams
Absolutely. Communication is about connection and is demonstrating thought and empathy. And those are things that are difficult to do with AI. Again, AI has a place in our communication. I truly believe it can help us be better.

I talk about the empathy paradox. If I need to have a conversation with you, Pete, where I really want to make sure that my messaging aligns with your way of being in the world, I can work with AI in advance and have it help me think through ways of approaching you that might be different than I would normally approach other people. That’s great and that’s a useful tool.

However, if I just outsource all the most difficult communication I have to have, a bad performance review, or a breakup, or something of that nature, you know, empathy is a muscle. You need to train it. And if I just outsource it, I can have empathy atrophy. And that concerns me greatly, especially for younger generations who haven’t had to have those difficult conversations in the first place.

So we do need to take the time to really think through our communication, leverage AI appropriately, and then make sure we demonstrate that this is our own work. You and I grew up going to school where you had to show your work, and this is part of how we do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us some stories that illustrate what you’re seeing with regard to empathy atrophy, or the landscape of us human thinkers, empathizers, communicators, and how we’ve already been influenced or altered by AI?

Matt Abrahams
So let me start with a story that I actually start the new chapter in the book with. And this happened to a friend of mine, a dear friend of mine. Like me, he teaches communication at the university level.

And he was applying for a new job. And he had a bunch of stuff going on in his life that was difficult for him, and so he prepared with AI. So he created answers through AI for questions he knew he was going to get asked. He memorized them. He had them up on the screen when he did the the Zoom interview.

And in the midst, you know, he gave good answers to questions that were prepared. And then the follow-up or the surprising questions he completely floundered on. And it was because he hadn’t done the necessary thinking through process to help himself be who he really was. I mean, he was eminently qualified for that job. Absolutely. He just had not prepared properly.

And this is happening all over the place. An investor I talked to, worked for a VC firm, I coached for a while. And he was promoted because of how good he was as an analyst. He was an amazing analyst. He relied on AI almost extensively to help him with the communication, the slides he presented, the documents he created.

And he was promoted to an investing position where he actually had to engage in conversation, give difficult feedback. And he was woefully inadequate because those communication skills that his leaders, bosses saw in him were not truly his. And he was in a position that he did not do well.

And it took a long time for him to get to a place where he could deliver at the level both his bosses and he expected of himself. So these are the ways that we’re seeing this over-reliance on AI manifest itself. Not to mention the times where people just jump to it whenever there’s a slightly difficult conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so, Matt, give us some step-by-step goodies that you recommend in such a world.

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, so a few things I’d recommend that people do. One is, as you are crafting communication to leverage the skills that AI can bring to you, the help, use it, as you mentioned, as Jeremy likes to talk about, a sparring partner.

So, for example, if I know I’m going into a job interview, I can have it present to me questions that I try to answer. Not like the person I talked about, to memorize the answers, but just to get through the pattern recognition of answering questions and, “How do I start?” It’s an agility drill. Athletes do a tremendous number of agility drills. AI is a great tool for that.

If you’re going into a meeting with a bunch of different people, assign AI different personalities, the skeptic, the supporter, and talk through with the AI what you would do and how you would respond. Again, helping you with pattern recognition, helping you expand your repertoire of communication in the moment. These are ways to leverage the tool to help.

And then when you’re actually delivering the communication, lean into the things that make you human. Share your in-the-moment feelings. Stop worrying about saying “um” or “ah” too much. These are things that we do in our normal everyday communication that help us connect.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay. Well, so as we’re implementing these pieces, do you have any pro tips, do’s and don’ts along the path?

Matt Abrahams
So it takes time and it takes practice. I mean, the only way you get good at communication is three things: repetition, reflection, and feedback. So you need to get the reps. So if you want to figure out how do you incorporate AI into your communication or improve any communication, practice. Try it.

Do different things. Explore. AI can actually help you. You can say, “How can I use you to best help me in this circumstance?” Or, “How have others used you to help?” So you have to get the reps in. You then have to reflect.

One of the big challenges I have with my students is they’ll get information out from AI and they don’t take that extra step to reflect on the quality, the sourcing, or even, you know, “Is this helpful to me and what can I learn?”

There are ways, and I actually use AI in my classes, have my students use AI to help them. So they might, in preparing for a big presentation in my class, put in an outline and ask AI to make certain parts more concise or make parts more engaging. And then I force them to think about and talk about what the suggestions were.

Not that the suggestions the LLM created are correct, but, “What is it doing in this moment? And can you make a choice to lean into it or perhaps do something else?” So it is repetition, it is reflection, and then feedback. And you can use AI to help you give feedback. You can record things, upload it, and have it give you feedback.

But ask other people, as a result of whatever preparation you’ve used with AI to give you feedback, are you starting to sound like AI? A fascinating research recently released shows that our language choice, the words we’re choosing, is beginning to sound more and more like that that comes from AI. So we have to be careful.

If we all start using AI so much, we’re going to start to sound like AI and lose our way of expressing ourselves. The words we use reflect the thoughts we have and the way that we connect. So, to me, the answer to your question is repetition, reflection, and feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued by when you said, upload the recording and have AI provide feedback. As far as I know, I hope you’re about to blow my mind with something new, no pressure, as far as I know, they can transcribe that and then give you feedback on the words. But are we also getting feedback on the vocal pitch, intonation, the pacing, like the pausing?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, there are tools out there that leverage AI that do that. And some of the LLMs generally available have features as well. So, yes, it can talk about intonation, filler words, words of hesitation. And, again, this is all information that can be helpful to you, not to say that what the AI says is correct or perfect, but it’s information for you to reflect on and try and experiment.

A lot of successful communication is about A-B testing, trying different things out, getting feedback. I think real human feedback is essential, but also leveraging tools to help can be a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, no, I’m right with you with regard to the sparring partner idea and then the reps, and just as a tool for reflection as well. I remember I was working with someone who’s trying to improve on sales, and she was sending the whole transcript of the sales conversation, you know, through the AI and say, “Hey, I’d love your input on, like, what went well, what could have gone differently.”

And, again, none of us viewing it as the oracle of the almighty sales guru who has all sales knowledge, but rather by saying stuff back, you then have the opportunity to respond. And sometimes the response is, “No, you’re totally off base. That was exactly the right move.”

And then, ideally, you talk to an expert as well who will give you feedback in terms of it’s like, “Well, no, actually, the AI was on the money,” or, “No, it’s more nuanced than that,” you know, whatever. But just having something come back at you, just like hitting a ball against the wall, enables you to reflect on that and send the ball back to the wall. And in so doing, you’re getting better at hitting the ball with a bracket.

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, in all the work that I do, I get to travel all over the place, helping people and working on communication skills with people. You know, people define success of communication is survival, “I got through it. I’m done.” And they leave and they don’t think about, “How can I do it better? What did I learn?”

So this colleague who’s, you know, feeding things into a system, that’s a great way to start that process. But you then have to take it to the next step, and say, “Well, what could difference look like? How could I do this in a different way?” And that’s how we improve, and that’s how we all can get better. So that reflection step is really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. And tell us, what are the tools that will also give us feedback on our pitch and pacing in a presentation?

Matt Abrahams
Well, there are many of them that exist, and everybody has to find their own that works best for them. I mean, I don’t want this to be a sales pitch for my stuff, but one of my students, upon graduation, created an AI coach version of me.

So I tried to get ChatMatt as a URL, but you can actually talk to it and feed in vocal cues and clues, and it’ll give you feedback on things like pitch and rate, etc. So there are tools out there that do it that can help you. But, again, communication is not all just that. It’s the constellation of everything that you do, and the rehearsal, the practice, the thought process, that’s all what’s critical.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, that’s kind of you to not want to turn this into a pitch session, but feel free. So ChatMatt…

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, it’s a thing. Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
…will provide feedback on my pitch and my pacing in addition to my words.

Matt Abrahams
Absolutely. And it’ll give you feedback on lots of other things. If you’re struggling asking your boss for a raise or you have to raise an issue in a meeting that might be sensitive. My wife actually prefers to talk to my chat bot than to me. She said it actually listens better than I do.

When it was first coming out, we tested it with my two 20-something kids. Believe me, they put it to the test because we didn’t want it teaching bad things or inappropriate things. And with my younger son, the tool actually made him feel guilty.

He asked some silly question and it said, “I am a tool for serious communication development. When you’re ready to work on something serious, come back.” I thought that was lovely. We encoded guilt into it.

So it’s a tool that it’s been trained on my teachings, my work, and again, leveraging AI, I hope, for a good purpose. Literally, the way it’s designed, and again, this sounds too sales pitchy, but there’s a phone number you can call, like you’re calling a friend, and when you call, it will connect to the AI coach once you’ve signed up and everything.

And you can literally just have that, you say, “I’m about to walk into the room. I didn’t expect my boss’s boss to be in there. What’s something I can say that…?” you know? And it’ll respond in my voice. And so trying to use AI to help bring communication to the moment where people need that communication coaching.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Well, now you’ve got a fun term, you say old-school AI, which is authenticity and influence. You shared with us a couple quick tips in terms of making something all the more authentic and you. Anything else you’d add about influence in the age of AI?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, absolutely. So in a world of AI, what becomes really important is the emotional connection. When we go to persuade people, it is really important that we not only persuade on facts and figures, which are important, but we also think about the emotional connection and component of our communication.

And that is something that is uniquely human. And we have to think about, “What is that emotional connection? How can I address and make that move forward?” And so we have to be thinking about that aspect as well.

So when it comes to persuasion, you know, some of these key elements we’ve known for millennia. It’s facts and figures, logos, it’s emotion, pathos, and it’s your credibility, how you show up in the background that you have.

I like to distinguish when I teach credibility to my MBA students, there’s what I call career and college credibility and Costco credibility. And career and college credibility is what most of us think about. It’s what’s on our LinkedIn profiles, on our resumes, on our vitaes.

But Costco credibility sometimes is more important. When you go to Costco, they give you free samples of food. Why would they do that? It’s not a great business model unless, when you try the food, you like it and then you buy it. They’re showing you the value.

So career and college credibility, really important. And AI can help you perfect that. But your lived experience, the showing of your credibility, that’s where you can really lean into this emotional connection.

You know, it’s one thing to say, “I won the Sales Person of the Year Award five times in a row.” It’s another thing to say, “Here’s how my sales methodology worked in this particular session, and this is what helped me close the deal.” Very different way of communicating your credibility.

So it’s thinking about the emotion, it’s leaning into the lived experience of your credibility, that’s the old-school influence piece that really makes a difference. And when you partner that with some of the things AI can bring to you, can make a really powerful combination.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that a lot. The ‘show me’ instead of ‘telling me’ of it, and the Costco sample concept. As we speak, I’m looking at my sound absorbing panels in the studio. And I ordered them from Music City Acoustics. And the way they got me was I was just looking up some YouTube video, like, “Okay, so how do I think about echo in this room? And what do we really need to do with that?”

And they showed me this detailed use of a software program and a microphone to calibrate it, to figure out the decay rate of different frequencies, and I was like, “Okay, this guy is a super expert on room echo maybe more than anyone that I’ve ever encountered, and he’s, you know, less than an hour away in Nashville. We’re just going to go ahead and hire them.” And that was that.

Because you get sound panels from a lot of places, but these folks are going to optimally size and place these bad boys better than I could possibly understand.

Matt Abrahams
Absolutely. And that experience you had influenced you, and that makes a big difference. Showing, it really does help.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Matt, tell me, anything else we really should make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Matt Abrahams
The one thing that I heard the most when I was traveling all over the world is people said, “How do I deal with conflict that sparks in the moment, you know, all of a sudden, you’re having a conversation, and somebody gets upset?”

So I added a whole chapter in the applied section of the book, talking about this, how to manage conflict in the moment. And it really boils down to just some very straightforward, simple practices. First, you have to acknowledge what’s happening, right? You don’t have to agree, but you have to acknowledge, “I hear, Pete, that you’re bothered or upset or passionate about that issue.” Name it.

And then give somebody room to actually state their position. We often go into defense mode and we assume that anybody’s position is equal in valence and significance to ours. And so we have to really listen and understand, and maybe even explicitly say, “How important is this to you?”

I’ll give you an example. My wife and I learned from some friends of ours a long time ago to do this. If we have a potential disagreement, the very first thing we’ll do is we’ll say, “How important is this to you on a scale of one to ten?”

And if you have a partner that you can trust, this is a wonderful way to diffuse conflict. So let’s say my wife, we agree we’re going out to dinner, but she says she wants Mexican food and I would like Chinese food. Potential conflict.

But if she says, “Hey, Mexican food is a three,” and for me it’s a seven, then there’s no conflict. We make this assumption that our partner or partners that we’re struggling with see the world and have the same level of import to whatever it is we’re discussing that we do.

So you have to acknowledge, you have to listen, you have to ascertain priority, “How important is this?” And then you have to do the hard work of figuring out, “What are the ways that we can work together to consider this, knowing that it’s about collaboration and not about competition?”

And so if we can do these things, all of a sudden, in the moment, spontaneous conflict and challenge can be managed much more directly. And then you can rely on some of the tools and tips that I’ve shared with you and others that are earlier in the book around, “How do you structure your information?” You don’t just ramble and list things.

You might use a structure like, “What?” “So what?” “Now what?” “What?” “Here’s my position or my suggestion. So what? Why it’s important and how I think it’ll help us. And now what are my suggested next steps?”

So in any spontaneous speaking situation, you have to deal with mindset and you have to deal with messaging. So the mindset is acknowledging, listening, understanding the prioritization. And then the messaging is taking whatever solution collaboratively that you come up with and packaging it in a way so somebody else can say it.

So, sorry for the long-winded answer, but that’s also another important part of this update and, really, a significant part of how we get better at communicating.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that’s very helpful and needed, and that’s a nice move in terms of, “How important is this to you?” And, indeed, you would have to have some trust because, then, I guess you could win every time, like, “Nine. This is nine-level importance.”

Matt Abrahams
Well, with my kids, everything is a ten. Everything with my kids, that’s a ten. So you have to calibrate. You have to calibrate, but it makes a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. And I also want your take, in terms of in the heat of the moment conflict, I think those are very great. Maybe you’d say, top down perspectives in terms of the issues, and how important they are, and thinking about them logically and rationally and not jumping to conclusions about, “Oh, they’re really mad, and they must have it this way,” you know? So very wise.

I’m curious about some of the, maybe, bottom-up perspectives of just keeping your cool in that moment. Any pro tips there?

Matt Abrahams
Right. So it can be really hard. We can be emotionally triggered very easily around something that’s really important to us. There’s a whole bunch of other factors that could go into it. If we’re tired, if we’re coming out of, you know, the fourth meeting, this is the third thing that didn’t go well today.

So the ability, and this comes from mindfulness training, the ability to acknowledge, “This is how I am feeling,” gives you a little bit of space to do something about it. So rather than being absorbed by the feeling, say, “This is me feeling frustrated.” “This is me feeling really sad by what the person just said.”

By saying those words to yourself, you give yourself a little bit of psychological distance so that you can do something. It gives you just a little bit of space. Also, if you can do something physical, ground yourself, feel the ground through your feet or your shoes, touch something. That gets you out of that emotional state so you can make a more rational decision.

Now I am not saying that emotions are bad. They are very important. Emotions signal that something needs to be done. But, at the same time, when emotionally triggered, it can hamper or actually lead to bad communication. So we need to actually give ourselves a little space.

And maybe the best thing for me to do, Pete, is to say, “You know, that comment was hurtful. And I need to take just a little bit of time before you and I can come back and talk about this more.” Taking that time out for yourself will help you tremendously. It’ll help you get your thoughts ordered. It’ll help you sort through the emotion. And it, ultimately, will help you deliver a better message.

So, you’re right, emotions loom large and we have to be prepared for those, and we have to just name them and maybe do something physical to help give us just that little bit of space.

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

Matt Abrahams
“No matter where you go, there you are.” It really helps to remind me that the place I need to be at this moment is right here and with the person or people that I’m with, instead of the three other things that I could, should, would be doing. It makes me chuckle a little bit because it’s a little, you know, it makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it’s also very memorable.

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

Matt Abrahams
I’ve been talking a lot about language and framing. And so my favorite framing research is very simple. These researchers went to a group of people and said, “Imagine you have a terrible disease. We have a potential cure. It has a 67% failure rate.”

They then went to another group of people, just like the first group, and said, “Imagine you have a terrible disease. We have a potential cure. It has a 33% success rate. Would you like to take it?” I hope you agree, a 67% failure rate, a 33% success rate is the same thing. Yet dramatically, people take the treatment, the imagined treatment, when it is framed as something positive.

And I’m not saying this means you should always frame things positive. What I’m saying is we need to think about how we use language to help us. I’ll give you an example. I work with a lot of people pitching ideas. You can frame a pitch as a problem that you are solving or an opportunity that you’re going to capture. You get a choice.

And you have to think about, “Which way will work best for my audience?” And here’s where you can test it out on people, or you can use AI to help you think through your audience, “Are these the kind of people who are more problem-focused or more opportunity-focused?”

But the way we use words to help us move people in the direction we want to, really, is something I’ve been focusing on a lot lately.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is intriguing, and I actually want to dig into this a little bit more.

Matt Abrahams
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I would imagine, you tell me, since you’ve lived it with so many clients. My hunch is “the problem we’re solving” frame works better if the investors are folks who care passionately about that specific issue, like, “Hey, you know what, my child had that problem. Wow, yes, I am touched and moved and would love to be a part of solving that,” versus if they’re just, you know, money-hungry and return-maximizing investors, “Oh, yeah, let’s talk opportunity.” That’s my guess. What’s the reality, Matt?

Matt Abrahams
I think your intuition is probably right. If people have a connection to an issue, a problem, that framing it that way works. The breakdown that I, typically, see and talk about is, when you have people who you’re communicating with, who are deeply in the depths, the belly of whatever the topic is, people who are deeply financial, people who are highly technical, people who are very scientific, they tend to like to solve problems.

When they were in school, they did problem sets. They didn’t do opportunity sets. So framing it for the way they are in the world, their background, works. But when you’re in sales, when you’re in marketing, when you’re in senior leadership, often it’s about the opportunities that lie ahead.

So I think it’s multidimensional. I think part of it is people’s backgrounds and just how they are in the world, but also, their connection to the topic also makes sense to me. I just am not aware of any research that bears out your hypothesis, although, to me, intuitively, it makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Matt Abrahams
The book I’ll share with you, from my dear friend Patricia Ryan Madsen. If you don’t know Patricia, you should get to know her. She wrote a book called Improv Wisdom. Very short, little book. It’s about how you can apply improvisation principles to your life.

So it’s not about getting up on a stage and trying to be funny. It’s about, “In my everyday life, how can I leverage ideas from improv to help me be more responsive and to be more connected and communicate better?”

It’s a lovely book. I mean, this is a book that I return to and I think everybody should give it a read. It is fun and helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Matt Abrahams
I’ll give you an app because I use it all the time. And, again, I’m not trying to sell it, although, I have. It’s called Superhuman.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. I use it all the time.

Matt Abrahams
Yes, it is great. So you know the power of it. It allows me to be more efficient in my written communication. And I am at least 30-35% more effective in my emails, of which I get hundreds, and it helps me be smarter in the way I communicate. So that is probably the most useful tool that I have.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, Matt, we usually have to keep the fast phase fast, but you’re just so intriguing here. So I love Superhuman because, one, it’s a blazingly fast interface. And it really kind of subtly trains you to use those shortcut keys.

Like, “Hey, these are here. Go ahead and use them. You know what? You’re right.” So it’s super responsive. The shortcuts, I’m grooving in with them. Oh, I like the split inboxes. It can identify a pitch roughly with AI so that they’re just in a separate tab of pitches. So I just go forward them to all of my team. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! But tell me, what are you finding transformational about Superhuman?

Matt Abrahams
So I, as a teacher, pretty regularly, send out very similar messages to people, and they have a feature called Snippet, and it allows you to, very quickly, send out similar emails. That’s the one that I rely on a lot as well.

And their built-in AI, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve used the built-in AI to help me find like, “Who is that person I talked to in an email three years ago?” you know? And it used to be I’d scroll through my sent folder and try, I might misspell their name. So those are the two features beyond what you have said that I use.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I guess that semantic piece really can come in handy. It’s like, “I don’t remember the key word we said, but it was a guy trying to sell me a thing with a video a couple years ago.”

Matt Abrahams
Thing, yeah, three years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like enough of those, you know, very vague descriptors chained together. It’s like, “Oh, I can work with that.” And then it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the one. Thank you.”

Matt Abrahams
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Matt Abrahams
This is going to sound funny, but I play darts. So I have an outdoor dartboard, and every day I try to go out. I’ve done martial arts for a long, long time, and as part of that, I took up archery and I found it very calming to focus.

Unfortunately, my wife won’t let me shoot arrows in my house, or around my house, and the archery range is a little farther away. And I found that throwing darts is helpful as well. It helps me be very present, it helps me focus, and I kind of have fun doing it. So that’s a habit that I’ve been enjoying recently.

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

Matt Abrahams
The one that I think most recently and relates to the new edition of the book is, “You can prepare to be spontaneous.”

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

Matt Abrahams
I would point them, first and foremost, to FasterSmarter.io. FasterSmarter.io is the source of all of the resources and the show, Think Fast, Talk Smart that I host. I’m a big, big user of LinkedIn. Happy to have you jump on there. And we have a newsletter you can sign up for at either FasterSmarter.io or on LinkedIn, and would love to connect with people in any way.

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

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, so I challenge everybody to take a moment to work on and reflect on your communication. I’ll tell you a practice I do. Every night before I go to bed, in my journal, I will write one thing that went well in my communication that day and one thing that didn’t go as well.

And then every Sunday, I go back and review for three or four minutes, and I make a plan for the following week of how to improve something that I was not pleased with. And that act of doing that makes a huge difference. I’m not saying I’m a great communicator, but I’m a much better communicator because of that.

So I challenge everybody listening to spend some time just reflecting on what worked and what didn’t, either in your communication or others, and think about how you could change your communication for the better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Matt, thank you.

Matt Abrahams
Pete, thank you. This has been a wonderful pleasure to come back and chat with you. Thanks.

Sep 10

1179: Dr. Martin Seligman on How Agency Propels Flourishing

By Podcasts No Comments

The father of positive psychology, Dr. Martin Seligman, discusses how to harness the hidden engine of human progress: agency.

You’ll Learn

  1. The key concept that determines whether we give up
  2. The building blocks of human agency
  3. How to find your human edge in the age of AI

About Martin

Martin Seligman is the most influential psychologist in the world and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center. A former president of the American Psychological Association, he earned his BA in philosophy from Princeton and his PhD in psychology from Penn, and holds ten honorary doctorates. His research—from learned helplessness to learned optimism to prospection—has reshaped how science understands human well-being. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Flourish, Authentic Happiness, The Hope Circuit, and Tomorrowmind.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Marty, welcome!

Martin Seligman
Good to be here, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about agency and just to talk with you. You’re kind of a big deal, a legend, if you will. And I’d love it if you could kick us off, as the so-called father of positive psychology, is there a particularly fascinating and surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans in all your research and writing and speaking and work that just really sticks with you time and time again?

Martin Seligman
Yes, and it’s the basic theme of my new book. And the discovery is about, “When do we give up, not try? And when do we innovate?

I started out 60 years ago working on helplessness, and I asked, “When do people give up? And when are they resilient?” And what I found to start with is when people believe that nothing they do matters, that’s when they give up. The psychological state is the key to it.

And then I asked the question, “Well, when do we innovate? When do we not give up?” And what I found was that, when we believed we were agents, when we believed that we could do it, that was the key to success and to not giving up.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s the big differentiator is the belief. If the belief is, “Yeah, there’s nothing we can do. You know, it is what it is. I’m kind of stuck,” then, we’re not going to do anything, versus, if we believe we’re agents, we have the capability to change the trajectory of things.

Martin Seligman
Yes, so the beliefs you have at work and at home are crucial to whether or not you give up and become depressed, or whether or not you succeed and innovate. So it’s those beliefs and how to change them that are the key to success and failure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m always intrigued when we discuss beliefs because there’s mountains of research, and you’ve done a lot of it, in showing that, “Hey, beliefs, they make a big impact in terms of how we perceive things, how we feel about things, what decisions we make, what behaviors we engage in or abstain from.”

And I guess I’d like to think and hope that my beliefs are accurate, real, true reflections of the world reality as it is. And yet, I’m sure I don’t have it perfect. So I guess I want to start there is how do you think about belief and truth?

Martin Seligman
Crucial question, Pete, and I’ve worked on it all my life and I’ve got a whole bunch of things to say about it. First, before modern psychology came across, people believed that it was the external circumstances that caused you either to give up or to innovate and succeed.

But let’s look at external circumstances and their relationship to belief. So take your 11-year-old son. He strikes out at the end of the little league game and the team loses. Well, the objective facts, the truth is that he struck out. Now what caused him to strike out? Was it a bad call by the umpire? Was it that he is not a good hitter and gave up? Was it because it started to rain that inning?

So reality is very often dissectable into what really is the cause, and that’s very hard to know. But it turns out, if you’re a depressive or a pessimist, someone who’s inclined to fail a lot, you will choose the most pessimistic possible causes.

On the other hand, if you’re an optimist, and we’ll talk about that at some length, you’re going to pick out the causes of that reality that are most likely to cause you to try and to innovate. So so-called reality leaves us a lot of room for what’s true behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. There are immovable facts in terms of what transpired, and yet the cause of them, we can point to all sorts of things, and whether we’re optimistic or pessimistic, we’ll reach different things. Well, now when you say cause, now I’m starting to think about this Robert Sapolsky determined biological stuff.

And not to go deep into that whole philosophical perspective, but I do want your hot take. In some ways, the view that our behavior is biologically predetermined feels like the opposite of agency. Is that how you see it?

Martin Seligman
Not at all. And let me give you an example at work that’ll help us think this through. Friday, noon, you open up your email and there is a message from your boss which says, “Come see me at 4:00 o’clock.” Okay, that’s the reality. Now, what is your reaction to it and how do you spend the next four hours? Now that’s not predetermined.

So let’s work this through. And this is a very important exercise for your viewers, by the way. It’s called, put it in perspective. And it’s how thought intervenes between the so-called reality, the 4:00 o’clock meeting you’re going to have with your boss, and what’s going to happen in the next four hours.

So the first thing we do, and what’s going to happen to you first, is you are going to make the most catastrophic interpretation possible, “Four o’clock, oh, my God, I’m going to be fired.” And, in fact, when we do this with people at work, we have people tell us at some length about the most catastrophic explanation, “I’m going to be fired.”

Okay, what’s the best thing that this meeting could be about? Well, we have people go into that and they’ll say, “The boss loved my memo and I’m going to get a raise.” Okay, tell me at length about that. Okay, now what’s the most realistic, likely outcome at 4:00 o’clock? “Well, it’s probably that the boss read my memo and she’s got some reservations about it but she wants to see what the economics of it are going to be.”

Now, the reason that’s important is it illustrates the reality here, what seems to be determined is you get this frightening memo, but how you spend the next four hours and how up for this meeting you are with your boss depends on your ability to make the most likely explanation and plan for it.

So it’s not helpful for people at work to say everything is determined, particularly because you’ve got a lot of choice in how you see so-called reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And so then, if we are latching onto the most likely scenario, then I suppose our natural behaviors would be, “I’m going to get those numbers together so I will be prepared to answer those questions effectively.”

“And, in turn, the boss thinks I’m great and prepared and smart and a capable contributor, all kinds of good things,” as opposed to, “I was just worrying about things for four hours, in which case I am not so prepared for an economic discussion.”

Martin Seligman
Yeah, if, indeed, you spend the next four hours under the influence of the most catastrophic interpretation, you’re going to be depressed, defensive, and passive. To the extent you spend those four hours thinking about, “Ah, well, the boss probably has some reservations about my memo and is going to want to know its economic implications,” you’re going to plan for it. You’re going to be agentic.

So it’s absolutely crucial that you make the realistic interpretation. But, in fact, we’re bad weather animals, and the most catastrophic interpretation of bad events is built into us by the ice ages. And, indeed, a lot of my book is about the long history from the ice ages to AI and how it impacts agency and our belief that we can do it or our belief that we are helpless and we should just give up and let the world take over.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So take us a bit on this historical journey and unpack it for us, please.

Martin Seligman
Well, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had in my 60 years of writing and research. So what I’ve done most of my life is actually take people in the here and now, people at work, look at the way their optimism and pessimism functions and move from pessimism to optimism.

And what I had found, Pete, over many years, and the whole field of cognitive psychology found, is when we believe we’re not agentic, when we believe we can’t achieve what we want, that’s when we give up and that’s when we’re depressed.

But, most importantly, if you look at people who succeed at work, people who beat depression, people who are resilient, these are the people who believe, “I can accomplish my goals now, I can accomplish them in the future, and I’ve got a wide range of goals.”

And so where I was before I started to look at history, Pete, psychology had become pretty convinced that there was this important notion of agency in modern times, and that it had three components.

The first was efficacy, and that meant, “I can get my goal here and now.” The second component was optimism, which is, “I can achieve my goals far into the future.” And the third component was imagination. So that’s what was established as something you should have.

And so I began to ask the question seven years ago, “Is this true throughout all of human history? What is its basis? And what is the implications in the far future with AI and human agency?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s intriguing in many ways, just like that 4:00 o’clock scenario you presented us with. I suppose we could take AI or anything throughout history and have a very unpleasant or pleasant view of each of those dimensions.

Like with AI, it’s like, “Oh, it’s so cool. I’m empowered to do things that could be new and powerful and tremendous. And I could invent new things. I could automate things. I could explore domains I never could. I could have custom software. I can save money, make money, have boring things automated.”

Or, it’s like, “Oh, the robots are going to take all our jobs. We’re all screwed. We’re just going to have to crawl into a hole and try not to die.” I mean, I suppose I can have high or low efficacy, optimism, imagination with regard to about any environment or development in the world.

Martin Seligman
Well, before we do AI and ask the question, “Is AI doom or is it the best thing for human agency that we ever came across?” I want to do ancient history with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Martin Seligman
It’s what really informs who we are. So let’s go back to 3,000 years ago. I looked at four different civilizations – the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Chinese, and the Persians. And if you look 3,000 years ago, there is no progress going on in any of those civilizations, 3,000 years ago.

And, very importantly, they don’t have the words for agency. They don’t have words that mean, “I can do it.” And, in fact, when they use those words, it’s the gods who are doing it. All four of them. Something miraculous happens in all four of those civilizations over the next 500 years. It’s called the Axial Age.

This is the age that the Buddha and the prophets and Confucius all come around, four different civilizations. And 500 years later, they’ve suddenly got the words for agency, they invent words that weren’t there before, which mean that human beings can do it.

And so, for example, if you take the Greeks, 2,500 years ago, they have no words for human beings achieving things. And then 500 years later, they’ve got words like akrasia, which means weakness of the will. So they can now distinguish between a person knowing what’s right and still failing to act. So they have notions about human action.

So what occurs in all four of these civilizations is we finally get the words for human agency. And when we get new words, that’s when we can act on those words. So, historically, going back as far as writing goes, when it starts, humans don’t have agency. The gods do it.

Five hundred years later, they’ve invented a vocabulary in four different civilizations, which says, “I can do it,” a vocabulary that’s optimistic about the future, in which it’s not the world crushing you, but it’s your will that makes a difference. So that’s the historical background.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating. And, well, Marty, my immediate question is, do we have all the words that we need in terms of your average professional? Are we missing a couple words? And can you give them to us?

Martin Seligman
Well, very important, in modern life, when we get new words, we create new realities. So let’s just take an example, Pete. In my own work, before about 1980, there was no word for burnout. So whenever a patient came to me with what I would now call burnout, I said, “Oh, you’re depressed.” Well, it turns out burnout is not the same thing as depression.

And once we get the word, once we get a new category, we invent new targeted therapy for the newly named condition. So, in modern life, when we get new words, and AI is providing us with not only a whole vocabulary of new words, but a search and accomplishment technology that takes us to places we’ve never been before.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So we’ve got the words and we have a whole word generating machine that does a lot. I guess what I’m curious about is are there, in your experience and research, some key words that most of us don’t know, but would be very much enriched and benefited by knowing?

Martin Seligman
That is really a good question, and the answer is I don’t know. Well, we have a new technology which is enabling us in many ways. You began 20 minutes ago with AI as doom. And having done ancient history with you, Pete, I now want to do the future and the present about AI.

And as you rehearsed, there are the doom-scrollers and the doomsayers have the day about AI. And I’m not one of them. As a positive psychologist, as the founder of positive psychology, when something comes along, I look for the very best it can do. So I’m someone who spends all day with AI looking for what it can do.

So let me go through a couple of things that have been enabled in my life that could not have happened without AI. So it’s very common among the doomsayers to say, “AI is dehumanizing us. It’s undermining how we write. It’s undermining our skills. And, worst of all, it’s undermining our emotional life.” Hmm, well.

Pete Mockaitis
Bummer!

Martin Seligman
I have more love in my life now because of AI. And let me tell you what happened. I have two four-year-old grandsons. I’m crazy about them. But I’m 80 years older than they are. They walk faster than I can run. And I can’t throw a football around with them.

I noticed, by the time they were about two, I was becoming invisible to them. And that hurt. So I went to Anthropic’s Claude, and I said, “Claude, help me write stories in which Max and Denny are the heroes.” So I started chapter one, “Max and Denny visit the haunted lighthouse at Stone Harbor.”

Well, I’m 150 chapters later, I’ve been doing this every day, and I’ve become visible to my grandchildren. They can’t wait to see me and to read to them. And so that’s an instance in which AI, and without it and without the illustrations that OpenAI, ChatGPT provides, I couldn’t have done this. So a lot more love in my life because of AI.

Creativity. Okay, this is the thing I work on all the time, innovation and creativity. And the question is, “Is AI creative?” Well, there are two views of creativity. It’s really, “Who is creative? And what’s the right number?”

So the usual view is the Michelangelo view, that creativity, Pete, resides in your head. And out of your brow, if you’re creative, comes Michelangelo’s David. The unit here is one genius. I actually think that’s pretty rare.

The usual form of creativity that I know is the Wright brothers, or McCartney and Lennon, in which you go back and forth between two people. And that’s the sense in which AI is hugely creative. And it’s actually what I do every day is going back and forth with AI about the edge of science where I am in psychology. So let me give you an example from my new book, Agency.

Chapter eight is about the Chinese. It’s about Chinese agency. Chapter nine is about the Hebrews. It’s about the difference between the Torah, the prophets and writings and the New Testament.

I send this off to my editor, and she says, “Hey, Marty, there’s no transition between chapter eight and chapter nine.” Now I’ve been staring at those two chapters for five years and I don’t see a transition. So I go to Claude, and I say, “Claude, write me a one paragraph transition between chapter eight and chapter nine.”

And what Claude then says is, for the transition, “At the very same time that the Chinese were worrying about the relationship of agency in the individual human being to the state, the Hebrews were concerned and wrestling with a much deeper question – the relationship of individual agency to God.” Holy cow!

Pete Mockaitis
Pretty good. Pretty good, Claude.

Martin Seligman
I’ve been staring at this for five years and it got it just right. So, actually, almost every day going back and forth with Claude Code and ChatGPT and working at the cutting edge of agency and trying to quantify this for black people and white people, women and men, modern China, there’s a new insight almost every day.

So the first thing I said, Pete, about AI is there’s more love in my life. The second is, in what I’ve been doing for 60 years, the cutting edge of psychological science, I have a collaborator that’s more creative than any collaborator I’ve ever had.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, right, with the back and forth process as opposed to expecting it to just be the oracle that shoots out, you know, perfection.

Martin Seligman
Absolutely. So being a pilot with AI, unlike being a passenger, is to be able to prompt back and forth as opposed to expect AI to tell you things. You have to ask the right questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m intrigued, and maybe AI is a tool for this end as well, if these associated beliefs are so transformational, it seems we would do well to hold the optimistic beliefs. What are your top suggestions if folks would like to nudge their beliefs, from more of a pessimistic zone to more of an optimistic zone, in doing that successfully?

Martin Seligman
Actually, the answer to that’s pretty well known, and I’ve spent much of the last 20 years answering that. And it’s basically to learn how to argue against your most pessimistic thoughts. So I’ll give you an example.

By the way, Pete, I’m a depressive and a pessimist, and so when I talk about tools that modify pessimism and depression, I not only try these things on myself when they work, but I do large scale studies of them. And I think it takes a pessimist to do serious work on optimism.

So let me tell you what happened at 4:00 in the morning, Pete. It’s about you. I wake up at 4:00 in the morning, six hours ago or eight hours ago, and I say, “Oh, my God, I’ve got my first interview about the Agency book in eight hours. I got nothing to say about this. I’m past my prime. Maybe I should just cancel the interview.” Okay?

Four in the morning, the most catastrophic thought. And, indeed, most people, when they wake up at 4:00 in the morning will be inundated with the most depressing, catastrophic, and pessimistic thoughts. So what did I do?

I opened my eyes and I started to argue against it. I said, “Well, wait a minute. I had a discussion with the New York Times yesterday right at the cutting edge. And I didn’t fail at that. And she really lit up and laughed at my jokes. And last week, I gave a 45-minute speech to 50 of my graduate students and 150 of their parents and kids, and I got a standing ovation.”

So I basically argued against my most catastrophic thoughts. And I argued realistically. So the most crucial tool we have for agency is, first, to recognize the most catastrophic thoughts we’re saying, and then to marshal realistic evidence against them, to treat our paralyzing, catastrophic thoughts as if they were said by an outside person whose mission in life was to make you miserable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good. Thank you. Oh, Marty, there’s so much good stuff we could cover. Tell me, any critical takeaways you want to make sure people hear about agency before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Martin Seligman
Well, this is a show about succeeding at work, and that’s been one of my main concerns over my lifetime.

And the main takeaway here is something brand new I’m going to tell you and your listeners about. So I’ve been interested in, “What is it not only that people who succeed at work have? But what do human beings have that the machines don’t have and are unlikely to ever have?”

And that’s a really important question because that’s where our cutting edge is going to be at work. So let me tell you what we have and the machines don’t have, and how I got there. So two years ago, the Chinese created a virtual Seligman.

They fed it all my books, my speeches, and you can go to it and ask for advice. And I’ve looked at a thousand of the transcripts now, it gives very good advice. But I was concerned with hallucinating, “When does AI hallucinate?” And I found one hallucination in the thousand transcripts.

Some woman had written in to me, and I gave it to the machine. She had broken her back and she wanted advice, psychological advice about what she could do. So AI, “Ask Martin,” you can do it in Mandarin or in English, by the way, gave her a very good advice.

And in the middle of it, it hallucinated. It said that I had been a consultant to the Reeve Foundation. I’d never heard of the Reeve Foundation. Have you?

Pete Mockaitis
No.

Martin Seligman
Christopher Reeves, Superman, broke his back and founded a foundation to teach optimism to people who broke their back. So notice, the hallucination here was right on track. It’s completely false.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the kind of thing you might do, sure.

Martin Seligman
Very coherent with what I might have done. So I said to Claude, and then to Chad GPT, “Hey, what kind of a machine are you? Are you a coherence machine or a correspondence machine?” That is, when you say something, is it because it coheres with what you already believe or because what you’re saying corresponds to reality?

And Claude said, “Marty, that’s just the right question. I am strictly a coherence machine. I don’t have eyes or ears or hands. When I tell you something, it’s the next most logical, coherent thought I have.” Great Claude. And now I’m getting to what the machines can’t do.

I said, “Tell me the 20 most important discoveries in the history of human science, a good list of 20. How many of those, Claude, could you have done?” It said, “Marty, I could have done seven of them.” I said, “Really?” “Yeah. I could have done tectonic plates. I would have fitted Africa to South America. I could have done Mendelian genetics. That’s just algebra. I could have done Big Bang, which is just a fancy mathematics of explosion.”

I said, “Great, Claude. I’m going to give you eyes and ears and hands. Now, how many of the 20 could you have done?” “Hmm, I could have done 18.” “Eighteen?” “Yeah, I would have discovered the neuron that required microscopes. I have eyes now and staining. I have hands.” “Okay, what couldn’t you have done?”

And now we get to the punchline, “I couldn’t have done Darwin or Einstein because they leapt well beyond the data. Einstein didn’t tinker with Newtonian mechanics. He leapt beyond it.” It’s called abduction, the leap beyond the data. If you’re a coherence machine, what you can’t do is be creative in the sense of leaping beyond the data.

And that’s what human beings have. That’s what you need at work. This is what separates the machines from Pete and me. We can leap to the best explanation. And so the takeaway that I would most want your viewers to have is, when I think about my home life, when I think about work, it’s not the next logical step I want to think about. It’s the leap beyond it, “What’s really going on here? And what can I do that doesn’t become apparent?”

So I think our leap, Pete, what we’ve got is creativity. The technical term is abduction. And I think what we most need at work and in our home lives is better abduction.

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

Martin Seligman
I’m going back seven centuries to my favorite quote. It’s 1365 in Norwich, England, and there’s this woman, a female monk, she calls herself Julian. You have to be a male. Her real name is Juliana of Norwich. It’s the middle of the black plague.

And here’s what she says. She says, “He said not, ‘Thou shalt not be travaileth.’ He said not, ‘Thou shalt not be tempesteth.’ He said not, ‘Thou shalt not be diseased.’ He said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome, and all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.’”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Martin Seligman
My favorite book of the last decade is Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, and even the movie that was made out of it. But the book itself, Cloud Atlas, I strongly recommend.

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

Martin Seligman
I want you to challenge your most catastrophic beliefs. You’re going to get into trouble when you believe the most catastrophic things you’re saying to yourself. They are being said to you by an unconscious whose mission in life is to make you miserable. Challenge those catastrophic beliefs with realistic arguments against them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Marty, thank you.

Martin Seligman
Pete, pleasure.