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Oct 17
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809: How to Make Wise Decisions using Quantitative Intuition with Paul Magnone

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Paul Magnone reveals how to make smarter decisions by tapping into both data and intuition.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you shouldn’t disregard intuition
  2. Why we make terrible decisions—and how to stop
  3. Powerful questions that surface brilliant insights

About Paul

Paul Magnone is Head of Global Strategic Alliances at Google where he is developing a growing ecosystem of partners that will unlock the next generation of business value via the cloud and related technologies. Previously at Deloitte and IBM, he is a systems thinker and business builder focused on understanding where technology is headed and answering what it means for a business. He is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University.

Resources Mentioned

Paul Magnone Interview Transcript

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

Paul Magnone
Thank you for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom but, first, I think we need to hear about your time working as a DJ when you were in college.

Paul Magnone
Oh, geez. Well, this was back before CDs were popular. We actually had a record library. So, this was carrier current radio, I didn’t do parties. It was college radio. And it was just being at an engineering school, it was a very liberating evening, whether it was Mondays or Tuesdays, depending on the semester, very liberating evening to go in there and just go into the record library, and do your thing. And it was me and a friend, Jim, who maybe he’ll be listening to this. I’ll tell him to listen in. And he would go and get every Led Zeppelin album, and then he would say, “The rest is up to you.”

So, depending on what was happening on a given week, I would manage the programming, and it was a little David Letterman-ish on the commentary side, but certainly heavy rock and roll, and it certainly scratched an itch in the midst of all the engineering school.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. Well, when you talked about Led Zeppelin, that reminds me, isn’t that like the quintessential DJ thing to say, “Get the Led out”?

Paul Magnone
There you go. Well, you would go and get all the Led Zeppelin and not care about anything else. So, I said, “Do you like anything other than Led Zeppelin?” He said, “Yeah, absolutely, but you handle all that.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, that’s a great system there for decision-making right there, is that he had a system which was Led Zeppelin, and you had to work a little harder with your music decision-making. That’s my forced segue, Paul. How am I doing?

Paul Magnone
They’re pretty good. Pretty good, yeah. So, it was option one was always locked in, and then it was what was the next option, so.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so you have codified some of your wisdom in the book Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information. And, can you tell me, when it comes to this decision-making stuff, do you have a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery that you want to share right off the bat?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think why this is intriguing to people, and we’ve spoken to thousands of executives and probably thousands more students as we teach at Columbia University when I say we, first of, it’s myself and Oded Netzer, who’s the Vice Dean of Research at Columbia Business School, and Christopher Frank, who is currently Vice President at AmEx Market Insights, leading the market insights team there. And we’ve come together over the past seven years, and we teach what we have learned.

So, obviously, there’s a heavy dose of theory here, but we’re practitioners, we’re in the trenches. And so, what we reflect back is “What are the practical tools and techniques that lead to better decision-making?” And you start to discover that it’s a hot topic but it makes people anxious. So, we live in a time today when data is exploding and yet it feels invasive and intimidating. So, for a lot of people, data is just not fun. And other people say, “I love data,” and then they kind of fumble the football.

So, in reality, we’re fortunate to have this staggering amount of information at our fingertips and yet we often hear people say, “But I don’t have enough data.” Okay. Well, maybe you’re not putting things in perspective. And, ultimately, with all this information and all these things that are flowing by, we consistently see poor decision-making and wasted investment, wasted resources at companies, wasted just time and effort and so forth, and we took a step back and said, “Well, why is this? Is it caused by fear, or overconfidence, or bias?”

And we realized that, with some focus and some of the techniques that we talk about, we can build a tribe of better decision-makers and maybe make a dent on all these wastes. That’s kind of our motivation behind it all.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that sounds exciting and I’d love to dig into just that. I’m intrigued then, in your subtitle, you got “Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information.” We’ve got boatloads of information. When it comes to intuition, first, could you define it for us and what’s its role here?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, so that’s a great question. And the fact is where you’re constantly challenged by people saying, “So, you’re going to teach me intuition? Don’t you either have it or don’t have it?” And the answer is, “Well, people often have intuition and they’re not listening to it.” And so, when you look at what’s referred to as the theory of learning, there’s competence and complexity. So, you begin, think as a toddler, you don’t know what you don’t know. And, suddenly, you start to put some things together, you start to hear some things, and you start to see patterns, and you start to learn.

And then, as you start to learn, you realize there are things that you don’t know. So, now you’re at the next level. You’re now conscious about your incompetence. And as you progress up this ladder, and there’s multiple steps along the way, you eventually get to the age of…or to the point of a teenage driver, a driver for the first time. You’re now, hopefully, consciously competent, you know what your limitations are, you know what’s happening around you. And by the time you get to be a seasoned driver, you don’t have to think so much when you’re making a choice.

When you’re driving and you’re a seasoned driver, and there’s a snowstorm, you might turn down the radio a little bit because you want less input signal, but you have a sense, and you’re sensing with your fingers what’s happening, you’re sensing all around you, and you might not even sense what’s about to happen but you see up ahead, “Hey, I remember that when I get to a curve like that, in a situation like this, with the weather this way, I should probably do the following.” So, there’s a sense of acumen that builds up over time.

And the fact is, in a business world, we say, “No, no, I just want the data. Just tell me how much it’s snowing. Just tell me the tire pressure.” Really, is that all you need to know? Or, do you really need to sense and respond in real time, and really get a sense for what’s happening? And really terrific leaders talk about the fact that they have a feel for the business. So, let’s take your question and go ask some business leaders, “What do you mean by feel for the business?” They may have different answers, but, ultimately, it’s some level of intuition about their business, how it’s impacted by the world, how their business impacts the world.

And so, this notion of intuition is the companion to all the data that we dive into or that we think we want to dive into. And so, the notion is we have to balance that. So, rather than make a decision based on just data, or based on just gut or intuition, trust your gut – there’s another wonderful top gut by a colleague of ours – what we’re saying is that balanced view is what’s important, and threading that needle, and building the toolkit for yourself so you can balance the data and the human judgment, that’s the path forward.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And I see additional interplay there associated with intuition. We have hordes of data at our disposal. It can be hard to even know what sorts of analyses to run on that, and intuition can serve up fantastic questions for investigation or hypotheses, like, “You know, I have a sense that maybe this is going on. Now, let’s take a look at data to see, in fact, if it is or is not.”

Paul Magnone
Yeah. And we hear a lot about data scientists, and, “Well, I need a data scientist.” To do what? At the end of the day, there’s a set of people that need to come together to drive a decision. There’s the business leader who should be data-driven, who should be paying attention to the data, but not only paying attention to the data. There is the data scientist, there is the data engineer who brings all the data together, but there’s also a data translator. And that person really ensures that what we’re solving for aligns with the business need.

And we also like to talk about a data artist, because, at the end of the day, we need to tell a story, and you need to compel people to action, and doing that requires you to put all of this in some sort of frame that is understandable and digestible. And so, that’s kind of a team that comes together to say, “Listen, yeah, there’s all these components, but how do I compel people to make a choice and how did we make the right choice?”

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of great stuff there. Maybe to tie some of it together and launch us, Paul, could you perhaps give us a cool story or a case study of a professional who did some great work with both intuition and information to come up with some rocking breakthrough decisions?

Paul Magnone
Well, I don’t know if this was a rocking breakthrough decision, but I will tell a personal story about when I was working for, probably at the time, a Fortune 20, maybe Fortune 50 company. You guys can sort out who that is. And we were investigating whether to work with a heavily backed startup in Silicon Valley, and I was charged with doing the due diligence, the business side of the due diligence, and I had a colleague of mine who was leading the technical due diligence.

And after weeks of investigation, we looked and said, “You know, this is, I think, a fascinating company but we’re not sure even after weeks of investigation,” because when we got to some detailed questions, they hid behind non-disclosure agreements and other issues and so forth. And the technical side we felt, “Well, we could probably recreate what they did but maybe there was something compelling here that we didn’t understand, so maybe we’ll take a flyer on that and give it a shot.”

On the business side, they kept on telling us, “You know what, you’re going to have a wildly profitable business if you base your business on our new technology.” Now, in hindsight, there were some signals that got my attention, specifically, they weren’t answering questions in much detail. And then, finally, after pressing them, their business development lead sent me a spreadsheet, and he said, “Look through this, and you can model out how profitable your business will be based on our technology stat.” And I called them back five minutes later, and I said, “Well, either your spreadsheet is broken or your business is broken.”

And I know I took a provocative approach to my comment there, but that was built on the intuition that we were all starting to build up the perspective that there was something that wasn’t quite right. The spreadsheet, let me describe that for a minute. There was a very large Excel, with one cell that I was allowed to put a number in, and this was a business around computing infrastructure, so servers. So, there 10,000 servers in the cell.

And it showed, when you did all the math, it showed a wildly profitable business running 10,000 servers. And he said, “Put in a 100,000, put in a million. You’re a huge company. You’ll just do more.” So, I put in one server because I want to understand at the atomic level…

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, fixed costs, labor costs, scale.

Paul Magnone
Yeah, what’s granular. One server. Wildly profitable. And I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So, I put in zero servers. Wildly profitable. So, either they had some magic or there was something that was wrong. Now, why do I tell this story? At the end of the day, we had data, we had insights, we had spent time with them, but, really, it was that blend as I described before of a lot of information, or seemingly a lot of information, but our intuition telling us, “We’re really not seeing the right information. There’s something they’re not showing us.”

And by pushing on that button right there, it opened up a further discussion. We, ultimately, wound up not doing business with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. So, tell us, how can we become similar Jedi masters, Paul, to get that sense of, “What’s missing? And how do I push on it?” Any key questions or frameworks or tactics that get us to making more good decisions more often?

Paul Magnone
Sure. Sure. So, there are really three fundamental ideas to lean on, I think, behind the book. So, leaders have just an enormous amount of data but we all see it. They’re not making better decisions. So, why is that? So, they’re denouncing the data, or they’re choosing to trust their gut, or they’re spending so much time trying to get a perfect decision. And they think the same data is the new oil so there’s spending as much as they can to build a bigger and better data refinery for that oil.

When, instead, what leads to a great decision is the balance that we’ve been talking about. So, that’s the first thing. Don’t lean in to one side or the other. Focus on that balance. The second thing is you don’t need to be a math whiz to drive great decisions. The smartest person in the room is the person who asks the better question. And that person, that leader, blends information and the intuition and the experience, as we described before, that leads to the better outcomes.

Think about it, you’re in a meeting, and the person who had the factoid, you don’t go up to that person and say, “That was amazing that you had that fact at your fingertips.” But the person that asks the question that nobody expected, that insightful thing that cuts right through, that’s the person you want to go have coffee with, right?

And the third thing is, as humans, we are terrible decision-makers, and, largely because we don’t have our bearings. And so, one way is to really explore what’s happening in the decision and the moment that you make it, and one way to look at it is you’re balancing time, risk, and trust. And if you think about that, “Do I have no time? It’s a crisis, or, do I have a lot of time?” Are you a fireman or are you in Congress? Do you have a lot of time?

Is it a high-risk or a low-risk situation? Are lives at stake? Are billions at stake? Or is it a throwaway decision, and it’s a reversible decision? Some decisions people agonize over and yet they’re reversible. And then the last part, trust, do you trust the data? Do you trust the person that gave you the data? Do you trust the organization that stands behind that data?

So, as you triangulate all those three, that in itself is a framework that should help you make some better decisions. Ultimately, we pull all this together and we refer to all of this as quantitative intuition, which is intentionally an oxymoron because you’re bringing the quant side with the intuitive side. And we define that as the ability to make decisions with incomplete information, and you’re using three techniques: precision questioning, contextual analyses, and the synthesis to see the situation clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you perhaps walk us through an example in which we’re applying these principles to an actual decision?

Paul Magnone
Sure. So, let’s talk about a day in the life of one of your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Paul Magnone
Because you love your listeners, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
We sure do.

Paul Magnone
There you go. So, your leader comes in on a Monday or a Tuesday, and says, “How do we react to this headline from the competitor?” Or maybe you’re beginning a planning…yeah, right? I mean, it’d never happen.

Pete Mockaitis
My first question is which headline and which competitor?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, yeah, right. But everybody at this moment is thinking this just happened yesterday. Or, maybe you’re beginning a planning cycle for a new product launch. Or, maybe your business is in decline and you’re trying to decide where to place the resources that are scarce. So, in each case, regardless of your role, if you’re in product or sales or marketing or manufacturing, everybody’s taught like a bias to action, so they start to jump in, “What? Let me go dive in.”

And what you should be doing is defining what problem you’re solving first. So, put that problem in context, “Here, our competitor announced this. Here’s the headline from our competitor. Let’s zero in on that one.” Well, put it in absolute terms, put it in context, absolute terms. Look at it over time and relative to what’s going on elsewhere.

So, the competitor said, “I just sold 100 shovels yesterday.” “That’s awesome. I sold 200 shovels yesterday.” Or, “I sold 200 and the competitor sold 500.” While you’re busy high-fiving that you sold 200 shovels, your competitor is walking all over you. By the way, why did that happen? Well, there was a freak snowstorm in July. Okay, so were you going to base your business and change your strategy based on an anomaly? No.

So, what are the assumptions that are going into that decision? Do you believe those assumptions? Is that true? And is it maturely important to your business or is it a blip? These are kinds of the things that you need to think about, those parameters, so we can go through any number of examples. But I think your listeners are probably living this every day.

And through this all, they need to synthesize all these different datapoints. So, we preach a lot about synthesizing. What happens most often is people are in meetings and you’re summarizing what you already know, or you’re summarizing to get to a point that you think the boss has already said because they’ve already anchored you somehow with one of their early comments. So, synthesize the datapoints and then go to the data after that. Then go to the data, right?

So, start with those first principles, “What is it that we really know? What problem are we solving? Do we really want to grow a product line, or are we stable, or are we under attack?” And then make a recommendation after you’ve set the frame for the problem, and then interrogated the data. So, this is what we refer to as being a fierce data interrogator, not a random data interrogator.

So, ultimately, we think of this as jazz. It’s not waterfall because a lot of the behaviors in these different disciplines – products, sales, marketing, manufacturing – tends to be rigid, it tends to be a waterfall, and they don’t read and react – to borrow a term from sports – they don’t read and react in the moment. And, ultimately, it needs to be jazzed.

You know the theme of your business, and you may go often at different directions but you’ll come back, and the drummer is going to go and do something, and, hopefully, it fits in the context, and you’re going to come back. So, it’s jazz. Go to the question, go to the technique that’s valuable in that moment, and don’t just rely on kind of the rigid thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you talk about jazz, I’m imagining it like, for marketing, “We launched a campaign, and then we see how it did, and then we interrogated, in terms of we get some contexts. Like, how well is that campaign performing based on general benchmarks, or historical other campaigns, or competitors, if we can know that?”

And then you say, “Oh, wow, that’s awesome. Let’s double down the budget in this channel with this messaging to this segment,” or, “Uh-oh, that’s very disappointing. Let’s perhaps reallocate budget in a different vibe.” So, it’s like jazz in that something happens and we respond in flow to it as oppose to, “Nope, it says in this quarter we’re spending $50,000 on Facebook ads, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Paul Magnone
Right, “Let’s go to the spreadsheet and say what I’m permitted to do.” That’s not thinking. That’s reacting. And that same marketing lead, marketing team, what you described is Monday morning. Wednesday morning, they have a different headline, and their competitor just announced something that’s shocking. So, in one scenario, they’re being proactive on a product launch and seeing the results, and then doubling down, as you said. In another scenario, they’re suddenly under attack, and that was all in the same week. So, how do you make decisions in those different situations, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, I want to talk a little bit about your phrase quantitative intuition. It sounds like you described a bit of that. But how do we get better at that in terms of this number feels high, wrong, low, crazy? Like, how do we know that or get there?

Paul Magnone
Right. Well, we try to not say crazy but, yeah, it’s really those three dimensions that I talked about at the end there. It’s precision questioning, contextual analyses, and syntheses. So, let’s break all those down. Precision questioning, as I said before, we tend to kind of react to the factoids and not take a step back, and say, “Well, listen, let’s put all this in context. What are the first principles? What are the fundamentals of our company? Am I reacting to an anomaly? Or, am I really making a decision based on a thought-out element?”

And precision questioning is really a technique where you will ask, “You know what, I want to understand what to do with a millennial audience.” “Great. Could you say more?” “Well, I want to understand how to sell this product to a millennial audience.” “Any millennial audience?” “I want to understand how to sell this product to a millennial audience that has this kind of budget.” You’re asking more granular questions until you get to an atomic level that people say, “Oh, what you’re really looking for is this well-defined decision, this well-defined task.”

And most often, we don’t spend the time to get granular. And one of the techniques that we talk about to do that is, we call it an IWIK framework, “I wish I knew,” and just the nature of that question implies permission, “What is it you want to know? What is it you know about a millennial?” So, spending the time, it requires a little patience. But spending the time upfront to do that precision questioning to narrow and get clear about it, to get concise about the thought, is critically important. That’s the first piece for precision questioning.

The second piece is the contextual analyses. So, as I said before, look at everything in context. What is the situation in absolute terms? What is it over time? What is it relative to what else is going on with my competitors, with other divisions in my company? And as you look at that context, you’ll come to the realization, “This is important to my business or not. Is this a blip? Or, this requires us to really consider a change to our strategy.”

And then the last piece is the syntheses, which almost no one does. Everyone summarizes and gives you every piece of information. Some of this is pride, “Look, I spent three weeks putting together 47 incredible spreadsheets and reports.” “That’s awesome. Put that in the appendix and tell me what you’ve learned from that. Tell me what’s surprising you in that. Tell me what is crystallized that you, as a smart person that we hired into this company, believe based on what you’ve just interrogated.”

Most of the time, people bring that to their leader, and say, “Look at all this work that I’ve done.” And the way we like to think of syntheses is everybody is the director of a movie. If you look at a movie, maybe an hour and a half, two hours, there’s what? Hundreds of hours on the cutting room floor because you don’t have to tell every detail. You can put all that in an appendix, but focus on what’s critical and what matters.

In journalism, they talk about not burying the lead, being very critical about what is the most important aspect. And we get away from that in business. So, you pull all that together and that’s what we refer to as quantitative intuition. And so, we talk about a set of techniques to go through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, I’d love to hear, do you have some super favorite questions that you’ve relied upon and you find super valuable in many different decision-making contexts?

Paul Magnone
So, yeah, it’s a great question. And we’ve talked before about putting things in context, which I think is one incredible pillar. But one of my favorite questions is a very short question, which is, “What surprised you?” Real simple. And the fact is if anyone has ever gone to a party, what happens when you leave the party? The people that you’re at the party with don’t talk about, well, yes, they had enough drinks, they had enough food, but that’s not the conversation. It’s what surprised them about the interaction between people, what surprised them about a particular situation.

So, in our personal life, we make the space and we give ourselves permission to have a conversation about surprise. But in the business world, no, no, no, the boss wants to talk about this, “I have a sneaking suspicion that we should be interrogating this other dimension but I’m not even going to bring it up.”

So, if you make the space for surprise, if you have the courage, or, as a business leader, you ensure that your team feels empowered to say, “Yup, we’re going to do the analyses that was asked for, but I’m going to make the space for surprise, and say this is an outlier that doesn’t make sense. This is an outlier that I think we should interrogate more. Or, really, we’re investigating the wrong thing, and the surprising thing is here’s a critical issue.” So, be open to that surprise and make the space for that conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that question. Please, Paul, more like that.

Paul Magnone
Yeah, we talk about IWIKs, “I wish I knew,” that’s probably one of the most critical techniques that we talk about. And, really, as I said before, you’re going back and forth between these various techniques, and you may find something in the surprise. This gets back to the jazz. When you have that surprise conversation, people can then say, “Oh, you know what, I want to go back and redefine the problem. I want to go back and maybe do a different set of IWIKs to explore an area, explore an adjacent area, explore a different area because, now, I’m tuned a little differently.”

So, really, it’s a lot of back and forth with these techniques. We also talk very much about guesstimating because, at the end of the day, what we’re taught from grammar school and up is “What’s the answer? What’s the number?” And mathematical precision matters, I’m an engineer by training. Everybody of the three authors were all technical, but guesstimating is really helpful.

So, the classic problem is, “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Well, you don’t need a census to go do that. You can figure that out on the back of a napkin. And the majority of people are asked on a daily basis to provide an estimate on the back of a napkin, “Well, what do you think? What’s in the zone here?” because we can course-correct once we know that we’re in the zone. And they’re at a loss for, “Well, how do I guesstimate?” So, we talk about a series of techniques around guesstimating.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re bringing me back to my case-interview days, Paul.

Paul Magnone
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Good times. All right. Well, so lots of good stuff. Could you bring it together in a cool example in terms of a person or a team used a number of these techniques from beginning to end to reach a fantastic decision?

Paul Magnone
Sure. One other company, this is one of the other authors had this direct experience, so we will again mask the company to protect the innocent or goofy, either way. But there was a question around what was the performance in a region of, again, a Fortune 100 company. What was the performance in a region?

And there were about 47 markets in the region, and looking through the region, they did the analyses. They practically looked at IWIKs, and said, “Here’s what’s important in the region. Here’s what we’ve discovered,” and made their quarterly business recommendation on where to put more investment, how to align the team, and how to allocate the resources.

At the end of the meeting, the senior leader said, “This is terrific. We really have our bearings here. Is there anything that surprised you in what you’ve seen so far?” And this was Chris, Chris Frank, said, “Yeah, what really surprised me is there are 12 of the 47 segments had a sharp rise in customer satisfaction, and I can’t explain it.”

So, what he did is he buried it in the appendix because it wasn’t terribly clear. And after a lot of time doing the correlation and the analyses, there was no answer to why, and so they were just outliers. So, the leader said, “So, read off what those 12 markets were.” And as he read through them, they mapped one for one with a pilot program that the company had in those 12 markets, and they intentionally didn’t tell anybody because they didn’t want to bias anyone doing the analyses.

And because of leading into that simple question, “What surprised you?” the whole room had a revelation that, “Oh, this is really a better way to engage our customers,” and that led to a multimillion-dollar investment in a customer engagement program that didn’t exist. So, the data was all there but they weren’t looking for it the right way, and they didn’t have the insight from their leader to ask the right question.

Now, if you used these techniques proactively, you would say, “You know what, I’m going to spend 45 minutes on here’s our quarterly business review, business report. I’m going to spend 10 minutes on here are some anomalies and surprises that I think we should investigate more.” So, as a practitioner, as a business person, and you want to be awesome at your job, make the space for that. Insist that, “You know what, you hired me for a reason. Here’s something that I think we should really look at.”

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

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think that the last piece is about as simple as it gets. When you’re bringing people together, you need to tell them before they even get in the room, “Am I informing you of situations, so everybody’s up to speed and has a common knowledge base? Or, am I compelling you to action today? Am I asking you to make a choice? And then, have I armed you on your team beforehand with everything to make that choice?”

I don’t know how many meetings I’m in where partway through the meeting, because everybody texts during meetings, people are texting each other, “What is the purpose of this? What are we doing? Didn’t we already have this conversation?” So, being very deliberate is very much appreciated, and having a conversation for awareness is fantastic. But setting people up for a decision, and bringing everybody along, that’s really important because decisions are team sports. Bringing everybody along the right way really matters.

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

Paul Magnone
Yeah, this is a favorite quote, I use it all the time, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” And so, that’s from H.L. Mencken, who’s a journalist in the early 1900s, and to me it speaks volumes of what we see today, where people have their fingertips on data and yet are just grasping at what seems to be the very first thing that they can answer with, and they’re not spending the time to dive in to the detail.

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

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think I’ll share a book, which feels like a study. It’s Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. And so, in some ways, our book Decisions Over Decimals echoes and builds on the system-one and system-two thinking, and we’re providing practical tools and techniques that balance the data and the human judgment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Paul Magnone
I’d have to go with The Road Less Traveled, the first version. I think he redacted or refuted some of what he said in his second version. But it’s very much about understanding yourself and how to solve problems.

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

Paul Magnone
Well, I’m partial to the Google tools, and then, of course, the techniques and frameworks that are in this book.

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

Paul Magnone
I’m not a practitioner of meditation but I think it’s really important to get centered and take a step back, and say, “What’s really happening?” And I try and make the time to do that, ideally, on a weekend, and really gather and reset. So, however people do that, whether it’s meditation or a night out dancing, whatever works for you.

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

Paul Magnone
I’m not sure it’s retweeted but I often say you can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts.

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

Paul Magnone
Well, our website is DOD, which stands for Decisions Over Decimals, it’s DODTheBook.com. You can reach out to myself or Chris or Oded on LinkedIn. And, obviously, in addition to everything else that we do, we teach at Columbia, so multiple ways to get a hold of us.

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

Paul Magnone
Make the space to share what you really think. As I’ve said multiple times, synthesize, don’t just summarize, and create that space to have real dialogue on the issues. So many times, that’s what we want and that’s not what we’re doing. And be brave and bold and make that space.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paul, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you many wise decisions.

Paul Magnone
Thank you very much, and to you as well.

Oct 13
0

808: How to Become a Great Listener with Oscar Trimboli

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Oscar Trimboli explores the science behind listening–and how you can become great at it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The difference between a good listener and a great one
  2. How to get into the great listening mindset
  3. The one question that will cut your meetings in half

About Oscar

Oscar Trimboli is an author, host of the Apple award-winning podcast Deep Listening and a sought-after keynote speaker. Along with the Deep Listening Ambassador Community, he is on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the workplace.

 He is the author of How to Listen – Discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication – the most comprehensive book about listening in the workplace, Deep Listening – Impact beyond words and Breakthroughs: How to Confront Assumptions. We adapted our previous episode with Oscar into the LinkedIn Learning course called  How to Resolve Conflict and Boost Productivity through Deep Listening.

Oscar is a marketing and technology industry veteran working for Microsoft, PeopleSoft, Polycom, and Vodafone. He consults with organizations including American Express, AstraZeneca, Cisco, Google, HSBC, IAG, Montblanc, PwC, Salesforce, Sanofi, SAP, and Siemens.

Oscar loves afternoon walks with his wife, Jennie, and their dog Kilimanjaro. On the weekends, you will find him playing Lego with one or all his four grandchildren.

Resources Mentioned

Oscar Trimboli Interview Transcript

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

Oscar Trimboli
Good day, Pete. Looking forward to listening to your questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, look forward to listening to your answers and insights. It’s been about two years since we last spoke. And I’m curious to hear, any particularly exciting lessons learned or updates?

Oscar Trimboli
Well, we’ve spent our last two years going into deep research on listening in the workplace with the research over 20,000 workplace listeners. We’ve published a book How to Listen, to make the title really simple, and we’re tracking 1410 people who’ve put up their hand who want to be part of a long-term study about how their listening behaviors change in the workplace.

So, through that research, we’ve got a view on that by country, we’ve got a view on that by gender, we’ve got a view on that by industry and professions, so that’s really rich information that tells us what really gets in the way of people’s listening in the workplace. And for a lot of us, there’s so many distractions that are getting in our way, and that’s just level one. It’s a first level of distractions that people are dealing with.

So, for me, I guess, many things changed my mind about listening, and I think the big thing was how to help people become conscious of listening for similarities versus listening for difference. And there’s a beautiful story that three is half of eight, just would love to get into it a little later on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, let’s do it. So, I’m intrigued, with all this research, any new discovery that was particularly surprising or counterintuitive or striking to you being a listening expert?

Oscar Trimboli
I think it comes down to the importance of the self-awareness bias. So, one of the questions we ask people in the research is, “Rate yourself as a listener,” and then we got them to rate others from the perspective of a speaker. And what was fascinating in this research, on a five-point scale from well below average, below average, average, well above average, etc., 74.9% of people rated themselves either well above average or above average listeners. So, three quarters of people think they’re above average listeners.

When we ask the question the other way, from the speaker’s perspective, 12% of people rated the person listening to them above average or well above average. So, there’s a six times delta in the perception of myself as a listener versus what the speaker perceives your listening quality to be. So, the value of listening sits with the speaker not with the listener.

And this is completely counterintuitive because there are so many listening filters that are in people’s way. And the first filter is the filter that we think that we’re good listeners. We don’t have frameworks. The periodic table of elements is a beautiful example of an international guide that’s consistent across the world that tells us high energy, low energy, dense and light material, but we don’t have the equivalent for listening. And we can probably speak about wine and cheese better than we can about listening.

So, learning, the thing that was counterintuitive for me was, “Why do people think they’re above average listeners?” And a lot of people just simply said, “Well, because I think I am.” Whereas, there’s a very clear descriptors in math, in the way language is constructed with nouns and verbs and adjectives, there isn’t an equivalent framework for listening. And when people start to go, “Oh, okay, maybe I’ve got some room for some improvement.”

So, adult learning theory will always tell us that improvement only happens when awareness is high, Pete, the need for change is high. So, this six times gap, Pete, is the biggest thing that I’ve learned. It’s like, “Wow, I knew there was a gap but, mathematically, six times was huge.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then that’s intriguing. And could we zoom out a little bit and hear about the big idea or core thesis in the book How to Listen?

Oscar Trimboli
In How to Listen, we want people to know the difference between a good listener and a great listener is a good listener will listen to make sense of what’s said, and great listeners help the speaker make sense of what they’re thinking. And the reason there’s a fundamental disconnect between the thinking speed of the speaker, on average 900 words per minute, and the speed at which they can speak, which is about 125 words per minute, so the likelihood that the first thing they say is what they’re meaning, it’s 14%.

And great listeners are conscious of this gap and move their orientation from, “How does this make sense for me?” to “How does this make sense for them?” and, ultimately, “How does it make sense for us in the outcome that we’re trying to achieve, not just in one-on-one conversations, but also in group meetings and organizational systems as well?” So, good listeners are focused on what’s said, and great listeners are focused on what’s not said.


Pete Mockaitis
Whew, so much good stuff to get into there. And that’s a handy framework there in terms of, “Oh, yeah, I’m a good listener because I absorbed a few of the things that you said. Therefore, I’m a great listener and ask for you to just raise the bar here.” It’s like, “Ah, but did you understand it and reflect it so well that the speaker themselves said, ‘Oh, wow,’ you’re taking it to a higher place and they themselves understand better what they are trying to convey.” That sounds awesome. Oscar, tell us, how do we ascend to such a level?

Oscar Trimboli
Well, I think getting the basics right is crucial, and a lot of us don’t set ourselves up for the basics. But let’s come back to listening for similarities and differences. Jennifer is a primary school teacher, and she’s raising her family, and she’s at home, and her son Christopher is three years old, comes home from school. And, like any good mom, she says, “What did you learn at school today, honey?” And he said, “I learned math today, mommy. I learned that three is half of eight.”

Now, Jennifer is a busy mom where she’s rushing around the house, she’s got other things going, and she misheard him, she was sure. And she said, “Honey, could you say that again?” And he said, “Yes, mom. I learned that three is half of eight.” And being a primary school teacher, she put her hands on her head, shook her head, and thought, “What are they teaching kids at school these days?” And the first clue is Christopher is three, and he’s already making sense of math.

So, Jennifer goes to the cupboard. She gets eight M&M’s out, and she puts them on the kitchen table, and she lays four M&Ms out like soldiers in a line, and four on the other side as if they’re facing each other. And then she picks Christopher up and puts him on the table, and said, “Honey, could you count these rows of M&Ms?” And he went, “One, two, three, four, mom.” “And on the other side, Christopher.” And he goes there, facing each other, “Four.”

And Jennifer says, “See, Christopher, four, not three is half of eight.” And with that, like Superman, Christopher jumps off the table, goes to a cupboard, pulls out a piece of paper, gets a Sharpie, and draws the figure eight, and shows it to his mom. And then he folds the piece of paper vertically and tears it in half and separates two threes for his mom.

And in that moment, Jennifer realized that the way Christopher appreciates the world was completely different to the way she thinks and processes it, and she knew that something was extraordinarily different about Christopher. Now, I said earlier there’s a hint. He was at school at the age of three. He graduated college much earlier than most, and he’s a world champion bug catcher today.

Pete Mockaitis
Bug catcher.

Oscar Trimboli
And when I say bug catcher, I mean computer software bug catcher.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Oscar Trimboli
So, he’s solving some of the most complex computer problems around the globe. And what you don’t know about Christopher is he’s neurodiverse, and the way he experiences the world is very different. Now, when you were hearing three is half of eight, three is half of eight, were you screaming at the pod, and saying, “Four is half of eight? What are you talking about, Oscar? You got this story wrong.”

And this is a magnificent example of how we listen to pattern match, how we listen to anticipate, how we fill in with our own experience, education, cultural background, our evidence to code what we think the speaker is going to say next. And in that moment, we spoke earlier 125 words per minute speaking speed and 900 words thinking speed for the speaker, but for the listener, it’s very difficult because you’re listening at 400 words per minute, which means you’ll get distracted, you’ll jump ahead, you’ll anticipate.

Now, Pete, it took a while for you for the penny to drop. And the minute I said he folded the piece of paper in half, you went, “Ah.” But what was going through your mind until that point when we’re talking about three is half of eight?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, with models and mindsets, I’m thinking about, “It’s half of eight in a bigger sense.” I was thinking like strategically, or the 80-20 Principle, or the vital few versus the trivial many. I was like, “Okay, Oscar is probably going to go land somewhere along these lines,” which speaks to my own way of representing the world as opposed to visually the number three looks like half of the number eight, whatever will you do.

Oscar Trimboli
Yeah. And thank you, you were anticipating, you were jumping ahead, you were using historical evidence, and yet zero is half of eight, too.

Pete Mockaitis
It is? Vertically speaking.

Oscar Trimboli
So, if you fold the paper vertically, it’s three. If you fold it horizontally, it’s zero. So, for many of us, you’re going to have a three is half of eight moment every day at work with your manager. You’ll have it with a coworker where they’ll say something and your mind is firing off and going, “They’re completely wrong. I’m going to wait for them to finish but then I’m going to tell them why they’re wrong.”

So, do you operate with a listening mindset that says, “Four is half of eight,” and that’s the only answer and that’s the only correct answer? Or, do you listen for difference and to explore a landscape where zero is half of eight, three is half of eight, four is half of eight, and who knows what else could be half of eight as well?

And I think many of us who operate in complex, collaborative, competitive, constrained environments would probably miss the opportunity because we’re trying to solve, we’re trying to prove, we’re trying to anticipate. And if we can just empty our minds and just be present and ask them to tell you more about that, you’ll soon help the speaker make sense of what they’re saying as well as you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you. Okay. So, then that’s a really cool illustration right there in terms of, “I’m locked in to how I’m thinking about it. If I think that you’re wrong, I’m already kind of discounting and not listening and are waiting for you to stop talking, or maybe I’m already thinking, ‘How do I kindly say this to Oscar that he’s mistaken? Hmm, let’s see.’ I’m not going to say, ‘You’re wrong.’ I’m going to say, ‘Well, Oscar, have you thought about how, mathematically, eight divided by two equals four?’”

And so, cool, that’s a really helpful story and galvanizing framework. Can you help us unpack a little bit of in the moment of listening, if we catch ourselves doing some of that, what do we do?

Oscar Trimboli
So, the first thing to become conscious of is to notice how you’re listening for similarities or difference. Now, what I want to point out is neither is correct or incorrect, or what’s appropriate for the conversation. So, a simple example is if you’re meeting somebody for the first time, if all you’re doing is listening for difference, it’ll be difficult to form a relationship because you want to find some common point of connection.

But if you’re on a project team, and the project is in its first third and it’s stuck, now is probably a good time to start to listen for difference. And for listening for difference is you need to move your orientation from the current context of the conversation, both zooming out in terms of time, in terms of orientation. So, some questions you could post to yourself is, “Is this true across time? If I went back a decade or went forward a decade, is it possible that what’s being said is true?” If it is, great. you’re starting to open up your mind to listen for difference.

“Is this true in my organization, in all organizations in our industry, in our country?” Again, if you zoom out and ask yourself, “If a competitor was listening to this, would they be agreeing or would they be laughing?” So, move your listening orientation not only to where you’re currently at in the dialogue, but start to ask yourself, “If I came back in ten years, would it matter if they’re right or wrong or can I just listen a little longer?”

Now, three simple questions you can always ask, “Tell me more,” and, “What else?” and the last one is the easiest to say and the hardest to do, it’s also the shortest, here it comes. Now, don’t worry, nothing blanked out on the mic. It’s no coincidence that the word silent and listen share the identical letters. So, for many of us, we just need to pause. The best way to unpack any conversation is to pause because that extra 125 words will come out.

So, Pete, zooming out and zooming in is one way to do it. The other thing to listen for carefully are absolutes. People give away wonderful coded language when they say, “always,” “never,” “precisely,” “impossible.” You start to listen for these code words, you know that there’s an assumption sitting behind that person.

I remember working with a lady who ran an organization that looked after the whole country, and the way they split up their business was commercial customers and private sector customers, sorry, and public sector customers. And the public sector customers, she said, “They never grow. They’re always difficult. It’s really hard. I really just want to shut down that part of the business.”

And hearing the word always, Pete, I simply said back to her, “Always?” And she smiled at me, and she took in a sigh, and she went, “Well, you know what I mean. Not always but mostly.” And I said, “If you lined up all your public sector customers in a room, which ones would be the closest to commercial?” And in that moment, she stared up at the ceiling, it felt like five minutes but it was only 30 seconds, and she looked back at me, and she goes, “There’s five customers that behave like commercial customers, and they’re growing and are really…and our team love working with them. But we’ve put a label on them and we’ve created a barrier to our own growth.”

Anyway, she took that back to her team and they had a whole discussion about these five customers, and they moved those five customers into their own business unit because, in that moment, I simply noticed her using this absolute word, always. So, listen carefully when people would use phrases like always and never and precisely and impossible. When people say that, what they’re sending a listening signal to you is there’s something to explore.

There’s a mental model, there’s a framework, there’s some kind of historical pattern that this person is matching to. But we know we all operate in dynamic systems, whether that’s our workplace, a government organization, a non-for-profit. Be open to the possibility that always is not always. And when you listen in at that level, you’ll help both parties make a big difference.

Now, Pete, it’s impossible to listen at that level if your phone…

Pete Mockaitis
Impossible, Oscar?

Oscar Trimboli
It’s impossible to listen at that level if your head is in a phone, on an iPad, on a computer because listening is something that happens in the modern part of the brain, and there’s a myth around multitasking that many people believe they can listen to a human conversation and actually listen. Now, you can listen to music and drive a car. You can listen to music and cook a meal. Any routine task, you can multitask very easily.

But when it comes to a complex dialogue, language is complex for the brain to process, you need to be present because your working memory, although it will switch between tasks, the consciousness to be present to listen, as you were, Pete, when I say, “It’s impossible to listen to human dialogue,” while doing something else.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. Well, thank you, there’s a lot of goodies here. And it’s funny, as you unpacked a little bit of what listening for difference is, look, sound, feel like, it feels like I found that I was thinking, “I do that all the time, and it’s almost because, I don’t know, I’ve got a strategy consultant brain, and maybe I’m easily bored, and I’m trying to ramp up the intellectual meatiness or challenge of that is listening to someone.” But that’s a really great takeaway is if my main goal is building up relationship, then what I want to be focused on is listening for similarities. So, how do I do that well?

Oscar Trimboli
When you’re listening for similarities, you’re listening for very simple things, either common experience, common contexts, or more often than not, if you’re meeting someone for the first time, it’s a common outcome. So, a really simple question, and the deep listening ambassador community that I mentioned earlier on, 1410 listeners that we’ve been tracking for three years, we’ve got them to test this phrase. And one of my clients in the UK has become quite famous in her industry for using this phrase to find this common connection very early, in fact, immediately at the beginning of the conversation.

And it’s simply this, “What will make this a great conversation?” Now, this is an example of a how question rather than a what question. A how question is about the process of listening versus the content of listening. And Emma, who uses this phrase, had made it her own, she says, “What would make this a great conversation for you?” So, she’s very specific, she’s focused on them. I try my question in neutral, so eight words or less is a good heuristic to think about. Your question is neutral rather than a biased statement.

So, the first question you should always ask is, “What will make this a great meeting for you?” And this is the quickest way to find commonality in the context of this meeting. Now, the reason I say, “What would make this a great meeting?” because, ideally, Pete, you’d love them to ask you the same question as well.

Now, what we’d learned from our research is only 30% of people where the deep listening ambassadors ask that question, the respondents come back and say, “What would make this a good conversation for you, Pete?”

Pete Mockaitis
Take, take, take.

Oscar Trimboli
Now, the neat thing about this question is that it acts like a compass setting for the balance of the conversation. So, I’m going to take you through, let’s call it a one-hour meeting. Now, I don’t recommend one-hour meetings. I recommend 50-minute meetings, and I recommend 25-minute meetings, but we’ll get to that shortly.

With this compass setting, “What will make this a great meeting for you?” They say, “You know, I just want to bounce the idea off you. I don’t want a solution.” Great. No problem. So, if it’s a one-hour meeting, at the 15-minute mark, you can simply ask, “Hey, Pete, at the beginning of our conversation you said you just wanted to bounce the idea off me. How are you going with that?” And Pete says, “You know what, I’ve pretty much exhausted what I want to get out. Let’s cut the meeting. I’ve got what I need.” And off we go.

So, we find commonality in that moment in the context of the conversation. This is the most effective way to do it because many of us are already coded as humans, to start listening for similar emotions, to start to listen for similar backgrounds, stories, “Oh, well, Pete, you’re a strategy consultant. Wonderful. Which kind of strategy firm were you working for? Wow, I had a strategy firm overview my business in the 1980s, in the 1990s. Tell me more about that.” That would be how I would find a connection.

Now, if you and I were having a beer in a bar, I would kind of go the opposite way, and it’s like, strategy consultant actually cost me my job once but that’s a story for another day. So, it’s easy for most us to try and find that connection as humans. We’re kind of trained in that way but to find connection in a conversation, that really simple question at the beginning will shorten your meetings and will get to the essence of the conversation much faster. So, that’s how our deep listening ambassador community are listening for similarities and creating connections early on in the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
So, Oscar, do all of us do listening for similarities and differences in every conversation? Or, do some have a slant or skew that we lean on more often?

Oscar Trimboli
Pete, I think one of the upsides of the pandemic for me is using online polling tools in the webinars I’ve been running. I know I’ve just got past 50,000 people across the English-speaking markets of the world, and, consistently, when I ask this question in a poll slide, which I will ask halfway through most of the webinars I run, “Your primarily listening preference is listening for similarities or listening for difference, listening for the familiar or the contrast.” And it’s very clear and consistent.

The majority of people, 92% on average, are listening for similarities as their primary listening orientation. You would need to be trained very differently because the Western education system from the earliest days all the way through to graduate schools are training people to patent-match and listen to similarities. Neither is right or wrong but just be conscious which one is useful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is excellent stuff when it comes to listening for similarities or differences. Do we have some other categories we should explore?

Oscar Trimboli
When I interviewed Ret. Sgt. Kevin Briggs, he’s known as the angel of the Golden Gate Bridge. So, he’s a motorcycle police officer. He’s a first respondent to people who are planning to jump off the bridge, and it’s not a pretty sight when it happens. There’s nothing glamorous about that. And he will get down there as rapidly as possible. And he told me this story about he was talking to somebody on the bridge, and, ironically, this person’s name was also Kevin, so there were two Kevins.

And the first thing Kevin always does on the bridge, he takes his jacket off if they don’t have a jacket on. So, again, he’s creating connection, he’s creating similarity there, and he’s getting down to eye-to-eye level. So, he has to literally look through a beam on the bridge to get to their eye level because to hold onto the bridge, that person has to be facing the traffic.

So, Kevin gets to eye level, which means he needs to kneel down. And as he says, he’s not the youngest person and it’s hard on his knees. Now, what he says is he’s always listening for adjectives. He’s listening for describing words. He’s listening very carefully to the kinds of words that Kevin was using to eventually describe the joy he gets from his daughter when he comes to his life.

And as Kevin explained, he was on the bridge for the best part of an hour with Kevin, and for the first 20 minutes, conversation was short. It was monosyllabic, meaning yes, no, no responses at all, and Kevin just stayed there and was present. But he realized something changed when Kevin, the jumper, started describing richer and more descriptive adjectives about his daughter. So, initially, he mentioned the daughter, and then finally he talked about his energetic daughter, his playful daughter.

These adjectives, these describing words are very interesting cues for us to understand the way people see the world. I was working in an engineering project in a pharmaceutical company, and I was brought in with this project that was literally stalled. All the execs came in, and I’ve got them to write in an envelope one word to describe the project, because the group had very low trust.

Now, when I opened these envelopes up, they described the projects the following way, and they were using adjectives: the political project, the stalled project, the waste-of-time project. All these describing words were really interesting. And the easiest thing for me to do would be to go, “Okay, great. How do we fix it?”

In that moment, I asked the group a really simple question, “Have you described this project to others the way you have anonymously put it in an envelope?” and there was a very, very heated discussion amongst the group about these adjectives they’d never discussed with each other. They were always going through the motions with each other in this big project.

At the lunch break, one of the participants came to me and said, “Oscar, why do you think our group isn’t being honest with itself?” And I said to her in that moment, “Is that a question you’d be comfortable asking the group?” And she said, “Absolutely no way.” And in that moment, I realized that by asking the group to describe the project, not whether it’s making progress or not, the problem was the team listening to itself. The problem wasn’t the project.

Now, after lunch, we had a very robust discussion. Some people might call it an argument. And in that moment, the group moved because they kept coming back to this envelope and using those labels, and, eventually, the group itself had moved on. And the project that had stalled for six months got resolved within a month, even though it was a 12-month project because the group was honest in describing what they were struggling with.

So, for fun sometimes, Pete, you just have to ask people, “What color does it feel like? If this was a drink, what kind of drink would it be? If it was an animal, what kind of animal would it be?”

Pete Mockaitis
What kind of movie would it be?

Oscar Trimboli
Exactly. And they make sense of it much faster because they feel safe describing that movie, that color, that animal, but they don’t find it as safe to describe their own feelings and emotions in that context. So, for everyone, listen at the level of those describing words, and you’ll see the compass direction the conversation should be going in rather than the initial compass setting of the conversation as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Oscar, this kind of feels like a whole another animal, this psychological safety stuff but that’s huge in terms of if they were able to just talk about these things earlier, it probably wouldn’t have gotten stuck for so long. So, any pro tips on how listening can help develop that so people feel more comfortable saying what’s really on their mind and what needs to be said?

Oscar Trimboli
It’s back to that quick comment I mentioned about shorter questions. I think a lot of time, people are listening, and no matter what content the other person is saying, they’re using that to load their argument, “I have to shoot back the next time.”Well, the first tip is to ask questions rather than make statements. So, if you want to increase safety, be open to asking questions, “Pete, I’m curious about what you mentioned on the stalled project. Tell me more about that.”

But for many of us, we want to jump in. We either want to fix, solve, progress. So, the first thing, ask questions. The second thing, try to shorten your questions. The shorter the questions, the bigger the insight. As I mentioned earlier on, just the simple act of being silent will increase psychological safety because they sense your presence.

One thing you want to be conscious of is, when done well, a great listener will change the way a speaker communicates their idea. And because of that, they’ll feel safer to say it as well. Not just the idea that’s on their mind, but the idea that’s on their heart, what their fears are, and their aspirations, not merely the next part of the content in the conversation.

So, my pro tip is simply this. Ask yourself, “Is this question that I’m about to ask designed to help me understand or is it designed to help them expand their thinking?” The highest level of that question is, “Is the question I’m about to ask helpful for me, them, and the outcome we agreed at the beginning of the conversation where we said ‘What would make this a great conversation for you?’”

If you can tick all three boxes, psychological safety is not only present, but it helps both parties explore their fears and their aspirations in that context as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Oscar, that’s beautiful. Well, tell me, we’ve covered some great stuff this time. Last time, we talked about the five levels of listening, which was beautiful. Is there anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Oscar Trimboli
For me, it’s simply this. There are four primary barriers we know to listening, whether you’re listening through the lens of time, whether you’re listening through the lens of connection, whether you’re listening through the lens of problem-solving, whether you’re listening through the lens of context. Take the listening quiz, ListeningQuiz.com. It’ll take you five minutes, seven is the maximum somebody has taken, but on average it takes five minutes.

You fill out 20 questions, and would give you a report that tells you what your primary listening barrier is and what to do about it. And we talk about that through the lens of the four villains of listening: dramatic, interrupting, lost, and shrewd, and the report outlines each of those. What we know is that when people become aware of what their primary barrier is, they can do something about it. Earlier on, Pete, we talked about the fact that people don’t often know because they think they’re six times better listener than most people do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s great. Thank you. ListeningQuiz.com.

Oscar Trimboli
Yeah.

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

Oscar Trimboli
This comes from a book that maybe most people haven’t read that’s by Neil Ferguson. It’s about a metaphor, The Tower and the Square. And it’s about power, and it’s about the difference between distributed power and hierarchical power, and how, over history, humanity is kind of juggled with both. And Ferguson, he’s a Scottish intellectual, and his quote in the book that really stood out for me is, “Does power exist if it’s not exercised?”

And, initially, I thought, “Wow, it’s something I hadn’t even considered.” And Ferguson’s quote is in the context of those two systems of power, and “Does power exist if it’s not exercised?” And that got me reading up a whole bunch of other books about power over, power across, and how people exercise power as well. But, does power exist if it’s not exercised?

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.

Oscar Trimboli
And it got me thinking because it was a question. Most quotes aren’t questions.

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

Oscar Trimboli
My favorite piece of research was around something I discovered with Speed City. Speed City was the San Jose University athletics team, which was around the Mexico Olympics, and the coach was an ex-military person. And he did very fascinating research around running styles and he broke the mold in running styles because, up until that point, running styles were very prescriptive.

And the coach had gone through, I think it was 12 and a half years of keeping track of high-performing athletes. Now, you have to remember, the athletes he trained held records from the Mexico Olympics for decades into the future in the 200 or 400. The 100 now, there was some advantages of altitude, of course, but not all of it accounts for altitude.

And the study was, and what he proved through his study was relaxing while running rather than being very prescriptive in the coaching, meaning using meditation before running. This was never done beforehand, using visualization before running, that was never used beforehand. And he got all these breakthrough performances.

In listening to the research around Speed City, at exactly the same time over at the University of Tennessee, the women’s running team, they also had breakthroughs using very similar things, and the only time they met was at the Mexico Olympics where they were able to compare notes, despite the fact they were doing this research in parallel for decades into the past. So, it tells you a bit about my running nerdiness, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s fun. Thank you. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Oscar Trimboli
Good listeners listen to what’s said. Great listeners help the speaker make sense of what they’re thinking.

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

Oscar Trimboli
Rather than learn more about me, learn more about your listening. Go to ListeningQuiz.com. Take the quiz and find out what your primary listening barrier is, and take the steps to do something about it. Or, you can get the book How to Listen and spend a bit more time unpacking the difference between good and great listening.

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

Oscar Trimboli
Just ask one more question. Keep it less than eight words.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Oscar, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun listening.

Oscar Trimboli
Thanks for listening.

Oct 10
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

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

You’ll Learn:

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

About Heather

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

Heather Hansen Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s awesome. Wow.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, about silence?

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we did, too.

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

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

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

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

Heather Hansen
No, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather Hansen
Okay.

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

Heather Hansen
Like a wobble meeple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather Hansen
Yeah, you’re lucky.

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

Heather Hansen
No, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

Heather Hansen
I love it.

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

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

Heather Hansen
You’re going to have groupies.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oct 06
0

806: How to Get Unstuck and Achieve Your Goals with Dominique Henderson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Dominique Henderson outlines some stumbling blocks hindering success and how to overcome them.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The framework for managing any problem
  2. How to make big changes easier and achievable
  3. Key words you need to erase from your vocabulary 

About Dominique

Dominique Henderson, CFP® | Dominique is a husband, father and thought leader in the financial services industry. His personal mission statement is: R.E.A.L. financial advice has the ability to change family trees, and everyone deserves an opportunity to change their family tree. As a Certified Financial Planner™, coach, speaker, podcaster and author, Dominique works to help people to get “unstuck” in their finances and careers so that they can be the best version of themselves. When not serving his clients you can find him enjoying a glass of wine, traveling with his wife, or spending time with friends. 

 Resources Mentioned

Dominique Henderson Interview Transcript

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

Dominique Henderson
Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about some insights from your book Assess, Address, and Adjust: A Practical Guide to Becoming Unstuck and Achieving Your Goals. Could you kick us off with your favorite, the best-est unstuck story that you got?

Dominique Henderson
Well, I got a lot of those. The best-est one would probably be…so, I really figured that I married up. I’ve been married to my bride for 25 years now. And one of the things that she taught me or told me as an observation, when I first started my business about six years ago, was that, “Hey, so you’re a financial advisor,” and I’m like, “Yeah,” and she’s like, “And you’re hiding behind your podcast, not showing your face, and you’re trying to get people to trust you with their money.” And I was like, “Whoa, that’s a really good insight.”

And so, even that right there helped me get unstuck because I think some of the things that we realize, and I’ve realized in coaching people, is that getting out of our own head and unlearning things that we maybe perhaps we’ve been comfortable with, or other people have told us, but just getting that outside perspective, I think, is really, really one of the foundational truths of what I’m trying to convey in this book. And that’s probably my favorite story about being unstuck. It started with me.

Pete Mockaitis
And did it work out? You got your face out there? Did that bring in the clients?

Dominique Henderson
Somewhat. I got my face out there, maybe a little bit too much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s a good-looking mug, Dom. You got that going for you.

Dominique Henderson
I appreciate that, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell me, as you’re doing your research and putting together Unstuck, was there any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you made along the way?

Dominique Henderson
So, we have to go kind of back a little. So, Unstuck is the product of a couple of things. The first is probably, if I’m just being really honest and transparent, my own selfish ambition to be, like, I want to be a writer. I’ve got a lot of stuff in me. And the pandemic afforded us some, of course, unfortunate things but also, with me particularly, the luxury of time, if you will, and to reflect.

And what I was noticing as a financial advisor, as well as a coach and consultant to financial advisors, and at least aspiring financials professionals, is there kept on resurfacing this theme, Pete, of people feeling like they had not reached their life’s potential, they were not living out their lives’ purpose, they were not fulfilling what they felt like they were on this earth to do.

And as I kept having those conversations, it kind of dawned on me when I was sharing those with my wife and just peers in my mastermind, is that I actually had some pretty good frameworks for working out what I would call where people were, which was this stuck place, to become unstuck. And so, that was the genesis, is really the pandemic. That was a blessing for me because it gave me a lot of time to reflect on those conversations, and actually put some things into action to help people.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, so then could you lay it on us then, what’s sort of the big idea or main thesis if there’s an actionable takeaway you got to remember? What is it?

Dominique Henderson
Yes. So, let’s just start with the title and then we can kind of dig a little further. So, assess, address, and adjust to achieve is a framework that I’ve used for quite some time. It is not just because I like iteration and I like the letter A. It was just because when you think about a problem that you have, let’s just look at weight. A lot of people may not be happy with how they look. They look in the mirror, and they go, “Man, Dom, you could do better. You could look better. What about those six-pack abs that you want?”

Well, first, I have to kind of assess my situation. I have to see where I am relative to where I want to be. Now, we may introduce a scale into the situation because it’s a pretty objective measure for where I am and where I want to go. And then I have to address, I have to say, “Okay, based on what I’m looking at, I want to do something about this. I need to address the situation.”

And then I move on into adjust. That means behavior-wise, I can decide to diet, I can decide to work out, I can decide to do both. I can hire a gym buddy or whatever. And that’s the way that I achieve the goal that I want. So, I think when we look at a problem or a set of problems, whatever we’re doing, that’s the rubric that I’ve kind of laid out to kind of dissect what stage you’re at in relation to getting to the end result that everybody wants when it comes to fixing a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s say the problem we’re finding in our careers is that we’re just not feeling it. We’ve lost our mojo, Dom. I used to be fired up and energized, and now I’m just kind of ho-hum. And I’m wondering, do I need to find something else? I don’t know. If we find ourselves in that place, how do you recommend we work through this assess, address, adjust bit?

Dominique Henderson
Yeah, I think I’m always a big fan of Gay Hendricks’ The Big Leap, that zone of genius part. What do you like and what do you love to do? Start there. What was it about the job that originally attracted you to that? And if you were to just kind of assess where you are right now, what about the job is not so exciting?

I think a lot of times it’s easy for us as humans to kind of look outside of ourselves for answers to what we may be feeling as a problem or reason that we’re stuck. But then to kind of say, “Hey, Dominique,” let’s just use my own personal example. So, I’ve been in financial services for 22 years now, and six years ago, approximately, I was in this really successful firm from all the metrics and stuff you do in this industry but I was not, like, really liking the rat race. Like, I was, to your point, like my mojo was gone. I wasn’t motivated to go to work. I was just like, “Ahh, I got to go through this again today.”

And my wife was noticing this behavior in me and we were talking about it, and she was like, “Well, maybe you need to start your own. Like, if you feel so strongly about the way financial services should be rendered, maybe you need to do your own.” So, I think people need to start with those questions about, “Hey, this is where I originally was thinking about this job or how I was thinking about this job, and it’s moved away. Maybe I’ve changed, maybe the job has changed, maybe the career, the industry has changed.” Do an evaluation on that and get back to what you like or what you love to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, when we do that evaluation, one bit is thinking about our zone of genius, what I really love, what’s important to me. Any other key steps in that evaluation?

Dominique Henderson
Oh, yeah, yeah. Plenty. So, I think the first part of this, and we talked about this in the book, are these three pillars that I think all success is kind of placed on. If you kind of think about this as a three-legged stool, you have your perspective, you have your programming, you have your process.

So, your perspective is just kind of your outlook, your north star, your philosophy in life. Like, how do you view things? Are you a glass half full guy or are you a glass half empty? What is it that kind of gives you how you view the world?

I think that first has to be a very, very healthy spot because, sometimes, we can, and I talk about this also, we can sabotage ourselves because we are too pessimistic, we may be a little bit too cynical about the situation, or we’re just the victim all the time. So, your perspective needs to be healthy. And I think, when we’re talking about a career situation, especially with how the pandemic has changed things, we went from being around people possibly, and interacting, and having all this feedback, if you will, to now we’re remote working, or we’re going to the office two times a week or something like that.

So, perspective is really, really good to kind of revisit to make sure that you’re coming at your particular problem and this goal that you’re trying to achieve, or wherever you’re trying to go, looking at it the right way. And, sometimes, Pete, we may have to employ other people. We may have to ask a wife or a spouse or somebody close to us that doesn’t have as much bias that we may have, looking at our own situation. So, I think that’s the beauty about perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And then you actually have a full-blown 30-day blueprint for approaching this stuff. any key actions then that pop up along the 30 days that are really transformational for folks?

Dominique Henderson
Yeah, I think, so as we go back to the three pillars, let’s revisit that. We take about 10 days or so to deal with your perspective. We take about 10 days or so to deal with your program. And we take about 10 days to deal with your process. So, your perspective, obviously, is your outlook, and that’s how we talk about that.

Your program is kind of how you run things. So, when I say run things, think about an operating system to a computer or an engine to a car. Like, you’ve got to have a way that you take your human capital, your purpose, your will, your relation, all that kind of stuff, and translate it into the world as some type of productive thing.

If you’re not doing that, it’s going to be really, really, really hard to achieve goals because the only way that the world really works is in exchange of value, so that’s your program. And then your process is you really need to have an organized system on how you’re going to spend your time. It may be, you like…I can name some things but there’s, like, the Getting Things Done method by David Allen, or Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain. There’s all these different systems that kind of organize your thoughts and how you’re going to spend your time and how you’re going to, basically, be valuable and show up in the world.

So, what the blueprint is doing is concentrating some time on different points along that journey and affirming you as you go through there. So, one big insight, I think, that most people don’t really incorporate in their lives that I’ve seen particularly powerful is accountability. And having someone that knows your situation well enough that can tell you, “Hey, Pete, I know you said you were going to do this.”

“You said you were going to do a hundred podcasts this year, and you’re only at 50, and there’s two weeks left in the year. So, let’s assess right now whether or not that was a realistic goal and if this is something you can achieve. But, as your buddy, I really want you to get to this because you said all these good things, yadda, yadda, yadda, that was going to come from it and now you didn’t achieve it. So, how are we going to fix that?”

So, it’s really, really crucial, I believe, to have that in your life, and sometimes it doesn’t feel good. Like, rarely does it feel good if it’s done the right way because they’re noticing things about you that could be defined as blind spots in your life. So, I think that’s one thing that I like in the 30-day blueprint that, if people do it, I think it will work for them, but often, like I said, it can be difficult because it’s not the most comfortable thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Yeah, I’m huge on accountability and just the power of when you commit to someone else, suddenly it’s real-er and it’s not make-believe in your head. It’s entered reality and you’re going to have to talk to somebody about it.

Dominique Henderson
Well, here’s a cool story. So, my wife was in education for 10 years, and most recently as an administrator at a public school, and she decided to leave her job as of January this year. And when we were just kind of going back and forth about the different ideas and her talent and her skill stack and all this kind of stuff, I was like, “You should really consult and kind of use some of the classroom management you used in your career for teachers because teachers are just struggling with that, educators are struggling with that.”

And I told her, I was like, “One of the first ways to do that, I mean, the easiest way is just to get on social media and just do this.” And so, I challenged her, I was like, “Do what I do with all my consulting and coaching clients. Get out there on social media and post something every day for 30 days.” Well, she went beyond and did it for 54 days, and she went from zero to, like, 36,000 followers on TikTok, so she really went at it. But the point is I was her accountability, I was like, “Hey, this is what I think you should do. I’m going to hold you to it,” and she’s like, “Yeah, this is a good idea.” And she went with it, and it worked for her.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, so we’ve assessed things, we’ve got some accountability. Any other transformational approaches when we’re looking to make a shift?

Dominique Henderson
Yeah, I think, one, and this is not a subtle thing necessarily in the book. It’s very pronounced. We talk about this also, which is vision. I think vision is so important. When I’m sitting down with a wealth management client or somebody that’s trying to get into the financial services industry, the first thing I talk about is, “What’s your why? Like, why are you doing this?”

In the case of a wealth management client, like, “Why do you want to save a lot of money?” “Because I want to retire.” “Okay, why do you want to retire for?” “Well, because I want to spend more time with the kids.” “Okay. Well, you know, you can actually spend more time with your kids without retiring. We don’t need a pile of money to do that. We can really think about the things that are important to us.”

And one of the questions I always ask is, “Why is money important to you? Like, what is it going to afford?” And so, getting back to our why, one thing I know, Pete, is that as a kid, I used to dream a lot. Like, I used to think I could be anything. I didn’t really have these self-limiting beliefs. I didn’t have boundaries on where I can go in my mind. But then “reality” sets in as an adult and I dream less.

So, I think one of the things that I really implore people to do is to dream more, like have a vision for where you want to go in life, and really define your why. I think it helps so much on the journey. It’s not going to be roses all the time. You’re going to have some difficulties there. But I think the vision, having that north star, if you will, really, really invigorates you to be the best that you can, and show up the best person you can.

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

Dominique Henderson
I think one of the things that I was thinking about when I wrote this is I really wanted people to finish this book with the idea that “I can.” I really wanted them to literally remove from their vocabulary that “I cannot.” Because from “I cannot” comes so many negative things. But, really, to have “I can” and here’s the deal.

“I can” may take some time. More than likely, it will. You may have to develop a new skill. You may have to become a different person than you currently are. But to eradicate from your vocabulary that “I cannot” was really one of the things that I think motivated me to finish this and to get this in people’s hands.

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

Dominique Henderson
So, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re probably right.” That’s one thing that comes to mind. I think that was attributed to Henry Ford, if I’m not mistaken.

The other one is, and I think they get the attribution on this wrong, but I think it’s Mark Twain, the one I know, which is, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you think you know for sure that’s just not so.” And I think sometimes the fact of unlearning something is so much more difficult than learning something new. And challenge yourself. I do this all the time because I challenge myself to unlearn concepts that don’t benefit me anymore.

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

Dominique Henderson
I like Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain. I think this is a really interesting notion for knowledge workers in today’s time because I have always been the type of person that collects information like artifacts. But before I came across his work, I was not really great at being able to retrieve what I knew, and that was because I was trying to use my brain to do it.

Just like I don’t use my brain to remember phone numbers, I use my cellphone, he has a really, really interesting framework, which I mentioned in my book also, about building a repository that allows you to retrieve information really, really quickly. So, it may be Evernote for some, it may be some other type of software that you use, but the framework that he has around it is, I think, excellent and probably would serve most people well.

So, that would be something to kind of look into if you’re one of these people that collects a lot of information, and you’re always, like, “Where did I put so and so?” whether it’s in a digital or a physical form.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Dominique Henderson
I’ve been reading a lot about The Infinite Banking Concept by R. Nelson Nash. So, just recently, I finished Killing Sacred Cows by Garrett Gunderson, but I’ve always got a lot of stuff on my nightstand. Favorites would probably have to go along the Andy Andrews. He’s a very favorite author of mine. I love The Noticer. I’ve read it a couple different times. Do I get another favorite?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Dominique Henderson
Okay. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. I love that one. I read that a couple times. So, usually, when it gets in my rolodex, like, the second or third time, it means that it’s pretty significant.

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

Dominique Henderson
Oh, man, I couldn’t live without Evernote. Evernote is my go-to of just kind of brain capture. So, if you kind of think about the thousands of ideas that run through your mind every day, how do you keep track of those? Some of them, obviously, don’t need to be written down. But for the majority of those that, or at least for creatives like myself, you’ll have something that you need to come back to later, and Evernote is kind of like my go-to because I can get to it pretty quickly as long as I have my phone, which I do always.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Dominique Henderson
I don’t think it’s a vice. This would be qualified as a vice but I love, probably three to four times a week and maybe more if I’m honest, a nice glass of red wine.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you frequently?

Dominique Henderson
Choose your version of hard. I think we have a lot of agency and more choice than we give ourselves credit for or sometimes wiling to admit, but we get to choose our version of hard. A lot of things are hard. Most things in life that are worth having are hard. Choosing your version of hard is probably something that I’ve heard more often than not, especially inside of my community.

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

Dominique Henderson
I would point them to DomHendersonSr, as in like senior, dot com. DomHendersonSr.com is the kind of hub for everything. You can get to the wealth management side of the stuff that I do. You can also get to the podcast, blog, and all the other fun stuff there too.

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

Dominique Henderson
Yeah, I would say don’t be so preoccupied, if I can use that word, with what others are doing. I think one of the problems that I’ve had, just personally speaking and being transparent, with my growth over the last six years as an entrepreneur, at first, I was way too concerned about what others were doing, and particularly comparing myself to others.

And so, I think comparing yourself to others is a recipe for failure. From a notion of replicating, duplicating what is already working somewhere, I totally get that. But I think where I took it, and where most humans take it, is “They do that better than me and I’ll never be able to be as good as they are at that particular thing.” People look at my podcast or my YouTube channel, and they go, “Dom, I can’t do video like that.” I’m like, “Well, you can start. You can start somewhere.”

So, get out of your head about comparing yourself with people. Stay in your own lane and be awesome at what you do, not what Pete does, or what Dom does, or what somebody else does. Be awesome at what you do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dom, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and minimal time being stuck.

Dominique Henderson
Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it.

Oct 03
0

805: How to Boost Your Confidence and Advocate for Yourself with Kelli Thompson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Kelli Thompson shares strategies for overcoming impostor syndrome and asking for what you need.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When self-doubt can be helpful 
  2. The exercises to boost your confidence
  3. What not do when advocating for yourself 

About Kelli

Kelli Thompson is a women’s leadership coach and speaker who helps women advance to the rooms where decisions are made. She has coached and trained hundreds of women to trust themselves, lead with more confidence, and create a career they love. She is the founder of the Clarity & Confidence Women’s Leadership Program, and a Stevie Award winner for Women in Business—Coach of the Year. She is the author of Closing The Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential & Your Paycheck, releasing fall of 2022.

 Resources Mentioned

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Kelli Thompson Interview Transcript

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

Kelli Thompson
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat with you and hear your wisdom. And I thought, for starters, could you share with us a wild tale of salary negotiation, something that was funny or dramatic? You’ve seen a lot of this stuff and so I just imagine you’ve got some cool stories here.

Kelli Thompson
Oh, my gosh, I have to just pick one? I think sometimes the wildest tales of salary negotiations was when I was sitting on the other side as an HR person, and people would come in and they would put down this salary that was just wildly above the range for the job. Like, a quick Google search could’ve told you, “Hey, this is kind of the range for this job.”

And lots of times they would get defensive on why they wanted that number, and they would give you really un-work-related reasons, like, “I want my partner to stay home, and so I need to make this much money,” or, “I have plans to buy this house, and so I need to make this much money.” And just keeping a straight face in those moments, and I get it, lots of times we want to make a certain salary so that we can have things in life that we want.

But to use it as a negotiating tool of saying, “You need to pay me this much so that I can do that,” without even having any reference of, “Hey, this is kind of the range,” those were always really entertaining, and just moments where I really just had to stay cool and calm and just practice that poker face.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it’s really interesting. And we had a great chat with Steve Dalton about negotiation sorts of matters, and he said sometimes if you share those things…I’m thinking about sort of when you’re starting a new job. When you share some of those things that could be helpful in terms of understanding your goals and how they might be able to say, “Well, you know what, we don’t actually have the ability to meet that salary number but we do have some cool benefits associated with interest-free loan for a down payment or whatever.” But saying, “I need this money because of this now, so make it happen, Buster,” ain’t going to cut it.

Kelli Thompson
No, no, not going to cut it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good to know. Well, so we’re going to talk a lot about confidence, particularly within your book Closing the Confidence Gap, confidence and advocacy in particular, as well in the zone of asking for more money. So, could you kick us off by sharing perhaps one of the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made when it comes to professionals and getting more confident?

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, I think one of the most fascinating things I’d found about really helping with confidence, and maybe it’s one of the simplest, is actually how I open the book. I think, a lot of times, we think that we will get more confident if we follow a certain set of rules. So, for instance, in my own life, my rules were, “Okay, you need to go to college. You should get this type of degree. You should find this type of job because, you know, it’s stable, it’s going to pay well, and you have promotion opportunity, and you have benefits.”

And my family origin was, “Hey, get married young so that you can have kids when you’re young and you have energy, and then you should go get a graduate degree,” like, there’s all these rules. That’s just my family’s rules. And when I talked with, especially women, that’s the majority of my clientele, they come to me saying, “Why do I not feel more confident because I literally followed all the rules, I took all the career advice I was supposed to? I followed this path but why do I feel so blech?”

And I think one of the things and one of the most surprising discoveries that they have is there’s no “Happy when…”, there’s no “I’ll feel confident when…” They think it’s going to be on the other side of a promotion or a title or a salary boost, and what they find is there’s just nothing there. And so, a lot of the things, what they actually find helped them close the confidence gap and become more confident is to live a life that’s actually aligned with their values, and stopping and asking, “What do I really want? What do I truly enjoy? And how do I say no to everything that isn’t that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, interesting. So, there’s almost an invisible script or an implied assumption, implicit and are operating mental frames, to say, “If I follow these rules, the result will be confidence, success, money,” any number of things. And people seem to discover again and again, that just doesn’t quite come to pass that way.

Kelli Thompson
Absolutely. And I think that’s just common because in the world of work, there’s just so much advice. There are so many well-intentioned, “Hey, you should do this, you should try this.” I know, even as an entrepreneur, I still get a lot of well-intentioned advice. And so, one of the things I really encourage my clients to do is really to stop, check in with your gut, “Do I even agree with that advice? Is this someone I should be taking advice from? Does this even align with my values? Does this even support what I want to do with my life? Does this even make me happy?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you for that. And now could you share the main message or thesis or core idea behind your book Closing the Confidence Gap?

Kelli Thompson
The central question behind the book is, “What would you do if you had a little more confidence?” And it really encourages to ask the readers to slow down and think about that, “What would I do if I had a little more confidence? Would I run for office? Would I ask for a raise? Would I try to set stronger boundaries at home? Would I go for the promotion? Would I quit my job?”

I’ve asked over 500 women this question, and the answers are just all over the board. But the central question of the book is, “What would you do if you had a little more confidence?” And then the book just unravels some tools, stories, lots of stories, strategies, frameworks to help you put into place some things, some actual tips that you can do, and do that thing that you said you would do if you had a little more confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And this might be a basic question, but how would we define confidence and the opposite of confidence? Because, in a way, it’s a big word that can encompass a lot of stuff.

Kelli Thompson
I have a line in the book that says, “A confident woman trusts herself. Her body is trustworthy.” And so, I really define confidence as trusting myself, like trusting my gut, my inner knowing, my nudges, and taking action on that because the actions of confidence come first, the feelings come second. And I think we can all put ourselves there where we felt nervous about doing something.

Maybe we’re going to hop on a podcast, or we’re going to give a presentation and you feel all the butterflies and got the splotchy neck and the sweaty palms, and you get into action, and when you’re done, you have the feelings of confidence. So, it’s getting into action that produces it. The opposite of confidence, a lot of people think that it’s doubt, but I think that there’s always a healthy level of doubt that comes along with confidence. And so, I like to think of confidence as a verb, and so to me the opposite of confidence would be stalling, inaction, and just being frozen.

Pete Mockaitis
When you said confidence is a verb, I was thinking of a confidence man, a con man, a flimflammer.

Kelli Thompson
That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Not that kind of confidence verb. Okay, that’s cool. As opposed to just sort of hanging back, which makes sense. It’s not so much that we’re terrified necessarily, though we might be. It could just be, “Nah, I don’t quite know about that. Maybe a little later.” So, stalling, being in a state of not doing action. Okay. Well, so let’s say we want more confidence, how do we go get it?

Kelli Thompson
So, the first place I like to have my clients start is, especially when they come to me…I work with primarily women in my private coaching practice, and when they come to me and their confidence is totally shot, they’re also usually dealing with a lot of burnout. They’re overworked, they’re exhausted, they’re not even doing work they love. They may be doing work that was delegated to them, and they just said yes because it was the “right” thing to do – and I’m putting right in quotation marks – and they just don’t feel good about themselves and their abilities anymore.

And this might seem overly simple but sometimes when someone has come to me in that sort of state, I know I’ve been there in my personal life, the first place I have them start is to write down everything they don’t want. You might be surprised on how long that list of things becomes of everything that people don’t want because they said yes to it four years ago and we just keep doing it because we don’t want to go, we don’t want to set a boundary, we don’t want to say no.

Or, we said yes to be nice, we said yes to keep a relationship that maybe isn’t serving us any longer because a lot of times when women come to me, and I say, if I would try to work on confidence and build their confidence, they are just so overwhelmed, they don’t even know what they do want. So, we always start with, “Let’s make a list of everything you don’t want, and start saying no to some of those things.” Because when we can start to clear out the things we don’t want, it removes all that noise and that interference to help us get more clear about what we actually do want, what do we value, and how we say yes to the right things in alignment with those values.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s handy. And then, I’m curious, when you’re in sort of the heat of things, like a big presentation is coming up, you’re about to ask for more money, or a high-stakes something, and you’re feeling all sorts of doubt, anxiety, do you have any tips for what you do acutely then and there?

Kelli Thompson
In the moment. Great. Yes, so all the time, I am speaking, and I’ve been a corporate trainer, I’ve been a public speaker for almost 15 years, and I still get nervous, so I just want to normalize that. But what I have them do in the moment, is I like to just encourage them to not only just use their thoughts, but I want them to use their body.

So, some things that they can do in their body. If you ever see me before a presentation, I will be standing in the corridor, doing four-count breathing. Breathing in for four counts, breathing out for four counts, and doing that over and over again because what that does is it can calm down our nervous system, get more oxygen to the brain, and kind of get us out of that fight or flight mode that likes to hijack us. Actually, the Navy Seals use that when they need to calm themselves down.

Another tip in the moment that I always encourage my clients to do, and I always do, is to always have ice water. Ice water can also just calm down the body. So, I really encourage clients to prepare, like, “Let’s have a plan for breathing, let’s have a plan for ice water. Let’s get our body regulated because then my next tips are going to help you a lot more.”

The next one is just to notice it. I think sometimes we get nervous and we get flushed, and we feel all this doubt, and then we start to shame ourselves, and, “Oh, I shouldn’t feel this way,” but I have yet to meet a person who has shamed themselves into a higher level of confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
“Stop feeling that way.” “Oh, okay. That worked.”

Kelli Thompson
I know, right? Because if you say, “Stop it. Stop it,” like, it just gets worse. So, let’s just notice it, and just notice it with a ton of compassion, and then let’s just give it a name, “You know what, this is doubt. This is doubt that comes with speaking up. This is imposter syndrome. This is nerves. This is anxiety.” Naming our emotions doesn’t give them power. It actually clarifies our language so we can have more resilience in the moment, and go, “Oh, yeah, this is just that doubt that comes.”

Then I want you to normalize it. Like, I think the statistic is 90% of people are scared of public speaking, 70% of people have experienced imposter syndrome. It is just so normal to feel doubt and nerves. In fact, I always joke with my clients that, “If you never felt doubt, we would probably be having a conversation about you being on the sociopathic spectrum.”

Like, doubt is a normal and healthy human emotion. It keeps us humble. It keeps us curious. It keeps us connected. So, let’s get back into our bodies. Let’s notice it with a ton of compassion. Let’s give it a name. Let’s just normalize it. This is normal. It’s normal. It’s normal. You can do great things while also feeling doubt. And then just reframe it.

One of my favorite reframes is, “I feel a lot of doubt, and this is good because it means I’m stretching my comfort zone today. I’m getting out of my comfort zone. This is where the learning is happening right now. This means I’m taking a brave next step, doing something that was on my goal sheet two weeks ago.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Kelli, there’s so much good stuff here I want to dig into. And I was really connecting with the notion of not shaming the emotion, and when you said, “This is normal, this is normal, this is normal,” that actually felt soothing as you were saying it, as opposed to, “I shouldn’t feel this way. I should be stronger.” The should statements – I’ve been listening to a lot of Dr. David Burns lately, hope we get him on the show later – in terms of they really do contribute to not the feelings that you’re going for.

Either the world should be different and you feel angry and frustrated that it’s not, or you should be different and then you feel sort of smaller or lame or inadequate because not only are you feeling the thing you don’t want to feel, but you are doubly cursing yourself because you shouldn’t feel that way, versus “This is normal, this is normal, this is normal” just has a calming effect right there.

Kelli Thompson
Yes, I’ve nothing to say to that than yes, it does.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then I want to talk about ice water. No joke, I was dorking out and reading all about the mammalian dive reflex which is so wild that if you put your face in cold water, you will literally have a bodily reflex that lowers your heart rate. I have tested this in my office with a heart rate monitor, because that’s what I do for fun, and it’s handy. So, that’s one approach is dunking your face in cold water. I have a feeling you have a different view when you said ice water. What’s your ice water approach?

Kelli Thompson
So, my ice water approach is, and if you are watching us on video right now, you would see me holding up ice water. Like, I always have ice water every time. I’m even talking to you on a podcast because, again, I want to normalize, normalize, normalize. I get nervous and I feel doubt even before I hop on podcasts, I have ice water. As you said, it feels like it slows the heart rate down because I get warm, I get flushed. I’ll just be honest. I start pitting out in my clothes.

And so, when I have ice water, whether I’m going on stage to speak, whether I’m going to be doing a webinar or a podcast, or speaking in front of a room, I always have ice water because it just helps bring that body temperature down a little bit and just slows everything down. And you have the proof, I’ve never done this on my iWatch, but now I’m going to try. I’m going to actually watch my heart rate on my iWatch and have a little fun with your experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And, in addition to the cooling, I think it also – is the word somatic awareness – it’s just a sensation that it’s a little jolt, like, “Oh,” and just sort of brings you into your body in terms of, “Oh, this is a thing that I’m feeling now,” as oppose to, you’re projecting all these worst-case scenarios or whatever that could be unfolding from your mind.

Kelli Thompson
Absolutely. And you used the word somatic awareness, so I’m going to go there because I actually talk a lot about somatic awareness in my book. In fact, one of the things that I talk about when it relates to confidence is I say that a lot of leadership development is what I call neck-up leadership development. And I know this because I design and develop leadership training programs for decades, and everything is, “How do we build more confidence?” And it’s all in our brains and our thoughts and thinking differently.

And when we teach leadership, it’s like, “How do we teach how to give feedback, performance reviews, ROI, look at the PowerPoint deck, the financial statement?” But one of the things that we don’t pay enough attention to that I talk about a lot in the book, and I talk about a lot with my clients because it’s worked for me too, is dropping below our neck and asking ourselves, “How am I feeling in my body? What is my body doing? What can I do with my body to…?” sometimes rev ourselves up.

I’m taking this podcast standing up because I know I sound different. I feel different when I’m talking and presenting when I’m standing up versus sitting down. How do those emotions actually feel in my body? And how can I just feel them, just as you’ve said, instead of constantly ruminating around what I’m making this feeling mean? Like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m not qualified. I’m going to fail, blah, blah, blah.”

No, I can just feel that in my body. I can breathe through that emotion. I can name that emotion. I can drink my ice water. I can change my posture to make me feel a different way. So, thank you for bringing that up because really getting in tune with our bodies is not something we talk about in the workplace, and it is so important when it comes to just changing our level of awareness and, I think, ultimately, boosting our confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You also mentioned imposter syndrome a couple times. Tell us, what precisely is imposter syndrome? Is that any different than regular old doubt? Is there a different approach we should take when we’ve got it? Can you unpack that?

Kelli Thompson
Yeah. So, I was speaking at a women’s leadership conference, and I actually asked that question of the audience, and one of the women just blew everyone away. She said, and I think she defines it best, she said, “You know what, doubt is just kind of an emotion that we feel. An imposter syndrome is self-sabotage.”

And how it’s actually defined, it was coined in 1978 by two researchers, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, and this study was done on women. It is a belief that despite a woman’s accomplishments, her credentials, her success, her accolades, she still feels like she’s going to be found out at any moment, or that she doesn’t belong in the room, or that she wasn’t worthy of what she’s accomplished, and all of this has been a source of luck.

And so, that causes women, and now the most recent studies, I think, have really broadened that to say, actually, 70% of people feel imposter syndrome, especially if you’ve experienced racial discrimination, if you work in a very gender-dominated industry where there are certain gender norms, or you work in a field like academia where brilliance is prized, that levels of imposter syndrome are really high.

And just because of this belief of being found out, or that “I’m not qualified,” or, “All my success has been luck,” it this consistent kind of self-sabotage to say, “Well, I’m not going to apply for the promotion. I’m not going to ask for what I deserve. I’m going to hold back,” and sometimes it can cause individuals to play small.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if we find ourselves doing some of that sabotage, entertaining some of those beliefs, what should we do?

Kelli Thompson
A lot of the techniques that I use are very similar to what I just already described in terms of let’s just notice it with a ton of compassion, “You know what, this is imposter syndrome. This is just what this is. It’s just I’m not going to shame myself out of this,” and giving it a name. But what I really encourage my clients to do is I like to think of imposter syndrome as like kind of an umbrella emotion.

Underneath imposter syndrome you might feel doubt, worry, insecurity, overwhelm, excitement, and really getting granular about that. But I want to normalize it but one of the things that I also talk about is I believe that I don’t even like to use the word fix imposter syndrome because I don’t think people need to be fixed.

But one of the things that I want folks to be aware of is that let’s also make sure that we are not working for an organization who does not have diversity in the room because imposter syndrome is more prevalent when people have not seen themselves in the highest levels of leadership. So, if you’re working for an organization that continues to have all white men in the senior leadership team, notice that maybe that imposter syndrome is not your fault, and it could be because, gosh, I literally cannot see myself in those rooms where the decisions are made.

So, I really encourage a both-and approach for imposter syndrome. One, if you are a leader of an organization, how are you creating a diverse workforce and psychologically safe environments where people feel seen? They watch people like themselves get promoted, speak up, make decisions while also knowing that imposter syndrome is a very real feeling. And I can also use some of the same techniques I provided earlier in the podcast to help me move through those feelings – because that’s what it is, it’s a feeling – and take action.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s shift gears a little bit and say that we’ve done a lot of the internal work in terms of the breathing, the ice water, thinking this is normal, this is normal, getting clear on what you want and what you don’t want, and these sorts of things. And then the time comes, we are about to advocate for ourselves. What are the best practices in executing that well?

Kelli Thompson
So, in advocating for yourself, I think it really depends on what you are advocating for. So, let’s just use the example of a salary ask. And so, if we are advocating for ourselves in terms of a salary ask, I really like for folks to, and this is coming from my HR perspective, come with the data. There is so much available data out there right now so that you can look at your job, and say, “Hey, what are the ranges that this should pay?”

So many states are requiring now jobs to put the salary ranges on the job posting so that we can kind of get a sense of what it’s paid. So, Glassdoor.com, PayScale.com, you can Google your state, BLS Wage System, and that will actually give you…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I’ve spent a lot of fun time there, actually, the website.

Kelli Thompson
That’ll give you hard data. So, find your data. And so, I think if you’re going to advocate for yourself, finding the data is always a great place to start. And then I think when we’re going to advocate for ourselves, I think step two, it’s really important to own what’s unique about you. Like, own your unique talents.

So, if you’re advocating for a raise, you’re advocating for a salary, maybe you’re advocating for a promotion, or you should be the person they pick for that project, own what is unique about you. Like, what is the thing that only you can bring to the table? Because I think that really helps reduce some compare and despair.

And then list that out to say, “Because I am able to do these things, here are the results I’ve been able to accomplish for the organization.” I can’t stress enough, as someone who’s been an HR leader in excellent times and has been an HR leader in the 2008 recession in banking, nothing is more important than to be able to communicate your talents and how that has correlated into results for the organization. Organizations and leaders love results.

And I think the third step really is working through that doubt, the imposter syndrome, just noticing that those feelings are normal, “This is normal, this is normal, this is normal,” and just reframing your mindset, like, “I am worthy of making this ask. This feels uncomfortable because I’m stretching my comfort zone.”

And then I just really encourage folks, when they’re advocating, I love to write things down first. In fact, there’s some neuroscience that shows that when we kind of go to the act of writing, it’s like pre-gaming. It’s like imagining in our heads so that way we can actually get to the thing, our brain is like, “Oh, we’ve done this before. I know my script. I have it written down. I’ve practiced it,” and then make your ask with confidence.

So, I think just to sum that all up, it’s really knowing your data, knowing the facts, owning who you are and how your unique talents have contributed towards results, and then taking action, knowing that the actions of confidence will probably come first and the feelings will come second, but being clear about your ask, practicing it, so you can make that clear ask, and ask for what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when making the actual ask, are there any key words, phrases, choice gems of verbiage you’d recommend we do or don’t say?

Kelli Thompson
Oh, I love how you said don’t say because lots of times, and, again, I’m talking with women who may have been conditioned, through no fault of their own, that they shouldn’t ask, it looks greedy, “You shouldn’t talk about money,” there can be messages. So, what I hear sometimes is tentative thinking, like, “I was kind of thinking that…” or, “Would you be able to blank? But if you can’t, that’s okay.” So, I would avoid that, “So, if you can’t, that’s okay.”

I even really encourage them to notice, like when you go in and say, “Hey, I’ve been taking a look at the salary data. And based on my unique skills of X and Y, I’ve been able to deliver A, B, and C this year, so I’d like us to take a look at my salary, and I think a salary of $100,000 is fair.” And what they do is there’s that silence that happens, and a lot of us aren’t okay with the silence.

So, what they shouldn’t do is jump to fill that silence because I think sometimes what happens is they fill the silence, and like, “But if you can’t, that’s okay.” So, I really encourage them to avoid doing that and just allow the silence to be, because lots of times the other person just needs time to process that. So, make the clear ask and allow for the silence.

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

Kelli Thompson
I think the biggest thing when it comes to advocating, boosting your confidence, all the salary-ask conversation, it’s just to be clear. People are horrible guessers and so I think it’s really important to be clear about what you don’t want when it comes to building your confidence, and then ultimately clear on what you do want. I think it’s important to be clear on what you’re advocating for and making clear asks. So, I often say that success loves clarity because our world is noisy. So, the more clear you can be, I think the more successful you can be.

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

Kelli Thompson
So, there are so many but the one I think I absolutely have to go with is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote. It informs really my entire business mission, and that is, “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”

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

Kelli Thompson
Well, right now, it should definitely be the confidence gap. That is a real study that was done by Wharton who studied the gender-based differences in confidence and how well people performed versus how well they advocated. And, as it showed, men tended to advocate a little better even though women tended to perform a little better. So, that’s the research right now that I’m obsessed with and it’s featured in my book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Kelli Thompson
My favorite book, the one that I have read three times, I’ve taken the online course, and I give it away to everybody I can, is The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown.

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

Kelli Thompson
Calendly. I literally cannot live without Calendly. I don’t know where it was for the early majority of my life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Kelli Thompson
I love getting up and working out in the morning. If I don’t get up and work out, especially lift weights in the morning, like, I am just unfit for human consumption.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ve all consumed you.

Kelli Thompson
It just makes me a nicer person, right? It goes back to the whole body thing you talked about, the somatic awareness. When I get into my body, I just feel better, I have more confidence.

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

Kelli Thompson
One of the things that has been highlighted in my book, because there’s been a group of readers who’ve had early access to it, and it’s a quote that I didn’t even think of when I wrote it, but it’s the number one highlight in my book. And it says, “A woman does not need to have a title to be a leader. She is any woman who wields influence.”

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

Kelli Thompson
Come visit me at KelliRaeThompson.com. You can learn more about my book and there’s lots of free downloads on my site, including a salary negotiation tool.

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

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, let’s just practice some compassion. I love the tip that you said, in your next moment where you’re feeling doubt, let’s just all, together, say, “This is normal, this is normal, this is normal, this is normal.” And then, remember, take your bravest next step, the actions of confidence come first, the feelings will come second.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kelli, this has been a treat. I wish you much confidence and success in the weeks ahead.

Kelli Thompson
Thank you so much for having me.