Communication Archives - Page 2 of 27 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis

Valerie, welcome.

Valerie Fridland

Well, thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

I am, like, literally so excited to be talking about your work and the implications of language in life and business and professional careers. So, tell us, what is your area of expertise as a professor and researcher and writer?

Valerie Fridland

Well, that’s a bit of a tongue twister. I’m what’s called a sociolinguist, which you don’t want to say five times in a row at a party because it tends to get blurred together. But what I basically study is how the language we use comes from who we are socially, and this can be things like whether we’re young or old but also from the way we interact in particular social settings. So, it’s not, like, there’s just one system of language and we use that same system everywhere. Language is really fluid and flexible depending on who we are generally and who we are in moments, and that’s what I study.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Lovely. And you have packaged some of your insights into your book, Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Tell us, any particularly surprising discoveries you’ve made while putting this together?

Valerie Fridland

I think every chapter was actually something very surprising to me even as a linguist where I knew some generalities about it, but as I did more of a deep dive into the background and history of some of these features that we love to hate in our speech, like “like,” or, “literally” used non-literally, that they all had these really fascinating histories to get to where they are today. A lot of them are centuries old, even though we think they’re new things.

So, I think the biggest surprise for me was how old some of the features that we think are new are, and also how “um” and “uh” are incredibly useful from both a listening and a speaking perspective, and I had known that there was literature that suggested that we do them because we’re thinking harder, but I didn’t know the extent of how impactful they are on a listener as well until I started doing the research.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, Valerie, we just can’t wait. How is that impactful and useful to a listener hearing “ums” and “uhs”? I’m assuming you mean impactful not just in the “I’m so annoyed at this unprepared speaker,” but rather in some other ways.

Valerie Fridland

It might be impactful in that way as well, but I think “um” and “uh” are a great example of things that we feel are socially not helpful, that actually offer a lot of linguistic benefits, and that’s why we do them, because things don’t just spontaneously happen just because. In language, they happen because they’re doing something for us.

And “um” and “uh” are interesting because, A, they’re universal. We really haven’t found a language yet that doesn’t have some form of “umming” and “uh-ing.” They may not sound exactly like English, so it might be “a” and “ano,” for example, in Japanese, but they have similar traits of being these short words that we put in when we’re thinking heavily about what we’re saying.

From a listening perspective, I think what was fascinating to me is that there’s a difference between “uh” and “um” that I think people don’t realize. We typically “uh” when we simply need a very short break to process something in terms of what we’re going to say. But we say “um” when we are doing even heavier cognitive retrieval.

So, what we find when we look at research, if we measure the pause length that follows an “uh” or an “um,” people pause longer after “um,” suggesting they’re searching for a word more deeply in their cognitive archives, than when you use an “uh.” And, typically, people tend to have some sort of sense of how long they need to break for. So, they understand how deeply they need to think.

So, when we asked students questions that could have one-word answers but some of them were more difficult than others, so, for example, “What’s your dog’s name?” which should be pretty easy for you to come up with, versus, “What’s the name of the sport in which they award the Stanley Cup?” which people like me would have no clue, we find that people either used “uh” or “um” depending on how long they thought it would take them to answer, which is really fascinating.

But the even more amazing thing about your “ums” and “uhs” in the listening perspective is they seem to signal to a listener that you’re going to say something that requires them integrate new information. So, for example, if we’d been talking about names, and then I was using a name that we’d talked about before, I probably wouldn’t say “uh” or “um” before it.

But if I’m switching course and bringing up something completely different, I probably would say “uh” or “um,” which signals that my brain is actually connecting different cognitive resources and different neural pathways to this conversation. Well, by doing that, by saying “uh” or “um” as a speaker, what I do is I get you ready as a listener for harder thinking, harder processing.

So, what we find is when we give people pop quizzes about an hour after a conversation or a story, they actually remember the points that followed an “uh” or an “um” better than they remembered the ones that didn’t, which I think is pretty amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

Wow. Yeah, that’s fascinating, and I had no idea. So, they remember that better than if they didn’t have it. And part of me wonders then, have we also done the experiment, comparing that to just silence prior to?

Valerie Fridland

Yes, that’s a very good question because, right, one thought would be, “Well, simply because there’s a little more time between.”

Pete Mockaitis

And some suspense, “I’m curious, what’s he going to say?”

Valerie Fridland

And so, we’ve done it where it’s silence, so silent pauses, and also where there are other noises, like a cough, that is the same amount of time as an “um” or an “uh,” and those do not have the same effect. In fact, we find that coughing actually makes it harder for people to remember what came after, so it’s more disruptive to the thinking process as a listener. But a silent pause does not have the same impact, so it doesn’t help you at all. So, it’s specifically “uh” or “um.”

What’s even more interesting is if a listener is listening to someone who they expect will not be fluent in English, so it might be a non-native speaker or it might even be someone that they’ve been told has some sort of speech impediment, it doesn’t have the same effect because then they think it’s related to their speech disfluency rather than as a signal of heavy cognitive information retrieval. And so, it does seem to be very specific to what we know and do for us typically.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s so fascinating. And I’m going to speculate, and you tell me what we know or don’t know or what the smarter speculators are speculating. I’m guessing that’s because somewhere deep inside us, we know or understand or have linked and learned that something which comes after an “um” is something that is thought out, it is considered, some effort has gone into it, and, thusly, we afford it, more value or significance or import, like, “Ooh, this is a treasure that is about to be placed upon me,” as opposed to some junk you can rattle off without thinking.

Valerie Fridland

I think it’s more like, “Oh, my God, they expect me to think by using that, so I better get ready.”

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, okay.

Valerie Fridland

So, when we look at the statistical distribution of where “uh” and “ums” tend to occur, they always occur in the average use before more abstract, more difficult, less common, or less familiar words, or at the very beginning of a sentence when we’re mapping out the sentence structure, especially of complex sentences. Which means that, as listeners, what we’ve been exposed to is that “uh” and “um” precede hard stuff, right? They precede things that are taking a little more cognitive effort.

So, that’s probably why we have learned to be trained into letting it signal to us that we better ramp up our cognitive resources to do some heavy cognitive lifting when we hear “uh” or an “um” in the speech stream. So, in other words, it’s sort of like a flag that says, “Hey, hard word here,” and I get my brain ramped up for that hard word because I know it’s coming due to the “uh” or the “um.”

Pete Mockaitis

And is there an optimal length of “um” or “uh” so as to maximize the powers of this effect?

Valerie Fridland

Well, “uh” seems to be more effective than “um.” and that’s probably because it signals shorter pauses than longer pauses.

And when someone “ums,” we find people are more likely to try to jump in and help them, and I think that’s because when you “um,” it signals to a listener that it’s a harder thing you’re doing, that you’re really searching more deeply in your cognitive word lexicon to come up with that word, so as a listener you start thinking, “Huh, what word are they meaning?”

Because have you ever had that happen where someone’s like, “It’s uh, uh,” and you were like, “Okay, I could come up with that word for you”? It drives my mother crazy, actually, because I do it to her all the time. But I think the “um” tends to signal that someone needs more help and, therefore, we don’t think about what they’re saying as much as what they are needing to try to say or get out, and it doesn’t help us.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. And could you tell us a little bit about the magnitude of this effect? Is this a smidgen more memorable, or is this like dramatically, double, triple memorable?

Valerie Fridland

I don’t think it’s a magnitude effect of in huge enormous order because there are a number of different things that can influence it. For example, if you say “uh” instead of “um,” also what type of speaker you are, if you’re native, non-native speaker, if someone thinks you have a speech disfluency, all those things affect us. It also depends on the listener and the speaker’s relationship and whether they know that person “uhs” and “ums” a lot, it’s just a habit, because we do have heavy “um-mers” that might say “uh” or “um” a lot.

And if that happens, you’re probably less likely to have this keeping on happening every time they’re using an “uh” or an “um.” And I think we’ve all met that person that “uhs” pretty much every word. Well, you just can’t devote that much mental energy to them. In fact, it can be kind of exhausting. So, I think we have to just sort of mitigate it to say “uh” and “um” are not bad things, in terms of how they signal to a listener that we’re actually coming up with some pretty important things that they need to listen and pay attention to.

The magnitude effect is that it’s certainly happening more than when they don’t do anything before those words. Whether you want to add “uh” in front of important words in a presentation, I would say that you probably want to hold off on that, but whether you want to eradicate them from your speech, that would be where I would spend more time thinking about.

So, say you’re preparing for a presentation as a speaker at a business or at a convention that you’re going to, I think what you need to think about is, “Do I ‘uh’ or ‘um’ as a habit where it’s distracting because what it’s indicating to a listener is I haven’t practiced enough because I’m searching for the words?” because that’s what “uh’ and “um” mean to us.

“Or is it helpful because it’s before key points that I might want them to remember later?” And I think that’s where the fundamental difference lies. If it’s before key points, it actually can be helpful. If it’s every other word, or even every key point, then it’s actually going to be distracting. So, I think you just have to be really strategic in what you choose to do with “um” and “ah.”

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I think the most striking thing you said is that it’s more potent than a silence, because I have found, sure enough in my own experience, when someone’s speaking, then they just pause for a while, “Well, what’s going on?” I mean, they’ve really got me. And so, if the impact of an “uh” is better than a silence, that sounds pretty potent indeed.

Valerie Fridland

Well, silences are confusing. I think what happens is when someone pauses, we don’t know why they paused. So, they could pause because they’re trying to give a rhetorical effect and really make us think about what they just said, or they could pause because they don’t know what they’re saying, or they could pause because they’re having a heart attack. I mean, we just don’t know.

And so, we’re, as a listener, trying to struggle to figure out why they’re pausing, but when we “uh” or “um,” we know what that is, and so it’s a really clear signal that someone is continuing, is planning to continue the talk, and also that they’re just needing a break to process things.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And tell us then, thinking about in professional context, if we are using “ums” and “uhs” or “likes” and “literallys,” what is the perception of us as speakers by those listening and hearing us, ideally in a professional environment, if you have that research available? Because I think that could be a concern is like, “Oh, my gosh, I sound like a moron with all my ‘ums,’ ‘uhs,’ ‘likes,’ ‘literallys.’” And to what extent is that well-founded versus a dream?

Valerie Fridland

I would say that one of the things people ask me a lot is how they can stop using “like” so much because they feel like it makes them sound like an idiot. I mean, that’s definitely something that people come to me to see if they can get any help, and there’s a couple things that I need to talk about before we break down the research on that. One thing is that “um” and “uh” are actually quite different than “like” and also “literally” used non-literally.

“Ums” and “uhs” are what we call filled pauses, and they actually are cognitive flags of processing. So, they’re really not having any semantic content or literal meaning. They don’t contribute anything to the meaning of what we’re saying. They’re simply indicating that a speaker is actually processing things in their brain, and that’s just a sort of verbal, “Hold on a sec.” “Like” has some content. So that’s different than a filled pause. That’s what linguists call a filler word because it fills a space in a sentence that could exist without it. So, I could say, “He’s, like, going to go there,” or I could say, “He’s going to go there,” and in both cases, the general meaning is the same. But if I say, “He’s, like, going to go there,” that actually gives you as a listener a little different vibe about what I’m trying to get across than if I just said, “He’s going to go there.” It might indicate to a listener, “I’m not 100% sure when or how or if, but I think he’s going to go there,” versus a statement like, “He’s going to go there.”

Or, if I said, “He’s, like, ‘I’m not going to do it,’” what that tells listeners, it might not be verbatim. If I said, “He said ‘Whatever,’” that tells you this is exactly what he said. But if I said, “He was, like, ‘I don’t think so’” that just means that’s the gist. It’s not verbatim. So, it actually communicates some literal meaning. I know it’s a really fine distinction, but it’s actually important in how we use them.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m laughing because sometimes when you’re communicating what happened, people might just make noises for the gist of what someone said, “She’s all like, ‘Aargh.’” And so, you wouldn’t ever say, “She said, ‘Wah!” “No, I’m sure she didn’t say that.” But if she’s like that, it’s like, “Oh, she was feeling kind of frustrated and irritated by your request.”

Valerie Fridland

Bingo!

Pete Mockaitis

“Yes, she was like that noise.”

Valerie Fridland

That’s exactly right. That’s a perfect example of the difference between “say” and “like.” The other thing we find with that quotative is sometimes people will say “I was like” when they’re talking about themself and then they’ll use a different verb to describe what someone else said. So, I might say, “Well, he said he didn’t want to do that, but I was like, ‘Hell, yes, I’m going to do that!’” where it’s more like you’re describing your thought process, and you want to make sure that someone doesn’t think you actually said it out loud. So, there’s actually a lot of nuanced meaning to “like” in those circumstances that it does communicate.

I think the “like” that people tend not to like is the one that we call a discourse marker, which is where it’s sort of just stuck in between things. So, it can be at the beginning of a sentence, it can be at the end of a sentence, it can be just stuck in the middle of a sentence, but people tend to think that it really has no meaning, that it doesn’t contribute much. And I think what we find is people tend to react more negatively in job interview settings, or in even communicative settings, to those kinds of likes than the likes that’s used as either an approximator.

And that would be something such as, “He was, like, 12 years old,” instead of, “He was about 12 years old,” or the quotative verb, because those actually serve a purpose, and the “like” that’s just stuck in at the beginning or the middle don’t seem to serve a purpose to us. So, I think what’s really important when we talk about, “Do people like or not like “like” in communicative or job settings?” is, “Which kind of ‘like’ are you talking about?”

As an approximator, “like” doesn’t really affect people’s interpretation of you because it’s so widespread and it seems to be across the age groups, and that’s the one where you’re using it instead of “about.” We do find a trend that younger speakers use it more in that context than older speakers, but even then, it’s quite prevalent in all ages’ speech. The quotative and the discourse marker “like” do tend to be typically younger speakers. And for that reason, when we look at how they sort of perform as speakers in job interview contexts and when they’re using “like,” they do tend to get a negative bent in their receptivity of job interviewers when they do that.

What that means is when you’re going to a job interview or a context that’s high stakes in a workplace environment, particularly if that environment or the upper management is older, using “like” in those other contexts does seem to give off a negative opinion of you. But the interesting thing is when we looked at that same research that showed that, that evaluators tended to rate people down if they used those kinds of “like,” we find that when they were in an interaction in that same interview, where they were having casual conversation about their families, or activities, or something that sort of switched from the more formal parts of an interview to the less formal parts, we find that that actually increased sociability ratings of that candidate.

So, I think what’s really the key takeaway here is when you walk into an interview, do you want to use “like” wildly? No. But, again, if you’re having a casual, more intimate conversation about something social rather than something occupational, it’s okay to let that more informal language out a little bit. You just want to be a little measured in your use.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it sounds like when you say it’s okay, it may even, in some contexts, be superior. Like, if we’re in a casual, socializing, bonding environment, and I am speaking in the Queen’s perfect English the whole time, like, “Valerie, what plans do you have for your weekend? I am looking forward to going on a boat with some friends.”

Valerie Fridland

“With whom do you want to go on the boat with?”

Pete Mockaitis

With whom, yeah. And so, it’s almost like, are you, like, do you have a script? Or is this just how you talk? Or what’s going on here? In terms of there’s a time and a place where these components seem to reinforce the vibe in a positive, likeability way.

Valerie Fridland

Absolutely. And I think what you did is you hit on a really interesting fact about language, is we have a repertoire or a sort of continuum that we operate on between this very, very formal, in a really high-stakes context type of language, and then we have the really solidarity-based, friendly, intimate language, and we all vary on those two poles of our daily conversation. So, when I’m talking to my family or a friend over a beer, if I talk to them like I talk to my boss at work, I wouldn’t have a lot of friends to have a beer with.

The same goes to say with my boss. If we have a more kind of distant relationship, if I take a too intimate tone with him linguistically, that will not go across very well. But what if I’m trying to build that kind of a relationship? Then I might want to add some more informal banter and talk about casual things in those tones because that will help us build a relationship. Because part of what makes us understand our relationship to each other is the way that we choose to talk to each other. So, if I use overly formal speech, what I’m doing is I’m distancing us.

And what we find, actually, is when we look at joking contexts or arguing contexts, joking contexts tend to have more informal speech. When we start to argue, we tend to actually use more like G’s on our I N G’s and more formal speech overall because we’re trying to take a power and authoritative stance. And I don’t think when we have a relationship with someone that’s friendly and casual, we want to have an authoritative stance with them. So, I think we do need to weigh carefully the types of relationships we have and what’s the most appropriate language to use in those contexts.

And, again, a lot depends on who you’re talking to. So, if you’re in a very white-collar field with older white men as who you’re going to be talking to, chances are a more distant, formal, linguistic environment will be what you find there. If you’re doing it at a startup in Silicon Valley, and they’re playing pool while they’re interviewing you, chances are you want to use a little more “like” and be a little more flexible, maybe even stick an “um” or an “uh” in and say “literally” non-literally about five times, because that’s the kind of language use that’s going to ingratiate you in that context. So, I think there’s no one answer. There’s a variety of answers, depending on the context you find yourself in.

Pete Mockaitis

In terms of thinking about professionals who want to be more awesome at their jobs, you have a wealth of knowledge about linguistic matters, we’ve covered a few fun nuggets here, what are some of the top do’s and don’ts that your research has highlighted for professionals in this context?

Valerie Fridland

Well, I think one really interesting do is that we should be a little more intense. When we look at people that use adverbial intensity, and what I mean by adverbial intensity is they use adverbs that pump up or ramp up how much they are trying to express of something. So, if I say, “I’m totally excited about this,” or “It’s really great the way our numbers have shot up,” that’s the use of intensity.

When we look at studies that measure how much people use adverbial intensity in workplace settings, we find that people that don’t use them, come across as very robotic and less sociable, and people that do use them not only come across as more sociable, but also as more reliable and as more believable. And I think that’s because when you use an intensifier, which is ramping up an adjective or a verb, what you’re expressing is, “I’m really confident in this. I don’t just feel like it’s good. I feel like it’s really good.” So, it’s basically saying, “I’m pretty committed to what I’m saying here, that I believe in its truth.”

Whereas, if I don’t use an intensifier, “You know, you take it or leave it,” I think there’s an ad that’s sort of, “Just okay is not okay.” Have you seen that ad? And it’s like, “How’s the surgeon?” “He’s okay.” I mean, no one wants a surgeon that’s just okay. You want a surgeon that’s really amazing. And it’s, again, this idea of intensification, highlighting how much of a quality something has, and my belief and commitment to it.

And so, as a speaker in a presentation or a business setting, I want to convince the people that I’m talking to, whether it’s sales or marketing, that I’m 100% on board with what I’m saying, and using some intensification can really help that. I think that’s one good finding that linguistic research can parlay into the job setting.

Pete Mockaitis

That is phenomenal. And we had Jonah Berger on saying similar things, that we like to hear confidence, totality, absoluteness, in so far as you could do that without being deceptive or, like, “Actually, we need a reasonable risk profile on this, and so your totally, absolutelys, are actually making me more nervous.”

Valerie Fridland

Right, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis

But in many contexts, we like a lot of absolutely, totallys, even if it’s a, “Hey, unfortunately, I know I said, ‘Absolutely, I could do that by Thursday’ but, you know, these emergencies have popped up.” Are you aware, do we lose face or credibility if we play the adverbial intense game and then don’t deliver more so than if we’ve played it safer?

Valerie Fridland

Well, I think it depends on how reliable you are, typically. I think that’s really a personnel-driven issue rather than a linguistic-driven issue. If you tend to do what you say, then I don’t think, whether you’re intensifying or not, people are going to be disturbed by you promising something extremely and not delivering.

But if it’s a pattern, then, absolutely, what it does is it actually makes people believe you less, and I think if you intensify more and deliver less, that’s absolutely going to be problematic. But I think that’s really personality-driven and how good an employee you are has a problem that’s less to do with your language and more to do with your performance.

But another thing that I would suggest that people think about when they’re trying to use language to help them in a job is we do a lot of speaking in our work, and sometimes we’re speaking to just colleagues and it’s really casual. Other times we’re giving presentations or we’re talking at a meeting and we’re representing something.

One thing that we find is when people are dynamic speakers, and that means that they use a fairly fast speech rate, and they moderate their tone up and down, obviously, you don’t want to do it in a weird way where it comes across like I’m doing it in a perfunctory manner, but just in a very excitable sometimes a little slower and more dramatic and others, that you’re moderating your tone a bit and your prosody, that those speakers come across as more charismatic.

And when people are more charismatic speakers, we don’t notice things like “ums” and “uhs” and “likes” as much. So, we filter them out because we’re really, really interested in what they’re saying. So, I think what we need to do is think about, “How can I be a dynamic speaker?” especially on Zoom, a lot of us are doing virtual meetings. And is there anything worse than having someone drone on and on in a monotonous voice, saying something very uninteresting without any dynamicity? Not really. So, think about being a dynamic speaker.

The faster you speak, and I don’t mean be crazy fast, make sure, obviously, people can understand you, but faster speech rate tends to correlate with better ratings of speakers, and a little more dynamic in your tone. And if you try to do those in a natural way, it can help you come across as a better speaker.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, thank you. Along the lines of don’ts, I’d also love to hear do you have any particular pet peeves that just annoy you so much? And also, there is scientific evidence, research to suggest, “Hey, it’s not just you. Most people can’t stand this, so maybe we should cut it out.”

Valerie Fridland

That’s a hard one because I’m supposed to know better. Of course, there are things that that annoy me. I’m personally really dedicated to LY on adverbs. I really love my LYs, so I like to go slowly rather than slow. And I don’t want to walk quick, I want to walk quickly. And research does show that those are going the way of the dodo, so I’m in a minority in terms of wanting to use them. But it is still something that prescriptively people do suggest you use. So, it does prescriptively seem to matter to people in writing, but in everyday speech it doesn’t seem to matter. But I also know that’s a me problem and not an LY problem so I’m trying to be more understanding of it.

The other thing that I think most people find annoying is those terms like “bruh” or “bro.” That actually drives me crazy. Well, the only reason is because I have a daughter who calls me “bruh” all the time, and I think there are a lot of older speakers that feel that way. But in general, I’m pretty understanding about almost everything we do in language because language change is fundamentally what brought us the English we speak today. I don’t think anybody wants to go back to the days of Beowulf, so I’m pretty open.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, I’d love to share with you some of mine and you tell me if there’s any research on this or I’m just a quirky fellow.

Valerie Fridland

Okay, I’d love to hear it. What is it?

Pete Mockaitis

I don’t care for, I think it’s kind of related to each other, when people say “obviously” as well as “right?” So, when someone say, “Well, obviously, this is the best podcast ever.”

Valerie Fridland

Well, obviously it is.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, it’s like, it just feels so presumptuous. I also feel the same way, like, with the newspaper headlines when it says that such and such issue. It’s like, “The Trump trial. What you need to know.” It’s like, “You don’t know what I need to know. You don’t know me. You don’t even know my context, my goals, my values, my visions. Like, what I need to know is wildly different than what maybe someone else needs to know.”

So, I guess I’m a little bit persnickety about, I guess, maybe just like the implied judgment. So, it’s like, “Obviously says to me, if you didn’t know that, you’re an idiot.” And it’s like, “Maybe they didn’t know that so don’t take any unnecessary risks here.” So, this is my view, but sometimes I’ve been told I could take language a bit literally, as opposed to just really absorbing kind of the emotional vibe that’s really what’s at work behind the language.

Valerie Fridland

I don’t think you’re alone. I’ve actually heard a lot of people that get annoyed with that “right?” that comes in as an agreement marker. So, Mark Zuckerberg actually uses that “right” form quite a bit, and there was even an article in the New York Times about his use of “right” in that way because people find it kind of insulting because what it’s assuming is he is right and you have to agree with him.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s like, “Actually, no, Zuck, I disagree vehemently.”

Valerie Fridland

“I disagree. Yes, I strongly disagree.” And so, I think what you’re talking about is this assumption that a speaker makes that you share the same background knowledge and belief system as they do. And, yes, it can be irritating when you get that idea, but I bet you have people in your life that say “obviously” and “right” that don’t annoy you that way. So, it’s probably somewhat dependent on who’s using the “obviously” and the “right,” but I don’t think you’re alone in especially the “right.”

I know that’s something that’s been written about a lot, because it’s not a “right” that’s simply asking someone to consider a proposition. It’s a right that’s asking them to agree with you on something and sometimes you just don’t agree with someone, and it sort of presumes that you should. So, I think you’re not alone in feeling that’s irritating. Rest assured.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, certainly. And tell me, anything else, irritants that we’d be better off just banishing?

Valerie Fridland

You know, I know a lot of people that don’t like “hopefully” as a sentential adverb because it’s supposed to only be in front of a verb and not the entire sentence. So, that was a complaint that I think about 20 years ago, really, was a big one so, “Hopefully, we’ll go there tomorrow.” And proponents of very prescriptive usage say that you can’t use “hopefully” as a sentential adverb. But I’m here to say that I think we use it as a sentential adverb more often than not these days. So, that’s another one that has sort of gone the way of the dodo and personally doesn’t bother me. But I’m sure there’s someone out there listening that’s getting very irritated about my “hopefully.”

Pete Mockaitis

These scorching hot takes are going to cause some rancor, perhaps, in the comments or…

Valerie Fridland

Maybe. Oh, the other one I think a lot of people get annoyed, and I use this one myself, so I apologize to everybody that I annoyed through this podcast, is “actually,” using “actually” quite a lot, where you say, “Actually, that is exactly what I thought,” or, “He, actually, is going,” or,“Are you actually going to do that?” where you’re using “actually” quite often. That seems to be something that I hear a lot about that some people don’t like the use of “actually” in those contexts because they think it suggests that someone wasn’t going to do it otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now when you say “actually” that reminds me of the phrase “to be honest.”

Valerie Fridland

Oh, yes.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, I think that goes without saying and I think you’re always honest. I have a friend who is a lawyer who, he was he was in court, and the judge said something to him. He was just sort of thinking for a while, it was like, “Well, your honor, to be honest, we…” and he said, “Counselor Doyle, I expect you to always be honest with me in my courtroom.” He was like, “Oh, yeah. Yes, of course,” which I thought was part of the “Yeah, that’s what we’re thinking, but we can’t say that because we’re not judges who could preside over the conversation.”

Valerie Fridland

It is really funny how we feel driven to tell people that we would be honest in this one circumstance, and not in every other one. But people definitely now are saying “honestly” or “to be honest” a lot more than they did before, and I think I have heard a number of people say that, “Well, I expect you would be honest with me all the time.”

But, again, that’s where we get that literal sense versus metaphorical sense of language use that people get really tied to, and this is a problem with “literally” used non-literally. People get really tied to what the original sense of a word was or the original use without realizing that there are so many things in language that we use every day that are the complete opposite of the meaning that they had a hundred, two hundred years ago.

“Literally” used non-literally is one of those that people get annoyed with, but “very” has changed in meaning drastically since the 17th century. When we look at Chaucer or Shakespeare or things from the 1500s, some of the Bibles, the Tyndale Bible, for example, we find that “very” was used to mean “true.” So, he would be the “very prophet,” meaning the true prophet, or you’d be “very” in word and deed, “true” in word and deed. And we didn’t find it used as just an emphasizer or intensifier until about the 17th century, where it started to take on, if something’s true, it has a hundred percent of something. It’s very emphatically true. It’s a high degree of something.

And so, we started to see “very“ used to mean extensively or extremely and not true anymore. Although, every once in a while, you’ll hear someone say, “On this very spot, this is where he died.” And again, that means on this exact or true spot. So, here’s a perfect example of a word that’s changed drastically and we use it for all sorts of purposes, every single one of us, and we don’t get annoyed by it. So, I think we just have to be a little more flexible in the way we look at language.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

I think that’s good. I feel complete.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Valerie Fridland

Honestly. To be honest, I feel like we’ve covered it all.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I appreciate your honesty. Can you tell us about a favorite quote?

Valerie Fridland

My favorite quote is from a linguist called Max Heinrich, and he had the quote that said, “Language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” And I think that’s a very accurate way that we describe the difference between who speaks a dialect and who speaks a language.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

Well, I think the “um” “uh” study, where people were given, they were connected with electrodes on their head, and they were given sentences where there would be an expected or predicted word in it, versus one that was unexpected. So, it would be like, “Everybody has bad habits. Mine is biting my blank.” What would you put in there?

Pete Mockaitis

Nails.

Valerie Fridland

Your nails, right? But what they did instead is sometimes they would put nails and sometimes they would have what followed be something unpredictable. So, “Everybody has bad habits. Mine is biting my tongue.” So, is it possible to bite your tongue? Yes. But would it be a weird habit to have? Absolutely.

Well, when they found that if they stuck an “uh” before the unpredicted word, they actually decreased the brainwave activity around that unexpected word. It was called an N400 effect, which is something that indicates someone didn’t expect to hear what they heard and they were having problems processing it.

Well, when you stuck an “uh” before saying “tongue” instead of “nails,” you decrease that effect, meaning people were better able to integrate that unpredictable information. And I also think it’s hysterical to imagine people, all stuck up with these electrodes, talking about biting their nails and their tongue.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Valerie Fridland

I love The Professor and the Madman. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book. It’s by Simon Winchester. Now, it’s, on the surface, the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I know sounds kind of boring, but it’s actually about a man that contributed in the 1800s to the Oxford English Dictionary, probably more than any of the other volunteers that they had working on looking at first known uses of words.But the crazy thing about him was that he was this brilliant genius in an insane asylum. He had been sent there because he was a madman and he had killed somebody, but yet he was so brilliant and he brought with him to the insane asylum his collection of rare books, and he spent his life helping to construct what we now know as the greatest dictionary of all time, the Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s really a fascinating book.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool?

Valerie Fridland

I would say that my favorite tool is writing things down. I know I’m a linguist and I focus on spoken words, but what I find when I’m preparing for something is the act of writing really commits the grooves in my brain to what I’ve written.

So, when we just sort of orally practice something, we’re just not dedicating the cognitive sort of density of writing to what we’re trying to get across, and it’s a little more superficial of a practice. What I find is when I write something, it commits my brain to what I’ve written. In fact, I can visualize it when I’m talking about it orally, and it really helps me be organized and conscientious in the way that I’m talking to someone.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

In my book, I say, “There’s no right way to speak English.” And I’ve actually found that that surprised me but it was one of the things that was most often quoted. In fact, for example, in the Wall Street Journal review, that was one of the things that was quoted because it was so obvious to me that we all have different ways we come to language, and whatever is right for us has been developed because it has worked for us in our lives, in our neighborhoods, and who we talk to.

But we have such firm beliefs about bad English that I think that’s why that has resonated with a lot of people that feel justified in the choices they make linguistically because that’s what their truth in terms of language has become. And so, when someone that’s a linguist who studies language is able to say, “There’s no right way to speak English,” meaning we have a lot of different diverse ways that we talk in different circumstances, and what’s right for one person and in one context isn’t right for everybody else, I think that’s legitimizing, for example, people that use “literally” non-literally or say “like” a lot or vocal fry or choose to use singular they. It just lets people be who they are and make the linguistic choices that fit their identity.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

They can go to my website, ValerieFridland.com.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

I would say just relax and breathe when someone is doing something with their language that bothers you. Just remember, it’s probably you, not them, and we can all learn to just be a little more understanding and empathetic to the different types of ways that we’ve learned to use language, and what’s worked for me may not work for someone else. What’s been indoctrinated linguistically into another person may not be the same as what I’ve learned or been socialized into. And I think if we can just relax a little bit instead of be so judgy, it will help us be better speakers, better empathizers, and also better employers.

Pete Mockaitis

Valerie, thank you. This has been awesome.

Valerie Fridland

It’s been awesome to talk to you, too. Thank you for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis

Monica, welcome.

Monica Parker

Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to hear your take on wonder and how it can help us be more awesome at our jobs. But for starters, could you tell us what do you mean by wonder?

Monica Parker

Yeah, sure. So, wonder as a word is something of a shape-shifter. So, you have wonder as a noun and wonder as a verb. Of course, wonder as a noun would be perhaps a wonder. It might be something that’s a catalyst for awe. And then you have wonder as a verb, to wonder, which would be perhaps how we might describe curiosity.

And so, my definition of wonder seeks to link those two concepts. And so, the way that I describe it, it starts with openness to experience, then moves into curiosity, then into absorption and awe. And it’s actually a cycle that, as we experience it, the more we experience it, the more likely we are to experience it in the future. And so, that’s my definition of wonder.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, that sounds pleasant. But can you tell us how that helps us be more awesome at our jobs?

Monica Parker

So, it starts by making us more awesome as humans. It makes us more creative, more desirous of studying the world around us. It makes us more humble, less materialistic, more generous, better community and team members. People who are higher in the composite elements of wonder are more likely to perform better in work and school, and build healthier relationships.

And recent evidence shows that wonder makes us less stressed and feel like we have more time. It’s basically what would be described as a pro-social experience. So, it simply makes us want to be better, more tolerant humans. And that’s just the psychological benefits. Physiologically, it also decreases pro-inflammatory cytokines and lowers our blood pressure. And the research shows a direct biological pathway between wonder and better health.

Pete Mockaitis

Fantastic. So, tell us, that all sounds swell, I’m wondering, is this teachable? Are some people naturally have the wonder groove going and others don’t? Or how do you think about someone who is not as wonder-y becoming more wonder-y?

Monica Parker

Sure. So, it certainly, because it has to do with our brain, there’s going to be natural elements of it that we have a higher propensity towards. So, pretty much the way our personality works is that about half of it is based on our genetics and the other half is based on our experiences up to about age 25. So, there’s no question that some people are going to be naturally may have higher openness, may be more prone towards curiosity, but it’s absolutely something that we can train ourselves to see as a mindset, and we can engage in activities that help us become more wonder-prone.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, I would love to hear a tale perhaps of someone who was less wonder-prone and went through some work and had way more wonder going on as a result.

Monica Parker

Sure. I can tell you some of the things that I find most exciting about this research is how it helps people who are, I think it’s fair to say that we’re dealing with a mental health crisis in America, as well as many other places. Forty million Americans right now are being treated for anxiety. Globally, 280 million people have depression. And so, one of the most exciting pieces of research that I’ve seen was working with people who had PTSD and who had trauma backgrounds.

After taking a whitewater rafting trip, which would certainly be wonder-inducing, they found that those people had a significantly reduced PTSD symptoms and, in fact, benefited for as much as two weeks after that experience. And so, what we know is that when people experience wonder, they become more better able to deal with what life throws at them.

And some of the research shows that that can be as simple as looking at some beautiful trees that give you a sense of wonder. Another piece of research shows that just three minutes looking at a particularly awe-inspiring grove of trees made people exhibit more helpful behaviors for the week following.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s fantastic. I’d love it if you could share with us some of these other quick yet super effective interventions. Three minutes of tree-looking for lasting benefit sounds right up my alley. What else can we do, Monica?

Monica Parker

Yeah, so the first is what I described, slow thought. Really, we are in such a rush all the time that we stop seeing what is around us. So, the more that we can engage in slow thought activities, and particular activities that help slow down our brain. So, we all have sort of that chattering monkey mind. So, these are things like meditation, chalk this up for again, another reason why we should all be meditating, things like narrative journaling, even a gratitude practice or prayer.

Any of those things that helps quiet down the brain and helps us engage in more slow thought, which, mind you, God rest his soul, Daniel Kahneman who just passed away, also talked about the power of slowing down and certainly how that can be effective in our work lives as well. Another way is to really open ourselves to novelty and new ideas. We get stuck in such the same rut of doing the same thing over and over again that we miss the wonder in the familiar.

So, the more that we can shake our noggins up a little bit and introduce new thinking and new places, new spaces help, and even just taking a wonder walk. And you might ask, “What’s a wonder walk?” Well, a wonder walk is you decide it is. It’s really a brilliant example of the power of priming. You tell yourself that you’re going to find things that will give you a sense of wonder on that walk.

And research found that two groups of walkers went walking for 20 minutes. One that was primed that they would find things to feel a sense of wonder about, the other group was not. And the group that went on a wonder walk had stress reduction benefits for the following week.

Pete Mockaitis

Fantastic. Now just how potent is stress reduction benefit are we talking here, Monica?

Monica Parker

Because it’s something that is so subjective, it’s hard to sort of give a specific definition of that. But what we do know is that it’s significant enough that it lowers people’s pro-inflammatory cytokines. And pro-inflammatory cytokines are those markers of disease that generally happen. If we’re actually sick, our body will release them as a mechanism to make us well, but frequently they will be released when we’re under stress.

And so, the stress reduction is significant enough, not just for the individual to sense that sense of stress reduction, but for the physiological changes to occur as well, where the pro-inflammatory cytokines actually reduce as well. And those are markers of conditions like heart disease, certain cancers, Alzheimer’s. And so, it’s pretty significant.

Pete Mockaitis

Fascinating. Well, while we’re talking medically, do you have a sense on the optimal dosage of this nature goodness or wonder experiences?

Monica Parker

To be fair, the more the better. The key, I think, is setting a mindset. And with practice, we can do that such that we start to see wonder in the quotidian. We really shouldn’t have to look for it. We should simply be able to find it. And that might be in a perfect autumn leaf. It might be this time of year, in the flowers as they’re starting to bloom. 

And so, really, it’s how much you’re willing to be open to it and find it in your life. But the more the better, there’s no question. But I would say like most things, a good practice would be if you can focus on doing one of the mind-setting activities for about 20 minutes in a day, then you will start to build the skills that will allow you to see wonder throughout your day-to-day life.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s just what I was thinking. When you said the word open, that really resonated for me because sometimes I am having wonder-y days and it’s a lot of fun, it’s expansive, it’s relaxing, it’s cool. And other times, everything is irritating and it’s kind of the opposite. And instead of being amazed at a leaf, I might be annoyed that the leaf is stuck to my shoe and crunching it all along the way. Do you have any sort of SOS or emergency stop-drop-roll kinds of things to shift us closer to the wonder mode?

Monica Parker

I’ll tell you, it’s probably one of the stop-drop-rolls that you’ve heard from a lot of other people because it’s what works. The first thing is to just take a big breath. We know that breathing helps quiet the amygdala. We know that it helps with our vagus nerve health, with vagal tone, which is one of the things that helps us stay calm. And so, really just taking a break to take a deep breath is probably the first SOS element. And I find that having a little mantra helps to just say there is wonder there, and then, hopefully, your eyes will be open to what you can find in your sphere that will give you that little bit of a wonder nugget.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And, Monica, you’ve got a lovely tidbit, five elements of wonder. They all start with the letter W. Could you walk us through these?

Monica Parker

Yeah. And so, these were a little bit what I started to describe at the beginning. So, I call them watch, wander, whittle, wow, and whoa. So, watch is the word for openness. Openness to experience is the personality trait that’s associated with the best, outcomes as a human, be it physical or mental.

And so, moving from openness to experience, we then, when we’re very open, what happens then, we become curious about something, and we become deeply curious. This is the watch element. And when I talk about curiosity, there’s really two types of curiosity. I’m focused more on the deep curiosity. You have surface curiosity, which would be sort of like Google searching to settle a bet, or maybe smelling the milk to see if it’s gone off. That’s not the kind of curiosity we’re looking for. We’re looking for the curiosity for the joy of the exploration. And this type of curiosity really starts to engage our brain in a different way.

We move from being deeply curious about something to becoming absorbed. That’s natural. We might find absorption in a flow state, but we might also find it from just being hyper focused. And this is where we call whittle. So, this is where we’re paring back attention. We’re really keenly focused on where we are hyper present. And then we move from whittle, if we’re lucky, into the fourth and fifth stages, which are the wow and whoa, and these are two stages of awe.

And the reason that awe has two stages is when we study the dynamic of awe as an emotion, it really does have sort of these two elements to it. The first is where we experience something that feels so vast. And that can be physically vast, like the Grand Canyon, or emotionally vast, like seeing your child take their steps for the first time. Our brain is shocked by that. And that’s sort of this wow moment. But then afterwards, our brain actually has to accommodate to understand what it is that it’s just experienced. And this is the whoa, where it’s sort of like mind blown. And those two elements together define the emotion of awe.

And after that, now our brain is in a hyperplastic state where we can embed all sorts of good stuff. And that brings us back to openness. So, now after that experience of the whoa, we are more open and, thus, more likely to be deeply curious, and then more likely to become absorbed and so on and so on. And so, I really do see it as this upwardly beneficial cycle that we can experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is lovely, indeed. Well, could you make it all the more real for us by sharing several stories of individuals who experienced some of the stressed, overwhelmed, overloaded, “Aargh” kind of a vibe to regularly incorporating more wonder and the results they saw from doing so?

Monica Parker

Sure. So, one of my favorite stories, and this may not be something that everyone can directly, I guess, connect with, but it’s about a gentleman named Steven Callahan. And Steven Callahan was a famed solo sailor, and he actually went on a solo race and ended up becoming a castaway. He spent 76 days adrift on the Atlantic Ocean and actually wrote an incredible book about that. And I had the opportunity to speak to Steve.

And what he said was that he was certain that it was his sense of wonder that gave him the alacrity to be able to survive being out adrift at sea, because he said that there were moments where he had such a sense of crisis and panic where all hope felt lost, but he was so overwhelmed by the beauty and the power, even the horror, in a sense, of the sea and of nature, and what that could do to him. That that moment of feeling like a small part in a bigger system, and being, in a way, almost helpless actually gave him the strength and the ability to see more clearly in order to take every single day and engage in the activities that would get him to be eventually saved, which he was 76 days later.

And, in fact, strangely, many people report that. I interviewed a gentleman who worked with people who were at the end of having had experiences like this, or having been in plane crashes, or even having been kidnapped and held. The day that I interviewed him, he had just been speaking to someone who had been held in a hole in the Baltics, and then was saved. And what he found is that people who are able to have a greater sense of wonder and then convert that to a sense of purpose survive these intense cataclysmic experiences.

And he said that if there was one thing that he would advise people to do, it would be to, first, find a purpose and, second, find their sense of wonder, because he said that those are the keys to being able to survive any kind of crisis, big or small.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s interesting when you said, “We had someone who’s a castaway, stranded.” And you said, “And many people share this,” like, “Wow, a lot of castaways.” But I hear what you’re saying in terms of crisis situations, kidnappings, etc. And even in a day-to-day professional environment where there’s less life-or-death stakes.

Monica Parker

But our brain thinks it’s life or death.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, and all those elements associated with how creatively, resourcefully you can operate really do. It makes all the difference in terms of whether you’re feeling like, “Oh, wow, cool ideas are coming to me, creative ways to use these resources,” versus, “Aargh, we’re screwed and there’s nothing I can do. Aargh.”

Monica Parker

Absolutely. And that’s where we start to get into one of the benefits of engaging in the slow thought. We know that one of the challenges that we’re confronted with in work environments is something that’s known as action bias. So, when we are, as professionals, usually, we are confronted with a situation where we really don’t have control, I think we saw a lot of this during COVID, we want to feel like we can exert control.

And one of the challenges is that society actually benefits that. Research shows that we will rate our leaders more positively if they made decisive decisions, even if those decisions later were found to be poor. And so, we have this real desire to act when sometimes we should just pause. And this is a little bit of wonder mixed with a little bit of Daniel Kahneman, which is to say that when we have the opportunity to slow down, we should.

And that is one of the things that Steven Callahan found being adrift. It’s one of the things that I heard from so many different scientists that I spoke to, that slowing down and allowing our brain to engage with what we’re really experiencing rather than catastrophizing or feeling the need to act, simply to act, really helps us make better decisions. And we see that in action bias, day in, day out in work environments. And we see that in more severe environments like being adrift at sea or, yes, being kidnapped by a terrorist organization.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Monica, tell us, any other top wonder do’s or don’ts to share before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Monica Parker

Yeah, so one of my other wonder do’s is to make sure that we’re getting enough sleep. Add that onto one of the challenges. When we’re sleep deprived, our attentional control really goes out the window and we become more ruminative. It becomes really much, much harder for us to become present. And also daydreaming. You mentioned earlier that some days you feel like you’re really on the wonder train. And some of that, daydreaming has gotten a bit of a bad rap.

There was a piece of research that came out, and they said, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” But actually, there is one type of daydreaming that’s really good for that, and that’s called positive constructive daydreaming. This is when we cast our minds forward and create in these play future scenarios. And that’s really, really good for us. So, I would encourage good night’s sleep, and then when you want to, allow yourself to have a good daydream.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, let’s see, I’ve read that paper, “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” Let’s see, that’s Killingsworth and Gilbert.

Monica Parker

Correct.

Pete Mockaitis

And what was interesting, as I dug into the data, what I found was it seems like, yeah, being present to what’s going on around you is a winning happiness strategy. So, go mindfulness, go presence, that’s great. However, if you were daydreaming in positive territory, the happiness results are pretty comparable to simply being present. But the problem is our wandering minds tend to go into unpleasant territory, and that’s just no fun.

Monica Parker

Correct. There are two other types of daydreaming, one which is just poor attentional control. That’s something that really plagues people who are non-neurotypical. So, those of us who have ADHD certainly struggle with that. And then the other is that this catastrophic daydreaming, where we’re imagining something that’s really terrible that’s going to happen, or something stupid we did in the past.

But we daydream almost 50% of our day. It’s something like 43% of our day we’re daydreaming, so there must be some benefit or our brains wouldn’t do it. And so, it’s really about finding a way to harness that and create it into, you know, make it one of your slow-thought activities as opposed to something that just becomes distracting and ruminative.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Monica Parker

It is by Albert Einstein, and he says, “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead. His eyes are closed.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

I think one of my favorites that I haven’t mentioned really reflects on the power of mixed emotions. So, they took a group of widows and widowers, and they found that those who remembered their deceased loved one, the both positive and negative elements of their partner, were better able to manage their grief. And so, that really is just a, I guess, support to say that mixed emotions, like curiosity, like wonder, like awe, where there’s a little bit of positive and a little bit of negative mixed, are really, really good for our brains and we should try to do more of it.

Pete Mockaitis

Ooh, that’s powerful. And I’m reminded of a conversation. We had Susan Cain on the show talking about her book, Bittersweet. And, yeah, that hits hard.

Monica Parker

Existential longing, that’s another one, that’s another mixed emotion. Very positive for us, and it helps us to have better emo-diversity or emotional granularity. And the greater emotional granularity we have, the healthier we are. But really having those mixed emotions, fight it out in our noggin, is good for tolerance. It’s the anti-polarization. There are so many benefits.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Monica Parker

I love Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It’s a great dose of wonder, a little bit of historical fiction, and, yeah, I just think it’s a fabulous book that everybody should read.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

Yeah, for me, one of my favorite tools, believe it or not, as terrible as they are, I still choose to see some of the positive of social networks. I’m global, my network is global, and I really do curate Instagram such that I find it to be an incredibly helpful tool for me.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Monica Parker

Sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Always sleep.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

I have a line in the book that says, “Wonder shared is wonder multiplied.” And I love that because it reminds us that wonder is not just a solitary experience, that it’s something that we can share with others and help it grow. We can share it in the moment or we can express it to others after we’ve experienced it. But every time that we share it with others, either in the moment or after the fact, multiplies the benefit and bestows that benefit on those that you shared it with.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

They can find me at Monica-Parker.com. And I have a weekly newsletter called Wonder Bringers that they can sign up for where I share other wonder nuggets.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

Yeah, my challenge is to follow wonder. And the best way to do that is to slow down. So, I guess I’ll put those two things together and say slow down and follow wonder.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Monica, thank you. This is fun. And I wish you many moments of wonder.

Monica Parker

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis

Chris, welcome.

Chris Fenning

Hi, Pete. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Pete Mockaitis

I’m excited as well. We’re talking about conversations today. Your book is called, The First Minute, which I love. It could really be like an action movie with a title like that, Chris. Tell us, what’s so important about the first minute of a conversation? Or is it just a catchy title?

Chris Fenning

Well, I’ve been told it’s a catchy title. The reason for the title is the whole book is literally about the first minute. So, it is quite an important thing. And you asked what it is, well, and why is it important? It’s important because, if in a work situation, if you’re at work and you’re communicating with other people, if you get the first minute wrong, you will pay for it through the rest of the conversation, your reputation can take a hit, and people may not want to communicate with you again in the future. But if you get it right, you can get people’s attention, keep their focus, and get their message across all in 20 to 60 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis

Chris, I love a very clear value proposition. There we have it. Okay. Cool. So, could you tell us a cool story about a professional who saw a transformation in terms of their first minutes were a little bit rough, but then they worked your magic, Chris, and on the other side, they saw some cool things? Do you have some tales like this?

Chris Fenning

Yes. There’s one person who really comes to mind, and she was a junior project manager at a time when I was a director in a large PMO. We were running big, big programs for a large American health insurance company, and this junior project manager had incredible potential but she was new in her role. And part of her role involved presenting to a senior leader, and this leader was a tough nut. They had very high standards, they expected everything to be in detail, to the point and complete, which is kind of a contradiction to do all of those things.

So, this junior PM did her best, and to prepare she did what many of us do which is include all the detail, help educate this person so they could really understand the message that was coming next. And, of course, that’s a crash-and-burn situation, because the more detail you put up front, the longer it takes to get to your point, the further you are from the value of your message.

And so, in working with her, we employed some of the things from The First Minute and also a technique that say only give three updates and then ask a question. And what happened is she went from delivering all of the detail up front, “Oh, let me tell you about this. This is what has happened and this is why it’s important. So that, blah…” and then she would get to her ask. She ended up coming in, and saying, “Hi, today I want to give you updates on three things. They are A, B, and C. What I want from you is a decision, some advice, and I literally don’t know what to do with the third one, so really looking for some help there. Let me start with topic number one.”

And she framed the conversation beautifully so that instead of feeling attacked and under pressure by that senior leader, the leader said, “Oh, great. Actually, I want to talk about number two. Can we go to that first?” And they had a conversation instead of this long, drawn-out introduction that led to the leader being frustrated because it wasn’t what they wanted to know.

So the impact for the junior project manager wasn’t just more effective communication in those meetings, which is an important thing. The biggest takeaway for her was her confidence went through the roof. She went from being scared going into these meetings, spending hours and hours preparing, and feeling that she would never be good enough going in – and these were her words – to after using these methods a couple of times, and seeing the impact, she felt confident.

Her preparation was cut more than in half, and she enjoyed giving the status updates, and ended up having a good relationship with that senior leader. So, it enabled her to shine in her role. And she went on to be a senior PM and do great things.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Chris, I love that so much because what you’ve just demonstrated there doesn’t sound too hard to do, “What is your first minute?” I think it sounds like, “Oh, high stakes first minute. It’s a make or break. I could lose it. I could screw everything up. I need to dazzle them with a startling statistic, or a hilarious tale, or something in order to grip them in our TikTok-addled world of whatever.” But what you did is you just basically just set up a nice little preview, like, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do and kind of what I want.” And it’s like, “Oh, I can do that.”

Chris Fenning

Yeah, you’re exactly right. None of this is complicated but it does take deliberate effort to apply it over time. None of it is rocket science. I can say that, my background is rocket science. This isn’t it. This is definitely simpler than rocket science, but we need to remember to do it. And you gave a really good word there. You said it’s a preview of the conversation, and that’s exactly what it is. The method that I just described in the book is called framing, and it’s the first 15 seconds, maybe 20 seconds. And if you frame your message, you’re setting up your audience to pay attention and know what you’re going to tell them, and understand why it’s important to them.

And that preview addresses three questions that we will have if somebody starts badly. And the questions are, “What are you talking about? Why are you telling me this? And what is your point?” And you can avoid those three questions if you deliver a very simple preview, a simple framing in that first 15 to 20 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis

I love that because what you’re describing there is exactly what’s in their head in terms of like, “Wait, what are we doing here exactly?” And I’ve heard, and I think it’s so well said, that great copywriting, like, if you’re writing words to be persuasive like in a sales situation, is joining the conversation that is already in your prospect’s head. Like, they’re having this conversation with themselves, and you’re just joining right there where they are, meeting them in that zone, that spot, and it’s like, “Oh, perfect. This fits right here.” As opposed to, “Ugh, I’m annoyed, I’m irritated, or I want to change the channel. Get this away from me.”

Chris Fenning

Yes. Yes. One of the differences with that, so in that sales environment, you want to meet your audience with the problem that they’re having, with the goal they’re trying to achieve. When we’re at work, we’re in the other sort of advertising space of pattern interrupt. What we’re doing is interrupting someone else’s day, interrupting their thoughts so that they focus on what we want to talk about. And that’s always a tough sell anyway because people have got their own stuff to do.

And so, we have to go about it in a way that, very quickly, shows the other person the value to them or the importance to them, which is why the second thing in the framing is intent. The first part is context, “What is this topic? What are you talking about?” The second part is intent, which is, “What do I want you to do with the information?” And the third is key message, like, the point of what you’re trying to say.

And the reason that intent is so important up front is, until we know what to do with a piece of information, our brains literally don’t know how to process it. And because we’ve interrupted someone, whether we’ve bumped into them in a corridor, or even in a planned meeting, they’re thinking about something else, we say “Right. Now, Pete, I want to talk about this topic.” If I don’t tell you exactly why you need to pay attention, your brain is not going to be able to understand what’s coming next, and it’s because of something called working memory or sometimes called short term memory.

Now this isn’t, “Where did I put my keys? And what are the names of my kids?” This is the, where our brain receives information, it has to work out which part of the brain to fire up to do something with it. Because if I tell you a funny story, one area of your brain will engage. But if I asked you a question, a different area of your brain will start fire up and pay attention. And until your brain, at a subconscious level, knows which part to engage, it just gets stuck in a loop saying, “Well, what do I do with this? What do I do with this? What do I do with this?”

And if we don’t give our audience a clear instruction, “Hey, I need your help. Heads up, you need to know this. I’m about to give you an instruction,” so that’s very clear intent. If we don’t say that, your audience is just going to be wondering, “Why are you telling me this?” right up until the moment that we do.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. And, Chris, I appreciate that new context in terms of bumping into them in a hallway or corridor because I was thinking, “Here we are at this meeting. It’s like, this is on the calendar. It has a title. We kind of know update about this project. We have some sort of sense for what it’s about,” but there’s still questions hovering around.” In the context you’ve set out, there’s even more of a wide-open field for, “Wait, what are we…? What’s going on right now? What are we even talking about?” So, that’s good.

Chris Fenning

And we start conversations in our own heads before we actually start the conversation with the other person. If I saw you across the office, “Oh, I need to talk to Pete about this. We’ve got this team meeting next week. I’m missing this critical piece of information. Oh, Pete, great, I’ve got you. So, blah…” and then I launch into the detail because I’ve already started that conversation in my head 10 feet away.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s true. Yeah, that’s really good to remember. I think, often, we’ll just sort of say something like, “Hey, can you send me the link?” “Can you give me the info? Do you have the newest data?” It’s like, “Wait, link, what link? What info? What data? Like, I really do need much more.”

Chris Fenning

“Can I talk to you about next week?” “Sure, I’ve got 39 meetings. Like, which one?”

Pete Mockaitis

Totally. All right. Well, let’s go into some detail. We got the context, the intent, the key message. You even gave me some seconds there. So, how about you give me a rundown of what do you mean by context? How many seconds is that? What’s a great example of context setting versus a poor example of context setting? And then do likewise for intent and key message. No pressure.

Chris Fenning

Absolutely. So, in terms of seconds, we’ll go with sentences instead, one sentence for each of those three things. One sentence for context, one for intent, and one for key message. If you want to get really tight, you can do it as bullet points because sentences can really run on. So, thinking in bullet points can help.

So, we start with context, and that’s, “What is the topic or the theme of the thing I’m going to talk to you about?” Now a good example would be, “Hi, Pete, can I talk to you about next Thursday’s team meeting?” I’m very specific on time and the event. If I said, “Hey, can I talk to you about next Thursday?” I’m thinking about the team meeting, you might be thinking about the meal we’ve got planned in the evening. And I’ll say, “Well, I’m struggling to get the location locked down.” Well, now you’re thinking about the place we’re eating and I’m thinking about the place that we’re meeting.

Rhyme aside, that is a very common type of misunderstanding because we’re not specific on time and event. So, clear context, “I want to talk to you about next Thursday’s team meeting.” You now know everything else I’m going to say relates to that and you’re not guessing with one sentence. Then it’s intent, and we’ve covered that a little bit, it’s saying what you want the other person to do, “Hey, Pete, I want to talk to you about next Thursday’s team meeting. I need some advice.” And you now know I’m going to ask for your help. Or, “Heads up, something’s changed.” You’re now preparing to adapt to whatever that change is.

So, you’ve got a very clear indication of what should come next and what to brace yourself for, and it’s not always bad things. I could say, “Hey, Pete, I want to talk to you about next Thursday’s team meeting. Funny story…” You now know I’m going to engage in a, hopefully, funny story at that point. And that gives you the option to say, “Oh, well, actually, I don’t have time for a funny story now. Can this wait till later?” So that sort of gives you an out, because it’s very clear what I want to talk to you about.

And the third part is that key message, which is the headline, the most important thing you want to put across. And one of the best ways to understand the value and importance of a headline is, imagine you were reading an article, a newspaper, a blog article. If you start on paragraph seven, how long does it take you to work out what that article is really about? Do you get it straight away? Or are you still sort of working it out as you as you go through and adjusting your ideas as you go through the rest of the article?

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I’m still figuring it out.

Chris Fenning

And as we go through, we sort of adjust what it may be about as new information comes along. But if you start with the headline and the first paragraph, assuming it’s a well-written headline and first paragraph, in most articles, newspapers, and so on, the headline and the first paragraph tell you what that article is going to be about. And that makes it easy for you to understand all the detail that comes afterwards. And that’s why you have a headline, and your key message is the most important thing you want to put across.

In the military, it’s often “Bottom Line Up Front” or BLUF is an acronym that’s quite commonly used. Put the most important thing at the front and then you can explain it, justify, expand it afterwards. But don’t put all that info first because you’ll lose the audience and they won’t know what’s important. So, you start with context, “This is the topic I want to talk to you about.” One bullet point, one sentence, then the intent, “Here’s what I intend you to do with it. Here’s why I’m talking to you about it, why you should pay attention,” another one sentence or one bullet point, and then the key message.

And we’ll be nice, you can have two sentences for that if you really want to expand it out. But very, very short, and it’s not about compressing the entire conversation into those 15 seconds. It’s about previewing, it’s about framing, which is the name of the technique, so that you can then go on and have that conversation, and your audience is not thinking those three killer questions, “What is this about? Why are you talking to me? And what is your point?”

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so we talked about the first minute, but, Chris, it seems that we’ve accomplished this within 15 seconds. Do you have pro tips on the other 45 seconds? Or what do you think about there?

Chris Fenning

Yes, otherwise, I mean, the first 15 seconds just wasn’t as catchy as the book. So, in the first minute, there are some other things that we should do, and I want to put in a caveat at this point. Like, all great models and methods and everything that we learn, there’s always a caveat, there’s always an exception. And what I want to make it clear is, for anyone listening to this and thinking, “Okay, so when I start a conversation, the very first thing I say is context, intent, and key message.” I’d say, “Hold on. First, please be a human.”

So, when you interact with people, have that human connection, have that relationship-building, like, “Oh, hey, Pete, I heard there was a storm in your area last week, and there were some fences damaged. Is your garden okay? Do you have anything, any issues there?” Have that type of conversation. And then at the moment you say, “Oh, by the way, I want to talk to you about…” when you switch to the work, that’s when these methods begin. Otherwise, it’s very robotic and we can come across as a very formulaic way of communicating. So, be a person first, but when you start talking about the work, that’s when these methods begin.

Pete Mockaitis

And I was going to say, with regard to the human versus work perspective, it’s funny because there’s, like, a whole spectrum there in terms of you might have something you need to share with a friend or your spouse, and this could actually be quite helpful in terms of getting things framed up, so they say, “Oh, okay, I understand,” to make for an effective conversation. But on the flipside, they might say, “Dude, why are you talking to me like that? We’re just pals here. There’s no need for this.” What’s your thoughts on that?

Chris Fenning

Yes. My thought on that at the moment, as I’m picturing my wife, who recently said, “If you context, intent, key message me one more time…” so, definitely, definitely some limitations on it. However, it comes down to situation, to topic, to your particular style, your friend’s style, and so on. If you’re in a friendly, friend-based situation, you’re chatting to your pal, but you’ve got an urgent situation that you want to talk about, then this can help you cut straight to the point.

On the flipside, if your style with them has always been more casual, well, then be more casual. You can adapt the style, but just know that when you start talking about the important thing that you want to communicate, the longer it takes you to deliver those three pieces, the more confused they will be and the more likely they are to make assumptions about the reason for their conversation or what the topic might be, and so on. So, the quicker you frame that up, the less assumptions there are, and the less risk there is for the rest of the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. All right.

Chris Fenning

So, the rest of the first minute includes one major piece and two small steps that can make the difference between you being polite or not. And the major piece is a summary. Now, this is useful if you’re about to explain something that’s big, or if you’re giving a status update, for example.

So, when we talk at work, we don’t have time to put in all the details. We have to summarize a much bigger piece of work, or a much bigger topic, or something that is more complex than we can fit into a conversation. And a way to do that is to deliver a summary in the next 30 to 45 seconds that make up the second part of the first minute, and that summary uses a method called goal problem solution. So, the overall structure of the first minute is frame it in that first 15 seconds, and then you can summarize your big message, and then you can have the rest of your conversation.

Pete Mockaitis

So, goal problem solution, are we hearing some of that in that 45 seconds then?

Chris Fenning

Yes, you are. Yes, and it’s a really, really good way to summarize or set up almost any topic at work. Let’s give an example. If I was giving you a status update, you’d say, “Hey, Chris, you promised you’d deliver this edited podcast episode in the next week. Where are we with that?” And I could say, “Well, my goal is to get it to you on Friday. The problem is my laptop died yesterday, but what I’m doing about it is I’ve borrowed a laptop for a friend and I’m making up some hours over the weekend. Would you like to know any more about any of those pieces?” So, I’ve summarized an entire situation. I didn’t say, “Oh, the dog knocked over my water, and the house nearly burnt down because there was an electrical fire.” I didn’t go into all that detail.

Pete Mockaitis

Sorry to hear that, Chris.

Chris Fenning

It was a tough day for the dog.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah.

Chris Fenning

And that’s what we add in. We tend to add all of that detail, we tend to add things that are chronological, things that happen in the order in which events occurred, and that’s a very natural way of telling stories and communicating, but it’s not a very effective way of doing it. And so, using goal problem solution gives you, as a listener, some critical information.

First is the goal, and that’s, “This is the thing that we’re trying to achieve.” In this case, in the example, trying to deliver an edited podcast episode, “Hey, I want to deliver this.” Now you understand what the whole topic is. It’s sort of an expansion on the topic. “Well, the problem was my laptop died. I haven’t been able to do it.”

And then I move on to a solution, which is forward-focused, and I’m looking at what I’m doing about it. I’m telling you the solution to the problem so we can achieve the goal, and the goal is what you care about. So, by doing all of that, I’ve condensed everything into a short summary, and then I finished it with a question, “Is there anything about that you’d like to know more about?”

And that gives you the opportunity to go, “Yeah, what happened with the water and the dog?” And you can expand on the problem, you can clarify what the goal was, or you can probe what the solution is going to be. You get to make those choices and it’s gone from being a very long monologue into a short status update followed by a dialogue where we both get to talk.

Pete Mockaitis

And I’m curious, with regard to problem, I mean, sometimes there just aren’t any problems. You know, the goal was, “I would get you this podcast by Friday, or whenever, and so my team’s working on it. And we should have no problem getting that done.”

Chris Fenning

There you go, that’s your problem.

Pete Mockaitis

I mean, so if there’s no problem, we just skip it, and that’s that?

Chris Fenning

That’s that. When it comes to status updates, if everything’s on track, just say everything’s on track. And that is one of the hardest things to do. I imagine a lot of people listening to this are thinking, “Well, my status update meetings are, we’re all in a room, and we go around the table, and everybody lists the stuff they did in the last week, and that’s the status update.” And that’s so painful and not efficient and, generally, doesn’t give value to everyone else in the room.

There are lots of reasons why we do it. There’s an innate human need to demonstrate value or a belief that we have to show we’re doing work otherwise people might not see we’ve got value in our roles. But in those situations, imagine if the updates – because nothing was going wrong – if your update was just, “We’re trying to achieve this goal and everything’s on track. Is there anything you like to ask me about?” If that was the update, how short would those meetings be?

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, that would be delightful. I think you’re really nailing something here with regard to meetings and the time they take, is folks want, I don’t know, sometimes we want someone, somewhere to say, “Good job,” and to know that, “I’m doing real things even if I’m working remotely,” or, “This is ambiguous knowledge work with lots of collaborators. I promise I’m actually doing my job.”

Chris Fenning

Yes.

Pete Mockaitis

Like, to be seen and heard and acknowledged, and that’s our humanity, and it results in long meetings. So, there’s our trade-off.

Chris Fenning

It is. It does. Now there’s a way that we, as the person speaking, can help find a middle ground, and it’s what I’ve been doing through this is always ending with a question, “Now here’s my update. Is there something you’d like to go into more detail about?” Or if I gave an update and everything was okay, so, I’m working on this super important project, but everything is on time, on budget, no risks, no issues, that utopia that very rarely exists.

But let’s assume that everything’s going well, and I said, “Yeah, we’re on this project. Here’s our next milestone. Everything’s on track. But can I take a minute to tell you just a couple of the great things my team has done, or a couple of the great things that we’ve done that has helped us stay on track?” And then the rest of the room can either say, “No, we don’t have time,” or, “No, we’re not interested,” or, “Yeah, sure you’ve got a couple of minutes to do that,” and you’re asking for permission rather than just taking time out of that group environment.

Pete Mockaitis

I like that a lot because you are asking permission, and, too, if I’m hearing that, I think that you’re a swell person who wants to give credit to your team and it’s not about you, “Can I tell you how amazing I am?”

Chris Fenning

That’s a tough one.

Pete Mockaitis

So, that’s really cool. And I’m feeling, like, the tug, like, the right answer is, “Of course, I should say yes, but I could also set parameters. Like, how about 40 seconds?” And then away we go. Or, “Chris, I think we all know that your team is full of rock stars, but tell them we appreciate them, and let’s move on.” And so, there we go.

Chris Fenning

Yes, exactly that. You’re giving everyone else in the room permission to say no, which comes back to, I mentioned there were two little things we can do to be polite in the first minute. And one is a time check and the other is a validation checkpoint. Now the actual semantics on those are less important than what they are. The first is, at some point in your first minute, preferably near the beginning, ask if the other person has the amount of time that you need. And here’s an example of how to do it badly, “Hey, Pete, do you have a minute?”

Pete Mockaitis

One minute?

Chris Fenning

And the reason that’s bad, yes, is most of us can’t organize our own thoughts in a minute, let alone have a conversation about whatever it is we want to talk about. So, if you ask for a minute, you better darn well need just a minute, because otherwise you’re setting yourself up to miss your own deadline. And I laughed while I said it, but this is a tiny but important reputation hit.

Because if I asked for a minute and then take five or ten, I’ve either badly misjudged it, I can’t time manage, I lied, I didn’t care, there’s all sorts of very, very small impressions that I give through that one statement. And if I keep doing that, over time, I’m becoming…I’m demonstrating that I’m less reliable. So, don’t ask for a minute. Ask for the actual amount of time or more than you think you’re going to need.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s great. Well, Chris, lay it on us, I’d love example, example, example, in very different professional contexts, maybe even some personal contexts, just to mix it up. We’ve got some nifty tools: the context, the intent, the key message, and a goal problem solution. Lay it on us, here we are at work, we got to say some things, say it for us in the format.

Chris Fenning

All right. So, we’ll go with somebody who works in a call center talking to their team leader because they want some time off. So, a great way to do it would be to go up, and say, “Hi, I’d like to talk to you about vacation. I’m looking for permission because I want to take next Thursday off work.” That’s the context intent and key message.

And then I could say, “Look, I’m trying to keep a good work-life balance, and I need to use my vacation by the end of the year, or I’m going to lose it. The problem is we are stacked as a team. I know that the call center volumes are high and it’s tough to take time off. So, what I’ve done is I’ve asked someone else in the team if they can cover my shift so that I can get this time off. Is that okay if I have the time off for next week?”

So, there was a lot going on in there and it would involve, in that case, finding someone else to cover a shift and so on, but in that situation, you can deliver a lot of information but in a very short period of time. And then the manager would have questions, “Well, when and who is going to cover you? And do they have the right qualifications? And what do you mean there’s a problem with using your vacation time?” There are all sorts of ways a conversation could go, but it’s been set up very clearly in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. How about another?

Chris Fenning

All right. It’s a different situation. You’ve got a merger and acquisition, small company being purchased by a large company, and there’s a problem, in this case. One of the managers in the small company is nervous about their, perhaps, nervous about their job. It’s a very different situation and quite emotive. And they could say to their new line manager, “Hi, I’d like to talk to you about the reduction of roles. I’ve got some questions. I’m actually a little bit concerned about what my position will be in the new company.” That’s the framing with the context, intent, and key message.

Then on the goal problem solution, “I know that our goal is to bring these companies together, and there’s going to be some downsizing. The problem is I’m really uncertain about what’s coming and it’s affecting how I think about what we’re doing next, and I’m struggling to deal with all of the integration activities we have. What I’d like to do is take some time with you to understand what that future hierarchy is going to be, and understand what my role in it might be.”

Now that’s a hard one to do. There’s a lot of emotion in there, and there are lots of different ways to approach it, but it very clearly lays out the conversation, and hopefully takes that emotion out at the beginning of the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s beautiful, and it comes across way better than, “So, are you going to fire me or what?” It’s, like, that may be the burning question that you have, but you are covering that and other bases, so you give even more good context and information if they, in good faith, engage you fully and candidly in that dialogue so it’s good.

And I think that it may be a good meta-lesson there is if you have, I don’t know, fear, resistance, trepidation, associated with saying a thing, for whatever reason, like it’s vulnerable or it might seem unprofessional, that’s what you want to know, “Am I going to get fired? Is this going to reduce my power? Am I still going to get paid my full bonus?” Like, “Oh, I feel so selfish, like not a team player, like they have these, you know, but this really is on my mind.”

I think that, in some ways, Chris, just taking the time to think through it with these key steps or ingredients can go a long way in bringing a little bit of peace and courage so you feel like you can go there instead of just wondering and keeping silent.

Chris Fenning

Oh, yes. Yeah, absolutely. Having a structure to help you plan a difficult conversation is so valuable. So valuable. And let’s explore the…we’ll give a slightly different example on that “Fear for my job,” and then I’m going to give a very everyday example of the start of a conversation that people have got, “Oh, yeah, I can see that in my day-to-day.”

But in this example where I’m worried about my job, “Am I going to get my bonus? Am I going to get my severance pay? Will I have a job next month?” I have a very clear goal for me. My goal is to find out whether I have a job. The problem is my boss is not telling me, so my solution is, “Go and demand from my boss.” That’s my internal version of goal problem solution.

Now I need to take a breath and think about it from their perspective and the organization’s perspective. So how can I find, how can I get what I want, get what I need, but talk about it in a way that isn’t just, “Me, me, me. I need to know my stuff. And you’re all bad and you’re the reason I can’t have it”? So, my goal is to find out, but the goal of the organization is to have a smooth transition with these two companies coming together.

My problem is I have no idea what’s going on, the company’s problem is there’s uncertainty about what’s coming next, and so the solution happens to be the same, “Can we please have a conversation and get clarity on what the time frames will be for knowing or what the announcements will be, or help me understand the process?”

So, your personal goal and problem are probably not going to be the things that come out of your mouth when you’re in a workplace situation. You need to find a way to frame them from the perspective of the organization, from the other individual, so that you can find that common ground, and it takes the conflict out, because as soon as you can find a common goal, in this example we want the organizations to merge together well, that’s a common goal. You get the other person going, “Yes, we do. I understand. We’re on the same page.”

And then you can introduce a problem that hopefully the other person will be like, “Yes, I want to help solve that problem because we’re trying to achieve that goal that benefits us all.” So, that little bit of preparation using a structure can help you find that common ground with the other person.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And you said you had one everyday example?

Chris Fenning

Yes. So, a goal problem solution for an everyday example is, “I’m trying to set up next month’s town hall meeting or our next month’s team meeting. The problem is I’m struggling to get approval from some of the individuals that are being invited. Can you help me get there, get in touch with their team leader, and get their approval?”

So, it’s a common goal, “I’m trying to get people to come up to next month’s or next week’s team meeting. The problem is I’m just not getting the feedback or interaction. So, as a solution, can I enlist your help, Mr. or Mrs. Manager, to get that interaction from the other team and get the feedback that I need?”

So, it doesn’t have to be a big topic. It’s still about finding that common ground so that the manager knows, “This is what we’re trying to achieve. Yes, I agree that’s important. This is the problem standing between us and that goal. Yes, I understand that that’s important,” and then you’re talking about the solutions. So, it can be big, it can be small, so it works in a great range of circumstances.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now after the first minute, I’d love it, you’re big on being concise, any pro tips on keeping things succinct, concise, as you are speaking beyond the first minute?

Chris Fenning

Yes. Three points at a time and then a question. So, if you’ve made three separate points and haven’t paused for the other person to ask a question or interject or provide feedback, you’ve gone on for too much.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Chris Fenning

So, that’s one. The second is plan what you’re going to say. If you get the first minute right, you’ll get to your question, you’ll deliver the most important piece of information, you’ll have summarized things so that you actually don’t need a lot of what you might expect in the conversation. You’ve already stripped out the detail, you’ve already stripped out the backstory, and if the other person doesn’t need or want it, they might just say, “Yes, okay, here’s the answer to your question,” and you’re done. So, plan for a really solid first minute, and you’ll probably find that your conversations are all a lot shorter.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Chris Fenning

The last piece is the validation checkpoint. If you’ve done a great first minute, and I framed it and I’ve asked if you’ve got time, “So, Pete, I want to talk to you about this thing. Do you have five minutes?” and you’ve said yes, and I’ve given a summary. Once I’ve given that summary, I just want to check, “Is this, like, are you the right person to help me with this? And can we do it now?”

Because having heard the summary, you might think, “Actually, this is a much bigger topic. I really want to give this attention. Can we schedule time later?” Or, you might say, “Actually, no, I’ve realized I don’t have the info you need,” or, “I’m not the right person,” and you can redirect me. So, validate that the person you’re talking to has the ability and the availability to talk to you at that moment.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Chris Fenning

My favorite quote comes from my dad, actually, which is, “If you want to do something, don’t talk about doing it, go and do it.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Any favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Chris Fenning

Yes, there’s a piece of research that blows my mind every time I hear about it. There’s an experiment about our inability to read emotions from text, and it was called “Can we communicate as well as we think?” and it’s by Kruger, Epley, Parker and Zhi, and they published in the Journal of Psychology. And they did an experiment where they sent people text messages that was sarcastic, and tried to get people to understand whether they were sarcastic, and it was 50/50.

And then they did it with their spouses, and it was still 50/50 as to whether people got the sarcasm. We just can’t interpret emotion from text. And it’s a brilliant piece of research, and it comes up so many times in things that I read and teach as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Chris, thank you for that, and props for having a specific citation. Extra credit for you. Extra credit. And a favorite book?

Chris Fenning

At the moment, my favorite book is, Thinking 101 by Woo-kyung Ahn. And it’s blowing my mind about my own biases and the way that I interpret and think about things. It’s really challenging the way that I approach problems and think. It’s a very eye-opening book.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Chris Fenning

Calendly. I couldn’t do this job efficiently without Calendly. It’s product placement, but playing calendar tennis with people, “Do you have time here? What about 10 o’clock there?” and juggling time zones. Calendly makes it so easy.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Chris Fenning

I don’t do it as often as I like, but my favorite habit is going to bed on time. It sets up the next day, the next few days. And if I don’t do it, I really pay the price.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear it quoted back to you often?

Chris Fenning

The thing that comes back most often, and this is the most highlighted phrase in the book from Kindle, so Kindle’s very nice, it shows you what people are highlighting, and 900 people have highlighted that framing should take no more than three sentences and be delivered in less than 15 seconds. Now for some reason, that is the piece that resonates with people, and I completely agree. Three sentences, 15 seconds. That’s all it takes to set up a great conversation.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Chris Fenning

My social hangout is LinkedIn. Come find me there. And my website is ChrisFenning.com.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Chris Fenning

I do. If you want to be awesome at your job and stand out, take 30 seconds to prepare for an important conversation. In fact, take 30 seconds to prepare for any work conversation. It’ll help you get clear on your message, you’ll have shorter conversations, and you’ll get the results that you want.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Chris, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you many fabulous conversations.

Chris Fenning

Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Mark, welcome.

Mark Carpenter

Thank you, Pete. Glad to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis

I’m excited to hear your wisdom on storytelling, and I’d love it if you could start us off with one of your most surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about storytelling over your whole career of working on this stuff with people.

Mark Carpenter

You know, I think one of the most surprising things that I found is all the research that’s there to support it. I got into this just because I practiced it. It was my wife who nudged me to write this book because she was saying, “You have this way of taking everyday experiences and turning them into stories that can teach lessons.”

And my first thought was, “Well, that’s just what people do.” And she said, “No, no, you do that. Not everybody does that. And you could help other people to be able to do that more intentionally.” So, as I got into the research on the book, I was a little surprised to find out the depth of research behind why storytelling works and why it’s so effective in our business settings.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mark, you’re already giving us lessons from a story in that when you said, “That’s just what people do,” and you had a dear, loving, trusted companion, your wife, who said, “No, that’s what you do.” I think that’s often the nature of strengths, is that they seem, “Oh, of course, it’s natural to us,” but, no, really there’s something. special there. So, look at you, already teaching a lesson with a story, Mark, right off the beginning.

Mark Carpenter

That’s what I do, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s just what everyone does, right? Well, lay it on us, what’s a particularly striking research tidbit or insight that is really strong?

Mark Carpenter

Ooh, if I can share a couple, I’d love to be able to do that. Well, one of them was some research that was done at a university, and off the top of my head now I’m losing which one it was, so I’m not going to try to cite it because I’ll probably get it wrong. But they took graduate students and they put them into three groups. And they shared with one group a bunch of data, some important information, told them it’s really important for them to remember.

They took another group, they shared that information with them, but they gave it to them with charts and graphs, too. This is what we do in business to help people remember, right? We put it in charts and graphs. And the third group, they gave them the information in the form of a story. Then they got them back together a couple of weeks later and asked how much they remembered, how accurately they remembered, and what the impact of that information was on them.

They found that the first two groups really had no statistical difference in how well they remembered or how accurately they remembered, how much they remembered, or how accurately they remembered. The third group remembered more of the information, remembered it more accurately, and the surprising thing to me was they found it more credible.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that is surprising.

Mark Carpenter

We think when we’re putting our charts and graphs out there, and we’re giving a bunch of data to people, that’s going to build our credibility. They actually found the information more credible coming into the form of a story because they could relate to it more, it meant something to them individually. It wasn’t just a bunch of numbers or a bunch of information. They could see the relation to themselves, and that’s why they found it more credible. So, that was one of the surprising findings that I discovered in the research that we did for the book. The other one is the work of Dr. Paul Zak, who has investigated what’s going on inside people’s brains.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, oxytocin.

Mark Carpenter

Yeah, the oxytocin guy.

Pete Mockaitis

A former guest on How to be Awesome at Your Job, so he must be a good guy.

Mark Carpenter

Oh, he’s a fabulous guy. I love listening to him. I’ll take me a dose of Dr. Zak just about any time. I love listening to that man. But he discovered that there were three changes that happen inside of our brains when we hear a well-told story. The first one is an increase in oxytocin, and we get that by hearing a relatable story, a relatable situation with relatable characters.

So, you hear somebody tell a story and you think, “Oh, yeah, boy, I’ve been there. I’ve been in that kind of situation before.” We get an increase of oxytocin in our brains. The cool thing is that increases your trust. So, as people are listening to your well-told story, they trust you more because of that increase of oxytocin. Isn’t that awesome?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m chuckling because I’m thinking, I don’t want to poke the bear here, but someone I know was listening to a podcaster who’s been semi-canceled, and I think potentially justifiably in terms of, “Okay, that was kind of beyond the pale.” But he told a story I totally related to, and I was like, “Well, maybe this guy is not so bad.” I was like, “Is that all it took? Is that all it took?” I was like, “Wow.” I was struck by my own reaction. And here you are saying, “Well, no, Pete, there’s biochemical stuff at work here that this is quite normal.”

Mark Carpenter

So, you’ve just given a great example of how that happens. You’ve seen it in reality. You also see it when you see somebody on the street and they’re wearing logo apparel of your alma mater, or your favorite sports team, and all of a sudden, you like that person because you can relate to them. There’s just that literal relatability that comes in. So, that’s one of the powers of storytelling.

Two other things that Dr. Zak identified. When you introduce a little bit of conflict, a little bit of risk in that story, which is what makes the story interesting, the listener has an increase of cortisol in the brain, just a little bit. And the effect of the cortisol is it makes people pay attention more. In small doses. Too much cortisol, it stresses them out. But a little bit of cortisol will make people pay more attention to what you’re saying. So, it’s no wonder people remember better when they hear things in a story, it’s because they’re paying more attention.

And then finally, when you get to a good resolution to your story, people get an increase in dopamine. That neurotransmitter that gives you that kind of, “Ahh,” feeling of satisfaction, when there’s a satisfying ending that comes to that story, that there’s a lesson learned, there’s a good resolution to that story. It’s like leveling up on the video game or checking off something on your to-do list, you get a little sense of dopamine. And that’s what connects people into stories. We all know we like stories, but Dr. Zak’s research shows why, what’s going on with us chemically that really makes stories attractive to us.

Pete Mockaitis

That is so good. That is so good, and intriguing in terms of the credibility piece, specifically. Well, tell us then, when it comes to professionals, I think they’d say, “Well, yes, stories are fun, Mark. I’d like to hear more. I’d like to be able to tell more. But really, how much of an impact is that going to make for my career? And how do I pull it off?”

Mark Carpenter

Well, our book’s subtitle is “How to Turn Your Experiences into Stories that Teach, Lead, and Inspire.” So, if you’re in a position where you need to teach, lead, and inspire – and if I had to do it all over again, I would add “sell” in there as well – teach, lead, sell, and inspire, then storytelling can be effective for you, and we’re not talking about creating fables. There’s great business books out there that are business fables, but that’s not the kind of storytelling we’re talking about.

We’re talking about taking your real-life experience and being able to turn them into stories that people can relate to, that they can learn something from, that will inspire some action, that will lead to some change. So, those are the kind of stories that we’re talking about, specifically, in our book Master Storytelling.

So, if you have a position where you need to do those things – and, by the way who doesn’t? – then storytelling can be of great impact to you. Think of it this way, I’m going to go kind of a baseline for everybody that’s in business that’s had to go through this: the job interview. You prep for that job interview, and you get in your mind what questions they’re going to ask, and you get your straight answers, and how you’re going to deliver those answers. But I pretty much guarantee your answers are going to be almost exactly the same as the person who was interviewed right before you.

Unless you answer the question in the form of, “Let me share a story about an experience that I had that illustrates that.” When they ask you about, “So, what do you feel like is your greatest strength?” Oh, we all want to say things like, “Well, I’m a really hard worker.'” But what if you said, “Well, one of the things that I’ve been praised for by other people is the level of attention to detail that I get. For example…” and then share an experience where you gave a high level of detail to something and were praised for. Your interviewer will remember that better than the person who says, “Oh, I’m really detail-oriented. I’m really good at getting to the details and solving problems.”

Pete Mockaitis

Mark, I love that. And, in some ways, storytelling sounds so lofty. We think of Stephen King just banging away at a typewriter. I’m sure he uses a word processor now. But, like the heroic novelist going through draft after draft, and throwing them into the wastebasket; or Hollywood; or I’m thinking about like “The Moth,” or epic keynoters on the TED stage. But what you did there was so easy. You made a statement, and you said, “For example…” and boom, and you go right into story. In some ways, the word example feels a little bit less lofty and intimidating than story. Like, yeah, but that’s the same thing.

Mark Carpenter

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re pretty practiced at telling stories. We come home from a busy day, and family or friends say, “Hey, how was your day?” And we tell them kind of the story of the day. But in that situation, we’re really just relating the experience. But if I need to teach a lesson from that, I’m going to be more intentional about the parts that I leave out, the parts that I leave in, and make sure I get to the point at the end of that situation or that story.

And so, we’re not looking at those epic novels or epic tales. We’re looking at those day-to-day things that people can relate to that will help them remember a point that you’re trying to make, and really lead to some action.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now this is maybe the most meta question ever, Mark. We’re talking about storytelling. Can you tell us a story of someone who improved their storytelling skills and saw really cool benefits to their career as a result?

Mark Carpenter

Yeah, I’ll give you an example of an organization I worked with just last year. They had an annual event where they would bring people in from each of the different divisions to present to the leadership team about what their part of the organization was doing to drive forward the mission of the organization. And what they found was a lot of people were standing up and saying, “Our organization is doing these wonderful things,” and they try to give some numbers behind it, and give some kind of lofty words to it.

And the person who was organizing that said, “I really want people to start telling a story, to give an illustration.” And so. they selected people who had an example of something that happened, a specific event that happened within their organization. And I took them through my workshop and coached them on telling that story. And she said, “That event was totally different this year than all the other years.”

Most of the time, the leadership team is sitting there, kind of leaning back in their chairs, a little bit of a bored expression on their face. This time they were leaning in. And what they found was they were taking these words on the wall that were the mission statement, and actually turning them into behaviors in the hall that people could see, and relate to, and understand, and it really drove a lot of energy in the company around their mission, vision, and values.

Pete Mockaitis

I think that is a fine instance because mission, vision, values can really get fluffy, like, “What do we even mean by that?” It’s like, “No, here’s what we mean by exceptional customer service. Get a load of this. Someone bought some shoes, but their dog died, and so we looked them up on Instagram, and drew a picture.”

I think this was a real Zappos story, “And we drew a picture of their dog and them wearing their shoes, and we said, ‘Hey, hope you have fond memories of Fido,’” or whatever. And it was like, “Oh! That’s what you mean by exceptional customer service, and not just listening, and saying, ‘Oh, I understand you’re frustrated, sir. Gotcha.’ Now, it’s more clear and memorable.” I’m remembering this from years ago, see?

Mark Carpenter

There you go. See how sticky stories are? And I love what you said, because it does. It takes the mission, vision, and values from words on the wall to behaviors in the hall, “This is what it sounds like, but this is what it looks like.”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, so tell us, fundamentally, what makes a story good versus disappointing?

Mark Carpenter

And so, I’ll start with the research that Dr. Zak and what he’s talked about. Because if you think of those three chemical reactions that we have in our brains, we need to tap into those. So, how do you tap into the oxytocin? You create an experience that people can relate to, with people they can relate to, and a situation or a problem they can relate to.

So, what’s their worthwhile goal? What are they trying to accomplish? And you set this up in the beginning of sharing your experience, “Here’s where we were. Here’s where we were trying to get,” and people can make the connection to, “Oh yeah, I’ve been in that similar situation.” Then you need to introduce some conflict, something has to get in the way of that goal or the story is pretty boring. It doesn’t have much energy to it.

So, what is it that gets in the way of accomplishing that goal? We call this the conflict. And so, that conflict comes in, and that’s what makes people pay attention because they’re going, “What’s going to happen? How are we going to get to the end of this?” And then the third part is what we call the change, “What happens to bring resolution to that?”

Or, “What happened that it didn’t resolve right, but we learned something from that that we can change going forward? Where was the mistake that we made that we can learn from in the future?” because that’s going to bring in the dopamine as well and help people walk away with, “Yeah, I want to make sure that I do the right thing so that I don’t have that same problem that Mark ended up with in the experience that he shared.”

Pete Mockaitis

Mark, I love this so much. I love just making it simple, simple, simple. So, when it comes to good stories I’ve heard about, “Oh, Joseph Campbell, ‘The Hero’s Journey,’” like that’s a lot of steps. And then we got, “Well, Dan Harmon’s got an eight-part story circle model.” And I’ve done that with my five- and six-year-olds. It’s kind of fun. But eight is still a lot of steps. But, Mark, you said we got three. All right, set the scene.

Mark Carpenter

That’s what we’ve narrowed it for that very reason. You’re telling a story the last two to three minutes. It’s hard to fit eight steps into two to three minutes.

Pete Mockaitis

Totally.

Mark Carpenter

Nothing wrong with that eight-step process, but for the purposes of the types of stories that I’m talking about, we needed something really simple.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, step one, we set the scene with relatable people, relatable situation, relatable problem. Step two, we’ve got a conflict, something that gets in the way of what we’re after. And step three, we have a change, either because of like an insight and victory, or, “Oh, Oopsie Daisy,” a disappointing failure, and then learning that comes from that.

So, Mark, I’d love it if you could just give us maybe several examples of, we’ve got a business situation, and I might tell the tale with slides and charts and data, but you instead give us our three-step stories that get the job done better. No pressure. Go!

Mark Carpenter

No pressure. Just come up with it right out of the blue here.

Mark Carpenter

Which story do I want to go with? Yeah, I’ll go with one that I’ve been telling recently, and it’s actually not one of my stories. It’s actually a friend of mine. So, here’s another tip that I can throw to your listeners. The stories don’t always have to be yours. You can borrow from other people, and just think of how you’re crafting that story. And then acknowledge it, that it comes from another person.

So, I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of leading with greater humanity. I call it leading like a person, not like a position. And a friend of mine was telling me about a leader that he had. He actually left the company because the leadership was very much in the command-and-control mode, and would fire people on the spot very publicly. He left that company, went over to another company that was actually a competitor. And he had an opportunity three months into this position to introduce the CEO at a big partners conference.

So, they had hundreds of their best partners in the room. He was giving the introduction to the CEO. He’d prepped it, he’d memorized it, he’d worked with the CEO and the details for it. He was feeling really good about it, feeling like this is an opportunity to be seen and to show his value to this new company. He gets through the introduction, and just as he’s introducing the CEO, he says, “Please welcome the CEO of…” and he says the name of his last company.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yay.

Mark Carpenter

All right. You’re feeling the pain right there?

Pete Mockaitis

It’s so relatable, Mark.

Mark Carpenter

You just came into the story, right? And hundreds of partners go, “Boo!” And he realized what he’d done, and he’s humiliated. Now, he recovered from it quickly by saying, “Of course, we know he wouldn’t work for that company. He’s the CEO of…” and he said the name of the right company, introduced the CEO, the CEO walks on stage, he shakes his hand, and then he walks off.

But as he was walking off, everyone is kind of avoiding him, and he’s thinking, because of the experience that he had at his previous company, “This is it. This is the end for me. I’m going to get fired as soon as the CEO is done speaking.” He found a quiet place away from other people, and started thinking about his next career moves as the CEO is giving this hour-long speech.

The CEO comes off the stage and, very intentionally, starts looking around until he finds my friend Nick. And he walks right to him, and he’s thinking, “Here it comes. Here it comes.” And the CEO puts his arms around him, whispers in his ear, “Don’t worry about it. We’ve all done it. We’ve all made these kinds of mistakes. You’re fine. It’s okay.”

That’s what I call leading like a person. And we all love to have leaders like that, because we will go to bat for leaders like that. So, if you want people to really give their best, that’s the kind of leader you want to be.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautifully done, Mark. So, here we have the situation, I can relate, “Hey, I want to make a great impression. I have an opportunity, that’s really cool. And then, oopsies, made a mistake, feel really bad about it. Uh-oh, what’s going to happen?” And then humanity on full display, and we feel good, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I like that.” And it’s like, “I, too, would like to be that kind of a leader, Mark.” Go on. There we are.

Mark Carpenter

Yep. And good job picking up those three phases that are right in there. Once you know them, they’re actually fairly obvious within the story structure. But it just makes it, as we’re talking about, an easy way to organize your thoughts so that you can make it concise. I’ll add to that that the important thing to keep in mind is “What is the lesson I’m trying to teach here? Well, what is my end goal?” because that will help you edit out extraneous information that happened within the experience.

You sometimes hear people make that mistake where they’re telling a story. They want to give every single detail in it, and you’re thinking, “Why is that relevant?” or, “Where’s that going?” And I refer to it as “They don’t land the plane there. They’re just flying around their story and they’re not getting to the point.” So, you have to know what runway you’re landing on, and that will help you get to the point more efficiently.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. Well, maybe let’s do just that, and say we’re trying to make a point to an executive, a leader, or an organization that something’s got to change. And I’ll try to get more specific, Mark, so that you can really work with this, “Something needs to change and we need to invest significantly in an innovation, a new product, service, offering, or we’re going to be in trouble. And we can’t just keep being all comfy cozy and expect that recurring revenue we’ve thought was great to continue forever if we just continue living in isolation and not creating new cool stuff.”

So, that’s the impact I’m trying to get, is folks can be, like, “Wake up. Take action. We got to do something and stop just living the status quo. There seems to be some foot-dragging and some comfort and risk aversion.” So, that’s a transformation I want. How could I make a story to help me do this, Mark?

Mark Carpenter

Well, there’s a couple of different ways that you can approach that. Number one, look at another organization that didn’t take those steps and has now failed. I could easily tell the story of Blockbuster Video. That’s a very well-known story that shows that they were a, “Nope, we are kingpins. We are cruising. We are just fine. You Netflix people are never going to make it.”

And I would get into some of the details of that. And where’s Blockbuster now? Because they weren’t willing to innovate and they looked at streaming as a “Eh, that’s a fad. That’s never going to going to fly. People want to come to a store and get their DVDs to go home and watch them.” Yeah, I think it’s a classic example of people not innovating.

If you can find one within your organization, if you can find a situation where “We lost this customer because we didn’t have this level of innovation, we didn’t have this direction of going forward.” As you were talking about that, I was even thinking of a very specific example years ago that I faced where there was a company that had just laid off a third of their workplace. And we talked to them about why, and they said, “Because no one’s willing to tell the CEO that he doesn’t have good innovative ideas.”

I was like, “What do you mean? What happens?” He’s “Well, the CEO comes in and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great idea. Here’s what I think we should do.’” He presents the idea, and everybody’s thinking, “That’s never going to work, but we really like this guy, so we can’t tell him no, and so we’re going to just try to make it work.”

And it keeps them from innovating on new products, and so their revenue keeps going down, and they ended up just laying off a third of their workplace because they weren’t able to have the tough conversations, basically tell the emperor that he has no clothes, and that the idea is not going to work. They need to expand into new areas. And it ended up putting that company at risk, and they eventually did go out of business. I wasn’t as invested with them when they went out of business so I’m not sure exactly what happened there, but I know that created struggles for them to just keep up with the market.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so this is really good. And it’s true, you know, as opposed to a fable. So, Mark, help us out in terms of when we think, “Okay, there’s a transformation that we’re going for. We think a story would be cool. We understand the three steps. But, huh, I need some source material.” How do you recommend we do the research, the scouting, the finding of the potential story, subject matter, to start working on?

Mark Carpenter

That’s a great question that I get all the time. And the question that I usually get is, “Well, nothing ever happens in my life. I don’t have any stories that I can tell.” And I usually say, “Well, you’re just not looking for them.” Pay attention. The stories are there. Do some research. Look at other companies. The internet is such a great resource for some of those things. Ask other people.

As we were writing the book, in fact, I included this in the book, a friend of mine shared an experience where he was looking for an illustration of a specific point. And the point that he was trying to make was, “Where has a well-intentioned action backfired on somebody?” And he was looking for examples, looking for examples, couldn’t find anything. Over dinner he mentioned it to his wife and she said, “Oh, I’ve got an example,” and she just had a perfect example for him to share. Ask other people. Open yourself up to those things.

I had an interesting situation where I was in a trainer certification. I was leading this trainer certification, and one of the activities that each participant had to do was to deliver a portion of the content, and include a story to illustrate the point that they were trying to make. This one participant said, “Well, can I just make them up?” And I said, “No, I want this to be a real experience,” and it scared her to death. She was like, “I don’t know where I’m going to come up with a real experience. Usually when I tell stories, I just make them up.” And somebody else in the room said, “I’m not sure how credible that would be.”

So, we talked about looking for your examples. Look for those moments where you have an emotional reaction to something. There’s a lesson embedded in there, and capture those, hold on to them. You may not need it now, but you will in the future. The funny thing is about this one participant in this trainer certification, she came back the next day, told a great story of something that had happened to her the night before on the elevator in the hotel where we were holding this conference.

And because she was looking for it, after that experience happened, she realized, “That’s my story. That illustrates the point that I’m trying to make,” but if she hadn’t been looking for it, she wouldn’t have noticed it. If you’re looking for it, it’s almost like the universe sends you the examples that you need, because these lessons just exist in our day-to-day lives.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. Think about the strong emotional reactions. And I’m thinking the same way you get ideas for anything is you just sort of like strike it with a stimulus and see what you got. So, I’ve been doing a little bit of journaling and thinking about the timelines and different phases of life, and, “What was I really into when I was 10 versus 16?”

And I think that could maybe spark some things in terms of shaking off the myopia associated with the here and now and the day-to-day of what’s up. And then when you go external, stories about businesses or whatever outside, I was impressed. You know, boy, there’s a lot of talk of AI and ChatGPT and whatever, and I’ve had really mixed results with this stuff in terms of, like, what it’s good at, what it’s not.

But one thing that it’s been very good, I think, is, first I asked for quantity, because I was like, “Give me 10 examples of people who had a transformation in their speaking ability, what they did, and the impact it made.” And it was really cool, it told me stuff like, “Oh, Warren Buffett took a Dale Carnegie course, and he thought it was so transformational that he says it’s the only degree, diploma, certificate, he has hanging in his office was from his Dale Carnegie course.” It’s like, “Okay, this is a little on the nose, ChatGPT. Is this even real?”

And so, I looked it up, and, sure enough, it was. And I was like, “Huh, I had no idea,” and that’s a great one. And even if when AI fails me, which it does more often than not, it just trying, helps spark fresh ideas for me. It’s like, “No, that’s no good, but you reminded me of something. Thank you,” and then it served its purpose.

Mark Carpenter

Exactly. And I’m glad you said that you validated that story before you used it.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Mark Carpenter

Yeah, you use AI as a way to generate ideas, to generate possibilities. The problem is sometimes that’s what AI is doing. They’re generating possibilities. So, they may come back with a story that is a, “Well, this could be true.” So, make sure you, before you use anything that AI generates for you, that you validate that it actually is true, that it actually did happen. I have heard that story about Warren Buffett, so I was thinking that it was true. But sometimes it’ll generate things, examples for you, that could be true.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, exactly.

Mark Carpenter

Not necessarily true.

Pete Mockaitis

It reminds me when people tell me a story about myself in the past that I don’t actually remember, and I say, “I don’t remember that happening, but it does kind of sound like me, and I don’t think you’re lying, so I’ll just assume that that, in fact, is what happened.” But with AI, it could sometimes just totally fabricate things. So, certainly, do your research and confirm it.

Next, I want to get your take on, in the process of preparing our stories, to what extent do we want to write out, record, transcribe, rehearse? Like, what does prep look like? And can you do too much such that it’s unnatural and less effective? How do you think about story prep?

Mark Carpenter

It’s different for different people. Some people love to just write out their story word for word, and then practice it until it’s natural, and it comes in a flow to them. Other people, bullet points are fine. However, for everyone, practice is essential. It is essential to practice it, to get those words out of your mouth, to formulate them in a way that sounds natural, that sounds normal, and that makes the connections that you want to make.

We have great tools to help us with that. You have friends. Practice it in front of friends. Tell the story to somebody else and see how it lands with them. Take out your phone. Turn on that selfie mode and record yourself and listen back to it. You will pick up a lot that way in terms of, “Ooh, that phrase didn’t work like I thought it was going to. That sounded a lot better in my head than it did coming out of my mouth.” So, practice it so that it does become natural.

To your point, yes, you can over-rehearse it to where it sounds like I’m just dictating to you from a piece of paper instead of actually having the emotion that comes with the story. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was asking me to coach him a little bit on a presentation that he was going to give, and the advice that he was given was, “You need to memorize this word-for-word.”

And it was really interesting listening to him because I know this person well, that I found it unnatural, and there were times where he’d get to a sentence and he’d go “Uh, uh, uh” and you could tell he was searching for the exact word. But if it’s your experience and it’s your story, and you’re comfortable sharing it with that structure, that three-part structure that I talked about, it will come out much more natural than if you’re memorizing the words, and it’s much more relatable that way as well.

Pete Mockaitis

And when it comes to word choice, any pro tips? I don’t know if there’s any favorite words or phrases or things to avoid. I guess I find, I guess, reading words or copy, in general, I find buzzwords really challenging and unpleasant and a turn-off, like, “You’re looking for a way to leverage omni channel support to increase the ROI of dah, dah, dah.” It’s like, “This is not working for me. Maybe it’s written for somebody else who’s like, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking for!’” But how do you think about words to use and words to lose?

Mark Carpenter

Use the words that are natural for you. That’s the biggest advice that I can give you there. If you’re putting in buzzwords, you’re likely using words that you would not normally use, and that will come across. You’ll lose your authenticity when you do that, so use the words that are natural for you. Now, also be careful about inclusive language. Don’t use words that are going to turn people off.

A friend of mine was giving a presentation to a group of Microsoft employees, and made some comment in the middle of a story about, “So, I Googled it.” That’s not what you want to say to people who work at Microsoft. If instead she had said, “I did an internet search,” and not used the G-word to the Microsoft employees, it wouldn’t have been as bad, but she just got a really negative reaction. People went, “Oh,” just right out loud, and she didn’t realize what she’d done initially until she replayed it and went, “Oh, yeah, that’s not the word I should have used here.”

So that’s the caution that I give around word choice is know who your audience is and what’s going to relate to them, but as much as possible, use your own natural language. That will increase the authenticity. It will increase the connection you get from the people you’re talking to.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mark, tell me any final do’s and don’ts you want to share about storytelling?

Mark Carpenter

I think the biggest do, be intentional. Just be intentional about why you’re telling the story. Don’t tell stories just to tell stories. We know they’re fun, and there is a time and a place to just tell stories to tell stories. But when you’re using a story to teach, lead, sell, and inspire, be intentional about what you’re trying to get to. What is the point that you’re trying to make? And the more intentional you can be, the better your stories are going to land, and the more it’s going to create a positive impact for you and the goals that you’re trying to achieve.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. All right. Well, Mark, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Carpenter

There is one that I’ve leaned on a lot when times get tough. We always get into rush times. One of my college professors, a great person named Ray Beckham, he gave us this advice as we were graduating. He said, “When you get into rush situations, when you get in emergency situations, remember these words, ‘Hurry, but don’t panic.'” That’s one of my favorite quotes, “Hurry, but don’t panic.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Mark Carpenter

This is one that changes over time, too, because I read a lot. And so, it’s usually my favorite most recent book. I love the book that I’ve just read. It’s called How to Listen by Oscar Trimboli.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Oscar, yeah, on the show.

Mark Carpenter

You had Oscar on your podcast?

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah.

Mark Carpenter

Love Oscar Trimboli, too. I think he’s a great thought leader, and he wrote a marvelous book about how to be more intentional about listening to other people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mark Carpenter

This is going to sound almost too light, but I love the Notes app on my phone. I use that to capture those moments when I have an emotional reaction to an experience. I say, “There’s a story there.” I just have a little folder in there that says Stories for Someday, and I just love to just capture that in there with a quick note that someday I’ll come back to when I’m looking for a story, and I’ll find an experience there that I can use.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Mark Carpenter

I think it’s just intentionally being grateful for something every day, and just acknowledging what I’m grateful for, it really helps me to have a better day.

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?

Mark Carpenter

It’s one that I shared a little bit earlier, that storytelling helps move your mission, vision, and values from words on the wall to behaviors in the hall, so that people can see what you mean by those mission, vision, and value statements.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mark Carpenter

Start with our website Master-Storytelling.com. So, you have to have a little dash between master and storytelling. That’s a great place. We’ve got some free resources there. We’ve got a little document called the Story Catcher that helps you to be more intentional about capturing those events in your life and turning them into stories that will teach, lead, sell, and inspire. So, I’d love to have people come out and get that free resource and connect with me. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Look for Mark Carpenter in Sandy, Utah, and you’ll find me. You’ll see a copy of the Master Storytelling book cover behind me.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mark Carpenter

Tell your stories. We’ve all got them. And so, be intentional about looking for those experiences that you can turn into stories that teach, lead, sell, and inspire. And look for opportunities to use those to accomplish your goals.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, Mark, this has been tons of fun. I wish you many lovely stories.

Mark Carpenter

Thanks so much. Appreciate the time, Pete.