Tag

Communication Archives - Page 3 of 26 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Nov 16
0

916: Six Principles for Writing to Busy Readers with Todd Rogers

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Todd Rogers shares powerful writing principles to help capture your busy audience’s attention.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why people aren’t reading—and what to do about it
  2. The critical question that will improve your writing
  3. The simple trick to get people to respond to your request

About Todd

Todd Rogers is co-author of Writing for Busy Readers, and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the faculty director of the Behavioral Insights Group, faculty chair of the executive education program Behavioral Insights and Public Policy, Senior Scientist at ideas42, and Academic Advisor at the Behavioral Insights Team.

Todd co-founded the Analyst Institute, which improves voter communications, and serves on its board. He also co-founded EveryDay Labs, which partners with school districts to reduce student absenteeism by communicating with families, is an equity holder and serves as Chief Scientist.  Todd received his Ph.D. jointly from Harvard’s department of Psychology and the Harvard Business School.

Resources Mentioned

Todd Rogers Interview Transcript

Todd Rogers

Thanks, Pete. Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s fun. I saw you have the book Pre-Suasion on your bookshelf, and then we had a moment of discussing how we both love Dr. Robert Cialdini, who we interviewed on the show and which was one of my favorite guests ever partly because we wanted him for so long. But you actually got to collaborate directly with him. Tell us the tale.

Todd Rogers

Well, I read his book Influence: The Science of Persuasion in undergrad, and I was like, “This stuff is cool.” And not too long after college decided I wanted to get a PhD in work, just like that, and so he was always on my mind. And then as I got to know him as a social psychologist and behavioral scientist, eventually, a few years ago, he and I had been talking about a project for a while, and he asked if I wanted to collaborate with him, with Jessica, my co-author on the book that I hope we’re about to talk about.

And I actually got choked up on the phone call when he asked if we would collaborate with him because I just felt like it was full circle that he was a real inspiration for why I’m doing a lot of this stuff. So, yeah, so it was really cool. We did a paper on how to respond to attack ads, and the psychology of how to respond to attack ads when your attacker is louder and dishonest. I don’t know where, we just came up with that.

Pete Mockaitis

So, it’s like if I’m running for office.

Todd Rogers
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, just for my future reference, should that be coming down the pike for me, how do I respond to louder and lying attack ads?

Todd Rogers

I haven’t thought about this paper in a little bit but the basic idea is that you often respond to an attack by countering it, you say, “That’s not true. I did not crash my car while drinking,” and so on. And then, in a way, it reinforces the underlying message, whatever the attack was, let’s say I was falsely accused of drunk driving and getting into a car accident.

And so, Bob had this idea that is just brilliant, obviously, was what you should do is, instead, say, “When my opponent says this, know that what they are really doing is deflecting from the fact that they have broken the law in so many other ways.” And so, what you do is you create a different association so that whenever the attack comes, people cognitively associate it with its own response.

And so, it’s called the poison parasite. You sort of parasitically attach the response so that whenever they reuse the image, or the phrase, or the whole idea, it automatically, through memory, what’s called conditioned association, it automatically makes accessible its response that negates the attack.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, that’s just handy to know for future reference.

Todd Rogers

Yeah, that’s not what we’re talking about but it’s cool. It’s cool how memory, like you can associate things to other objects so that when those objects come up, they bring to mind other things. And so, instead of responding directly, which is you should keep repeating their phrase, and say, “When they use this phrase, think of this. When they use this phrase, think of this.” And then whenever they use the phrase, it becomes self-negating.

Pete Mockaitis

Fabulous. Thank you. Well, we are talking about your book Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. And I’d love it if you could share with us – having studied reading and writing for so long – can you kick us off with a particularly striking, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about this stuff over your career that really sticks with you?

Todd Rogers

It’s a really high bar but I will start with something that, after saying it, is obvious but is underappreciated. No one is reading what we’re writing. That’s a place to start. Everyone is skimming. Everyone is busy, and their goal, when they read anything we send them, is to move on as quickly as possible, so quickly that very often it means moving on before even understanding what we’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, that sounds true. I guess in our heart of hearts, if we don’t want to believe it, “Well, surely, my trusted colleagues and collaborators, who value my input, are carefully reading,” do you have any striking datapoints or studies that underscores this?

Todd Rogers

We’ve a ton of randomized trials where we test different elements of writing to see whether people are actually reading it. So, let me just do one. One of the principles in the book, the book is called Writing for Busy Readers, and one of the principles is less is more. And we do a whole series of these experiments, I’ll just describe one, where someone is sending a message, in this case, it could be fundraising messages, it could be like sign up for registration of a webinar, it could be fill out a survey, it could be respond to me about a time.

We’ll do one where I was emailing 7,000 elected school board members. We’d written a web crawler, I was surveying them. And it started with a bunch of gratitude expressions and respect, “Thank you so much.” Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis

“Thank you so much for serving the youth and shaping the future generation.”

Todd Rogers
You got it, Pete. It sounds like you could’ve written it where you just dictate this, but it turns out that was all useless but you got the spirit of it. So, along “Thank you. You’re so important. You’re doing great stuff. And you are. It’s a really hard job. Nobody likes you because you’re making hard choices. Thank you. Will you please fill up my survey?”

And in the other condition, we said, “I’m a professor,” same first sentence, and then deleted all the gratitude, “Please fill up my survey.” And the important thing is we had a couple hundred people read both versions and predict which one will get more responses. Literally, almost everyone, 93% of people think that the more deferential, longer message will get more responses. But consistent with literally every experiment we’ve ever run on this topic, the shorter one was substantially more effective, in this case, twice as many respondents when we eliminated all the extra words.

Similarly, I read an experiment with a large federal political committee. I’m not supposed to say which party but one of the big parties in the United States, and there aren’t that many, and they were sending 700,000 donors an email for fundraising with six paragraphs. I just said, “Let’s arbitrarily delete every other paragraph so it doesn’t even make sense anymore. So, we just went from six to three by just randomly deleting paragraphs. People read them. They agree it’s incoherent where we cut every other paragraph. Still increases donation by 16%. One principle is less is more.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wow! Oh, I can see why we all, why you and I both love Bob Cialdini, and I love everything you’re saying – data-driven and impactful. Wow! So, you said almost nothing, “I’m a professor. Please fill out this survey” and that is ideal.

Todd Rogers

Well, yeah, it works like flagging. It is almost certainly better if someone reads all the respectful deferential verbiage, that that is probably more effective if they read it all because I’m showing all the respect. But stage one is, “Do they read it at all?” And it is very common to just deter people from engaging with what we write by just having extra words.

Think about how you go through your inbox. I do these surveys whenever I teach it, it’s like, “Okay, you have two messages in your inbox. One is three sentences, the other is three paragraphs. Which one do you read first?” Everyone reads the three-sentence one. Everybody’s busy, everybody’s skimming, and they’re just doing triage with this like a flood of stuff coming at them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I suppose the exceptions are probably quite limited, like, “I am choosing to read a novel for the pleasure of enjoying reading words and visualizing scenes and connecting with these characters.” There’s that but that’s maybe, is it fair to say, Todd, that’s only when you’re reading novels more or less?

Todd Rogers

Yeah, when we’re reading poetry, when we’re reading The New Yorker, or when we’re reading novels, it’s a different purpose of reading. The kind of writing that Jessica and I are talking about in the book is practical writing. It could be text messaging your parents to coordinate for Thanksgiving dinner. It could be writing to your boss. It could be sending a sales pitch or a proposal to a client. Practical writing that is not recreational, everybody’s skimming. The TLDR version of our long book, which is not that long, is we need to make it easier for our readers. And the easier we make it for our readers to read and skim, the more likely they are to read, understand, and respond.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Less is more, that’s powerful and self-explanatory. You gave us a couple of examples. But tell us, Todd, is there anything else we need to know about this principle to begin putting it into action right away and enjoy its benefits?

Todd Rogers

There are three parts to less is more but I will be very, very brief about it. Fewer words, fewer ideas, which is the hard part. That means deciding some ideas may be helpful but not worth it because there’s tradeoffs. And the third is fewer requests, which I think people don’t intuitively get at first. If I asked you for four things, one, you may postpone doing any of them; two, you’re going to do the easiest one first; and, three, you may just get derailed on the process of going from one to two, and then you just get distracted.

We’ve seen in experiments of all kinds of variety that when you ask for multiple things, you’re less likely to get any one of those things done than if you ask for one thing. And so, again, just like writing, it just requires prioritizing, like knowing what your most important things are, and deciding whether it’s worth the cost of adding more.

Pete Mockaitis

So, let’s say, Todd, I am sending out a sales pitch or I want to persuade you or some other guest to appear on the podcast, I could say, less is more, say, “Hey, I think your book is awesome. Come on to my show.” But I think, as I put myself in their shoes, it’s like, “Okay, who are you? And is your show legit?” So, I got to give them a little more, but do I have an attachment or a link? Or, how do I think about this?

Todd Rogers

There isn’t a single right answer. You know your context, your goals, your audience. That said, you know that I’m skimming. And so, what we say in my lab, and I’m not saying everyone should do it, but in our lab, no email should be more than four sentences. Let me give you context. 

In our lab, it would be like, “Pete,” sentence one, “so fun being on the podcast. Thanks for having me.” Two, “At the end, you asked me a question about this.” Third, “Below, I have more details about that,” or attached, or linked, “Here are more details.” Four, “Let me know if you have any other questions about it.” And then, “Todd.”

Then underneath that, I can have it organized so that it’s easy to skim, and we can use the other principles. But what you don’t want is it to be buried in four paragraphs later, like, “Oh, the details of the answer to your question.” And so, if you’re emailing me, I think probably the optimal way is, like, the first paragraph is some version of it’s three sentences or two sentences, being like, “Admire your work. We’d love to have you on the podcast. Details of the podcast are below. Lots of great people have been on it, including our mutual friend, Bob Cialdini.” And then below, it’s like, “I’m the best. And How to be Awesome at Your Job is awesome, and you’d be more awesome at your job if you’re on my podcast,” or whatever it is.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Cool. So, less is more, fewer ideas, fewer words, fewer requests. Let’s hear the second one, make reading easy.

Todd Rogers

Make reading easy. And that is short words, common words, short simple sentences. The coolest thing that I learned when Jessica and I were writing this book, and I don’t want to speak for her. She, actually, when she talks about it, there are other things that she found to be the coolest things she learned, but for me it was the vision tracking research where when you compel people to read, they go, “Word, word, word,” and you’re watching their eyes, the eye tracking, they go, “Word, word, word, word. Period.”

And then they pause at the period. It’s this thing very creatively called the period pause effect, which is that people pause at the period, and they just sit there, and you may not even notice it, I don’t notice it. I didn’t notice it since I read this stuff. But when you read, you’re just like, you pause there to make sure that you get what the idea was. And very often, you have to go backwards and reread. And that’s because the sentence was kind of complex, and you didn’t really get it. So, it’s cognitively taxing, it requires a lot of effort to read complicated writing with unfamiliar long words. That’s problem one. So, that means people are going to quit in the middle of it.

Two, it’s totally inaccessible to a very large fraction of people when we write in ways that are difficult to read. So, the median United States adult, that means the 50th percentile or if you rank order them on the reading ability, reads like a 9th grade reading level. So, when we write in ways that are complex, we’re inaccessible, unreadable to a large fraction of people. But even to those who are able to read it, the audience that is able to read these complex sentences with unfamiliar uncommon words, for them it’s cognitively taxing, and they’re just more likely to give up and move on.

So, the idea is, again, the easier we make it, the more effective it is, the kinder it is to our reader because we’re making it faster for them and less depleting. It’s also more accessible and inclusive because more people can read our stuff.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, when we talk about long sentences and big words, any particular numbers or rules of thumb you have in mind?

Todd Rogers

No.

Pete Mockaitis

“Twelve words max.”

Todd Rogers

Yes, make it as easy as possible for your reader, and that honestly depends on context, and it depends on what the expectations are. I work with people who write intelligence assessments in the intelligence committee. And I was working with somebody who said that their reports have to be 20 pages, that’s the norm.

You can’t write it shorter than that without looking like you didn’t do your job. And so, okay, well, you can’t make it short. You can make it easier to read so you can write with shorter, more common sentences and words. You can also make it skim-able, which I’m sure we’ll get to as the third – make it easy to jump around.

Pete Mockaitis

Maybe pictures?

Todd Rogers

Yes, if pictures convey it more easily to your reader, then great. Everything is through the lens of, “How do I make it easier for the reader?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. So, next stop, you’ve got design for easy navigation.

Todd Rogers

Oh, right on. We just cued that one up. Nice. I think it flows naturally, design for easy navigation. The idea is – this is going to sound like an absurd sentence but Jessica and I are arguing we focus when writing too much on our writing. And, really, if we take seriously that people are jumping around and they’re skimming and they’re moving on before they even get the main point, then we should design our writing like a map to give headings and guideposts to let people know what’s here, what’s there, and it allows them to jump around and find the parts that they want to dive into and read more closely, and then pop back up like a map, and then navigate.

We’ve run some experiments where we add headings or not to a multi-paragraph message. And in one experiment we ran, it was six paragraphs, maybe seven paragraphs, and we inserted headings or we didn’t after every two paragraphs. Then we looked at whether anyone read anything or acted on anything after the second paragraph, basically after the headings. More than doubled the likelihood of the people got past the second paragraph.

And the idea is just that a sensible person, optimizing with their limited time, for how best they are going to use their next second as they’re navigating their to-do list. If they can’t figure it out, it looks like a wall of text, they’re going to look at it, maybe jump around, and then give up, unless it’s super important to them, in which case, they’ll devote more time. But adding structure, making it easy for people to skim makes it easier for busy readers to get through what we’re writing to them, and helps us be more effective.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, this is bringing me back, talking about easy navigation and the next step, we’re talking about formatting, use enough formatting but no more as your rule of thumb. I’m reminded of back in the day, making a lot of slides at Bain & Company, there was a phenomenon which I kind of thought was fun where they had selective bolding. It’s like customers who had their service requests met the first time were 87% more satisfied, and that part is bolded.

And so, I always read it in my head that way. It’s like, “I’m reading normal words, and now these are bold.” And I thought it was cool because, from a visual perspective, if you were to – we’re talking about skimming – if you were to glance at the slide and read 15% of the words, the bolded ones you will get, “Oh, okay, get it done the first time is a huge deal. Okay, cool. And so, there we have it. Thank you for your selective bolding.”

Todd Rogers

I love it. And Bain is awesome at this. I’m sure if you were a consultant at Bain, you probably went through the training in the first couple of weeks where you each had to make a voicemail and an email, and this is part of their onboarding process. They’re awesome at it. You talked about the selective bolding. I think it makes sense to talk both about design for easy navigation and use formatting judiciously or carefully together.

And the idea is, “How do we make it easier for readers?” And, in this case, what structure and components of structure do we add to our writing? So, here’s one that I love. It’s not going to be formatting but it’s part of designing. I love the bottom line upfront that the US Army uses. It’s called BLUF. For any veteran listening, and I don’t know if you’re a veteran, Pete, but they’re amazing at communications in the army.

And they have a regulation, literally, like a formal reg that demands that any writing in the US Army, first sentence is the bottom line, bottom line upfront. So, if you’re a general writing to an enlisted person, or an enlisted person writing to a general, everyone knows where the bottom line is, it’s the first line. And so, it completely makes it easy to skim. It also disambiguates. That’s a word, we’re talking about writing, so it’s easy.

It also just makes it clear to everybody how we write in our group. And that is especially helpful for lower-status people. Like, an enlisted person writing to a general, completely understandably without clear guidance, would write something like, “You know, I admire your work and we once ran into each other in the mess together. You may not remember me, I’m also from Wisconsin . I just wanted to see if we could have a meeting next week,” as opposed to now, it’s like, “Meeting next week.”

I love that, that makes it easy for readers because they have rules and norms and, in this case, regulations about how we write. That won’t work for everybody because different organizations and different people have different expectations about what a message is supposed to look like. If I wrote you a message like that, where the first line is

“Pete, it was so fun being on the pod. Thanks for having me. I wonder if maybe you could’ve asked this question differently?” and then whatever. Very different than if I was like, “You should’ve asked…” you see having clear norms on how we write. Your question was about formatting and the selective bolding that people at Bain and other places use.

What Jessica and I found is that, in a bunch of surveys, people interpret bold, underline, and highlight as the writer telling the reader, “This is the most important content in this text.” And so, it’s incredible at getting people to read whatever those words are. We do these experiments where we have a sentence that we’re really interested in, and we test people afterwards if they read it.

And when it’s not bolded or underlined or highlighted, nobody reads it, half the people read it because it’s midway through the document they’re reading. And then when you bold, underline, or highlight it, everybody reads it. And so, okay, it’s really powerful, people interpret it the way you would expect they interpret it.

So, then what we do is we use bold, underline, or highlight to draw attention to a different sentence that’s near the one we care about, and everybody reads that other sentence, and it induces, it causes a bunch of people to skip the rest of the text. Because everyone is going fast, and when you tell them, “This is the most important sentence,” it licenses those who are really short on time to just skip everything else, “I got the key information. Got it. Thanks. Ready to move on.”

And so, again, so much of this, there’s tradeoffs. You have to be really careful because people interpret you as serious when you say, “This is the most important thing,” and it licenses them to not read the rest of it.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. So, it’s very effective, it’s so effective it’s dangerous because if you use it wrong, you’re missing out, “You read the thing I bolded instead of everything. And, actually, oopsies, I didn’t bold the thing that I really, really needed you to read.”

Todd Rogers

You got it. Exactly. Again, like so much of this, these are powerful tools as long as we use them well but they also can go awry.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Another principle you have is tell readers why they should care.

Todd Rogers

It’s a pretty straightforward one.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s the first quarter of every nonfiction business book.

Todd Rogers

Of course.

Pete Mockaitis

“This is the most important idea ever.”

Todd Rogers

That’s right, yeah. So, you’re right, and it’s the title of your podcast How to be Awesome at Your Job. Because we are obsessed with randomized experiments, I’ll just show you an illustration. Rock the Vote is an organization that recruits, that gets young people to register to vote, often by having volunteers go to concerts. And they did this experiment where they were asking potential volunteers to volunteer.

And in one case, the subject line was, “Volunteer to register voters,” because from the Rock the Vote perspective, that’s the point. The main idea for Rock the Vote is, “We’re getting people to volunteer to register voters.” They did another condition where they said, “Go to concerts for free while registering voters. Go to free concerts while registering voters.”

From a reader’s perspective, that’s a thing they would care about a little bit more. If you focus on what the writer cares about, it’s, “I’m trying to get people to volunteer to register voters.” But from the reader’s standpoint, “Go to a Beyonce concert and register voters” is an entirely different thing. And so, what they found was when they focused on what the reader cared about, they 4X’d registrations.

And the idea is, like you said, it’s the beginning of every nonfiction business books, it’s the title of your podcast, it’s outrageously important and too easily overlooked that when we write we focus on why we care about the thing, and that’s all I care about. As Jessica and I were writing this book, Writing for Busy Readers, we are trying to help writers be more effective at achieving their goals.

In the process, whatever is necessary from the writer’s perspective being the message, we should review that and elevate the parts that we think the reader might care most about because that’ll capture more of their attention, be more likely to motivate them to read and respond.

Pete Mockaitis

It is a tendency. That is, writers talk about what they care about, what they’re into, and then neglect sort of the audience first all the time. And I think I was guilty of that and it was Nick Morgan’s book Give Your Speech, Change the World that really landed it for me in my early days of keynoting, like, “You must start the journey from why to how.”

But I love how so much, it’s so exciting to me, I almost just assume, “Well, of course, we all want to accomplish great things in an organization, and have cool relationships and culture and have fun, and get things, so I don’t even need to mention that. I could just get right into the super cool tactics I discovered,” and that is just wrong.

I have learned the hard way you must tell readers why they should care, or listeners why they should care. Nick Morgan is right. You’re right. And legions of nonfiction business books, publishers, and editors, are not wrong. I might advocate that they shorten the why case a little bit in many of these books, but it absolutely needs to be there.

Todd Rogers

I’ll plus one that shortening part.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Now, let’s hear about make responding easy.

Todd Rogers

Make responding easy is for those of your listeners, and you, who have followed behavioral science. Make responding easy is just about the essence of the greatest hits of behavioral science. If we reduce friction, we simplify processes, if we prepopulate forms, if we make it really easy to figure out what the key information is, people are more likely to get it and respond to it.

Jessica and I have this mantra, “If it’s important for us the writers, make it easy for them the readers.” That’s the thing. If it’s important for us, we want to make it easy for them. Here’s an incredibly micro example that may be familiar to you, and it is way too familiar to me, which is a group email or group text of, “Let’s find the time to meet.” And I’ll often initiate and be like, “Here are six times that work for me over the next two weeks.”

The next person will, verbatim, actually say, “The second and third work for me, possibly the fifth and maybe the sixth.” And then the chain dies. And the idea is that any reader, first, needs to understand what they’re trying to say, but even if they do understand what they’re trying to say, then they need to go, like, keep in mind, first, second, maybe fourth, fifth, and then go back down to mine and see which ones are they referring to, and back and forth.

If it was actually important to you, if you want to make it easy, you’d say, “Time X, Y, and Z work for me. I could do whatever after Z. We’ll call it A, and then go in reverse order.” And like you actually repost them. And the idea is just if we really want to make it easy, if we want people to respond, we’d make it easy, which is instead of having them navigate to figure out what’s going on, you pull it all in one place.

That’s a trivial example. A really important example is…have everybody followed the…anybody remembers in 2000, there was a guy running for president named Al Gore, who’s running against another guy named George W. Bush? And it turns out, it’s one of the closest elections, maybe one of the closest elections in the US history.

Florida swung the vote and it came down to a couple hundred votes. And it turns out that in Florida, there was this thing called the butterfly ballot, not the one that went to the Supreme Court, for anyone who is conflating everything involving that election. It was a ballot that was extraordinarily complicated. I teach it in my class. It was just really hard to follow what button you’re supposed to push to vote for which person.

I’m not even going to try to describe it to you. Like, look it up, butterfly ballot from 2000. But by making it not easy, and it was actually designed by a Democrat who presumably might’ve preferred Al Gore, but it was a Democrat who, in good faith, was trying to help older people be able to read it. So, in order to have giant font, then you’d use both sides of the page. And then to figure out what button to push, it just became like comical how complex it was.

And they think that that led to something like 5- to 10,000 net votes for George W. Bush by accident because people are, like, typed the wrong button because nobody can make sense of it. I say that only as like an extreme example of, like I was talking about, getting people to schedule a meeting. I also want to show, sometimes, this matters for important things too.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s powerful as an example and it cuts through the core of why, “Why does it matter if one is awesome at their job?” The consequences are massive, it’s like, “Someone was not so awesome at designing that ballot, and now we may never know who ‘should’ have gotten elected because of what went down with a butterfly ballot in Florida.”

Todd Rogers

Look it up and get ready to laugh/cry. Just amazing. I didn’t even realize it until we started writing this book because I got it confused with these hanging chads, for those of you who lived through it.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yes, and I’m all about making responding easy, or making whatever behavior you want to occur easy. And this is kind of BJ Fogg Tiny Habits. We had him talking about that in terms of your own personal behavioral design, as well as in your communication. And I hope, Todd, you had an easy time scheduling this interview, collecting the guest FAQ page, and then the scheduling. And we did not have to have any communication whatsoever, in fact.

Todd Rogers

No, it was super easy. That’s the idea, right? Like, you made it so like here. I think you used Calendly or something like that, and it was just like, “Here are some availability. Just choose one.” It was not 17 back and forth emails to find the time that work for us. I’ll go with a more practical one for people who are trying to be awesome at their jobs.

It is estimated that Amazon’s 1-Click purchasing generates billions of dollars in net revenue relative to before they literally patented 1-Click shopping. And the idea is just reducing steps, makes people more likely to follow through. And in that case, it was increasing sales. In the part we’re talking about in the election, it’s swinging the fate of the Republic.

Pete Mockaitis

And I’d heard that they have, in fact, parted with millions of dollars in legal fees defending and enforcing this intellectual property against infringement, like this is dearly precious to them.

Todd Rogers

Yeah, and I don’t think anyone ever had thought that it would be better to buy things with one click instead of five. Like, really, the genius was with coming up with that idea. Who could have ever thought that one? No one could’ve thought of it prior to the geniuses at Amazon, thinking of it. I’m being sarcastic in case anyone was trying to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, certainly, just like in general, when things are easier, you get that result. I’m thinking about, occasionally, someone needs to be paid via a cheque. Like, I think I was getting some carpets, I was like, “Oh, a cheque, huh? Well, that’s going to be a while. I got to figure out where that thing is, where the envelopes are, where the stamps are. And now I just really kind of don’t want to because I was ready to go click, click, click. Here’s your money. Thanks for the carpet. But now it might be a good week or two before I get all these components together for you.”

Todd Rogers

Right. And then, honestly, it’s a minute and a half of work but you’re still not going to do it. And it’s no animus. It’s just you’re human and it seems like it’s a pain, and I’d rather watch another episode on Netflix.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, these are powerful principles. Can you tell us are there any specific do’s, don’ts, words, phrases that you also want to make sure to mention beyond these broad principles?

Todd Rogers

The TLDR version of the book, the too-long-didn’t-read version of the book, and of all this work, is that if we make it easy for our readers, they’ll be more likely to read, respond, and understand. It’s also just kinder to them to write in a way that makes it easy for them. That’s the big picture. How you then do that? How do you make it easier for the reader? That’s what the book is about.

And if you can put on the show notes, we have a one-pager, a checklist if people want it. I also, on our website, with a computer science colleague, we trained GPT4 on the principles, and then tuned it for email, so it was pre-imposed with edits, and it’s incredibly good at rewriting your emails so that they’re actually skim-able using the principles, and so you can find that on our website, WritingForBusyReaders.com.

And there’s a Chrome extension and also people use it for their Gmail and stuff. The idea is it turns out the AI tools, the LLMs are very good at learning and internalizing the principles, and with examples, can get better at applying them.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, that’s a plug-in that we use or a series of prompts we feed it?

Todd Rogers

No, it’s just on our website. You can paste an email, hit click, and then it outputs what it would look like if it were written according to these principles. And what’s cool, it’s like a teaching tool. It also is really useful just because these are good ideas but I love it as it brings to life, instead of this, like, “I don’t know how I would apply that to this.” It just makes suggestions, “Well, turn this into a bulleted list. I would start this as a separate paragraph. I would simplify this.” And it doesn’t say these things, it just does them, “I would simplify this sentence.” And the I, I was personifying our AI overlord.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, we tend to do that. All right. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Todd Rogers

There’s this body of work that has just started over the last few years called subtraction neglect, which is that when you ask people to improve anything, this woman Gabe Adams and collaborators at University of Virginia did it. You ask people to improve something, “Improve this itinerary for a trip to Washington, D.C.,” “Improve this short essay,” “Improve this Lego construction item,” people are massively biased towards adding things and we just fail to think to even subtract things.

And there’s this tendency across categories that if we want to improve things, we add. And very often, we can improve, as Jessica and I talked about in writing, we can improve by subtracting but it’s just something that doesn’t naturally or easily come to people’s minds. It’s incredible. It’s really cool research by Gabe Adams and collaborators called subtraction neglect.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah, Leidy Klotz had a book talking along those lines. We had him on the show and, yes, that was thought-provoking. Okay.

Todd Rogers
Yes, Leidy is a co-author on our work.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Todd Rogers

I don’t know about my life favorite but my favorite recent book is called Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka. She founded Code for America. She was the first Chief Digital Officer of the US. And her big thesis that complexity favors the sophisticated, that we have all these government agencies that have these complex systems that are unnecessarily complex, for reasons that are both often policy-driven, and we act like it’s actually implementation, people who are implementing, implement what the policy says, and we should be redesigning policy because, downstream, that leads to actually better use of technology.

But I love the last third of the book is about how complexity favors the sophisticated, which means that when we have complex processes, we deter not randomly, we deter the least sophisticated, the most harried, possibly and often for government services the most who would benefit from some of these things. But we have often, processes that are unnecessarily complex. Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool?

Todd Rogers

I’m going to name two. One is pretty basic and the other is pretty frontier. The basic one, I love my Google Keep, which is just a to-do list keeper that is social and I can share with my wife and family members, and so we update the to-do list. It’s so basic and central to our lives. The more sophisticated, and also your listeners are going to think I’m pretty basic, I love using ChatGPT in all of my life, and I love using GPT4, the underlying tech in some of the apps that we’ve made, because I probably use it several times a day in all sorts of creative ways from editing things I’m writing to generating ideas, to coming up with study materials.

The other day I had it generate descriptions of flowers that might grow on Mars because we’re doing a silly study on what kinds of names people like. So, from both basic, but one is medium to low tech, which is the Google Keep, to the ChatGPT, which everybody would say, but I love the underlying LLM of GPT4, and Bard, and all of LLMs for now. And, again, I just want our AI overlords to know I’m naming them as my favorite.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Rogers

WritingForBusyReaders.com. It has the checklist, the one-page checklist for the principles of how to write more effectively for busy people. It also has the editing AI editing tool for your emails. And it also has a lot of other resources that’s great, like substitution ideas for instead of saying, “The reason is…” you can say “Because…” and there’s a whole set of thousands of word pairs, and you just never use this phrase, always use this one because it’s more concise and more direct. But www.WritingForBusyReaders.com.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Rogers

Yeah. We write all the time. We are all writers. Whether it’s Slack messages, emails, text messages, proposals, reports, we write all the time. We should edit. At a round of editing, whenever we are writing anything, where we ask ourselves, “How do I make it easier for my reader?” How to do that is going to depend on the context, and that’s what Jessica and I have really focused on.

But when you do that, when you edit through the lens of making it easier for the reader, you will be more effective at achieving the goals you have for whatever it is you are writing. In the process, it’s also just kinder to your reader.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Todd, this beautiful stuff. Thank you and I wish you much good writing.

Todd Rogers

Thanks for having me, Pete. This was fun.

Nov 06
0

913: Upping your Influence with the Five Principles of Captivating Stories with Karen Eber

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Karen Eber shares neuroscience insights to help you maximize attention and impact in your communications.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why storytelling dramatically increases your influence
  2. The five factory settings of the brain
  3. The key to creating memorable stories

About Karen

Karen Eber is an author, leadership consultant, and keynote speaker. She has a TED Talk on storytelling and recently published, The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories That Inform, Influence, and Inspire, with HarperCollins.

As the CEO and Chief Storyteller of Eber Leadership Group, Karen helps Fortune 500 companies build leaders, teams, and culture, one story at a time. She’s a former Head of Culture, Learning, and Leadership Development at GE and Deloitte.

Resources Mentioned

Karen Eber Interview Transcript

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

Karen Eber
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m pumped up to hear about some of the gems you got for us in your book The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories That Inform, Influence, and Inspire. And I’d love it if you could start us off with an example of a perfect story or a super memorable gripping story that exemplifies a perfect story in action.

Karen Eber
I’ll tell you the opening story in my book, which is about my eyes. I was born with blue eyes, like most babies, and at about the age of four months, they start to change to different colors, so I have a brown eye and a green eye. And I’ve always loved this. Why have one eye color when you can have two? And it’s a special thing but, as much as I loved it, I would come to recognize the exact moment when people would notice it for the first time.

And their words would slow in the middle of a dialogue and I could see them moving back and forth, almost like their brain was in a negotiation, trying to think like, “Which one do I look at?” And they would eventually stop mid-sentence, and say, “Do you know you have two different color eyes?” to which I would usually go, “No,” because what do you say to that?

And then I would brace myself because the following script happen just about every time, of, “I know a dog that has two different colored eyes.” I’m like, “Okay, thank you.” “David Bowie, he had two different color eyes,” which he didn’t. He had an accident and dilated pupil. And then it would turn into, “Well, do you see the same colors out of both eyes? And what color are your parents’ eyes? And do your eyes give you special powers?”

And this thing that I love suddenly became this burden because I was now this weird thing where they would call other people over and there would be 10 faces trying to get a viewpoint of my eyes, and I hated it. I didn’t love the way I was treated for the thing that I really enjoyed about myself. And one day I decided that I was done with it.

And so, once I got the “How did that happen?” I told them how I was born with brown eyes, and, “One night, when I was about four years old, I was in my room coloring, and you know that big box of crayons that everybody has where you’ve got the broken ones, and peeled ones, and the perfect ones? Well, I reached into that box and I pulled out a green crayon and I sniffed it, and it didn’t really smell like anything but I took a nibble and kind of liked the texture and so I ate the green crayon, and I like it so much I ate all the green crayons in the box. And the next day I woke up, and my eye was green.”

And then I would be quiet, and you could see whomever I told this to, there would be this internal negotiation going on of, “Is she for real? Like, there’s no way this story is real but she said it so straight, I can’t really tell. Like, what do I say? What do I do?” And I would let them off the hook. But what happened was this shift in energy, where I went from this thing and this weird person and weird, weird thing on display to a moment of connection.

And most of the time, people recognize they had been asking me all these silly questions, and they kind of made me not human, and that this was something that actually made me more relatable and more human. And it created a shift that not only was memorable because I’ve had people tell me decades later that they remember this. But that it created a connection that we probably wouldn’t have had had this not happened.

And so, for me, this was the perfect story to start with because it shows stories aren’t just about giving a presentation. They can be a moment of connection, or shifting energy, or shifting circumstances so you can get into a different type of conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, yes. And what’s nifty there is you have a lot of reps in terms of, okay, this happens to you repeatedly so you can sort of experiment and see how things go and what works. And, sure enough, you’ve transformed an experience which is sort of annoying and a burden to deal with into something fun that you can laugh with and roll with.

And that is cool. There you have it. Stories transforming what’s going on with our brain experiences. And in your TED Talk, you mentioned just that, is that our brains kind of mirror each other, the storyteller and the story receiver. What is this science fiction, Karen?

Karen Eber
Yeah, it sounds almost too fake to be true. There’s a neuroscientist out of Princeton, Uri Hasson, who put people in MRI machines, and the first person, first group, goes in, and they are listening to an episode, or watching an episode of a show on the BBC, and they are measuring their brain activity. And when they take them out, put them in a second time, and this time, those people are told to recount the episode that they had just watched.

They then record the brain activity during that. And then a new group of people are brought in. They go into the MRI and they listen to the recounted episode of the people that were in the MRI machine. So, you have three different instances of watching, recounting, and listening to the recounting. And what they found is the activity was the same.

It didn’t matter if they had experienced it, if they were the ones recounting it, or they were actually listening to the recounting of it, that neural activity was very similar, which means that stories almost gives you this artificial reality because, as you’re listening to it, your brain is imagining and seeing and placing you in the story, and it then lights up as though you were in it, which is why we go to the movies, and our heart is racing because James Bond is running across the rooftops but we’re not moving because our brain is saying, “You’re in this movie,” or it’s imagining what it would feel like, and you can feel that amped feeling.

Or it’s also why this time of year is where there’s often a lot of horror films and things that people pay attention to. That’s why you get so amped and surprised, it’s because your brain is, like, “You are here about to have someone jumped out at you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that’s wild. And now that gets me thinking in terms of the emerging proliferation of fMRI type devices with kernel or neuro link or others in terms of if all of our brains are doing the same things in response to the story being told or heard, it seems that it may not be so fanciful to think of a world in which technology can decode what’s happening in our brains to relay that story.

Karen Eber
Let’s give an asterisk next to it because I’m not trying to suggest that it’s like propaganda and we can brainwash everyone into it, but what does happen is that your brain, your senses are starting to engage as though you are the character there and you’re having some of the experiences. And so, it is a more dynamic way to interact with stuff.

It’s not quite propaganda at scale though but part of the reason why this is increasing in interest and popularity is that in the past 15 years, our understanding of the brain has just become so much more. There are just so many more discoveries and understanding and experiments have been done to help us be more savvy, but what is really happening from how we are communicating, consuming, deciding, all of these things are just we learn so much every day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, with that said, can you share with us, what’s sort of the big idea or main message behind the book The Perfect Story?

Karen Eber
It builds on the science of storytelling but in a relatable way. So, this won’t have you be putting on a lab coat and breaking out test tubes and beakers. The idea is that it’s not enough to tell a story the way you tell a story is going to make a difference in the experience with the listener. So, there are certain ways that our brain is going to respond to information but it’s the way we put together that information to put in the unexpected events to engage the senses to build tension in the story.

It’s the orchestration and the choices that we make that cause the brain to pay attention and be immersed in it or not. If you think of a movie that you tried to watch and didn’t get very far in, it’s because your brain just said, “This is not worth the time or the calorie spend.” And so, the book gets into, “How do you understand what’s happening in the brain when you tell stories?”

But, more importantly, what do you then think about when you are putting your stories together so that you can create an immersive story? And then it takes you through the full process of developing and telling stories, telling stories with data, and making sure that they don’t manipulate while you navigate the vulnerability.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very cool. And before we get into the particulars of how that’s done, could you share with us a little bit of the why in terms of what’s ultimately at stake for professionals if they do this well or not so well? What kind of career trajectory impact do you think that makes between folks who tell okay stories from time to time when they remember, to those who consistently take the time to craft the perfect stories where they can?

Karen Eber
I think it comes down to attention, and the greatest gift any audience they can give you is their attention. It is a precious commodity. And we have choices to make of “Are we going to talk at people?” If we’re in a business setting, are we going to pull out the PowerPoint quilts of slides then just pick and choose, and just dump things at people and put up the 10-point font, and say, “I’m not going to read this,” and then proceed to talk at people where no one remembers it ten minutes later? Or are we going to be thoughtful about how we’re using that attention and really trying to connect people to information that’s going to inform their world and help them think differently, or maybe reach a different decision?

If you take the time to really build these muscles and then you become faster at it, you are always going to be winning the hearts and minds, you’re going to be connecting with people and being relatable, you are going to see how to motivate individuals on an individual level. The more that AI and automation comes in, the more we need to be able to leverage individualization at scale. And so, storytelling and really communicating are just a really dynamic way to do this and maximize the attention that we get.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that end, let’s dig into how it’s done. You’ve got a fun turn-of-a-phrase, you say we’ve got five factory settings of the brain. Tell us, what do you mean by that? What are these settings? And how do they impact how we tell stories?

Karen Eber
If you think of a phone that you unbox, it comes with a factory setting. There are certain apps and programs, and anytime you restore the phone, it’s going to go back to those basic settings. It’s like, “Here’s the core things that run it.” There’s something similar in the brain when you communicate. There are basic ways that we’re going to respond to information and communication. And so, I call them the five factory settings of the brain.

And they get into different things, like the first one is that your brain is lazy. It is meant to be the broker of calories in your body. The number one job of the brain is to keep the body alive. And part of that is making sure you’re safe. Part of that is also regulating how you breathe, move, digest, all of those things but it’s also, “How do I need to set my foot down if I’m going to be walking downstairs?”

And so, the brain is using 20% of the body’s calories for these things, and the majority of these calories are going to these predictions for like, “How do I move around?” And that means it always wants to have a surplus of calories because it never wants to go bankrupt. The goal of the brain is to respond to stimulus to be able to be ahead and anticipate and make predictions versus to react because by predicting, you’re making a guess and you’re doing something, and sometimes you’ll get it right and sometimes you’ll get it wrong.

But if you’re reacting every time, it’s a much bigger energy drain. So, what this means in terms of stories is that because the brain is lazy, it’s not meant to be deeply immersed in everything all the time, and it looks for moments for when it’s going to be able to step back and conserve calories. These are the nights that you binge your favorite show on TV that you’ve seen several times, or maybe you put in a movie that you could recite the dialogue because you have that moment of, like, “I just don’t want to think.” That’s your brain saying, “Let’s conserve some calories.”

The same thing happens in meetings and stories when you notice you’re drifting off. That’s the brain taking a natural pause and conserving calories. The way to overcome this in a story, though, is to put things in that make people have to spend calories, put in the unexpected events, be building the tension, be engaging the senses so that the brain is there, interested, ready to go.

So, that’s one. There’s five more but these are starting to help you understand, “Okay, I get it.” There are certain things that the brain is going to be doing, and that then gives me different choices as the storyteller to then play with and see how immersed I can make the brain.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I’m reminded, there’s a marketing book called Don’t Make Me Think, and I feel that when I’m interacting with webpages or any number of things, like, “Okay, oh, this isn’t going to be quick and easy. Ah, never mind, maybe later.”

Karen Eber
Right, and that’s fair. I even joke, like it’s our attention span, and some of it is. Our attention spans have definitely changed, especially through COVID, but it’s also there is, at the bottom of this, a whole internal wager, like, “Is this worth the attention and the calorie spend?” and sometimes it’s not. Or, if we’re tired or hungry, that it gets diverted and it makes it even harder.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear the other four factory settings.

Karen Eber
The second is that we make assumptions. So, the brain hates for things to be incomplete. It’s always going to be making predictions and trying to anticipate because it wants to respond and not react. So, the faster it makes an assumption or a prediction, the faster it can say, “All right, we’ve done this. Now, we can conserve.” Maybe we have to course-correct every now and then but we know.

And what this means is this is why you try to guess the ending of the movie, or the book, or you’re in a meeting and you’re trying to anticipate what the person is going to say, or the show starts, and you’re like, “Yeah, I know where this is going to go. Forget it. I don’t need to be paying attention to this.” And what you want to do when you’re telling stories is either slow down these assumptions or you want to lean into them.

So, if you lean into, if I said to you, “He gave her the passcode to his phone,” what does that bring to mind for you?

Pete Mockaitis
I recently saw an Ashley Madison documentary so I’m thinking about infidelity. You’re right. I filled in a lot of gaps there.

Karen Eber
You did. That’s really fine, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Apparently, during the romantic relationship and there’s trouble in paradise.

Karen Eber
Yes, completely, right? And then there’s someone else that’s going to be making an assumption, they’ll might say, “Well, he trusts her.” So, there’s many different things. But just by that one sentence, your brain is already trying to make assumptions and fill in the gaps because this is what we naturally do. So, sometimes in a story, you want to lean into what those assumptions might be and let the brain finish a thought. And sometimes you want to disrupt them, you want to put in an unexpected event or detail that makes them pause because you want to have their brain hit the proverbial speed bump, and say, “Wait a minute. What? That’s not what I expected.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. Sometimes you go with the flow with what they expect, and sometimes you don’t. I’m thinking about how in casinos and video games, they very deliberately finetune the percentage of time you receive your variable rewards. Do we know, Karen, is there a range of percentages in which we want to give them what they’re expecting versus something totally different?

Karen Eber
No, it’s all choices and experimentation. While I’m giving you steps, it’s really not formulaic. It’s really more like here are a whole bunch of ingredients, and you can make a Mediterranean dish, you can make a Thai dish, you can make an Italian dish. It’s up to you on the combinations that you put it together with, depending on what you want for that audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s also making me think about comedy in terms of, I guess that’s what makes jokes, jokes, is that, “Oh, you’re expecting one thing then, surprise, we get you with the other thing.” And I guess I’m thinking about the comedy I love the most is a little weird, like, I don’t know, Key & Peele or Nathan for You, and it’s because, for me or my taste, it’s like they crank it up even more, like, “Whoa.”

Karen Eber
Comedy is such great storytelling because what they’re doing is they’re forcing your brain to spend calories. They’re building the tension because you think you know where it’s going to go, and your brain is guessing what this joke is, and then, zing, you get the punchline and it went in a different direction. And then you’re like, “I did not see that. That is so clever,” and you remember that joke, and it’s because it challenged your assumptions and it helped your brain spend some calories. And so, now it’s become a part of your experience and your long-term memory. Same thing can happen in stories, too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear more of these factory settings and implications.

Karen Eber
Third one is that we have this library of files in our brain. So, if you take a photo on your phone, and you swipe up on it, you’ll see the F-stop, the date, the location, the megabytes, like everything that was used to take the photo is stamped on it. And something similar happens to our senses that is a metaphor. So, as you’re taking in information through your senses, and you’re having these experiences, they get stamped with emotions and stored in your long-term memory the same way that this photo has.

So, when your brain is going to make these predictions and these assumptions, it’s going through this library of files of things that you know, or things that are related to what you know, or maybe sometimes it’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got to open a brand-new file for this one. We’ve never experienced this before.” And these are all going to be different because we all have different experiences. But when you’re telling a story, you want to connect to what people know because you get a very different imprint.

So, if I say to you, “The incision was small,” how big do you think that is using centimeters or inches or some type of measurement that is helpful to you?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, when I’m imagining a small incision, it’s between half an inch to two inches is a small incision.

Karen Eber
Yeah, right.

Pete Mockaitis
Not that I know anything about surgery but I’m just going to declare that for a small incision.

Karen Eber
Right, exactly. Your brain is going, “What is small?” and you’re not even thinking. This is all happening subconsciously. But if I say to you, “The incision is the size of a paperclip,” you immediately see it, you immediately know how big it is, and I’m now taking up free real estate in your brain because that just gave you, and often I can build on it, and you are not even having to think about it.

And so, when you’re telling a story, you want to put in some of these things that are going to immediately connect to what people know and give that visualization so that the person isn’t even having to connect the dots. You are taking over their brain and putting this fully-formed idea or image in there, and you’re getting instant cognition from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s the fourth one?

Karen Eber
The fourth one is that we…actually let me ask you. If you walk into a networking event and you didn’t know anybody there, what would be your thought process for who you want to go talk to?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, it varies a whole lot based on my overall mood and objectives but, generally speaking, I find the safest move, this is what it feels safest, is to go to the one who is adrift, lonely, isolated, looking at their phone, as oppose to those who are like huddled up and like deeply engaged, leaning in in a conversation, like, “Okay, I’ll let them lie but that person looks like they might appreciate having me into their world.”

Karen Eber
Totally. And what your brain is doing, is they’re going, “Who is that person or that group that I can walk up to that feels safe?” Exactly what you just described. So, that is like, “This is going to be my person for the next five minutes or maybe for the whole event. Who knows?” and it’s the in group. This is the group that we share something in common, maybe it’s values, or beliefs, or experiences, or even aspirations, and say, “We feel a sense of kinship with this group.”

It also categorizes things into outgroups, so that group that’s huddled together really tightly that looks like it’s too hard to break into, it’s like, “Yeah, I’m not a part of that group. I could go over to that group, I could try, but I don’t really feel a part of it.” And outgroups are where we notice differences. And so, when you’re telling a story, you want to be thoughtful of, “Are you trying to have the audience feel like a member of the in group, feel like some group that they feel a part of, or that feels safe to be around, or are you trying to have them notice or feel the experience of being a member of an outgroup, which charities do this?”

A natural disaster happens, and you see a charity spotlighting an individual that lost their home, has no electricity, is struggling to get clothing, food. Meanwhile, you’re sitting in electricity and have food and running water right next to you, and you recognize how different your circumstances are. So, some of what you want to think about is, “What is the experience you want the audience to come away with? Do you want them to feel a part of something or a connection to the idea in your story? Or do you want them to notice how different they are?”

And neither are right or wrong, these are just some different ingredients you could choose, which brings us to the last one, which is that, at our most simple level, we seek pleasure and avoid pain. We’ve got this cocktail of pleasure neural chemicals which are serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. These are mostly released in moments of connection, so you can’t wield them, you can’t command them. It’s truly when someone feels that bond, that connection, that they are shared.

There’s also a cocktail of adrenaline, or epinephrine, or cortisol, and it’s released when the brain says, “Okay, you need to focus. There’s something here that’s potentially not right. You might be in danger, so we’re going to give you these.” And what happens in a story is that we see increases in some of these neurochemicals as a result of the story.

So, when your heart starts racing because there is something that happens on screen, or someone jumps out and surprises you, and you feel that wave through your body, that’s adrenaline. That’s your brain saying, “Focus. There’s something happening.” And the story that gives you goosebumps or makes you maybe well up with a tear or two, that you’re getting different pleasure neurochemicals.

And so, some of what you want to think about is what is that experience. So, are you intentionally telling an uncomfortable story, or are you telling a feel-good story, or maybe both? And so, now you start to look at these five and you recognize you have choices and where you’re making the brain pay attention and spend calories, and where you are leaning into assumptions, or slowing them down, and how you’re taking advantage of what the person knows by putting fully-formed ideas in their head.

And then thinking about, “Am I trying to have you feel a member of the group or different than a group? And am I having you or both? And am I trying to have you feel like a member or have that feel-good experience or an uncomfortable experience, or both?” So, now you start to see, “Okay, these are all choices, and I might not choose all of them in every story, but I can start to see where these are going to make a difference in the experience that someone has of this story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you give us a demonstration perhaps of a lame story that fails to take into account these ingredients, and then that same version hopped up with some goodness? But, yeah, it’d be really fun to see these in action.

Karen Eber
I think what I would love to do is an activity with you, if you’re open.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Karen Eber
Let’s take a basic story and then show how we build it. Are you game?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Karen Eber
Okay. So, I want you to think of a vacation experience that you don’t mind sharing with people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I went to the Dominican Republic with some friends once. It was an all-inclusive resort.

Karen Eber
Amazing. Give us the 30-second version of it. Don’t worry about the five factory settings or any of that. Just tell us a little bit about this vacation.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. It’s very lazy. It was warm. There was a beach. It was all inclusive. There was much food and beverage and water. Chilling. Talking. Eating. Yup, just relaxing stuff.

Karen Eber
Amazing. Okay, so now I’m going to have you tell the story again. So, we’ve got a basic story, “We’re in the Dominican Republic, we’re on vacation, all-inclusive.” Your brain is in lazy mode, for sure, on this vacation. So, now I’m going to have you tell this again, and this time I want you to describe the colors as you’re telling the story. Make us feel like we’re there seeing some of the things that you’re seeing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. There were white sands, palm trees with brown trunks and green leaves, bright blue water, some oranges and pinks in the sky during the sunrise and sunset times.

Karen Eber
Yeah, so now we went from this kind of bland landscape that we can’t necessarily picture to, now we’re picturing this. We can the seascape, we can see a sunrise and a sunset with the colors. So, now, I want you to tell it again, and this time, I want you to bring our senses into it of what are you hearing? What does it smell like? What is, if there any taste involved, what are some of those things? Tell it again and make us feel like we are there experiencing it beside you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, for the sounds, we can hear some seagulls, we can hear some ocean waves, we can hear, I remember, there was this very colorful fellow who ran this sort of water aerobics course twice a day, and he would yell out nice and loud, “Aqua gym!” And I remember there was this repetitive baseline, like, “Dit-rit, dah, dit, dah, dit” whenever the “Aqua gym!” was happening.

Karen Eber
I’m going to pause right there. Dear listeners, I hope you see what just happened. We never would’ve started there but now we can see this moment, and this Aqua gym and the music, like, amazing. So, I hope you’re seeing as well, this is now, we went from this basic story to now we’re there and we’re feeling it, and our brains are, whether we like it or not, our brains are there thinking those things and seeing it. Amazing.

I’m going to ask one more iteration. So, this time I want you to describe your emotions on this. Like, tell us, as you’re hearing Aqua gym and the music and all that, like give us the emotional experience of what did it feel like being there.

Pete Mockaitis
It felt very carefree in the sense of we didn’t have to rush, we didn’t have to worry about what time it was, or what day it was, or what needed to get done. It was just being with friends, like, “Hey,” and just let that sense of carefree timelessness, and it’s very peaceful.

Karen Eber
Amazing. So, if we put it all together, I want you to tell the story one last time of just pulling some different things of you’re on this trip, and it’s carefree, and you’re painting the scene on the beach, and we’re hearing this sights and sounds. Just pull a few of the things in from each of the iterations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure thing. And I imagine, with iterations, with the time available to think right, revise, etc., we’d come across a whole lot smoother, but, I’d say, for a story, I had an amazing time on vacation at the Dominican Republic. I had some of my best friends with me. We’re in an all-inclusive resort situation. Beautiful white beaches and blue skies with some nice oranges and pinks during sunrise and sunset.

Bright blue water, fun sounds of seagulls and the seashore, and this fun fellow who would proclaim twice a day, it was time for “Aqua gym!” and play the “Di-dah, di-dit, dah” tunes as a subset of folks on the beach would run with big goofy smiles to participate in the Aqua gym without a care in the world. And we, too, didn’t have a care in the world in terms of what we had to do, or accomplish, or where to be, or what time it was, and it was just very, very peaceful and relaxing and restorative to bond with those guys on that trip.

Karen Eber
Amazing. Amazing. So, in three-ish minutes, we took the basics of a vacation and now we’ve been there with you, and we can see and we get the sense of what it’s like. That’s the difference of you start to make choices and, first, you’re doing this on the fly and doing it amazingly. And thank you for playing along because I appreciate that’s never quite easy to do on the moment. But it shows that you can make different choices to play with different things to pull people into it.

And now I’m going to have Aqua gym stuck in my head.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, so now I’m curious to know, so those are some general principles that can serve us well. Can you perhaps zoom into any particular do’s and don’ts as we’re trying to pull this off? Like, we’re in a professional setting, we want to be persuasive, we think, “Okay, storytelling is cool above and beyond just charts and graphs and data.” What are some pro tips and things to do and things to not do as we’re trying to integrate some of these principles?

Karen Eber
Well, let me start general, and if you want to dig into story time with data, we can get more specific. The biggest mistake, I think, people make is that they think, “Okay, this is an opportunity to tell a story. What story can I tell?” and they focus on the story. You always start with your audience. Every time you tell a story, even if you know the idea you want to tell, you want to center on who you’re telling it to because the story is in service of the audience, and there’s something that you want them to know, think, feel, or do after.

And if you don’t start there, if you don’t ground yourself in “What do I want the audience to know, think, feel, or do? What is their mindset today? And what might be an obstacle?” you risk the story not landing or connecting with the audience at all. Starting with that, you start to picture who you’re talking to and you can make sure that you’re making it relatable to them.

So, that’s the biggest thing of whether it is storytelling with data, or in a meeting, or presentation, or even a story you’ve told many times, you want to stop and just really be thoughtful of “Who is this group I’m telling it to? And what is it that I’m trying to do after?” because that is what’s most important. When you don’t, it’s like the uncle at the holiday table that’s just telling the same story on a loop, that you don’t even need to be there because he just says the same thing over and over.

He’s not saying it for you. He’s saying it for him. It doesn’t matter who’s there. He’s just telling the story. And those moments are always so grating. Same thing that happens in any setting if you don’t start with your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And anything else?

Karen Eber
The biggest thing from there is to put a structure to your story. It’s tempting to just go and let the story meander and not really worry about how you’re structuring it. But when you put a basic structure in place, it’s not only going to be easier for you to tell. It’s going to be easier for the audience to hear. So, once you figure out the audience, you’ve figured out what you want them to know, think, feel, or do, their mindset, and what might be an obstacle, you then want to come up with the four-part story structure.

First one is the context. What’s the setting? Who’s involved? And, really, why should the audience care? Write one sentence out for that. Not every detail, not every plot point, but write a sentence that summarizes the context. Write a second sentence for the conflict. What is there to be resolved in the story? What is the tension and the fuel for the story? Maybe it’s between two people or a person and themselves but you want to get really clear on that conflict that’s going to be the heart of the story.

The outcome is what is the result of the action? What happens as a result of whatever that conflict is? What’s done? And the last is the takeaway. What is it that you want the audience coming away thinking? Because the takeaway should connect back to what you mapped for the audience. So, if you take five minutes before a story to plan out your audience, and then you take another five minutes to plan out a basic story structure, in 10 minutes before the meeting, you can have a more cohesive story that is going to better land with the audience.

Now, there are still all these other things that we would want to do and add to it with time that get to engaging these senses and emotions and counting for the five factory settings. But if you can ground yourself on these things, you’re going to have a better structured story to tell and it’s going to be easier for the audience to listen.

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

Karen Eber
Is there anything that is a burning question that’s helpful to make sure we touch on?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s take professional settings, stories, data, how do you imagine them working together well? Or, is there a time where you will want to lean more story, more data, right down the middle, story and data? How do you think about that?

Karen Eber
It’s story and data. So, data never speaks for itself. If we go back to the second factory setting that we make assumptions, we are each going to make different assumptions because our assumptions are based on this library of files, all these experiences that we have, and yours are different than mine. So, if I put up a slide that is a simple chart, it seems like there would be no room for a different deciphering, but what really happens is we’re making different assumptions, and we don’t even know. So, then we try to get to a discussion, and we’re not talking about the same thing.

So, recognizing data doesn’t speak for itself, what you want to do is guide people through the story of the data so you can have a common starting point even if people disagree with it. I think there’s this myth or a bias that data are fact and story are not, and that is not true. One is not anymore important than another. Together, I think, they come together to make really helpful understanding and ensure that you can have a discussion and make sure everyone is starting from the same place.

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

Karen Eber
It is by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a neuroscientist. I just heard her say this, and I keep thinking about it. She says that emotions are the recipe for action. And I just keep thinking about what an interesting statement. And we know data doesn’t change behavior; emotions do. But I love thinking of these emotions are the recipe for action, especially I think at work when we’re often encouraged to leave emotions out of it. Like, they’re part of everything that we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Karen Eber
I just read this book that is a memoir, it’s called The Many Lives of Mama Love. It is by a woman by the name of Lara Love Hardin. So, I just finished writing and publishing a book of my own, and I now am finding I have time to read for fun again. And I met Lara at TEDWomen and was really intrigued by her story of someone that had a really hard life and struggled with drug abuse and built her way back to this really incredible story. So, I really enjoyed that quite a bit.

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

Karen Eber
Google Keep is my external brain. I dump everything into it from story ideas to to-dos, to a running list of where I need to be. I can access it on any device, and it saves me from trying to remember. It’s like if I’m on a walk, it goes into Google Keep, and it works so well to keep me on track.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Karen Eber
Use Google Keep. It really is, actually, part of what works for me is spending time every Friday planning out a couple weeks of where is my time going, and where do I want to free up space for thinking time or writing time. And then I do go into Google Keep and use that to prioritize and make sure, because I have free today what my priorities are and shifting around. I am an introvert and I like to have good chunks of thinking time for working on things but also for resilience after a full day of speaking. And so, I am continually calibrating my calendar to make sure that I have the right balance of what I need.

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?

Karen Eber
The statement that data doesn’t change behavior but emotions do, I think, is something I said it in my TED Talk, and people, random strangers will send me messages on social media how that stood out to them. And I think that we are in a data-rich era but, as one of my friends said, but we’re insight-poor. And I think the more that we can connect to things in a different way, the more powerful they can be.

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

Karen Eber
My website is the best place. It is my name KarenEber.com.

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

Karen Eber
Embrace stories. Don’t be afraid. Don’t wait for someone to invite you to tell one. Don’t think that you can’t tell one because you have to present data. Stories have compounding interest and they earn you the ability to tell more of them. And they honor the most precious thing that people can give you, which is their attention.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Karen, thank you. This has been fun. I wish you much luck and many enjoyable stories.

Karen Eber
Thank you.

Oct 05
0

904: How to Gain Trust and Insight by Asking Better Questions with Mark Balasa

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Mark Balasa shares the most important lessons learned on trust from his celebrated career in asset management.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to build trust with anyone
  2. How trying to sound smart can hurt you
  3. The most important question to ask in any meeting

About Mark

Mark is the former founder and CIO of Balasa Dinverno & Foltz LLC, a wealth management firm.

Mark has been a featured speaker on investment and technology topics with organizations such as Morningstar, the Financial Planning Association (FPA), Charles Schwab & Co., and Standard & Poor’s. He has been quoted in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barron’s, Smart Money, and BusinessWeek.

Mark has been recognized as one of the top wealth managers in the country by organizations such as Robb Report Worth magazine, Medical Economics and Bloomberg. He previously sat on Blackrock’s RIA Advisory Board, J.P. Morgan’s RIA advisory board, PIMCO’s advisory panel for RIAs, the advisory board for State Street Global Advisors, and the technology board for Charles Schwab & Co. Mark has written for INC. magazine website and publications for CCH.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Mark Balasa Interview Transcript

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

Mark Balasa
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to dig into your life and career and the wisdom to be gleaned from it but, first, I want to hear a little bit about when you grew up, you were in a town of 300 folks. Tell us what was that like?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, it’s funny. Looking back, it was such a small town. Of course, when you were growing up, you don’t know that. That’s just normal. So, when we went to the nearby large town of 7,000 to go to school and shop and everything else, but it was awesome. You knew everybody, everybody knew you, very relaxed. It was a great spot to grow up.

Pete Mockaitis
Now was there anything odd that, I guess, you later learned was odd about the experience of being in such a small town that came to light?

Mark Balasa
What struck me, as I came to Chicago to start my career, was how unusual that was in many ways. Because you knew everybody, there was, of course, good and bad. They knew all your business, you knew theirs, but for the most part, it was very positive. And going into a much larger city and into a working environment, where you had to learn the ropes about how to trust people, how to navigate relationships that you didn’t grow up with them, because it was so intimate in such a small town, so that was a period of adjustment, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. It’s sort of, like, “Huh, this is different. I know nothing about you, and you, and you, and you.”

Mark Balasa
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to youth. Okay. Well, I’m so excited to dig into… you’ve had just an impressive interesting career, and we’ve had a number of really delightful exchanges and conversations, so I think that we have a lot to learn from you. And I want to hear maybe just the four-minute version so we can get a little bit oriented. Can we hear a bit about your journey from founding your asset management company to exiting it, and then we’re going to dig in a whole lot more from there?

Mark Balasa
You bet. Again, the four-minute version of this is I was in the financial industry, I found that very boring, so I went back to get additional schooling in credentials, etc. I always thought it fascinating to be able to work with somebody about what’s really important to them, and finance, of course, checks that box pretty well.

So, I started a firm inside of an accounting firm and left that, went and started a wealth management firm and I brought in partners as I went along. For me, the journey was fascinating, Pete. The opportunity to help people, to get to be, in many cases, friends with them, to know their families and get paid for it at the same time, it was a dream career.

I loved getting up every day going to work. I love growing the firm. There was lots of challenges. Of course, there is in any business but it was so rewarding. We had people that were clients for 30 years. Some, of course, were just started just as I was leaving, and everything in between. But it was the relationships and the ability to help people that made it so rewarding.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, tell me a little bit about the decision to sell or exit as well.

Mark Balasa
We became victims of our own success, in a way, and, of course, it’s a first-world problem but, as the firm went along, Mike, and Armand, and I were the three founding partners, and we wanted to bring in additional talent to grow the business. So, a really important way to do that was to give ownership. Not give, I should say, but to provide ownership, which they had to pay for.

So, as the firm continued to grow, and we got leverage, if you will, in terms of our asset growth and so forth, the revenue and the profitability was quite high. And so, what happened is the ownership interest became very high and very expensive. And so, what in the beginning was kind of a manageable debt load for a young person to buy in became very expensive, and it got to the point, actually, it was borderline not doable.

So, we looked out into the future, we said, “Gosh, it’s going to take probably another 12 years, maybe 15 years, to transition the firm internally,” and I was 60 at the point, “And do we want to work that many years?” And the answer was no. And so, we decided to look to the outside. I would tell you that, over the course of the firm’s trajectory, I would say three, four times a year for the last 20 years, we had people approached us to buy us.

So, we know that there was an interest. We always deflected that because we have the opinion that we wanted to have our own control, grow at the pace we wanted to grow, etc. And so, in making this decision, we knew it would be a big one because we’d be bringing an outside capital, in the end, actually, ownership but the reason for doing it was the ability to transition internally and transfer the firm got too expensive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, a victim of your own success, yes, well, I guess that’s what I wanted to establish here because you are a kind, humble, generous man, but you said the revenue and profitability became quite high. I’ll say it for you, it seems like you guys were crushing it in terms of you were growing well, more and more folks were entrusting their assets to you, you were named seven times one of the best financial advisors in the US by the magazine that report such things.

And, yes, as I’ve interacted with you, I have also been just impressed by your way. And so, I kind of want to dig into the underlying skills or mindsets associated with your success. First of all, is it fair to say, your success as a company was not due to the fact that you generated massively superior returns relative to all of your competitors? Is that a fair statement?

Mark Balasa
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I imagine there’s something else going on there because that would be kind of obvious, “Oh, hey, Balasa’s company makes the most money. Let’s just go over there.” There were some other factors that were driving this success and growth. And what do you think some of them were?

Mark Balasa
That’s a great point. Each industry has its nuances, Pete, and ours, returns from an organization are like a state secret. Unless you’re a public mutual fund or a hedge fund that we have to report some of this stuff, it’s almost impossible to get people’s returns. And so, I can talk about our returns relative to peer groups, if you want to do that later, and then we were very proud of them.

But you’re absolutely right, when people come in to hire someone like us, you don’t do it based on returns. I would calmly tell them the criteria for a high net worth individual to hire someone like us is as follows. Number one, do you trust them? That’s a gut instinct. The second is, what is their background, if you will, academic and so forth?

Number three, what’s their scope of services? Number four, who’s the team I’m going to work with? Number five was fees. And number six was returns or vice versa. The last two were fees and returns. So, the thought process of hiring was not based on returns.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about trust. There’s something that I think all of us would love to exude, to have a vibe such that folks want to trust us to buy into our ideas, our proposals, or what we’re after. And, in some ways, that feels kind of intangible. I think some people just give you a vibe that you’re like, “Hmm, I don’t know about that guy.” And others, like, “Yes, I really like and trust them.” What, Mark, do you think is behind this in terms of you and your team that made you come across as trustworthy?

Mark Balasa
I’ll answer that in two different ways. First, structurally, our firm collected a fee for the services provided. We got no compensation from any other source. Not selling any products, not giving information, literally nothing, so we had no other objective other than serving our clients. In other parts of the financial world, there is that conflict where you’re being sold a product that has a commission or some other incentive for the person to sell it. We didn’t have that.

So, structurally, us and firms like ours, had that to help, if you will, as the foundation. But to answer your question a different way, for me, it’s trying to not sell in the sense of, “Look how good we are,” but, “Let me sit down and ask you, what’s important to you? What do you struggle with? What are your problems? And can we solve them?” And being honest about whether or not we can solve them. So, if we can’t, then say that, “You’d be better served over here,” or, “This is what we can do in terms of what you’re struggling with. This, we can do, we can do very well.”

So, it was, frankly, something I never learned in school but in the real life, which is how important it is to ask good questions, and how important it is to listen. Those skills are unbelievably important to me to build trust in the sense of solving a problem and not selling something.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect. Well, Mark, I was hoping you’ll bring this up or I was going to foist it upon you because that’s what exactly what I’ve observed as we’ve had interactions. And, in some ways, I think it could be rather easy to become sort of prideful or arrogant or to think you know a lot. But in our conversations, I know you’ve experienced much more success and experience in terms of financially and scope over the course of running your business and career.

But when we’re having conversations in the world about media, podcasting, etc., you are full of questions and listening well, and not cutting me off. And I really do feel like I am the expert, you are the pupil, and it’s kind of fun, it’s like, wow, you can teach me so much. But here you are, you’re in a learner mode and it’s just great to be on the receiving end of that. And I imagine your teammates probably felt likewise over the course of your career journey. Have you heard feedback along those lines?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, very much. Thank you for those kind comments. I would give you an example to illustrate the point. So, for a number of years, we did recruiting on college campuses for new team members. We eventually gave up on that. We only wanted people with two- or three-years’ worth of experience. But whether it was someone with two or three years of experience, but certainly, for sure, someone coming out of college.

They would come in and they would have a lot of background, let’s say, on investment or taxes or estate, whatever, and then we would give them additional learning. So, let’s say two years in, they’re now going to present to a client on some specific topic. They tended to come in with, in their mind, a prepared avalanche of information and data.

And what you had to encourage them on was, “Look, a couple things. One is they really don’t care what you know until they know you care.” You hear that a lot but it’s so true. The person doesn’t think that you’re there for their self-interest. They don’t really care how much you know. Number two, you’ve got to learn to modulate that. So, things I used to talk to our new team members was, “Look, on a scale of one to ten, if you know a lot about the subject matter, and one means you know very little.”

A client comes in, an interior professional so you know ten, or whatever the subject matter is. A client comes in and, in my case, let’s say it’s investments, and it’s a widow, and she’s on a three on a scale of one to ten. Well, then you need to talk at a level of four, just ahead of where she’s at but not over her head, not jargon, not tons of data but more stories to give her the point and the comfort to take her and educate her to where you need to go.

By comparison, if you’ve got a CEO from a company in Chicago coming in, and he’s a nine, well, then strap on, go to ten, and get data and give concepts, and give hard-charging data. In other words, you have to modulate with who you’re in front of to help them bring them along. To come back to your point about how do you build trust, and how do you communicate well, it’s doing two things. Being aware of who you’re in front of, and being good at what your subject matter is.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that really resonates. As I’m thinking about conversations I’ve had, if someone is dropping lots of complicated stuff on me, way over my head, I never really walk away thinking, “Wow, they’re so knowledgeable. I felt clueless. I should really go with them.” I think, “Hmm, this guy probably knows a lot because I wasn’t understanding it, but they could also be a con man. They could just be making up these things I don’t actually know.” So, that doesn’t give me a great impression even when they do know a lot, and they’re sharing a lot to prove that they know a lot.

Mark Balasa
That’s very true. And I’ll give you a nuanced example of that. Almost always, when a husband and wife came in, they were on a different spot on a scale of one to ten, so you had to adjust your presentation, the questions you ask, and how you presented it, to both audiences at the same time, especially the wife, which is stereotypical but, unfortunately, it’s true.

They’d have less knowledge about taxes and investments, and so forth. Most of them didn’t have an interest in it. If they felt that they couldn’t understand or follow you, and they left the meeting, that was not good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no.

Mark Balasa
No, no, because the husband and wife are going to make decisions in the car on their ride home, and she says, “I have no idea what that clown was talking about.” That doesn’t help your cause, so you’ve got to learn to do both at the same time without being disrespectful or condescending to either party.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share a little bit about how you, if you are, I don’t know if I want to use the phrase dumbing it down, but let’s say you have a ten-level knowledge, you’ve ascertained that the person you’re speaking with has a three-level knowledge, so you’re aiming to be a four. When you are doing that, how do you do that in a way that doesn’t come across as patronizing, or like, “Well, listen up, little lady, let me simplify this to you. Mommy and daddy have a lemonade stand…”? How do you do that skillfully without coming across as patronizing?

Mark Balasa
You have to do both. You have to talk intellectual, high-level, for the one that’s a nine or ten, and give data or numbers, but then give stories, give examples, or say, “Out of that, tell me what you heard.” Let them play that back, “I heard nothing or I had these two bits.” “Great. Here’s the other thing I’m trying to explain.”

And many times, not always, many times the husband or the wife, vice versa, will step in, and say, “Here’s what he means. Here’s what they’re trying to say.” And, of course, almost all of them appreciate that because you’re trying to meet them where they’re at. And so, it’s more of a conversation at that point, which is what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so now I want to talk a bit about asking good questions and listening. When you were in the process of having a conversation, and attempting to do just that, how do you do that? What is your mental process by which you are generating good questions and listening well?

Mark Balasa
You bet. Some of it, of course, is just practice makes perfect. But in terms of how to approach it, I always took it from the perspective of, “If I was in their shoes, what would I want to know?” I’ll give you an example. One of the reasons I came into this business to begin with was when I got out of college, I was studying for the CPA exam, and a buddy of mine that I was growing up with from northern Michigan, lived in Chicago, he came to sell me insurance, and he asked me a bunch of stuff. Here I was, I’m 22 years old, he’s selling me life insurance, “Okay, I’m not sure I need it.”

But he’s asking me all these stuff in the sales process, I think, “Well, I don’t know.” So, I remember going to the library, back in the day when people went to the library, there was no internet, and trying to find an answer to how to buy life insurance, and I could not find it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. And so, I told myself, “Well, gosh, if I can’t find it, there’s got to be other people that are confused by this sort of thing.” And that’s literally part of the reason I went into this business.

So, I try to put myself in their shoes, their age, their gender, if they’ve got kids, if they’ve got a mortgage, they like their job, they don’t like their job, all that stuff. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “What’s important to them? Why are they here?” And so, I would try to build the questions off of this specific scenario, but there are some standard ones that you could certainly start with.

So, for example, “What does success mean to you? If we were here together a year from now, and you’re with us, and you look back, what would you say, ‘Gosh, this was a homerun for us to work with your firm’?” I would ask that question. Another one I would ask questions about is what is their experience around money or taxes or estate. Those are generic. Several don’t apply, frankly, but you get the idea. There’s a handful of standard questions to get things started.

But, almost invariably, when you ask a couple of things, especially around, “When do you want to retire?” Oh, my gosh, is that loaded. All kinds of stuff would come out of that. So, I just gave you a bunch of openings to start to ask questions about, “Why did you say that? What do you mean by that?” So, I can give you examples but that was kind of the general premise.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you’re in other contexts and generating good questions and listening, how do you think about that? So, in the world of asset management, you are asking questions to gain an understanding of their situation to tailor what you’re going to share and to see if you’re a sensible fit. When you’re in learner mode, it’s a little bit of a different process of generating questions. How do you play the game in that context?

Mark Balasa
For me, part of the answer to that question is I try to think to the end, “What am I trying to accomplish? What do I need to understand better?” And I try to take it back from there. So, in the example, let’s take, I’m starting to do more in the social media world, which I don’t know much about, so there’s infinite ways for me to learn.

So, I try to say, “Okay, why do I need to know how Instagram works? Why does someone who views it, what do they get from it? If I’m a sponsor and I’m going to monetize Instagram in some way, how does that work? Why does it work that way?” So, in other words, I start at the end and I come back, as best I can, and try to say, “What do I need to understand to get to that point?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I still don’t think I understand Instagram, Mark. So, okay, kudos. All right. So, we start at the end, and so then we ask the questions that drive us there. Do you have any favorite master questions that you find you use again and again as you’re trying to get the lay of the land and understand the situation?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, I hope I can think of examples. So, let’s say we’re going to look at a brand-new piece of software, and then maybe we can take other examples, Pete, if you like. But I don’t know anything about the software so I would start with the salesperson on the phone, “Tell me about you a little bit. Great. Tell me about your company. How many employees? How much revenue? How long have you been in business? Can I talk to some of your referrals as a client, a client referral? Tell me who your chief competitors are?”

So, it’s a series of things to understand more about their business, nothing to do with their software yet. Because if those things don’t check out, I don’t really care about your software, frankly. I want to know that that’s a stable business, if you will, before I’m going to proceed further.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Mark, I’ve made that mistake by not asking those questions, because, a lot of times, when it comes to someone who’s very eager to give me a software demo, the answer is, “It is a super cutting-edge hip startup who has revenue and profit that is minimal, that existed for less than a year,” and I’m sort of there to help them learn how things work. In a way, that’s okay. That’s sort of fun. That’s sort of how things can get created, it’s sort of a two-way street.

But you’re right. To the notion of, “Do I want to invest myself in this software?” that becomes important because, like, “Oh, shoot. There’s a high risk it won’t be around in a year or two.” And then it’s like, “Well, now what? I guess I’ve got to go find another one to solve the problem I was trying to solve.”

Mark Balasa
Yeah, and that came true just making some mistakes for our firm with technology over time. I did exactly what you said. I remember we had a CRM early on, it was neat stuff but the company wasn’t viable, and so we had to convert a year later because they were out of business.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, CRM conversions, not pleasant. Okay. So, lovely. And now when it comes to the listening, how do you ensure that you are really tuned in and getting the goods?

Mark Balasa
That was one of the hardest things, frankly, to mentor and train new people on, was the ability to just be still and listen. And I mean not just thinking about what you’re going to do tonight after dinner, but listening. And, for me, some of that comes back to inside of you. It takes humility, it takes patience. Some people, depending on personality, it takes perseverance. But, in my view, it’s critical.

How many sales presentations have you been in? I’ll give you an example. So, we went to update our website a couple times in the last 10 years in our firm. Both times we put out an RFP, and you would have these three or four firms coming in, all kind of preselected, certainly know what they were doing. But you would watch the sales process, it was so fascinating. You’d have one group come in, they came in actually from New York, flew in, it was an hour meeting. They spent 55 minutes with their deck. They never even asked our name, and it was just this long trudging page-by-page process of just listening to what they had to say.

By contrast, if you start a sales meeting, or actually even a regular meeting, by saying, “What’s important? Why are we here? Let me ask you some questions. What’s your biggest pain point?” Even though you’ve already prepared a deck, I would always start with saying, “What questions do you have first?” Because if they asked a question, they come out and then frame something they’re struggling with, even though you’ve had two sales pre-calls, if you will, sometimes that’s with different people, sometimes it’s with them, invariably if you ask them that question, they tell you where they want to go.

And so, one of the hardest things in telling and training a new team member for us was they’d be very prepared for the meeting, the sales meeting. They’d have a 10-page deck and all kinds of data to back that up if we needed it, and their inclination is to present that, and we would always say, “No, no, don’t do that. Because out of those 10 pages, you probably need a page and a half. You just don’t know which page and a half it is. You have to start with what’s important to them, and then come back and use the pages that represents or makes that point.”

My favorite way to listen and to engage someone is with the whiteboard. Because when you present something that’s written, on a PowerPoint or whatever, it’s kind of pre-canned, and people kind of almost automatically kind of turn off a little bit, especially after four or five pages, they do. By contrast, if you’re on a whiteboard, and you ask me a question, and I draw a picture, and I write words, and draw numbers and designs, you’re engaged the whole time because I’m building and it’s custom. It’s a reaction to what you just asked me. It’s not pre-canned.

And so part, to me, the importance of listening is you can do that in person, real time, you ask me a question, here’s an answer based on all my experience, my network, and my training specifically about something you asked, as opposed to, “Turn to page seven now, and we’re going to go through these six bullet points next.”

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, very different energy. Very different feel there. Absolutely. All right. Well, Mark, tell me, anything else about listening, questions, engaging people, relationships, you want to make sure to mention?

Mark Balasa
I think those have been a good series of questions, Pete, no.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now since you happen to have a towering expertise in money, let us know, as professionals who have an interest in their money, are there any top things that people tend to get wrong as they’re thinking about money or managing their money that you’ve sort of seen as a pattern over and over and over again?

Mark Balasa
There’s lots of ways to answer that question. I’ll pick two. On the actual specifics, expenses are really important when it comes to money and investing. You want to try to minimize costs. That’s universal. Morningstar’s done two studies over the last 20 years about bond returns. And so, there’s, pick a number, 2500 bond, mutual funds in the United States. The difference between the top tier and the bottom tier, the number one difference is their expense ratio. It’s not how clever the manager is, it’s not how the duration of the bonds, it’s not the quality of the bonds. It’s their expense ratio.

Because the bond returns are so narrow that if someone is charging you 1% to manage your money as opposed to 0.2 of a percent, that’s a 0.8 of a percent immediate benefit to you, that’s a huge difference in terms of collective return on the bond side. So, expenses are always important. Taxes, always important. So, when you’re investing, what’s your after-tax return, not so much your growth return? So, if you have a high turnover, you’re constantly selling and buying, you’re going to pay a lot of capital gains, short term, in particular, capital gains, that really eats away at your return.

So, there’s a couple of examples of universally always true things on the investing side. Let me answer your question a different way, and this is behavioral finance. Are you familiar with behavioral finance, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’m thinking Richard Thaler comes to mind, Nudge.

Mark Balasa
Yup. Yup, exactly, Nudge. That’s exactly right. Daniel Kahneman is another one. They both won Nobel Prizes for their work in behavioral finance. For your listeners, it’s a field of study that tries to look at mistakes that human beings make when we’re dealing with finances just because of the way our brain is wired, and they’re called heuristics. I’ll give you just a couple of examples.

Human beings as a species are overconfident. Now, that helps us in many ways. So, when you go to start a new job, you’re going to get married, go to college, you’re really not sure what you’re up against, but, “I can do this, by God. Here I go.” And that’s awesome for us. But when it comes to finance, overconfidence is not an advantage.

We think we know more than we do. So, if you have a stock, you work in a company, you think you know all about it, well, really, you don’t. And so, helping people against some of these heuristics, overconfidence, loss aversion, framing, anchoring, all of those things play tricks on how we make our decisions. I’ll give you an example, loss aversion. This is one of the chief things that you have to deal with when people are investing their money.

When a human being sees a loss, it’s very different than when a human being sees a gain, and that bleeds into their decision-making. Thaler has done this one, a great example. He’s got a room full of participants.

And he says, “I’m going to flip a coin. And if it’s a head, I’ll give you $1500. If it’s a tail, you give me 1000. How many of you want to take the bet?” Like, no hands go up. Well, mathematically that makes no sense because the 50/50 bet and you get an extra $500 if you win. No, human beings don’t like that chance that they could lose.

How about 2000 to a 1000? “No, I don’t know.” Twenty-five hundred to a thousand? No hands started going up. That was his way of quantifying that for a human being, a 10% gain is one unit of pleasure, a 10% loss is two and a half units of displeasure. And so, think about your portfolio. What people do then, psychologically, is they hold on to their losers because they don’t want to recognize the loss, and they’ll get rid of their gains because it feels fabulous to say, “I sold a stock when it doubled.” So, that’s not a good recipe, selling your winners and holding onto your losers.

And I can’t tell you how many times people come in, we’d go through the portfolio, and we say, “Okay, we should get rid of these six types.” “Well, no, I can’t. I’m underwater on those. We have to wait till they come back.” That makes no sense.

So, behavioral finance is a really rich area for people in terms of how they can check themselves. One of the things you can do there is encourage everybody, and it’s maybe too pedestrian, but to be a long-term investor, and it’s easiest to do many times with exchange-traded funds or mutual funds as opposed to individual stocks because you don’t see all the moving parts. It’s easier to stay the course.

But in periods of like 2008 and during the pandemic when we got big drops, oh, my gosh, is that hard. I was at a meeting in Chicago, and there was a person who sat on the board for an endowment for one of the prominent universities here in Chicago, PhD in Finance, runs an enormous firm. So, he’s on the investment committee for this university in Chicago for their billions of dollars of endowment.

2008 hits, and you know how bad that was, right? One month led to the second month, led to the fifth month. It’s like its sixth month, constant grubbing of the portfolio. Portfolio has easily lost in the stocks at 50% of their value. So, here’s this sophisticated university, with world-renowned people on the board, including this gentleman, and the investment committee came in about five months into this, said, “We’re going to sell a bunch of the stocks.” “No, no, no, don’t do that. We’re probably near the bottom. We don’t know. We’re probably near the bottom. No, we can’t.”

“As a fiduciary, we have to stop the bleeding.” “No, no, you can’t.” “Oh, yeah, we have to.” And they did. About two months, maybe 30 to 60 days before it bottomed, it went up. And when it goes up, it goes up disproportionately quickly in the beginning. And so, the psychology there is, like, “Yeah, I missed the first 30% back. I got to wait till it drops again.” It’s all bad.

So, to come back to your question, what are some things, as an investor, you should know? Taxes matter. Costs matter. Diversification matters, I didn’t touch on that. And on the behavioral side, coming up with checks and balances so that you don’t get greedy, and that you don’t get frightened.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Well, so now you have sort of turned over a new chapter in your life and career. You have towering knowledge in asset management, and now you’re in media. What’s the story here, Mark?

Mark Balasa
You bet. As we sold the firm, I wanted to do three things, Pete. I wanted to try to work with my family, so I’ve got some family members involved in the new business. I wanted to do something, not to give back some of my money, but also my time. And the third thing is I wanted to do something faith-based. And so, our new venture does those things.

And so, I’m a complete novice at this world, but the people I’m working with are much more experienced, so I hope I’m bringing some of my experience to the table to help us reach a younger audience with things that are impactful for them, for their lives, and for their families.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you give an example of something that you’re putting out there that’s impacting folks?

Mark Balasa
We recently just started a podcast about a month ago, it’s called Is THIS for Kids? And it’s two young parents, Jonathan Blevin and Katie Ruvi, who review each week something in terms of a movie, a song, a video game, or TV show through the lens of, “Is this good for your kids?” And they’re not telling you whether or not if it’s good for your kids, but they’re telling you things you should be aware of, especially with things a lot of parents don’t have time to review, like video games or music, “Are those lyrics, are they okay? That video game, is that too violent? Is it too much sexual content?”

You, as a parent, can decide but we want to tell you, “Here’s what you should be aware of.” So, it’s an attempt to help busy, young parents, with the avalanche of stuff that’s available to their children, about how to navigate that world. So, that’s a specific example of how we’re trying to bring to the market with something that hopefully is helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And I’ve watched “Is THIS for Kids?” and I actually really love it because I am a semi-young, approaching 40 parent, and it’s not just a couple of prudes, like, “Oh, dear, dear, I was so repulsed by this egregiously inappropriate whatever.” It’s sort of like, “Well, hey, in Barbie, there was a masturbation joke, and it was kind of an eye-roll but I actually didn’t think Barbie was that fun anyway.”

And then just, generally, sharing, “Hey, these are my thoughts, these are my observations, this is my best guess for what age it’ll probably be fine,” and it shows that two good parents – I assume they’re good parents, they come across as good parents, Mark – can come up with different interpretations and conclusions of something, and have a lot more fun and laughs and nuance than, “Oh, no, they said the F word two times, so, therefore, this is immediately banned.”

So, I think it’s really cool. So, good job.

Mark Balasa
I appreciate that. And I’ll just tell you, one of the first things that struck me about the point you just made about the interplay between the two of them, because they don’t agree on many things, so Jonathan tells Katie that she’s getting older, and Katie says, “Well, I’m like a fine wine. Jonathan, you’re more like a sippy cup under the couch.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s a nice chemistry in that they seem to genuinely like and care about each other, but they do not mind to razz. Okay. So, that’s a very different thing, “Is THIS for Kids?” and faith-based media stuff. So, tell me, how have you used these skills associated with listening and good questions as you do something totally different?

Mark Balasa
Well, what I’m trying to do is, as you just said, you assemble those skills that I’ve acquired in my other business into this and help the team learn how to do sales presentation, how to do an interview, how to work with a new vendor, kind of some of those universally needed skills, if you will, regardless of what the actual business is, whether it’s a service or a product, and trying to bring that to them, so that’s hopefully my contribution.

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

Mark Balasa
I think that’s it. Thank you.

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

Mark Balasa
I thought about that, it’s a great question. I’m not sure if I can attribute this to Winston Churchill but I remember reading it in context of him. I’m a real big World War 2 aficionado. And he said to some of his military leaders during the war, he said that, “Authority is taken, not given.” So many times, when a young person would be in our firm, they’d say, “Well, how do I become an owner? And how do I get to lead a team?”

It’s one of those tricky things. You don’t really have a checklist, right? You know it when you could see it but I would always tell, “Look, you have to essentially take the authority because no one is going to step up and say…” Well, I shouldn’t say no one. It’s less likely someone is going to tell you, “You should go do it,” as opposed to stepping up and take it.

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

Mark Balasa
Going back to behavioral finance, I love that stuff. I would use it with our clients all the time. In many cases, I would tell them if I’m using it so they would see the folly of their own decision-making, and that area is ripe with so much interesting research. Like you said, Richard Thaler with Nudge, he did another one recently. What was it? Misbehaving. Daniel Kahneman has got a great book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That’s actually one of my favorites. But there’s so much stuff in there that’s not applicable just to finance. It’s applicable to running a meeting, to how to interact with people. I think it’s just a really helpful thing for anybody’s career.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Mark Balasa
I’m a big fan of Patrick Lencioni. And so, two of his books are actually a required reading at our old firm. We’re doing it at the new firm as well, which is how to be an ideal team player, be humble, hungry, and smart, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good stuff. Pat was on the show. It’s so good.

Mark Balasa
Very nice.

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

Mark Balasa
This is a boring one. As bad as it’s going to sound, Excel. I just use it. Even my to-do list, as something as simple as that, I just found it indispensable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, now I got to ask. A to-do list in Excel, are you putting some numbers or quantification on some of the columns? Or, how does Excel enhance a to-do list?

Mark Balasa
It doesn’t. It’s just easy. It’s a great question. I’m not that sophisticated.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I thought you’re like, “Approximate hours required to complete this task.” All right. And a favorite habit?

Mark Balasa
Favorite habit for me is probably reading, if I can answer that broadly. Whether it’s for your own benefit, for your own edification, for your professional development, I know media is voraciously consumed by the younger generation, but maybe it’s just me and my generation, but I don’t retain things as well when I watch them as opposed to when I read. And so, for me, reading is critical on all fronts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget that you’ve shared with colleagues that people associate with you or they quote back to you often, a Mark original?

One of the things I almost always would ask at the end is, “Is there anything else I should be asking?” And so, I would get teased for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have asked me that, and I asked that myself, so it’s a good one. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mark Balasa
BVM Studio. Right now, we just have a landing page. We’ll have more to come but that’s an easy way to reach out.

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

Mark Balasa
For me, as I look back over my career, the things that stick out is this. The world is a hard place, and an act of kindness, a sincere effort to help someone is always recognized and it’s almost always rewarded.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with BDM Studios and all you’re up to.

Mark Balasa
Thank you very much, Pete. It’s great to spend some time with you.

Sep 18
0

899: How to Speak Smarter When Put on the Spot with Matt Abrahams

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Matt Abrahams outlines six steps to improve your spontaneous speaking skills.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to feel more comfortable speaking on the spot
  2. Four tactics to keep speaking anxiety in check
  3. The easy formula for great self-introductions

About Matt

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

When he isn’t teaching, Matt is a sought-after keynote speaker and communication consultant. He has helped countless presenters improve and hone their communication, including some who have delivered IPO roadshows as well as TED, World Economic Forum, and Nobel Prize presentations. His online talks garner millions of views and he hosts the popular, award-winning podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart: The Podcast. He is the author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot. His previous book Speaking Up without Freaking Out: 50 Techniques for Confident and Compelling Presenting has helped thousands of people manage speaking anxiety and present more confidently and authentically.

Resources Mentioned

Matt Abrahams Interview Transcript

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

Matt Abrahams
Thank you so much for having me back. I’m excited to chat with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited, too. It’s been five and a half years.

Matt Abrahams
You can tell by the lack of hair and the more gray I have that it’s been a while.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Well, way back in episode 253 when the show was but a pop was when we covered that. I’m curious, in your world of research and communication, have you discovered anything new that was surprising and striking to you?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, so I’ve spent a lot of time since we last spoke thinking about several concepts: how to be more engaging, how to be more concise, and with the new book I have coming out, really, an amalgamation of those, combining those, and the notion of how to speak more effectively in the moment. A lot of our communication happens spontaneously. Yet, if we ever receive any kind of training or spend time thinking about it, it’s always for planned communication – pitches, presentations, meetings with agendas. And, yet, most of what we do in our personal and professional lives happens in the moment and on the spot.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And that’s just a great title here for your book Think Faster, Talk Smarter. And you’re bringing back some fond memories for me when I was in a high school speech team. Impromptu was my jam, although you still got, I think we had to divide eight minutes of prep and talking, and, ideally, it’d be about less than two minutes of prep with your notecard, so it’s still not quite on the spot. That’s more time than, “Hey, Pete, what do you think about this?” than you get in most circumstances.

Matt Abrahams
I love that you did impromptu speaking in high school. There was a time when I left High Tech before I started what I do today where I taught high school, and I actually coached some kids in impromptu speaking. And it’s a great way to learn how to be better on your feet, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, tell us, when it comes to Think Faster, Talk Smarter, overall, what’s the big idea here?

Matt Abrahams
Well, first and foremost, I think the most counterintuitive idea is that you can prepare to be spontaneous. That’s the big thing. And then the second thing is that many of us feel that there are people who are just born with the gift of gab, and they can communicate effectively regardless if it’s planned or not. And I’m here to tell you that you can actually learn to get better at it.

And most people can improve dramatically by taking some time, putting in some practice, and adjusting their mindset to do this in a way that they might not have thought to do it. So, really, you can practice to get better. Everybody can do it. And the book and the process that I teach has six steps to it. The first four are really around mindset, and the last two are around what I call messaging.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m excited to dig into these six steps. Maybe before we do that, can you share with us a cool story of someone who felt pretty flustered when they were called upon to speak, and what they did, and the transformation they saw?

Matt Abrahams
Yes. So, I have worked with a great number of people from seasoned executives down to just everyday people, students, for sure, and there are numerous examples of people who have been put on the spot. So, one that comes to mind is an individual who was attending a meeting, he was just an engineer in the company. He was going to learn about the future releases of the product and different people around the table were sharing their pieces.

His boss, who was supposed to share his work, you can see where this is going, didn’t show up. It turned out that his boss’ wife went into labor, and he was obviously doing what was most important for him, but that left the person who was working with me in a moment of utter panic. He had to now represent his whole team’s work without having prepared to do so.

He did okay. It wasn’t the end of the world but he was definitely stressed out about it and a little bit traumatized, and that’s what brought him to do some work with me. And when I walked him through the methodology I introduced just a few moments ago, he later had a subsequent situation, not the same situation, but another situation where he had to step up and speak.

His team was doing a tribute to that part of the project he represented several months prior. They were celebrating what they did, and he was put on the spot by his boss to stand up and say something as a way of congratulating the team for their success, and he was able to do it with much more confidence and it came out much better.

So, just in a few short months, he developed the ability to speak better on his feet. He felt really, really good about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. All right. Well, let’s hear what are these six steps?

Matt Abrahams
So, when we start, we first have to start with mindset. And the very first step in mindset has to do with managing anxiety. Regardless if it’s planned or spontaneous, anxiety looms large in communication so we have to first take steps to manage our anxiety. The second step has to do with the way we strive for perfection. Many of us want to get it right when we communicate. I make the argument that there is no one right way to communicate. Certainly, better ways and worse ways but no one right way.

Step three has you reframing the circumstances you find yourself in. Many of us see these situations as threatening, we’re put on the spot, we have to defend our position, and that can actually make it very difficult for us. Step four in the mindset category has to do with listening. It sounds ironic but some of the things that help us best communicate in the moment is to listen more deeply and better.

And then we switch from mindset into this notion of messaging. So, I am a huge proponent of structure. I think frameworks help us in all communication but, especially, in the moment when we have to speak on the spot. And, in fact, the whole second part of the book is dedicated to different frameworks and structures you can use for different situations, like introducing yourself, making small talk, answering questions.

And then the final step, step six, also has to do with messaging, how to be clear and concise. One of the big problems when we speak spontaneously is we ramble because we’re discovering our content as we are speaking, and we tend to say more than we need to. So, being focused, clear, and concise is critical in all communication but, especially, spontaneous communication.

So, those are the six steps: mindset and messaging.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, maybe let’s tick through each one of these. For the step one, what are the top do’s and don’ts for managing anxiety?

Matt Abrahams
So, when it comes to managing anxiety, we have to take a two-pronged approach. We have to manage both symptoms and sources. So, symptoms are what we physiologically experience. Some people feel their heart really pounding, others sweat and blush, some shake, and there are some things we can do to manage those symptoms. I’ll give you examples in a moment. But we also have to think about sources. Those are the things that initiate and exacerbate our anxiety.

So, when it comes to sources, let me give you three quick things we can all do. Number one, take deep belly breaths, the kind you would ever do if you’ve ever done yoga, or tai chi, or qigong, where you really fill your lower abdomen. And, interestingly, what’s most important is the exhale not the inhale. So, you want your exhale to be twice as long as your inhalation.

Second, and this is a mental thing, remind yourself that you are speaking in service of your audience. Often, when we are asked to communicate, it is because we have something of value to provide to those that we are speaking to. If we really listen in to our self-talk right before we speak, we say lots of negative things to ourselves, like, “You better not screw up,” or, “You should’ve prepared more,” or, “That person who just went is far better than you are.” So, if we can remind ourselves that we actually have value to bring that the audience can benefit, that can cancel out some of that negative self-talk.

And then, finally, what we need to be thinking about is our body and how our body is reacting. So, if you blush and perspire, you need to cool yourself down. If you shake, you need to do some purposeful movements, like stepping in if you’re standing up. To cool yourself down, holding something cold in the palm of your hands will reduce your core body temperature. The palms of your hands are thermoregulators for your body. So, those are some just quick tips of what we can do for symptoms, and there are many others.

The second side of the equation is sources, and there are many sources of anxiety. One source is that we’re very nervous about not achieving the goal that we’re trying to accomplish. So, if you’re an entrepreneur, maybe you’re trying to get funding. If you’re one of my students, maybe you’re trying to get a good grade. If you’re working in an organization, maybe you’re trying to get support for your cause.

What makes us nervous is we start thinking about what will happen if we don’t achieve that goal, and that can make us very nervous. So, what do we do? We have to get present-oriented because worrying about a goal is worrying about something in the future. So, becoming present-oriented can short-circuit that. For example, you can do something physical. Actors and actresses will shake their body out. You can walk around the building. If you get in your body, you’re not in your mind.

Second, you can listen to a song or a playlist, it helps you get very present-oriented. A very simple way to get present-oriented sounds silly is to say a tongue twister. You can’t say a tongue twister right without being in the present moment, and it warms up your voice. So, lots of things we can do to manage symptoms and sources to help us with the first step of the spontaneous speaking methodology.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Manage anxiety, understood. We got the symptoms, we got the sources, and that’s handy. In terms of getting present, I’m intrigued, are there some additional ways that you recommend folks get into their body as opposed to their mind?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, a great way, if you have an opportunity, is to connect with people, have conversations. So, if I’m ever in a physical space with other people where I’m presenting, maybe I’m running a meeting, or I’m giving a presentation where I know I’m going to get Q&A, and it’s appropriate, I’m out talking to the people, just getting to know them. It’s very hard to have a conversation with somebody and not be in the present moment. So, I’m listening, I’m connecting, that helps.

Another simple kind of fun way is to start at some hard number and count backwards by an even harder number. So, start at 100 and count backwards by, let’s say, 17s. That can be very challenging. So, there’s a lot that we can do to get ourselves present-oriented.

Pete Mockaitis
Seventeens.

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, try it. you can do the first one, that’s 73. Oh, I’m sorry, 83, and the rest are really hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now let’s hear about the second step when we’re thinking about striving for perfection.

Matt Abrahams
Yes. So, when many of us speak, our goal, we feel, is to do it right, to say the right thing, to be perfect. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. Society doesn’t help. If you ask people, “Who’s a really good speaker?” they will typically pick people who are professional communicators. They’ll say some TED speaker from doing a TED Talk, some politician, actor, actress, and that sets an incredibly high bar for the quality of what communication should be like.

Now, we seem to forget that these folks have been trained, and coached, and practiced a lot. In the case of TED Talks, sometimes they’re even edited. So, we need to be thinking about the criteria we use to judge and evaluate our communication because we set the bar really high. That said, we try to achieve it and we want to be perfect and right. And we can disabuse ourselves of that.

I start my Stanford MBA course every quarter I teach with this saying, I say, “Try to maximize your mediocrity in your communication.” And let me tell you, Pete, these folks’ jaws drop. They’ve never been told in their lives to be mediocre. But the value of this is when you strive just to get it done, you put less pressure on yourself, which actually boils down to cognitive load.

Your brain is like a computer. It’s not a perfect analogy but it works. And you know on your laptops and or phones when you have lots of apps or windows open, your system performs a little less well. It’s not performing at its top speed because it’s doing too much at once. The same thing is true with you when you communicate. If I’m evaluating and judging everything I say, that means when I communicate, I have less cognitive focus and effort in what I’m actually saying.

So, you can reduce that by just telling yourself, “Hey, dial down that judgment and evaluation.” I’m not saying never judge and evaluate. You should. But if you dial that down a little bit, you can just focus on getting it done. And when I explain this to my students, I end the class by saying, “Maximize mediocrity so you can achieve greatness,” and they get it. They understand that the pressure they’re putting on themselves actually works against them.

So, that’s step number two. Just get the communication done. And, in so doing, you’re likely to do it very well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And how about the third one, service as an opportunity?

Matt Abrahams
Yes. So, many of us, when we think about our speaking situations, and we think about, “Oh, you’ve got to answer questions on the spot,” for example, or, somebody asks you for feedback, or to introduce somebody in the moment. Many of us don’t say, “Oh, this is a great opportunity.” We think, “Oh, my goodness, I’m going to screw up. I can’t believe I’m in this situation. I have to defend myself or my position.” So, we get very defensive.

And that affects not just how we hold our bodies. We get tight and tense. Our tone gets more curt. Our answers get really short and brief. We can adjust that by reframing the circumstance even in the most difficult spontaneous speaking. Let’s imagine a Q&A session where somebody is just coming at us, fast, furious, spicy. We can still see that as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to connect, an opportunity to potentially find areas to collaborate, and, in so doing, it will change our approach.

We become more open in our body posture. Our answers become more detailed. Our tone becomes more collaborative. All of that will help us do better in the interaction. So, reframing these situations not as hostile and challenging but as opportunities can fundamentally change how we approach this.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Let’s hear about listening.

Matt Abrahams
Well, so I host a podcast called Think Fast, Talk Smart. I’ve not done nearly as many episodes as you’ve done. We’ve just come up on our hundredth, and it’s all about communication. And across these hundred episodes, what has been very clear to me is that listening is critical. We absolutely have to listen better. Most of us do not listen well. We listen just enough to understand what the person is saying so we can then respond, rehearse, evaluate, and judge. We need to listen deeply.

I once heard a video where somebody was talking about jazz and jazz music, and he talked about a teacher he had. And the teacher told him that when he’s listening to jazz music, to really understand it, he has to listen until he sweats. And I love that. When you listen to really connect and in the moment with somebody, you have to listen intently. Listen until you sweat.

So, when it comes to listening, I have a framework that I borrowed from a colleague of mine at the business school, his name is Collins Dobbs. And he talks about, in crucial conversations, three things. And these three things apply to listening beautifully, so I borrowed it – space, pace, grace. To listen truly well, you have to give yourself pace, space, and grace. By pace, I mean slow down.

All of us move so quickly and we have so much going on, we distract ourselves, so we need to slow down so we can really listen. We need to give ourselves space, not just physical space. Move into an environment where you can listen well, but also mental space. We have to give ourselves space in our minds to really focus, be present, and pay attention.

And then grace, we have to give ourselves permission, not only give ourselves pace and space, but to listen internally to our intuition. So, when somebody says something, if you said to me, “Hey, Matt, I’m doing great,” well, the words might say one thing but my sense is the way you said them might mean something else, and I need to give that some credence, and then act upon that as well.

So, the ability to listen minimizes the likelihood that you will respond poorly in a spontaneous speaking situation. For example, you come out of a meeting and you look at me, and you say, “Hey, Matt, how did you think that went?” And, all of a sudden, I hear, “Feedback. Pete wants feedback. Well, Pete, you did this poorly. You could’ve done this better. This should be different next time.”

But if I would’ve really listened, I might’ve noticed that you came out the back door, not the front door, that when you asked me, you were looking down, your tone of voice was very different. What you really wanted in that moment was support. You didn’t want feedback, and I missed it, and I made it actually worse not better. That’s why we have to listen really well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when it comes to some of your frameworks, what is the framework for introducing yourself?

Matt Abrahams
Well, let me give you an all-purpose framework first, and then I can give you a specific one when you do an introduction toast or tribute. So, my favorite structure in the whole world is three simple questions: what, so what, now what. The what is your idea, it’s your product, your service. It could be the person you’re introducing, including yourself. The so what is why is it important to the people you’re talking to. And then the now what becomes what comes next.

So, if I were introducing you, Pete, I might say, “I’m really excited to introduce you to Pete. He’s a very talented person. He does many things, including host a podcast. In talking to Pete, you’re going to learn so much from his vast experience. Now, I’m going to turn the floor over to Pete.” Did you see I just did what, so what, now what as a way of introducing you?

Now, if you’re doing a toast or a tribute, where you’re introducing an idea, a product, maybe a group of people, another structure can work really well, and that is what I call WHAT. What is, “Why are we here? What is the event?” The H is, “How are you, the person doing the introduction, connected to the event?” The A is an anecdote or story you might tell that’s relevant and appropriate for the group. And then the T is some kind of thanks or gratitude.

So, imagine you are the MC, the master of ceremonies at a wedding. You would start, you wouldn’t have to necessarily say why you’re all here. People can figure that out as they see everybody all fancy dressed and probably came from a ceremony. But you might want to explain how you’re connected. You might say, “I’ve known the bride and groom for 10 years. In fact, I introduced them.” And then you would give an anecdote or story that’s relevant and appropriate, and then you would thank everybody, and then maybe bring up the next speaker.

So, the WHAT, why are we here, how are you connected, anecdote or two, and then thank you can be a helpful way of introducing people or an event.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, could you show us that in action? Let’s just say there’s a project kickoff, everyone’s getting together, and they’re going around introducing themselves. Matt, could you show us the introduction of self in action?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, I hate the, “Let’s all go around the table and introduce ourselves.” I think there are so many better ways to get to know each other and names. But if you have to do that, so what I like to do, I do a slight variation of what, so what, now what, in that I start with something provocative. Rather than saying, “Hi, my name is…” That’s boring. Everybody sort of tunes out.

So, I’ll start by saying, “I’m somebody who’s passionate about communication. My name is Matt, and I am a podcast host, an author, and a teacher. And I look forward to sharing with you what I’ve learned about communication and, more importantly, learning from you what you know about communication.” That’s how I would introduce myself. It’s a little more engaging. It allows me to animate and demonstrate my passion. And it really sets up the next step of the interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now let’s talk about being clear and concise.

Matt Abrahams
Many of us, when we speak spontaneously, we discover what we’re saying as we say it. So, we say more than we need to. My mother has this wonderful saying that really helps get to the crux of this. And I know she didn’t create it but I certainly attribute it to her. And her saying is, “Tell me the time, don’t build me the clock.”

Many of us are clock builders. We say way too much either because we want to demonstrate how much work we’ve done, or how smart we are, or just so into whatever it is we’re talking about, we give way more information than people need. And, in so doing, we can bore them, we can cause them to get confused, we can lose our place and where we’re trying to head. So, really being concise is critical, and there are lots of ways to be more concise.

The two that I like to start with is, one, you have to know your audience. You have to understand what’s important to them. The more relevant you can make your content, the more likely you can focus it on the needs of your audience. That’s number one. And number two, you really have to think about your goal. Whenever you communicate, you have a goal, and you have to think about that goal such that it will help you focus.

And, to me, a goal has three parts: information, emotion, and action. In other words, what do you want your audience to know? How do you want them to feel? And what do you want them to do? And even in the moment, when I’m walking into a situation where I have to speak spontaneously, I can quickly say what I want them to know, feel, and do, and that helps me focus what I say.

I bet, when you were doing impromptu speeches in high school, at some point, before you started speaking, you would think to yourself, “What is it I’m trying to accomplish here?” And whatever that answer was helped you focus your communication so you were clearer and more concise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Matt, this is quite a lovely rundown here. So, those are our six steps. And so, I’m curious then, maybe we’ve done all that prep, and yet, still, someone puts us on the spot, we’re drawing a blank, what do we do?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, the number one fear people report to me is, “What do I do when I blank out?” And we can reduce the likelihood of blanking out by having a clear goal, thinking about our audience, and leveraging a structure. Because, if you think about it, a structure gives you a map, and if you have a map, it’s hard to get lost.

So, I might know, not remember, or know exactly what I want to say next, but if I’m using a structure like what, so what, now what, and I know that I’ve just covered the what, I know that so what has to come next. So, it helps give me directionality. So, we can avoid blanking out by, first, really leveraging a structure and knowing our audience.

Now, let’s say the worst happens. Even though you’ve got a structure, even though you’re feeling good about your communication, for whatever reason, you blank out. In that moment, there are two things I recommend you do. One, go back to go forward. Repeat yourself. When you repeat yourself, often you will get yourself back on track.

It’s like when you lose your keys or your phone, what do you do? You retrace your steps so you can find your way. Same thing works. Second, if that doesn’t work, distract your audience. You just need a few seconds to get yourself back. Here’s how I do it.

Pete Mockaitis
“Look over there.”

Matt Abrahams
Not so much that way. Not the smoke and mirrors distraction. But here’s what I do. When I teach, I teach the same strategic communication course multiple times a year at the Stanford Business School, and sometimes I’ll forget, “Did I say that in this class? Have we covered this already?” And I just need a moment to collect my thoughts.

So, I’ll just stop wherever I’m at, and I’ll say to my students, I’ll say, “I want to pause for a moment. I’d like for you to think about how what we’ve just covered can be applied in your life.” And when I say that, my students don’t think, “Oh, Matt forgot.” My students think, like, “Oh, how could I apply this. It’s important. We should apply it. It’s nice that he’s giving us time to do that.”

I think all of us can come up with a question that we could ask pretty much anywhere in our communication that would give us just a few seconds. So, imagine you’re in an update meeting, a product meeting, you could pause, and say, “What’s the impact of what we’ve just discussed on our timeline or on the product we’re coming up with?” People will think about it, and in that moment, you can collect your thoughts.

So, if the worst happens, repeat yourself. If that doesn’t get you back on track, ask some kind of question, assert something that gets people thinking in a different way, and that gives you time to rethink what you’ve got to do.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And then I’m thinking of the project management or project kickoffs setting, it might be any number of great things to prompt people to think about it. Now, I guess in some ways, if the question is too far afield from what you were talking about, they’re like, “Huh? Why were you asking us to do this now?” Like, “I’d like for you to anticipate some of the sticking points as you imagine this playing out in process.” Like, “Really, you’re telling us about the financial projections? I don’t know why we’d do that now.”

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. Well, of course. So, of course, there are certain constraints but you could certainly say in the midst, you can say, “Now I want everybody to think back to the previous project. What were some of the sticking points that got in the way? Or, what are some of the financial issues?” Depending on whatever it was, people will start thinking.

And you could even say, “We’ve got some new people on the team. They don’t remember what it was like last time. I’d like each of you to just turn to somebody and share what a big issue it was for our last release, and then we can start talking more about where we’re going.” I don’t think a single person would question that at all, and it will help you be more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, Matt, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, I would just like to re-emphasize the fact that everybody can get better in their communication. The process I’ve delineated might sound intimidating, might sound like hard work. It’s not. You can do it in bite-size pieces. You can practice. The reality is this: the only way you get better at communication is the way you get better at everything else in life – repetition, reflection, and feedback.

If you’ve ever played a sport, a musical instrument, you had to practice. And then you had to reflect, “What’s working? What’s not working?” And then, finally, seek advice, guidance, and support from others so you can get better. I’ve seen it in my own life, I’ve seen it in the people I teach and I coach. You just have to take the time. You take small steps forward and it makes a huge, huge difference.

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

Matt Abrahams
So, a quote that I love, Pete, and thank you for asking this, is a quote by Mark Twain, and it’s got a little tongue in cheek here but it proves a point that I just made about how we can work to get better at spontaneous speaking. And Mark Twain said, “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”

And the point behind this is you have to put in work. You have to practice to get better at spontaneous speaking. Mark Twain knew it a long time ago. It still holds true today. And it puts a smile on my face every time I think about it, and I think it helps others understand what’s possible when it comes to spontaneous speaking.

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

Matt Abrahams
I have lots of favorite research points but I’ll share some research from a friend and colleague, her name is Alison Wood Brooks. She teaches at Harvard Business School. And a while back, she did some research that looked at how we can reframe our anxiety around speaking not as something that makes us anxious but as something that excites us.

It turns out that our physiological response to excitement and anxiety are exactly the same. Our bodies have one arousal response and we can reframe that and relabel it. So, instead of saying, “Oh, I’m so nervous,” we could say, “Hey, I’m really excited to do this.” And we can attribute those symptoms we’re feeling to excitement. And it actually ends up with us performing better, that is we feel better about how we did. And the audience sees us as doing better. So, I love that research.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Matt Abrahams
So, one of my favorite books of all time is a book called Improv Wisdom. It’s a book by Patricia Ryan Madson. I know Patricia, I’ve gotten to know her over the years. A very skinny book but it’s got lots of life changing advice that comes from the world of improvisation.

There are very few books that I have read where, upon closing the book, I have fundamentally changed my life based on what I’ve read. And this is one of those books, and it’s a book I return to often. So, it’s called Improv Wisdom Patricia Ryan Madson.

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

Matt Abrahams
So, I’ve already alluded to a few, there are two. Actually, you know what, there are several that I use. Let me share the most useful tool I think I use, and that is paraphrasing. I think paraphrasing is the Swiss Army knife of communication. You can use it for so many things. As a podcast host, I use it to really clarify what I heard my audience members say, my guests say.

I also use it as a tool to distribute airtime in a meeting. So, if somebody’s talking too much, I’ll paraphrase and throw it over to somebody else to talk some more. And I also use paraphrasing to clarify in my own life what it is I just heard somebody say. So, if one of my teenage kids, or somebody else in my life says something, and I want to validate that I heard it, and make sure that I got it right, I’ll use paraphrasing. So, that is the single most useful tool I use to be awesome at what I do.

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

Matt Abrahams
Well, first and foremost, I invite people to listen into Think Fast, Talk Smart, that’s a podcast I host. It’s short episodes all about communication. Definitely consider checking out the book Think Faster, Talk Smarter. I’m not that creative with my naming. It’s all about spontaneous speaking. And then if you go to MattAbrahams.com, you’ll find a whole bunch of resources I’ve put up there for all things communication. And if you’re a big LinkedIn user, feel free to link in with me as well.

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

Matt Abrahams
I challenge everyone to think about the impact communication has on the work that you do, and on the others that you work with, and I encourage you and challenge you to work on your communication so that you can be a better version of yourself, a better colleague, a better partner, a better parent. Communication will help you do that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Matt, this has been a treat. I wish you many fast thoughts and talks.

Matt Abrahams
Awesome. Pete, it’s been great to be back with you. Keep doing the good work that you do. Keep thinking fast and talking smart. Thank you.

Aug 14
0

890: The Five Laws to Asking for What You Want with Laura Fredricks

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Laura Fredricks shares battle-tested tips to confidently ask for what you want.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to respond to “I’ll think about it.”
  2. Why you want to talk only 25% of the time
  3. Persuasion pitfalls to avoid

About Laura

Laura Fredricks is an author, speaker, and consultant who trains and coaches individuals, businesses, and nonprofits. Her latest book is Hard Asks Made Easy: How to Get Exactly What You Want. Through her previous six books, Fredricks has helped hundreds of global executives, industry trailblazers, marketing and communication leaders, boards, fundraisers, entrepreneurs, teenagers, artists, philanthropists, and everyday people achieve their best professional and personal lives possible.

Since 2005, Fredricks also has taught at New York University School of Professional Studies.

Resources Mentioned

Laura Fredricks Interview Transcript

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

Laura Fredricks
Welcome, welcome, to you, too, Pete. Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat about your book, Hard Asks Made Easy: How to Get Exactly What You Want. It sounds super useful. But, first, I want to hear, as the ask expert, what are some of the wildest asks that you’ve come across in your days?

Laura Fredricks
It was two kids that wanted a dog and parents weren’t having it. They weren’t having it. So, I came across them and they came to me, and, of course, they’re doing all the stuff. So, I said, “What are you doing?” “Oh, we’re making the bed where the dog could go, and then we’re baking cakes for them, have the dog get them.” And they were doing all these extraneous stuff. It was hysterical.

So, I said, “Well, one thing you could do is wake up early every morning as if you’re going to walk the dog, because you know what’s on your parents’ mind. We’re going to get the dog and we’re going to be taking care of it.” I said, “Sure, you’re responsible so wake up early. Get that powder and go. And then you got to ask for the dog. You can’t just keep saying, ‘I want a dog. I want a dog.’ That’s not an ask.”

“Say, ‘Look, mom and dad, we wake up early every morning. We’ll take care of the dog. This is really important to us. We think it’s going to be great for the family. Can we go out this Saturday and look for a dog? Please, it’s important.’” And they did, they got the dog, and away we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Laura Fredricks
I did something sneaky in there, Pete. It’s all what we’re going to talk about. Every ask, two sentences, and a question.

Pete Mockaitis
That is absolutely something I’m going to ask you about. It’s funny because I can imagine this is in my future. Our kids have made reference to wanting a dog.

Laura Fredricks
It’s coming.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans when it comes to asking during the course of your research and career and writing on this stuff?

Laura Fredricks
A lot. And this is the number one thing. Confidence wins the day. The more confident you are, the more likely you are to get what you ask for. I get this ask all the time, Pete, “Do women make better askers? Do men make better askers? If you’re at the top of your field, does that make you a better asker?” It’s all about confidence. And so, one of the things I try to do is create confidence in preparation first, and then actually asking. But you will get more of what you want by just a confident delivery.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I was going to ask specifically how you define confidence. So, you say a delivery that comes across as confident.

Laura Fredricks
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, whether you believe you deserve it or whatever is not so much relevant?

Laura Fredricks
No, it is. Because when you believe it, you deserve it, you look confident, there’s no way you can look any other way. So, that is the stepping stone to being confident. You have to be 100% sure that this is what you want, what you need, and what you deserve.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There we go. Now, let’s dig into the book, Hard Asks Made Easy: How to Get Exactly What You Want. What’s sort of the big idea or main thesis here?

Laura Fredricks
There are five laws of asking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Laura Fredricks
I can walk you through them if you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, let’s do it.

Laura Fredricks
Good. So, I always like to do it this way. Pete, tell me one thing that you need this week or this month.

Pete Mockaitis
I need my team to chug ahead on, frankly, a pretty boring, repetitive project.

Laura Fredricks
Okay. Okay. Good. So, here we go. And that’s a good one because I just did an interview with someone, actually, which is really exciting, and she needed more sponsors for her show, so we walked through that one, which was great. But this is asking a team to keep going even though it’s not exactly exciting work. Did I get that right?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Laura Fredricks
Okay. So, here we go, Pete. Law number one, know exactly what you want with numbers and dates. So, knowing that, how would you ask your team? Numbers and dates.

Pete Mockaitis
I need all 890 of these episodes converted over for dynamic ad insertion by September 25th.

Laura Fredricks
There we go. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Notice you didn’t say, “By fall,” “By the end of the summer,” by whatever. That, really, “Now, I’m crystal clear of what we need to do. I’m your team member. I’ve got a good idea.” Good. Now, law number two, stay with me, write the old-fashioned way, or type it on your phone but it has to be brain to physical here, 15 things your team is going to say to you.

So, I’ll help you out. “Don’t have that kind of time,” “Can’t make that deadline,” “Why do you need it by that date?” “What’s in it for me?” “Do I get extra pay?” “I’ve got these other tasks to do,” “Where is this on my priority list?” Okay, I just gave you seven. Now you fill in.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, my team is so fantastic that I think they’ll probably say, “Oh, hey, well, we’ll try. I mean, yeah, we’re going to do our best but I don’t know. I mean, that’s kind of a short deadline.”

Laura Fredricks
“Well, what happens if we don’t make the deadline?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Laura Fredricks
Okay. “Can we get extra help if we don’t make the deadline?” “Once that’s done, what else am I getting?” You get the point, 15 things. And we do this because of this reason. The number one reason people don’t ask, it’s not to hear, everyone here knows it’s not fear of rejection. It’s they’re afraid they’re going to hear a response they’re not prepared for.

And so, law number two, get you prepared. First step is 15 things you think they’re going to say, and then you go back, and what will you respond to each of them. That gets you right into the beginning of the show we talked about, law number three – deliver with confidence. Now, your listeners can’t see but every time I do an important interview, like the one we’re doing now, I stand. You’re standing, too. Why? It’s confident. No one exists in my universe right now other than you, Pete. Nobody.

Pete Mockaitis
Why thank you. Felt good.

Laura Fredricks
My voice is up, my energy is great, this is it, but people just step over this, like, “Oh, I got this. I’m good. I know my boss.” Just like you said, “My team is great. They love me. We love them. It’s all fine.” But we’re not delivering with confidence.

Law number four. Clarify what you think you heard. So, let’s say, one of the responses, which is very common, not that your team would give it to you, but let’s say they do, “Oh, Pete, you know, I got to think about it.” What would you say?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I suppose when I’m thinking about something, usually, there’s something pretty specific under the surface that I need to think about in terms of, like, “Well, I’m wondering if I have that capacity given that there is a vacation scheduled.” And so, often “think about” really means gather some more information and do some research to bring a little bit more certainty to an unknown.

Laura Fredricks
Right. So, the thing about that, which is a very common response which we’ll have to prepare for, is your only job is to find out the “it.” What is the it? Now, you went down and said, “There’s research. There’s something to contemplate on,” there’s always something. But you need to find out in that moment what it is.

So, anyone hears I have to think about it, this is what you say to your team member, “Thanks so much for sharing. This is great.” This is my words, use whatever, “To the extent you feel comfortable, can you share with me what you’re thinking about?” And here’s the most important part, “I’m here to help you,” and you bring it back in. It’s not I threw something at you, you threw a response back, time is going to take care of it. There we go.

“To the extent you feel comfortable, can you share with me what you’re thinking about? I’m here to help you.” And you know what? They tell you. And exactly the reason might be that you just said, “Well, you know, here we are. It’s August 3rd, I have the last two weeks of August off. I don’t think I can make the September deadline.” And now we know what it is. It’s the timing.

It could be, “Well, I’ve done 90% of this project. I don’t think I should do any more. I think this other teammate should do it because I did 90% of it.” You don’t know what the “it” is, so figure out the “it.” And then law number five, and this is very important, right there and then, plan your next move while you’re talking about it.

Because if it’s, “That’s great. Go back. Think about it. We’ll circle back. August 3rd will be closed.” August 15th becomes August 30th, and too much time goes by. So, you could say, “Great. Work it out with your teammate. Friday 10:00 o’clock, let’s meet again and finalize this.” And now you’ve taken a big topic and you’ve condensed it, and you’re going to get an answer in a short amount of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. There we have it. The big idea is those five laws, and you just laid out what are those five laws. And I think the part that’s vibing for me the most is the idea of we fear more getting a surprise question that we can’t answer than we do getting a no. And I think that resonates, well, for me. I guess maybe you’re suggesting it’s universal.

Because if I get a question I don’t know the answer to, I feel, I don’t know what the word is. I feel kind of like a loser in terms of, “Okay, guys. So, you’re coming in here asking for a special favor, and then in reply, I have a very basic clarifying question to ask of you, and you have no idea. That feels kind of disrespectful to me who’s being asked that you don’t have your act together. And so, that’s what I’m feeling.”

Laura Fredricks
It does. It does. And, also, like you said the word, surprise is correct. I always say, “You don’t want to have that deer-in-the-headlights look, like whatever.” That’s why I did law number two of writing down the 15 things because you’re pretty much going to hit the parameter of where it is. And many people in leadership positions, this is the reason why they don’t ask.

Think about it. You don’t get to be CEO, you don’t get to be in the C-suite, you don’t get to be the VP out of the sky. You’re prepared, you’re good, you’re knowledgeable. You’re the one to have that role, and a lot of times they don’t step up and ask for that same reason.

Pete Mockaitis
Because if you’re the vice president of whatever, and you ask the CEO, and the CEO asks you a sensible question, and you’re like, “Ugh, I have no idea,” then you’re sort of worried, like, “Uh-oh, maybe I’m not going to be the next CEO because the CEO now thinks I’m dumb and unprepared.”

Laura Fredricks
You’re supposed to know it. You feel judged.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I suppose when you do these 15 things, you can have the polished version of “I don’t know” at your disposal.

Laura Fredricks
Well, what you can do, and I recommend to everyone, like use this as a positive moment. We’re kind of on audio here but the visual matters. When you hear something you don’t like, normally, your body language tanks and you just give it away. Just say, “You know what, that’s a great question. Let me circle back. How about Friday 2:00 o’clock? I’ll have the answer. We’ll go from there.” Use it to your advantage. Use it as a leverage point. Don’t let that take you away. If response number 16 came and you weren’t ready, keep that list. That becomes number 16.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I like the clear formulations here. So, we got our five laws. You’ve also got three rules and a formula. So, let’s hear these, too.

Laura Fredricks
Yes, I do. Well, these all came from… asking has always been left from luck, chance, and time. If I ask enough people, one person is going to say yes. If I spend so much time with Pete, he’s going to naturally know what I want. And that’s how asks had gone, and I said, “I have to put organization, structure, and focus because when people have a path, they’ll follow it, and they’ll do it. Without steps, they’re not going to do it.”

So, my three rules, which are pretty easy but you’ve got to follow them, is be prepared, be personable, be present. And the preparation is what we did in the second law, but it’s also beyond doing your research. Really get to know a person. This comes to play when people want another job and they want to network, and they want to find a reference, and they want to find someone who might be in the company that they’re about to go in, where they’re a candidate for.

So, first of all, if someone is going to say, “Hey, I know this person, and it might be good for you. I kind of know them, kind of don’t,” there’s a lot of questions you need to ask, “Do you know anything about them? Do you know their interests, how they like to be communicated with? Are they kind of a person who is relaxed, likes jokes, very formal?”

All that stuff you can gather, makes you prepared for when you want to use that person as a reference should you ever become one of the top candidates. Just be prepared. I think people step over, it’s like, “I know Pete. He’s a good guy. The conversation will go well.” It won’t. Be prepared.

Second is be personable. And what I mean by this is, it’s one of my mantras that I love, your tone is as important as your words. Everyone who comes to me, it’s like, “What’s the right words? What’s the magical formula to ask?” And I can do that, but I always practice with them, “How do you sound? Take your phone, record your voice. Do you like it? Are you using one or two words way too much?” Your tone is as important as your words.

And then the last is be present. And I say listening with presence matters so much. Now, it’s gotten a little bit easier since a lot of us still do a lot of communication on Zoom, so we can look at our computer screen and focus. And you’ve prepared all your guests like me, to have no distractions, cellphone off, landline off, windows closed, the whole bit. The same applies when you’re going to ask. You have to be present. Nobody exists but the person you’re asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And can you also share with us the 75% to 25% rule?

Laura Fredricks
Yes. That gets to listening with presence. How many times, think back, that you had a conversation or even someone asked you where they’re overtalking it, they’re selling it, they’re pitching it, they’re selling it again? And by the end of the conversation, you don’t know if you’re supposed to think about something, you don’t know if you’re supposed to respond to something, and it was a great conversation but you’re kind of clueless.

So, I say, especially when you’re in the ask, it has to be they talk 75, you talk 25, which gets us to the ask formula of two sentences and a question. You end on a question so that the person you ask speaks next.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, two sentences and a question, and the goal there is that you’re not overtalking, and they do the next speaking, as opposed to dead silence, “Okay, now what?” So, can you give us a few examples of sentence, sentence, question, sentence, sentence, question?

Laura Fredricks
Sure. Sure. There’s a person I knew who wanted, she was the vice president and the CEO position came up. She’s in Colorado and she contacted me. And, again, people can go too heavy on what they accomplished so that they should naturally rise to the next position. And I said, “Listen, let’s do this in preparation. Let’s frame your interview. Let’s frame your ask. Go in there, and here we go.”

First always, “Thank you for your time. This is great. It’s a wonderful opportunity and I’m really looking forward to it” sentence number one.” Number two, “I’m here today to share with you my three points of taking this company to the next level in the next year,” sentence number two. Question, “Is this a good time to talk about it? I’m really excited about it.”

So, this is a job interview. Now, what did I do? Two sentences and a question. We’re going to get to asking for the job in a minute but I like this prep first. I like saying, “I have three things to share with you,” because what does that do, Pete? That means I’m waiting for number one, I’m waiting for number two, I’m waiting for number three. It focuses the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Laura Fredricks
Now, we’ve advanced why I am going to be the best CEO because I’ve already thought of how we’re going to advance the company. Listen to the back and forth, they’re going to talk about the stuff. And so, at the very end, saying, “I hope I’ve answered all your questions. This is so important to me in my career,” and here we go, “I’m asking you now to consider me as the next CEO. Can you do that?”

Nobody asks for the job. They talk around it. But when you ask for it, there’s laser focus that you are the person who really wants this. You’ve put a lot of time and energy into it. You’re going to advance us and you actually asked for the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. “Can you do that?” and they’re like, “Sure. I can think about that.” Or, I guess they’ll say, “Well, no, actually, someone else is going to get it. So, sorry about that.”

Laura Fredricks
And that’s fine but at least you planted a major seed that this is something they really, really want, especially if you’re moving up in the company. There can be way too many assumptions that, “They know me. They’ve seen my work. We’ve gone out. They know my plan,” and when it comes to this moment, you have to treat it as if they kind of know you, kind of don’t, but you have to be the person who asks for the job because you want the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you give us another demonstration of the two sentences then question?

Laura Fredricks
Sure. Sure. Let’s go back to the interview I just did. The woman said, “I need more sponsors,” which we know from law number one is not an ask. I said, “Give me an example.” She wanted Coca-Cola to be a sponsor for 25,000 by September 1st. Okay, that’s what we wanted. Okay, it was kind of a framed ask. It could be any sponsor. It could be a local bank. It could be whatever but we used Coca-Cola because everyone knows it.

So, anyway, we go in and say, “You know what, first of all, what’s in it in for them?” “I’ve studied your company, and a lot of people tune into my podcast, and I think this can be a tremendous partnership. What I’d like to talk to you today is about Coca-Cola being a $25,000 sponsor by September 1st. Can we talk about it now? What else do you need to know before you make this important decision?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, they’re clear on, “Well, here’s what I need. I need to know your demographics, your dah, dah, dah.”

Laura Fredricks
Precisely. You’re right down the runway, “It’s 25,000 by September 1st.” And then you get into everything else. Here we go, “I’m not the decision-maker. The budget is over. We don’t support podcasts.” Then you get into the 15 things, and you’re going to respond.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s do one more example.

Laura Fredricks
So, there’s a lot of people that need more personal time now or through the end of the year, or they want a promotion, or they want a raise, but I’m going to go with personal time because more people are coming to me, that’s as important as raises and promotions.

So, here we go. And when you speak to your boss, you’ve got to remember, they don’t remember how much vacation personal time you have. I think they think it’s emblazoned in there, like, an Excel spreadsheet but they don’t know. So, go in there and say, “You may be aware or not that I have 10 personal days in calendar year 2023. I’d like to ask for three more personal days that I can use in September. And if we have to count them against my 24 time, that’s okay. Is this something that you’re ready to decide now? How can I help you make this decision?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there we have it. Well, so I like that we got right into a lot of the pro tips on the formulation of the ask. Can we maybe back up a little bit and talk a bit about that asking reluctance. We talked about the fear of not knowing what to say. You’ve also formulated what you call two devils and three temptations when it comes to asking. What are these?

Laura Fredricks
Well, the two devils are assumptions and expectations, and that can just sabotage, even your thinking, about asking. So, there’s a lot of assumptions. Let’s go back to the person who wants to be CEO. They can do a lot of assumptions of, “I’ve been here X amounts of years. I’ve taken this company here. Everybody knows me.” And, like, in what we ever say, “It’s going to be a slam dunk,” but that’s way too much assumptions.

Or, “The more time I spend with someone, the more likely they are to know that I want their business.” This happens a lot in sales, a lot in real estate, “Take the person out for a thousand times, and they know that that person is going to buy the house from them.” Assumptions. Wipe it away.

Expectations. This comes a lot in personal relationships, especially, when we expect someone to know, “You need to clean the house more.” We expect someone to know, “It’s your turn to do food shopping.” We expect someone to know, “We have been on vacation. We’re going to take the biggest one we ever have.” Wipe away expectations and assumptions. You do need to ask and you can’t rely on those two.

And then my three devils, I mentioned them before, and they surface all the time: luck, chance, time. “If I ask,” and I hate this, “ten people, one person will give me investment.” Chance, “Well, my chances are pretty good because I just went out with them last time, and they’re going to know, and they’ll just do it, but I’m going to take my chances. I’ll sit back and wait.” And time, fall back on the other one, “The more time I spend with people, the more naturally they’re going to know what happens, and I don’t have to ask. It’s just going to happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, tell me, Laura, any final things you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Laura Fredricks
Yes, there’s a couple things that I like. Just keep in mind, anytime you ask, it’s a conversation, and anytime you ask, it’s an opportunity. A lot of times, people can ask because they feel like they’re taking something away, the person is going to have less than they had before, but always think it’s an opportunity. They’re going to say yes, no, maybe, move on, but I’m guaranteeing you, if you don’t, there’s someone right behind you who’s going to ask that person. So, remember, it’s an opportunity.

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

Laura Fredricks
“The quality of your life depends on the quality of questions you ask yourself and others.” I made that up and I like it. It’s my guiding principle.

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

Laura Fredricks
I look a lot towards two things – The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Advancing Philanthropy, just because I know the mindset of people with a lot of money, what they’re doing with it, why they’re giving it, why they’re not because that comes up in a lot of asks. Most asks have a monetary element to it, so I monitor those two. And, also, I’m an avid reader, I read The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post every day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Laura Fredricks
To Kill a Mockingbird hands down. It’s my favorite book then. It’s my favorite book now. and, Pete, one of the wonderful things is I got a chance to see Jeff Daniels be featured as Atticus here in New York City. And what’s so wonderful and sometimes terrifying is that the lines, the original lines from the book, in the play made people gasp because they’re timeless. We’re still dealing with these issues. And so, to write that kind of book and still have it so relevant so many decades later is just amazing.

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

Laura Fredricks
A couple because I’m on the road a lot, I use Egnyte because then I can access any of the documents I have, any of the press releases, on and on, and I like that a lot. Oh, my MailChimp, I could not live without that because that gets out my newsletter. And if anyone wants to be on my newsletter, it’s laura@expertontheask. Send me your email and I will put you on. I do a newsletter once a month, and it’s called 2S 1Q, two sentences and a question.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Laura Fredricks
So, those are my best. And then I invest in a lot of good lighting because it’s sometimes very difficult in a New York condo to get the right lighting, so I always invest in good lighting.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Laura Fredricks
Read The New York Times religiously every morning, and my other two, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post because external forces govern internal decisions. You have to know what’s going on locally, regionally, nationally, internationally because they affect every ask you can do, won’t do, or need to do. And I also want to know what’s on people’s minds when people are asking. People don’t think about your ask in an incubator. They know what’s going on in the world and it’s on their mind so you have to be prepared for that.

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?

Laura Fredricks
I gave one before, “The ask is a conversation,” “Your tone is as important as your words,” and, “Listen with presence.”

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

Laura Fredricks
Two ways ExpertOnTheAsk.com or simply my name LauraFredricks.com.

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

Laura Fredricks
Make more asks. Don’t hold back. Use the five laws. Honestly, they really, really work. Be prepared. Be personable. Be present.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck with all your asks.

Laura Fredricks
Thank you. Likewise, my friend.