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Jan 23

833: The Four-Step Process to Influencing People and Decisions with Andres Lares

By Ida del Mundo | Podcasts | No Comments

Andres Lares reveals the surprising psychology behind decision-making and shares a four-step process to influence others.

You’ll Learn:

How to tap into the hidden driver behind most decisions
The critical steps that set you up for greater influence
What to say when you’re losing the other person

About Andres

Andres Lares has been the Managing Partner and CEO of Shapiro Negotiations Institute since 2017. Prior to this role, Andres served various roles including Chief Innovation Officer where he led the company’s development of technology and content. For over a decade Andres has advised professional sports teams in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL on contract negotiations, trades, and other critical negotiations. He has been featured in publications including HBR, Forbes, CNBC, Entrepreneur, and Sports Business Journal. Andres guest lectures at conferences and institutions around the world and teaches a course on negotiations at Johns Hopkins University.

Book: Persuade: The 4-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions
Website: ShapiroNegotiations.com

Resources Mentioned

Study: “The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of ‘Placebic’ Information in Interpersonal Interaction“ by Ellen Langer, Arthur Blank, and Benzion Chanowitz
Book: “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman

Andres Lares Interview Transcript

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

Andres Lares
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear your insights on persuasion. Could you kick us off with a particularly striking, fascinating, mind-blowing, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made in this domain? No pressure.

Andres Lares
Yeah, no pressure, huh? So, yeah, this is kind of like if I give this up and there’s no really reason to listen to the rest of the podcast…

Pete Mockaitis
Keep it short, yeah.

Andres Lares
Exactly. So, people would be done in one minute. So, there is one thing that really struck me. So, when we got into this, I’ve been doing this for about 12 years now, and pretty early on, the thing that struck me and sticks with me is, essentially, kind of a quote that we use in our trainings that’s been around, really, since Aristotle. He was kind of teaching this many years ago, and perhaps not enough people listen. But it’s that, “People make decisions emotionally, and then they justify them rationally.”

And that has really stuck with me. We have done an enormous amount of research that indicates that is definitely the case all over the world, regardless of culture and language and everything else, so that really has stuck with me. So, that’s it, we’re done, we can pack up and go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really want to dig into that. So, I’ve heard that and that seems sensible. Can you unpack that with some of your research and some examples of what that really sounds like in the internal dialogue and practice?

Andres Lares
Yeah. So, really, where does it come from? And, really, where it comes from is kind of heuristic, all the shortcuts in our brain that we take because we have to. And so, there’s a lot of this that’s covered in one of the books that I have enjoyed, and it has impacted the most ever, is Thinking, Fast and Slow, and no surprise it’s a Nobel Prize winner that wrote it.

And another that would’ve won one if he was around, but it was one of those things that, because there’s so much that we have to compute in our brains in a short period of time, we really, essentially, are struggling and taking as many shortcuts as we can. So, what does that look like? So, I’ll give you an example that we often talk about.

So, this is a study done many years ago, and, actually, you know what, there’s a couple. So, the best one, I’ll shift gears here and convince myself of another one. So, here’s a perfect example of a shortcut and how emotions drive things. So, many years ago, there’s a study done at Harvard, and it was at a library or, essentially, where folks didn’t realize what was going on but it was a study that people were in a copy machine, a line to the copy machine.

So, again, just the context here, a line to the copy machine, you really are doing nothing else while making copies. Well, in this study, they basically had actors approach real people and ask three different ways in order to butt in the line. So, the first was, “Can I go in front of you?” and so that was the first thing they asked.

The second one, they said, “Can I go in front of you because I’m in a hurry?” And the third one, they said, “Can I go in front of you because I’m in a hurry? I need to make a lot of copies.” So, that’s the three, so you’re asking someone. So, now, the percentages here will tell you how long ago this was. I don’t think they would stand at the time. But, in the first example, basically just asking to go in front of you, 60% of people approved.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so nice of them.

Andres Lares
I know. And so, that’s how I know this was not done recently. In the second, they literally said, “Because I need to make copies,” and 93% of people let them in front. And then when there’s kind of a reason that was a little bit more reasonable, which would be the fact, “I need to make a lot of copies. In addition, I’m in a hurry,” it went up only to 94%.

So, what’s happening there, right? Just simply the word because, and someone sharing a reason with you, is enough. It’s compelling enough for your brain to think, “Oh, yeah, that’s probably a good reason. Then go.” Even the actual reason itself rarely even matters that much. Now, you can’t always do this, and there’s different circumstances will provide different results.

But similar studies have been done all over the place and with adjustments of all types, and there’s always that aspect where our brain is taking that shortcut and it almost doesn’t matter what comes after the word because, “I hear because, there must be a reason. It must be good. Go ahead.” And so, as an example, and there’s millions of them where people make emotional decisions.

And I’ll give you one more that I particularly enjoy. This has been done with jellybeans and things like that. Imagine this big jellybean, one of those where if you pick the number of jellybeans in a container, you get a prize. Imagine that. And so, they said, “You have a choice, in this one there’s 10 jellybeans and one is red. And if you picked the red one, so one in ten chance, you will $100.” In another one, they said, “Look, in this case, there’s a hundred jellybeans. Eight of them are red. If you pick a red one, you’ll get a $100. Which would you choose?”

Now, most people, more than 50%, again, all over the world, will choose the second. Now, why did they choose the second? The first one has a 10% chance. The second one has an 8% chance, eight out of 100%, one out of ten. But what happens is, well, one is kind of a denominator issue where the math may be a little bit more complicated for folks in the moment. But the second is, emotionally, they feel like they have eight cracks at that red jellybean to make the money rather than the one crack.

And so, that feels more important than the denominator, how many jellybeans there are, and so they pick it. So, those are two kinds of very different examples of that at play.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, now I’m thinking about counter examples just to put this to the test. I think I’ve often been in a situation where I do exactly that. I want something or I don’t want something, I just like something, I don’t like something, and then I find a way just to rationalize it afterwards. Sometimes, what’s interesting, I find that I fail.

Like, for example, when I saw the…it took me a long time with the iPad. I said, “Okay, I’ve had some good experiences with Apple products – the iPhone, the iMac, the MacBook Pro. I like all three of them. I really see their place in my life. But for the longest time, the iPad is just like, “I don’t see how I need this. I have got a laptop which can do just about all those things and more.”

And so, I think I went for years without an iPad. Friends, roommates, others had iPads, loved them, and I kept looking at it, thinking I wanted it but it just didn’t click for the longest of times. I guess I was not able to martial the logical reasons until I had just enough experiences of being on a plane and not being able to open up my laptop all the way to actually be able to view it and sit it on the thing, because I’m a tall guy, and try to get it a comfortable angle.

And then I thought, “Well, okay.” And then I think there are some lower price options, it’s like, “I don’t need the newest one, and, yeah, I’ve got a birthday coming up.” So, the things all kind of align. But I found that intriguing that. You tell me, am I abnormal or is there a certain threshold that has to be met here? It’s like, “I could have desire but be unable to bring enough logical justification,” even though I’m so good, I think, at rationalizing and justifying a lot of things in order to get me to do the thing that I want or don’t want. What’s going on on the second layer here?

Andres Lares
So, when I hear that story, my first reaction is, “It was the emotion that drove you.” So, what I hear in that story was, “It wasn’t until I was cramped like this in an airplane where I was thinking, ‘What am I doing here? I’m on this four-hour flight across the country, and I can’t do anything. It’s frustrating,’” whether you want to watch Netflix and just relax or you want to get some work done.

And that’s the moment where kind of how you felt in that moment was the true compelling kind of emotion that enabled you to get the iPad. In my opinion, that’s part of what happened there because that’s really what drives it. And then you can justify, “Okay. Well, iPad is the best because I’m an Apple user and it’s going to sync in very well,” or whatever.

Then the logic will kick in and kind of work through all the details. But that first desire, or that shift from desire to actually doing it, I think that probably happened on an airplane where you said, “Enough is enough. I need this thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is interesting. I guess I thought when the iPad was first unveiled, I had some desire, like, “Ooh, that looks cool and shiny. I like it. I want it. But I don’t really need it. Where does it fit in into anything?” So, I guess maybe, in your model, what’s happening here is I have insufficient desire until I had a new emotional experience of, “I’m very uncomfortable in this seat and want to have more comfort in the seat.”

Andres Lares
So, it’s interesting because I think that is a none kind of money version of what we often see, which is that folks will want stuff. There’s something that you want that’s got some strength. But avoiding something you don’t want has even more strength, and that happens with money, right? So, we see someone, $100 for sure versus 50% chance to win 200 or zero. Mostly you will pick 100 because what happens is they miss out. And it happens even more strongly if it’s a loss.

And so, I think what’s happening there is the fact that, “Hey, this thing is shiny,” whatever you want. The thing that’s compelling but the level of how compelling it is when you actually then face a negative emotion, where it’s like, “This is really frustrating, and I could get rid of this frustration if I bought a tablet, and that tablet happens to be an iPad,” I think that’s the one that’s going to be more compelling, which is why that happened. And so, when it’s nice and shiny, that’s compelling but it’s typically not as powerful as the other.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’m curious about sort of business-to-business type decisions. Like, I think, in a way, at least if you are a director at a publicly traded corporation, for example, you have a legal obligation to look out for the shareholders’ best interests. And so, it seems like there are some solutions that, it’s like, “Oh, this should produce ROI.” So, in some ways, like we’re really “supposed to” think extra super duper logically about the financial logical consequences of a thing. Are emotions still running the show here, too?

Andres Lares
So, I mean, yes, but there are some things that remove some of that, right? So, for example, if you’ve got a decision that takes a long time. So, the longer you put something through a decision-making process, and the more people are involved, although group-think does happen, but more people, more time. There’s a bunch of these variables that will do that, so in the moment.

If you think about…let’s move to a totally different world. Let’s go to a grocery store, and that’s another example, the grocery store. Why is it that there’s gum and snacks while you wait to pay? So, those gums and snacks are also in another aisle but they’re bought significantly less. But in that moment where you’re just waiting and you’re sitting around, it’s going to take three more minutes, which feels like 15 where you’re waiting for the next person to pay, you make this kind of emotional decision of, like, “Oh, yeah, this is what I need.”

And so, what happens is I think that’s kind of taking advantage of that. Now, over time, if you saw that in the aisle, you wouldn’t have gotten that piece of gum, or you wouldn’t have gotten that candy bar. And the same thing would occur with corporate decisions. If you’re the director of the company, if you make a decision over a couple of weeks, it’s less and less emotional. Now, emotions are still at play.

I remember kind of finding this stat which still shocks me to this day that the first and last, as far as like those two, typically, in an RP type process where it’s a little bit informal, or in a fully informal kind of bidding process, the first and last are selected more than 50% of the time, even when there’s more than four or five vendors. So, it’s imbalanced in the first and last. And, again, that’s another way where we’re emotional beings, and the first sets the tone, the last is the one we’re most likely to remember.

And so, the first sets the tone, and others don’t necessarily stack up to it, or they say some things that are unique, or the last does something that’s impressive in any way, they’ll last with us, and you pick them. But it’s unbelievable that you may not be picking the best partner for your company. You’re literally picking who went first or last potentially. And even worse, we don’t know it. And even if we do know, we often can’t do anything about it.

Now, of course, there are ways. So, writing things down, decision-making processes, taking time to digest and think through it, creating a criteria, there’s things you can do but it is amazing how emotional we are as beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is so shocking and striking, I almost feel to construct a counter narrative that explains it, such as, “Well, the first person, they really got their act together. They got some hustle. That is a high-performing organization that moves quickly, and that’s an advantage so they deserve stuff. And the last folks, boy, they really put some fun into this. They took their time. They did their research and their homework and their preparation. And so, the first and the last may disproportionately, in fact, be superior potential partners.” I might be stretching here, but that’s where I kind of go.

Andres Lares
In the cases where there’s no choice, I think we see it happen too, but it happens just about everywhere. So, another one is called the winner’s curse often. So, if you think of like a bidding system, typically the person…and this happens in sports. We do a lot of work in sports. And if you think of an athlete goes to a team, oftentimes, and this happens in baseball perhaps in more than any other sport. It’s okay, you’re willing to pay $10 million a year for 10 years.

I’m willing to pay more, if you’re willing to pay more, then you go back and forth. Then you find the person that wins is, essentially, cursed because they win, by definition, by overpaying for that player. And so, again, and that’s typically emotional. When we’ve been in the trenches with teams, that is because they get caught up in the deal making, or because it is a blurriness, it is an emotional piece because, I would say, 99.9% of the time when we meet with the teams and we’re kind of involved in these kinds of decisions, they have written down a number as a walkaway that’s lower than they end up paying.

So, they end up going well above what they said they would, what they think is reasonable, and so that is where the justification comes in. “Oh, I am going over but things have changed,” you know, fill in the blank. Now, of course, there are times when things have actually changed. Maybe you start a negotiation early. Now, five other players get signed, now the market has moved up. That, of course, is a possibility.

But very rarely is that the reason that’s happening. It’s deal fever. We’re in it, we spent so much time, and there’s a sunk-cost fallacy, “I’ve spent this much time on it. It’s only this much more,” and that’s where the justification comes in and, really, it becomes more emotional rather than if you’re objective, you’d say, “Look, the max I was going to pay is probably ten years, 10 million a year, and it’s better for me not to do that than it is to pay more.” We just very rarely come across that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Andres, we’re having so much fun jumping all around the psychological world here. Maybe let’s get to the fundamentals here. Your book Persuade: The 4-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions, we’ve already got some tasty tidbits from it. But what would you say is the core message, thesis, big idea of this one?

Andres Lares
So, it’s a four-step process to influencing others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Just like you said.

Andres Lares
Exactly, that’s it. Build credibility, engage emotion, demonstrate logic, facilitate action. So, really, it’s building credibility, people will not care if you’re not deemed credible. Think of a toothpaste commercial. Every toothpaste commercial has someone whether is or looks like a dentist, that’s because they don’t have credibility without that kind of the dental-looking attire. And so, that’s an example, and a crude one, but it is an example.

Then engage emotion. As I talk to people, people make decisions emotionally, and then they justify them rationally. Then comes demonstrate logic. Now, of course, there is a time and a place for logic. So, it isn’t that you just never do it. It’s that you typically and most compellingly do it after you build credibility and engage emotion.

And then, finally, the fourth is facilitate action, which is if you can think of all the situations where you say, “Is this a good idea?” and your teammate says yes, your colleagues say yes, “Okay, are we going to move forward?” “Yes, we are.” And then, all of a sudden, you check in two weeks later and nothing has happened. I think just about everyone can relate to that.

And so, facilitate action is about creating an environment where it’s as likely as possible that the behavior that you want to be taken will be taken.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, it sounds good to me. Lay it on us then, let’s say we want to do some great persuading, can you maybe give us some example demonstrations for how we’d step through each of these pieces from building the credibility to engaging the emotion, to demonstrating logic, and to facilitating action?

Andres Lares
Yes. So, let’s try to pick something that potentially anyone can relate to. So, you’re working with a colleague at work, so potentially, let’s say, they’re not necessarily someone above you or below you. They’re kind of a lateral position, and so, hopefully, this is generic enough that it works for everyone. So, the first thing is you want to think about, “Okay, do I have credibility with this person? I’m trying to convince Pete to do something, okay, so how am I going to do it? Well, first is, does Pete know who I am? Does he think that I’ve got good ideas? What is his perception of me?”

And so, let’s assume that it’s a neutral perception. Met a few times and not much there. So, the first I think about, “How do I build credibility?” So, the build credibility might be simple things. So, spending time with someone, unless you actively do something very negative. Generally, spending time with someone helps you to build rapport, trust, and credibility.

But also, you can give yourself a few things. So, when you bump into Pete, and there’s an opportunity to say, “Hey, I thought of you the other day when I read this article. I’ll send it to you by end of the day tomorrow.” That’d be an example of manufacturing an opportunity where you, in this case, you should genuinely have thought about the person and think that article might make sense. And then I sent it to Pete in the time that I said I would.

Well, now, you’re starting to create not only that connection based on thinking of the person, but also a sense of reliability, “I said I would do something by end of the day tomorrow, and I did.” So, you can do a few of those things, and you start to get the ball rolling. And, of course, any time you drive value, you write good ideas, things they can nibble on at work, anything that is important and valuable to the other party would help build credibility.

So, then comes emotion. So, let’s say, in this case, you’re working on a project together, and, again, to pick an example most people could relate to, Pete has this as priority seven and I have this as priority two. And so, my job is to try to convince you to bring it up to maybe not two but certainly higher than seven.

Well, then you think of, “Okay, what’s the emotion that we’ll trigger?” So, let’s pick two examples. Well, one would be achievement, “Pete, this is one of the reasons I asked you in particular to kind of be involved in this project is because I know that this is going to get a lot of attention for the senior leadership team, which is a really important project.”

So, this was done very well. Again, it has to be true. This is genuine. If it’s disingenuous, then please don’t use the model. But if you go back to that, okay, so if that’s the case, and there’s a sense of achievement, doing a good job in this, and that includes time, but also high quality, a sense of achievement that it’ll be better for everyone, and so that could be an example.

Another one could be fear, the other way, “So, I’m a little bit worried, Pete, that we’re a little behind schedule. Being behind schedule right now is not a big deal, but if we were to end up being late, I think this could be a disaster for both of us. I saw one of our other colleagues late two months ago on a similar project, and they ended up getting…” fill in the blank, right, as whatever the repercussion would be.

So, that would be an example of fear or achievement. There’s a lot of them. Then the next might be demonstrating logic. So, there, what is the logic you could say? So, “One of the things that I’ve found is, because we’re currently meeting once every two weeks, by the time we actually get to the next meeting, we’re forgetting what we covered. So, I think rather than doing it once every two weeks, and this will take eight weeks to get these meetings, if we were to meet a couple times in one week, I actually think we could pump it out faster.”

“So, rather than our estimation of 20 hours total, we could probably do it in 10 or 15. Would you be open to considering something like that and we’re kind of done it faster for both our sakes?” So, something like that would be a logically compelling argument, that, “Hey, I’m going to save you time and more efficient and get this off your plate faster, so you can get to other priorities.”

And then, finally, facilitate action might be to provide them with options. So, providing with options could say, “So, two ideas that I have are, one, do you want me to do this piece and you do that piece? Or would you prefer the other way around, I focus on this priority, focus on that part? What would you prefer?”

And you, ideally, be offering a set of options, and you might be thrown a third, but you’re willing to accept any of them, so they’re all acceptable to you, but that way the person feels, and do in fact, have some control over the result because we surely know that when you come up with a collaborative solution, they’re more likely to become committed, rather than if I say, “Hey, Pete, here’s what I need you to do, and here’s when I need it done by. Please go and execute and come back here when you’re done.”

So, that would be a bit of a generic example but, hopefully, give you some sense of how those four phases would come into play.

Pete Mockaitis
I appreciate that, yes. Well, now could you maybe give us a couple of top do’s and don’ts within each of those domains? So, when it comes to building credibility, for example, what are some great things we can do versus not do? In your book, you’ve got a few sections, “The Influencer’s Toolbox.” I love toolboxes, so if there’s anything that’s leaping to mind that’s extra handy, lay it on us.

Andres Lares
Yes, so do’s and don’ts. So, I’d say for credibility, the do is…well, something else, some of the don’t is, “Do not skip this step, this is potentially the most important step.” If you think of kind of your life right now, and how much you get bombarded with messy, whether it’s emails at work or calls and spam calls, and all the stuff that’s going on, it’s easier to just ignore something than it is to deal with it.

So, credibility is the thing that stops you from ignoring it. It’s what cuts through and it helps to cut through the clutter, if you will. And so, I think I see this a lot in…we’ll take away a little bit from kind of the job piece, and I’ll go to sales for a second. This is a perfect example in sales. Often, I see a rush through to get to sale, and they skip the personal, the credibility-building, the trust-building, they get right to the sale.

And so, what happens is when you miss that first part that even allows you to get there, so people just don’t care, “You’re just selling me something, and I don’t want to be sold to. I want to be part of the buying process.” So, the credibility piece is the don’t is don’t skip it. It can be easy and oftentimes you wonder, “How important is this?” Well, it’s really important.

For emotion, as far as do’s and don’ts, so it’s got to be, I think, the don’t again would be it has to be genuine. And so, really, the emotion is about thinking about, “Okay, what is…?” So, here, for example, we’re doing fear and scarcity. I’ll give you an example of a don’t would be, although it can work, it’s sleazy and doesn’t work long term, that’s why you see at commercials late at night, “This deal is only good for the next 15 minutes. If you call now, you get three easy payments rather than four easy payments.” It’s that constant.

Now, the thing is, where most of us are far enough to know that once this commercial ends, this commercial will run again tomorrow night, and the next night, and the next night. It’s a fake exploding deadline. And so, I think there, when you think of fear, when you’re thinking of scarcity and those things, especially if they’re negative, it’s got to be genuine. In that example I gave, the consequence. It has to be a real consequence, that actually you saw someone faced because your credibility will be lost if it’s made up. And so, it’s a don’t again in emotion.

And then for logic, I think do tell stories. The best way to communicate evidence, logic, data. Oftentimes, when I’m doing this big chart and graph, and that is helpful, it’s important for visual learners but then take the extra step, tell a compelling story of how that potentially helped another client, or why you should get a raise, or whatever it is. But if you can tell a short and compelling story to communicate the same message as you could be sharing in another way, you will be more effective in the former.

And then, finally, facilitate action, I would say some do’s are consider providing options, for sure. And then, well, the one other thing is consider a safety net. So, safety net meaning, again, I’ll go to the crude late-night informercials because they use a lot of psychological warfare on all of us, but it’s the money-back guarantee.

And the constant of that is, “How many people actually buy that product and then send it back?” Very, very, very small number of people in almost all cases. But just the mere fact that if we purchase it and we’re not satisfied, we can then send it back. That makes us more comfortable to purchase it in the first place.

So, an example in business, certainly sometimes there can be a warranty of some sort. That’s an example of almost any product that’s sold in the B2B space or B2C space, but if you could remove some of the risks for another party, you’ll make it more likely that they move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, I also wanted to get your take on some body language pieces. Are there any really reliable cues or indicators that we can feel somewhat confident about when we notice, and what do they mean?

Andres Lares
So, what I’d like to do is slightly tweak that, if you’re okay with this, and say the thing that you can count on is to only make decisions when you’re getting a consistent message from the body language. So, that’s the only thing that’s reliable. What do I mean by that? I cross my arms like this while having a conversation. Technically, that is not the best sign, but on its own, it means nothing. It happens to be particularly cold in this room, and so that could be just literally a physical response that I’m being cold.

But, now let’s take me crossing my arms like this, turning a little bit away from you, so I’m actually facing another direction, and, potentially, say, I slow down my smiling and now start having facial expressions that are more neutral or potentially negative, then you can really start to read into that. That’s kind of a pattern at that point.

And so, what you want to see is consistency with the tone, what’s being said, and the body language. And if there are more than one, typically two or three that tend to lean negative, you want to change what you’re saying, change the environment, ask a different question, think of another approach, whatever it may be.

But I would say, so the do’s and don’ts, the do’s is look for consistency, look for multiple things that point in the same direction, negative or positive. Lots of smiling, open hands, leaning in would be the positive. Crossing arms, turning away, less smiling would be the negative ones but you want those to be consistent and multiple if you’re going to read anything into it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, in terms of a real-time adjustment we might make, what are some of the options there?

Andres Lares
So, two of the most common, one is kind of, “Oh, did I say something … Do you have any questions? Did I say something that maybe was off a little bit?” And so, in my opinion, lots of people recommend that. I think that can be something that is doable but that can take a lot of confidence. It’s almost like calling someone’s head on it, “Oh, no.” And there can be a little bit…but that is something that people do.

But generally, I would say is try to ask a question or try to change where your conversation is headed. So, I’ll give you an example, potentially, this would happen. Let’s say in an interview. Let’s say you’re in an interview for a job, and so you see that, someone has crossed their leg, turns away, and starts, all of a sudden, you see eyebrows changed a little bit. It’s a little more negative. Then, whatever you’re saying you might try to finish it kind of rather quickly.

And then, seeing that, “Pete, I’d love to tell you more about that, but I did have a couple questions for it, if you don’t mind. Is this a good place I can ask you some,” and then say, “Okay, tell me more about…” then fill in the blank of questions you have ready. “So, you were saying something,” or the opposite. If you’re asking a lot of questions and the person’s kind of doing those negative things together, they may be signaling to you the fact that, “You know what, you’re kind of done asking questions. Now it’s my turn. I want to get to know you, and it’s been too one way.”

So, essentially, what you’re reading is whatever you’re saying or doing in the moment, they’re not particularly appreciating, so any pivot from that, and then see how the body languages react. After a minute or two, are you still seeing that negative body language? One other thing I would say, and this gets into NLP and things that are a little bit less science-based or that are a little bit more controversial. But there definitely is growing evidence that you can do something that is called mirroring, which should be to try to also move towards the body language that is more positive and they’ll kind of follow you.

So, for example, if I noticed that you’re tilted a little bit this way, and you’re kind of leaning back a little bit, I would first mirror. So, I would tilt a little bit the same way, I would try to speak at the same pace as you are, so whether it’s a lot faster and then really, really fast, or slower. And then what I would do is, over time, over the next few minutes, I would start to kind of tilt my head this way, I would start to lean in, I would start to open my body language.

And so, what you can do is you can also shift that way. So, not only what you’re saying and the tone of your delivery, but if you actually mirror their body language that’s potentially negative, in particular in this case, and then start to move towards more positive body language, they should follow you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal. Thank you.
Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Andres Lares
I think a few that come to mind. So, one I particularly like that one of our facilitators often says is, “Much is lost for the want of asking.” So, to remind us that if you don’t ask for it, you can’t get it. You don’t always get what you ask for, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get it.

I think there’s another one which is often attributed to Epictetus. I’m not sure if, necessarily, it was in fact him or not, but it’s, “God gave us two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak.” I think that is a good reminder, and just kind of the value of listening, asking questions and listening. So, I like those.

And there’s one more. Harry Truman, I believe is credited with this, but it’s, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that really counts.” And I think that one is brilliant. So, those are three that come to mind. You asked for one, I gave you three. I hope that’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Andres Lares
So, I would hate to kind of duplicate but I’d probably go back to the copier study, the jellybeans study, some of these. Those were the originals and they were done the first time, and I find it particularly interesting that was done 20, 30, 40 years ago, in some of these cases, and so much has changed in the world but they continue to be…when they’re redone and adjusted, they continue to have the same results. So, all those, kind of reminding us of human nature and how if often doesn’t change.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?

Andres Lares
I would probably go back to Thinking, Fast and Slow. I think from, certainly from a nonfiction perspective, that would be my number one. It’s a big read, but really an incredible one.

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

Andres Lares
For the personal side, I’ve got family all over the world, and friends all over the world, so I cannot live without WhatsApp. From a professional side, any good calendar app. Currently, it’s Google Calendar, but that is another one that I can’t live without.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Andres Lares
It would probably be playing hockey. So, I play hockey every Monday night, been doing it for years. Awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a key nugget you share with folks that really resonates with them; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Andres Lares
So, yeah, I would say one, and this is more on the negotiation side and the influencing side, but it’s, “Negotiation is a process and not an event.”

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

Andres Lares
So, we’re not as active as we should be on social but we do have a bunch, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the usuals. But I would say probably the website, ShapiroNegotiations.com, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions. We’ve got a blog that’s weekly that goes out there, too, that deals with job-related issues plus things you might do, buying a house, buying a car, lots of B2B stuff as well. That’s our focus, so feel free 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?

Andres Lares
For me, it’d be having a process. I think one of the things that I’ve appreciated in this journey that I think when we go out and train and coach folks, we often will learn as much as they do just from the way people do and kind of the best practices. But I would say the concept of having a process for persuading others, for often negotiation, communicating, has really kind of increased my performance.

And I would say it’s something that I’m so excited about. And so, I would challenge others to, when it’s say to say, “I don’t have the time,” or, “I’m just going to wing it,” to prepare and follow a process to do it, and you will definitely be more successful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. This has been fun. I wish you much luck in all of your persuasions and negotiations.

Andres Lares
Well, thank you for having me. I hope it’s helpful to folks as they do a great job at their jobs, and, hopefully, this is helpful there.

Jan 09

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

By Marco Bartolome | Podcasts | One Comment

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

You’ll Learn:

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

About Casey

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

Email: casey@boldtype.us
LinkedIn: Casey Mank
Website: BoldType.us

Resources Mentioned

Tool: WebFx.com
Tool: Hemingway
Tool: Difficult & Extraneous Word Finder
Tool: Grammarly
Study: “How Little Do Users Read?” by Jakob Nielsen
Study: “The Impact of Tone of Voice on Users’ Brand Perception” by Kate Morgan
Website: PlainLanguage.gov
Book: “Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works (Interactive Technologies)” by Janice Redish
Book: “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Book: “Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less” by Joe McCormack
Book: “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk, Jr., E.B. White, Test Editor, and Roger Angell

Casey Mank Interview Transcript

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

Casey Mank
Hi, thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Casey Mank
That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
I did. Guilty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the tone?

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

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

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

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

Casey Mank
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Casey Mank
Absolutely, yeah.

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds worth doing.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nov 10

816: How Anyone Can Build Powerful Executive Presence with Harrison Monarth

By Marco Bartolome | Podcasts | No Comments

Harrison Monarth shares simple but effective approaches to get others to perceive you as a leader.

You’ll Learn:

Why it’s easier to build executive presence than you think
The easiest way to improve people’s perception of you
How to still contribute when you don’t have answers

About Harrison

Harrison Monarth is one of today’s most sought-after leadership development-and executive coaches, helping CEOs, senior executives, managers, and high-potential employees develop critical leadership skills and increase their interpersonal effectiveness and ability to influence others. He has personally coached leaders from major organizations in financial services, technology, medical, legal, hospitality and consumer industries, as well as those in start-ups, nonprofits and politics.

Harrison’s client list covers organizations such as General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, MetLife, AT&T, Northrop Grumman, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Deloitte Consulting, Cisco Systems, GE and Standard & Poor’s among others, as well as start-up entrepreneurs, political candidates and Members of Congress.

Book: Executive Presence, Second Edition: The Art of Commanding Respect Like a CEO
LinkedIn: Harrison Monarth
Website: GuruMaker.com

Resources Mentioned

Study: “A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way: Explaining Why Gratitude Expressions Motivate Prosocial Behavior” by Adam M. Grant and Francesca Gino
Book: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Harrison Monarth Interview Transcript

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

Harrison Monarth
Hi, there. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom about executive presence and more. And I’ve got to hear the story about you proposing marriage on your first date.

Harrison Monarth
Yes, so I had seen my wife over the course of a couple of years. She worked in the same neighborhood where I worked. At the time, I lived in Denver, Colorado, and had seen her from afar, admired her from afar, she was very beautiful, and didn’t know her but circumstances led us to get to know each other through a mutual friend.

And since I had already been in love with her for a couple of years, at our first date, we had a wonderful first date that dragged into the evening, seeing a movie. And it was after the movie that we went back to our café, and after some more conversation and other shenanigans, I proposed, she accepted, and eight months later, we got married.

And, by the way, it’s been almost 20 years, so that was 19 years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. Congratulations. Well, we keep the show G-rated but I’m curious what shenanigans we’re referring to that lead to both of you feeling, like, “Yup, feel pretty certain this is going to be just fine”?

Harrison Monarth
I think it’s a bit of a cliché when you say you just know and you click with someone, and everything just really connects in all levels. And, yeah, it was that for us, so it’s just a feeling of knowing. Yeah, we’ve been inseparable since.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s awesome. Congratulations.

Harrison Monarth
There’s no secret to it, actually. It’s just I think we’re lucky, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I think that here’s where I make a forced segue, I think that a lot feels the same way about executive presence, Harrison, in that it feels like, “Hey, some people have it. They’re lucky. They got it. And some people don’t.” But I’d love to hear your perspective on this. Your book Executive Presence, Second Edition: The Art of Commanding Respect Like a CEO shares some learnable behaviors that anyone can take on.

Maybe, can you kick us off with a particularly surprising or counterintuitive or extra fascinating discovery you’ve made about executive presence from your years of research and work in the field?

Harrison Monarth
Now you said something interesting. I think you said you either have it or you don’t, or people have maybe the perception, “You have it or you don’t.” And I think that is one of those misperceptions about executive presence. It’s often how we describe a nebulous quality-like charisma, somebody has it or they don’t.

Executive presence, I found in my research over the last 20 plus years, and probably unconsciously over many years before that, is a set of behaviors, traits, qualities, characteristics that we can identify and where we can understand that we all have a profile of certain behaviors that serve us, that help us, and others that perhaps get in the way of having an executive presence and having that positive influence.

And so, for me, the big aha was the understanding that, you know what, all these qualities, these behaviors, you don’t have to have all of them, but you need to know where you are on that scale and what you have and what you don’t have, so you have to start somewhere. And then you can create a plan and decide based on your circumstances, based on the company in which you work, the people you work with, the system you’re in, what’s important to develop and what you need to maybe continue doing and what you need to intensify or magnify.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, a collection of behaviors. Harrison, could you perhaps segment the lofty concept of executive presence into a manageable set of categories we can get our arms around?

Harrison Monarth
Sure. So, if I were to break it down, and, again, this is the world according to me. This is by no means an exact science, obviously. But executive presence is a combination of communication, behaviors, communication skills such as managing difficult conversations, about engaging others, being the kind of communicator that can easily engage other people.

Telling strategic stories in business and to explain complex topics and subject matter. Being inspiring and persuading. Helping people understand something and come to a decision. So, these are all, say, behaviors under communication. Political savvy is important. Do you have the ability to create alliances to manage up, to generate buy-in and support from people?

Courage. Competence. To me, you have to have competence in something. You have to be able to communicate both develop a level of expertise and intellect, and develop sort of a persona that lets other people know that you can be counted on, that you’re a person of substance and competence in order to be seen as having that presence.

Delivering results is an important part as well under the category of competence. You can’t deliver results if you can’t contribute value to an organization, to a group, to a team. We’re not necessarily seen as having an executive presence, or we will have an executive presence that’s shallow, like a politician, let’s say in cases.

Acting decisively is part of it. Having courage. Being calm under pressure. Those are all some. I’m not going to rattle off the whole, let’s say, 27 or 30, but those are some that I think are very important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a whole boatload of things. I’m curious, if that feels overwhelming for folks, could you give us some hope, some inspiration with a story of someone who was kind of low on this collection of behaviors, but then did some things to make a huge upgrade to executive presence and see good results?

Harrison Monarth
Yes, I can. I had a client not too long ago who was at a management level in a company, and networking was something that she found distasteful. She didn’t like it. It was uncomfortable for her, and just generally reaching out to strangers. Considers herself an introvert and, generally, just uncomfortable with engaging people that she had no business reason to engage.

And so, what I helped her with, a couple things, number one is changing her mindset to basically say, “Look, what can I contribute to the person, to the company, to the organization that would be of value?” So, this one important shift in terms of how to even get out of your shell or think about yourself not by way of grabbing or self-promoting, but to actually contribute value.

The other part was what I talked about, helping her create a stakeholder map. So, creating a visual representation of where people are in the company and who has influence, who is someone that could help you get things done, who is somebody that can help you do better at your job, hit the ground running if you’re new in the job, and, basically, contribute value more quickly.

Once you have those people, once you have a map like this, once you have a good overview of who’s who in the organization, then you obviously need to engage and have substantive, hopefully interesting, conversations. And I think this is where a lot of people have shied away. They are worried that they have nothing in common with the person, that they are at too low a level, let’s say, they’re relatively new in their career, new at the company, “What would that person want to talk about with me?”

And so, what I asked her to do in this case is I asked her what she would be genuinely curious about if she were stuck in an elevator with that person for two hours, “What would you talk about? What would you ask that person that you’re genuinely curious about?” And so, it kind of broke it down for her, and she really thought genuinely about, “Okay, I would want to know this. I would want to know what is the person thinking about our division, or my job, my role, how we could most contribute value, what challenges that they have in a similar role or at a different part of the company.”

There were so many questions that she herself generated after a while, and then she felt very confident all of a sudden to there was no status differential, all of a sudden. It was just, “How can I connect with that leader in a way that I show that I’m genuinely interested in them but so I can learn from them as well?” So, that’s one of the ways I helped, and it made a huge difference for her because, obviously, she uses that now to engage with others that she really has no business reason to connect with.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. So, I’m curious, if we’re going to put forth some effort into developing executive presence, what might you suggest as some top high-leverage starting points in that they need development for a lot of people, and it’s relatively easy to do something about it, in terms of, “Well, just videotape yourself a couple of times, and you’ll stop doing that, bada bing”? Are there any kinds of domains and practices that have a really strong bang for the buck there?

Harrison Monarth
Yes. I’m looking at this as building it from the ground up, because, first of all, again, we’re all a mixed bag. We’re strong in some areas, we’re not so strong in other areas. And so, my recommendation is always to get feedback, first of all. And I ask people two questions. Number one, and to use these questions with others that know them, that can actually make comments, “What do you appreciate about me? How do you perceive me?” number one.

And the second question is, “What would make me even stronger?” And the first question is somewhat open, it’s “How am I perceived? How do you perceive me?” People will generally, because it’s not anonymous, they’re telling you face to face, generally speaking, they’re going to tell you a lot of nice things about you, the things they actually like about you, that they appreciate about you, that make you strong, which is great, but you also need to know what could potentially hold you back.

So, I coach them and ask them the second question in a very specific way, and not, “What are my blind spots?” not “What am I not doing well?” or, “What could I be doing better?” All of these things put the other person in sort of a negative mind space. It puts them into criticizing mode, and nobody wants to criticize you face to face.

And so, what people do like to do, rather than give negative feedback, is they like to give advice, and that’s why I would like to give keep second question, I tell them keep it very positive. Instead of saying, “What are my blind spots? Or, what am I not doing well?” first, I’d tell them, “Thank them for all the nice things they just said about you, because they probably did.” And then you say, “Now, what would make me even stronger?

And the word even is so important because the premise here is that, “Well, you just told me a lot of nice things that I’m strong in these areas. Now, what would make me even stronger?” That will then allow the other person to keep it very positive to actually give you advice. So, for instance, if somebody thinks you’re a micromanager, or that you’re too controlling, had you asked, “What am I not doing well?” chances are they probably wouldn’t have told you the truth, or they might’ve sugarcoated it so much that it would’ve been too vague.

And so, if they do feel though that you’re a little bit of a micromanager, simply by asking the question, “Now, what would make me even stronger?” they could say to you, “Well, if you give people a little bit more autonomy at work, how they arrange their projects, how they set up their time in order to get the results you need and get the work done, that might make them more engaged, and that might increase their productivity, so give them a little more autonomy.” They just told you the exact same thing, and gave you advice rather than criticize you for being a micromanager.

So, I think you start there. You get feedback first. And you said, “Well, what are some quick bang for the buck, basically?” I would say something that anyone can do. So, this will give you an idea of what you need to work on. But I always tell people, whether you’re an introvert, whether you’re shy, whether you’re generally more quiet, these people are typically thinkers, contributing your perspective, your ideas in a meeting is probably the number one thing that could move you up in people’s minds as somebody who’s contributing value and somebody who’s engaged and wants to contribute to solutions and challenges and help solve challenges.

Speaking up, that’s something anyone can do, once we get over the discomfort of doing so, but it’s something that can give you influence almost instantly. And too often, people are just hanging back.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m having flashbacks, Harrison, to in high school and college, my Model United Nations days, going to conferences, pretending to represent different countries. And there was a guy, shout out to Robbie Clayber, if he ever listens to the show, who I just got a chapter started in my high school, and he won a lot of awards for being an outstanding representative.

And it’s like, “So, what’s the trick?” He’s like, “Honestly, just keep going up to the microphone and talking.” I was like, “But what if you don’t have anything smart or insightful or worthwhile to say?” And he said, “It doesn’t even matter. Just the more you get up and say stuff at the microphone,” that’s how he won all these best delegate awards.

And I thought that seemed off, but then in my experiences, as I was watching it happen, too, yes, the exact same pattern played out. Now, life is not exactly, or business careers are not exactly a Model United Nations conference for a high school or college student, but I think some of the same principles apply in that just talk more, and, hopefully, it’s value-added so you’re not just wasting everybody’s time.

But, Harrison, if anyone has concerns that, “Oh, I don’t know if what I have to say is that insightful or worthwhile in speaking up,” do you have any pro tips on either overcoming that resistance, or a quick way you can do an internal safety check, like, “Yup, that is a worthwhile contribution” versus, “No, folks will probably roll their eyes internally and wish I would shut up?”

Harrison Monarth
By the way, there are studies, there are a number of studies from the Haas School of Business, for instance, that showed that in small and medium-sized groups, speaking up and contributing your perspective makes other people see you as having leadership, potential leadership qualities, they see you as influential, and then other studies confirm that as well, and even see you as more competent, by the way, even if you don’t always get the answers right. They just see you as more competent to lead because you’re seen as hardworking, as contributing, again, to solutions, as one that could make a difference to the team. So, there are some great qualities.

But, to your point, “So, what if I feel like I just don’t have anything to add?” So, I’m going to give you the light version, and then I’m going to give you the power version. The light version is, think about, “Why are you there? What’s the point of you even being in this meeting?” And, hopefully, you’ve thought about this beforehand.

And if you haven’t, then maybe you learn a lesson that next time you do think about “Why am I there? What questions do I want to ask? What do I need to find out? What’s the objective? What are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to solve a problem? Are we trying to brainstorm? Are we trying to come to a decision or discuss, get to a consensus?”

There is obviously some sort of objective. And if there isn’t one, or if you don’t know what the objective is, ask other people, “What are we trying to do here?” and then think about why you, why are you there, and then, hopefully, you can connect the dots there. But generally, I say prepare for these meetings even if you feel, maybe you’re new, and you don’t have anything super relevant to add. Well, you could probably ask some good questions. So, think about what those questions are.

And then you might actually be the person, those meetings often go off the rails, people start rambling, they go all over the place, they go down rabbit holes and start talking about things that really had nothing to do with the meeting objective. So, you could be the person that brings everybody back on track, and say, “Hey, weren’t we trying to decide between A and B? We’re really just going way off of that, so here’s what I would like to add to that discussion.”

And so, there are lots of different things if you prepare, ask questions, and make points, and point out maybe some things that others hadn’t thought about. But then the power version, I want to tell you a quick anecdote. So, I’ve done a lot of work for PepsiCo, and worked with some senior leaders on Indra Nooyi’s leadership team.

And an anecdote that I thought was just incredibly inspiring from her was when Indra Nooyi was a consultant for Boston Consulting in the 1980s, from there she was hired to become the head of strategy for Motorola’s automotive electronics division. And in one of her first executive-level staff meetings, she said she was completely out of her depth.

So, they were talking about two things that she didn’t really have much of a clue about: cars and electronics. And so, she said that based on her skill and experience as a consultant, she could’ve asked smart questions and created a framework of understanding for herself and survived, but that she really wanted to make a difference as soon as possible, make a contribution, have an impact on the business.

And so, what she did, in order to be able to contribute, she hired two professors as tutors for herself, on her own. So, she hired an electronics professor who would teach her about electronics from a thick electronics textbook, and then an automotive technology professor, somebody from the automotive technology college, to teach her about the inner workings of a car. And she would do that for an entire year.

So, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, she would have two hours of electronics tutoring from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m., and then the rest of the week, Thursday, Friday, somebody from the automotive college would stop by and help her, for an entire year. And she said it was extremely hard, but think about it, the impact that had on the others around her and her understanding of subject matter and of being able to connect the dots, to me, that’s another level of wanting to make an impact and wanting to contribute value that that’s up to us.

We have to think about where, “What time can I carve out? Where am I willing to make some sacrifices, of tradeoffs to develop my understanding of things, my expertise?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. And I’ve heard it said here a couple times that if you read the top five relevant books to your field, you’ll be more knowledgeable than 90 plus percent of the people in that domain. And I think that varies by domain, but I think that’s often rather true, that it may not take ten hours of one-on-one professor-tutorial a week for 15 plus weeks to pull it off. It might take 16 hours of reading over a couple of months, and, bam, there you are having some knowledgeable perspective.

Harrison Monarth
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think and then you decide how much further you want to go. And you’ll see, “Do you have an impact? Are you making a difference?” And I agree with you that you don’t have to necessarily have the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about becoming an expert at something, or a master at something. I think small steps, like you said, reading a couple of books on the topic, reading insights and papers and articles can make a huge difference already.

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

Harrison Monarth
No, I would say the idea of getting feedback, understanding, having developing your internal self-awareness, external self-awareness, how you show up to the world, and then deciding, “What do I need to work on?” is a great foundation to, then, increase your executive presence.

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

Harrison Monarth
There’s a quote by George Bernard Shaw who said that, “Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely.

Harrison Monarth
And I think that’s powerful because it puts the control in your hands.

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

Harrison Monarth
Francesca Gino, a few years ago, led a study with Adam Grant on gratitude, the power of gratitude. And they found that, aside from Gallup also found that showing gratitude, managers showing gratitude to employees can boost productivity by 5% to 10%, people feeling appreciated by their managers, being more engaged at work, and being happier at work. So, I love that study because it just reinforces something that we all intuitively know, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite book?

Harrison Monarth
As a matter of fact, right in front of me, it’s called Daily Rituals. Daily Rituals by.. oh, Mason Currey. And it just talks about rituals that famous artists, composers, painters, writers, have had, and it’s full of failures.

So, the book is full of how these people tried to get out of work, tried to avoid work, procrastinated, but then found themselves still producing masterpieces and great works. And I think it just sort of humanizes them, and it makes you feel less like a loser if you don’t feel like getting off the couch for a full day.

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

Harrison Monarth
For me, a favorite tool is reframing, so reframing things. I think the power of reframing, looking at things from different perspectives, first, it makes you calmer. Taking different viewpoints on something because there’s so much that stresses us out, but if we’re able to put things in proper perspective, reframe them in not just one different way or look at one different perspective, but look at it from many different perspectives, it makes you calmer and it actually helps you find solutions. It opens your mind to other approaches.

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

Harrison Monarth
A key nugget. Well, actually, to be honest with you, it’s connected to that, it is this looking at things in a different way. And one thing that people often either cite or remind me of that I’ve talked about at a workshop or in a coaching session is this idea of rather than thinking of yourself, think about others and how you can contribute value to others will make a lot of things easier from speaking up to networking, to increasing visibility, to getting involved with people and things. That just the idea of looking at it from the perspective of “I’d like to make a contribution. I’d like to contribute value” has a huge impact on our willingness, our motivation, to actually go out and do it.

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

Harrison Monarth
LinkedIn is a great way. I’m on LinkedIn. Certainly, we have our website, GuruMaker.com, but LinkedIn, I post on LinkedIn not as often as I’d like but, yeah, messaging on LinkedIn and just connecting that way and staying in touch that way is great.

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

Harrison Monarth
Yes. I would say a challenge would be, and this is often I give challenge in the workshop, I would say pick six people that know you, have worked with you maybe, or working with you, ask them the two questions, “How am I perceived?” Wait for the nice answers and maybe they’ll tell you something interesting. And then the second question, “Now, what would make me even stronger?” and listen, wait for the answers, be grateful for the answers. Probe if you want to have clarity, and then you have something that you can work on, potentially, to make you even more effective and even stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Harrison, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much fun and success and executive presence.

Harrison Monarth
Thank you very much. Pleasure talking to you.

Oct 13

808: How to Become a Great Listener with Oscar Trimboli

By Marco Bartolome | Podcasts | One Comment

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

You’ll Learn:

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

About Oscar

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

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Book: The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Neil Ferguson

Oscar Trimboli Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Bug catcher.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
It is? Vertically speaking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Impossible, Oscar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Take, take, take.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
What kind of movie would it be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar Trimboli
Yeah.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar Trimboli
Thanks for listening.

Sep 26

803: How to Write Like the Greatest Masters of Persuasion with Carmine Gallo

By Ida del Mundo | Podcasts | One Comment

Carmine Gallo uncovers the communication secrets of masters like Jeff Bezos that help you write more clearly and concisely.

You’ll Learn:

The basic grammar lesson that makes all the difference
The easiest way to simplify complexity
How a single sentence makes your data more impactful

About Carmine

Carmine Gallo is a Harvard instructor and program leader in executive education at the prestigious Harvard Graduate School of Design. A “communications guru,” according to Publishers Weekly, Carmine coaches CEOs and leaders for the world’s most admired brands.

Carmine’s bestselling books, including Talk Like TED, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, and The Bezos Blueprint, have been translated into more than 40 languages.

His latest, The Bezos Blueprint reveals the communication strategies that fueled Amazon’s success and that help people build their careers.

Carmine is one of the most influential voices in communication, business, and leadership and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Success Magazine and on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and ABC’s 20/20. He has built a global reputation for transforming leaders into powerful storytellers and communicators.

Resources Mentioned

Study: “Bad is Stronger than Good” by Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer, Kathleen D. Vohs
Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Book: Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Past episode: 771: How to Own Your Career and Build Your Dream Job with Ann Hiatt

Carmine Gallo Interview Transcript

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

Carmine Gallo
Thanks, Pete. Nice to see you again and thank you for inviting me back. Now, did I read or hear that you have now recorded over 800 episodes?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Carmine Gallo
That couldn’t be right. I thought that was a typo. I thought somebody had said maybe 80 and had accidentally added a zero.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, 800. It adds up.

Carmine Gallo
Congratulations.

Pete Mockaitis
We had three a week then two a week for six plus years. Mathematically, that’ll get you there.

Carmine Gallo
Congratulations. That’s excellent.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Carmine Gallo
Good to hear.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, I’m stoked to talk about your latest The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman. And what I’m intrigued, Carmine, hey, we love lifelong learning here at How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Carmine Gallo
I know you do.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve written some books and you’re an expert at communication but my understanding is you went back to writing class prior to writing this book despite having written other books already. What’s the story here?

Carmine Gallo
I’ve written books on how to deliver better presentations, like Talk Like TED, which was a book about how to deliver TED-style presentations, one of my earlier books was The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. A lot of what I’ve written is on communication with a lens on presenting. So, this was the first time that I took a deep dive into the art of writing because Amazon, one of the big things I learned, is that Amazon and Jeff Bezos have created a real writing culture. In order to advance at Amazon as a professional in your career, you have to be a good writer.

Well, in order for me to write about the art of writing, I’d better learn a little bit more about this frustrating art that just scares so many people, and it scares me when I’m looking at an empty page in trying to start a book, and I know it scares a lot of other people. So, I did kind of go back to class. I not only took writing classes again, I’ve been working on this for about three years, but I also interviewed a lot of experts and professionals who have written some of the best writing books so that I can just not write a writing book but distill the essence of what you need to know to be a better writer and a better communicator.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you. And so, I’m curious, if some of us want to sharpen those skills, any particular books, courses, resources, that were really awesome for you?

Carmine Gallo
Believe it or not, there is a YouTube sensation, her name is Gill, “English with Gill.” And Gill is a British grandmother who has like a million subscribers on YouTube, which is just unbelievable to me, and she teaches English as a second language but she takes a deep dive into why some words are more powerful than others or why some writing is more effective than others. So, if you just look at Gill, Gill teaches English on YouTube, you’ll be able to find her.

So, I went back to school and I talked to her and I’ve talked to other language and English experts, and it’s interesting because they do tend to come back to the same strategies, and they’re strategies that we’ve all heard before and maybe it brings back some bad memories of English grammar class, but they’re very effective when it comes to writing and communicating in the workplace.

And one of those in particular, if you don’t mind, I’ll dive right into something actionable that people can take away, and that is the focusing on the active voice versus passive. Almost every single – even Stephen King – every single great communication writer, everyone who writes about communication, always goes back to this idea of writing in the active voice, and it makes sense from a business perspective as well.

So, just to remind people, subject-verb-object is the active voice. “The girl kicked the ball,” that’s active where the subject performs the action, not “The ball was kicked by the girl.” So, now, if you look at…start looking at headlines. Look at, like, newspaper headlines in print where they only have a certain amount of space, it’s all active voice.

“Last week, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.” The subject is the Fed, and what did they do? They raised interest rates. That is so much more simple, understandable, concise than saying, “Interest rates went up today because of action taken by the Fed in yesterday’s meeting.” There’s not enough space for that.

So, if you just think about writing more in the active voice than in the passive, your writing will improve substantially in emails, in memos. And when I reviewed 24 years of Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters, which are apparently, among business professionals’ models of clarity, 94% of the writing and the sentences fell into the active voice. Out of 50,000 words, 94% are active, “Amazon achieves record revenue,” “AWS does this.” So, if you just stick to the active voice, it’ll make writing a lot easier, and your reader will find it more understandable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I totally agree that active voice is strong. And I recall an assignment I had in high school in which we – I always use the passive voice right there – we were forbidden, our teacher, Judy Feddemeier, forbade us, not we were forbidden, there is a subject. Judy Feddemeier forbade us to use any form of to be verb. No is, are, was, were.Just none. It was hard. It stretched your brain. It’s not like, “The glass was on the table”; “The glass sat on the table.”

Carmine Gallo
But, Pete, we forget these things because I remember that as well from the classes that I took. But we forget that these are basic writing strategies and tools that will make us far more persuasive as communicators in the workplace. Imagine if your emails stuck to a more active type of sentence, everything would be so much more clear and understandable, and people appreciate it when you get to the point.

I was just thinking of some examples the other day when it comes to emails. I would rather see an email with a subject line, if I’m an employee, that says, “New hybrid work policy requires three days in the office.” In one sentence, I get it. I may not even have to read the rest of the email or I can file it away for later. I know that the subject of this email is the new hybrid work policy and what does it require.

So, at Amazon, they call it BLOT, which is bottom line on top, which they sort of copied from the US military. The US military has a writing code called BLUF, bottom line up front. The point is, and I think this applies to every business professional listening, is that if you want to come across as more understandable and concise and clear when you’re writing emails especially, start with the bottom line.

Give me the big picture, like you always ask. Give me the big idea, you ask guests all the time. Give me the big idea. Give me the big picture up front and then fill in the details. That’s called bottom line on top at Amazon. Again, they’re teaching people how to be more effective communicators through the written word.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it’s funny, as I think about the copy I see on Amazon pages, copy meaning the words for sales, they’re excellent and it really stands out when you’ve got some sketchy overseas supplier of a thing and their English isn’t on point, like it stands out even more against the backdrop of other Amazon writing, and it’s tricky.

And, for me, it’s like, “Well, if I can’t trust your writing to be good, and you’re highly financially motivated to have the writing on your sales page be as excellent as possible, I don’t know how much I can trust that you’ve gone through other quality control steps in producing your product.”

Carmine Gallo
Good point.

Pete Mockaitis
But, then, I think, “Well, Pete, maybe it’s just not fair. Like, English is not their first language but maybe engineering is, and so it’s just fine.” But it does, emotionally, make me a little skeptical, like, “I don’t know if I can trust this product if their English is askew here.”

Carmine Gallo
Pete, you brought up a good point, and this is not necessarily something I was going to mention but it really was a catalyst for the book. I wrote an article about three years ago for Forbes, which is one of the platforms I write for, and it had to do with Jeff Bezos banning PowerPoint, and that turned out to be a very popular article, and now a lot of people, some of your listeners may already know or have heard that, that he banned PowerPoint within Amazon.

He replaced PowerPoint with the written word. In other words, when he has a meeting, now he’s no longer at Amazon, but let’s say he’s at Blue Origin, his space company, when he has a meeting, he doesn’t want people to come in with a PowerPoint because he says, “PowerPoint doesn’t really teach me anything. It doesn’t tell me that you’ve really thought through this idea. Anyone can throw bullet points on a slide. I want to see full-written narratives that have sentences with nouns and verbs and subjects and paragraphs.”

And when I talked to a few people, one person in particular who had to tell the team that they no longer can use PowerPoint in the next meeting, and he said a lot of the engineers came back to him and they were very frustrated and upset, they said, “Well, I’m an engineer, that’s what we know is PowerPoint, and now you expect me to be a writer?” And Jeff Bezos said, “Yes, I expect you to be a writer. And if you want to succeed in this company, don’t pitch me with PowerPoint, pitch me with the written word,” a writing narrative is what he called it.

So, again, it kind of comes back to this idea, Pete, that people are not necessarily going to tell you that your writing needs improvement – I don’t think a lot of people will say that – but it makes an impression, and it leaves an impression. Every time you send an email or write a memo, anything in the written word, if it’s not clear and concise and understandable and gets to the point quickly and is easy to read, it leaves an impression, and it’s not always a positive impression.

Pete Mockaitis
It absolutely does. Well, it’s funny, and I come from a strategy consulting background so PowerPoint really is like our means of expressing ourselves. And I think it’s true that it’s easier to…well, I guess both artforms or communication media can be done well and they can be done poorly, but I think it’s more glaringly obvious to people if the written words alone are bad than the PowerPoint is bad because I think a lot of people don’t even know what a good PowerPoint looks like in terms of, “I have an action headline that says what the slide says.”

Instead of saying, “Sales over time,” it says, “Sales have declined dramatically since we introduced this product.” It’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s the point. And then I see a picture of data which shows me that point,” as opposed to, “Here’s a bunch of data pictures. Yup, that’s my business update.” It’s easier to maybe, I don’t know, stay by there.

Carmine Gallo
I would also argue that everything starts with the written word even when you’re creating a PowerPoint slide. I write my texts into the note section of PowerPoint and then I practice it, and I reduce it, and I cut it down, but almost everything is going to start from the written word somewhere. So, if you can be a stronger writer, it’s going to dramatically improve everything you do when it comes to communication.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Carmine Gallo
But writing is hard. Writing is hard. I’ve written ten books, and you’re staring at these blank pages, I know it’s tough, I know it’s hard, and I think people are intimidated by it as well. That’s why I try to make it understandable and, at least, approachable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you did mention that I do ask for the big idea. So, lay it on us, what is the big idea for The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman?

Carmine Gallo
Well, Jeff Bezos turned an idea that most people said could not be done. People forget that. But in 1994, most people said, “What’s the internet? Oh, and you’re not going to be able to sell books on it.” So, he turned this bold idea into one of the world’s most influential companies. And we could argue, I can make the point that it touches your life each and every day.

So, the big idea, Pete, is that the communication and leadership strategies that Bezos pioneered at Amazon to turn that vision into a reality is something that any one of our listeners can adopt today in their career to move from where they are today to that next level or that next step in their career, the step that they imagine themselves to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you, that’s clearly stated, and it’s like you’ve been practicing, Carmine.

Carmine Gallo
You know where that came from, Pete? I’ll be honest with you. I’ll tell you exactly where that came from. I like to read The New York Times’ book reviews, and when they talk to an author, there’s a great exercise. This is a fantastic exercise. They want that author to be able to identify the book’s big idea, like you say, in 50 words or less, and that’s one of their first questions, “Tell us about this book in 50 words or less.” So, they place a limit on it.

And I have found that what a great exercise that people can do even in a professional setting. Before you walk into your CEO’s office to talk about this idea, before you send out that next email, can you express your idea in 50 words or less? That’s hard to do so you have to think through this. What is the most important element of that idea that you need to get across?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun. Arbitrary limits and constraints certainly can help with clarity and concision.

Carmine Gallo
Hey, with TED Talks, 18 minutes. That’s an arbitrary limit. 18 minutes. When I wrote my book Talk Like TED, the most common question I get is, “Well, how can anyone say everything they know in 18 minutes?” And the answer is exactly what the TED conference organizers tell people, “You don’t. You can’t. You have to select.” So, good communication is an act of selecting your best ideas and not compressing everything you know in a short amount of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely agree there. Well, so we’re going to talk a lot about great things that Jeff Bezos did in terms of strategy, tactics, principles, processes, practices that cascaded on through the organization. But just in case we got some Jeff Bezos haters amongst the listeners, I’ve got Marshall Goldsmith in my ear right now. I’m thinking everyone who’s successful, they succeed because of something, and they succeed in spite of some things.

So, I’m just curious, before we jump to conclusion that everything Jeff Bezos said or did was brilliantly perfect, are there any things that we should watch out for and not be so keen to model?

Carmine Gallo
That is a good question. When I decided to focus on Bezos, it wasn’t so much everything he did, every perspective from a management perspective, it wasn’t that at all. It was actually something that Walter Isaacson had said a few years ago. And Walter Isaacson, the great biographer, was asked, “Who of today’s contemporary leaders would you put in the same category as some of the people who you’ve profiled, whether it’s Ada Lovelace or Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs?”

And without hesitation, he said, “Well, Jeff Bezos. He’s like the visionary of all time.” And it’s interesting, when you ask people, if you ask ten people about their opinion on Jeff Bezos, you will get ten very different reactions. Some people are very critical, some people want to learn more about him, some people are fascinated by him, but you get ten very different reactions.

When you speak to people who works side by side with Jeff Bezos, I believe you had somebody on your show, Ann Hiatt. When you talk to people who actually worked side by side with Bezos, they all say exactly the same thing, they use almost the same words, which is demanding, yes.

but also someone who raised the bar on excellence. So, he had a commitment to excellence, demanding excellence. And almost every single person I spoke to ended with the same thing, “I never would’ve traded it for the world.” And those people took what they learned from Bezos and started their own companies using many of those methods, especially when it comes to communication, that they took away from Bezos and Amazon. That’s what I’m focused on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Carmine. So, lay it on us, what are some of the most killer practices that we should adopt or abandon when it comes to our communication? And I’d say, ideally, I’d love things that are surprising, lesser known, counterintuitive, and generate a huge return on our investment in terms of, with a little bit of effort, we have huge impact. So, no pressure, Carmine, but give me your greatest hits, succinctly.

Carmine Gallo
Yeah. The first part, and we’ve already touched on it, so I won’t go further into depth, but that’s the writing. Because Amazon is a writing culture, go back to class, understand that the written word is foundational to your success and to your career’s success. Communication itself is foundational, and that’s a big lesson that we learned from Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos, when he first started Amazon, before he had hired one employee, put out a job posting ad, and it was for a coder. He needed a software coder, which would make sense, he’s starting an e-commerce startup. And in that ad, he said one of the most required skills, other than the basic coding knowledge, is top-notch communication because he understood early on that in order to communicate something that had never been done, or something that people felt uncomfortable with, that it would have to be communicated simply, very simply.

So, this whole idea, my first chapter in the book is “Simple is the new superpower.” I’m fascinated by people, not just Bezos, but a lot of other professionals as well, who can simplify complexity. Bezos did it well, and I think that it is a foundational skill now for anybody, how to get your point across in a complex environment in a way that is clear but also understandable.

If can give you one example, Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, is now on the board of Amazon, and she said that her ability to simplify complexity was her go-to skill, which is really interesting to me because she’s crediting communication skills as one of the foundations and the pillars for her success, of rising through her career at PepsiCo, because people would say, “Wow, this is really complex and it’s really hard to explain and understand. Oh, send it to Indra. She’ll be able to analyze it and then explain it to us.”

And she said, “Be known for a go-to skill. Find that ability to communicate things in a way that is simple and understandable.” So, the biggest takeaway, I’ll give you one huge takeaway from the book and from the research that I think is counterintuitive, that the more complex information that you have to get across, use simpler words. Remember, I mentioned Gill teaches English? She took me back to 1066 when, during the Norman invasion, when the English language began to change from simple words to more complex Latin-based words.

When you want to get your point across, you have to go back to the ancient words, which are simple, one-syllable words for the most part. The more complex your topic, the simpler you need to keep your word choice. To me, that was so fascinating, and once I heard that, it made sense. And I was writing part of this book during the COVID pandemic, during the shutdowns, and I’ll never forget reading about healthcare communication.

Healthcare communicators learned that when there’s an urgent message to get out, you go back to simpler words. So, for example, “Wear a mask.” One syllable, “Wear. A. Mask.” Three words, all one syllable. Not, “In order to increase protection against COVID, the recommendation is that you wear appropriate facial coverings to reduce the transmission or airborne viruses.” No, it’s, “Wear a mask.” And what I learned is that, in healthcare communication, that’s what they’re taught.

Now, of course, there’s endless debates on that, but the point is when you have an urgent message to get across, simplify the message. And you simplify it by using simple, short words. And Grammarly is a perfect example of this. I’m sure a lot of your listeners, maybe you, have used Grammarly.

Grammarly will study your writing and make it better. That’s the whole point of the software, they make it better. And they try to strip out words, or they rearrange sentences, that’s what the software tells you to do, but it also gives you a rating. And that rating is based on what level or grade level that language is appropriate for. So, what do you think is the ideal grade level for good writing?

Pete Mockaitis
If we mean good, like it’s understandable such that folks can take action on it, it’s pretty low as a whole. And salespeople see this all the time with copywriting, like straight up, easier words make more sales. So, it might be like seventh grade or even easier, you tell me.

Carmine Gallo
It’s eighth grade.

Pete Mockaitis
Eighth grade, okay.

Carmine Gallo
It’s eighth-grade language. And here’s something fascinating that I learned. I was analyzing all of Jeff Bezos’ 24 shareholder letters. The first ones had a lot of great wisdom in them but they were…they didn’t register an eighth-grade level. They were a little higher than that, some were even college level. As he wrote more complex information in the years that followed, the grade level got lower. It got lower.

So, pretty soon, in the last part of his tenure as CEO, they were most eighth and ninth-grade level language if you run it through a software program like Grammarly. And that, from what I learned, was intentional. He got better over time. He was aware that the more complex and bigger Amazon got, he had to become a better writer and simplify it more for the audience.

So, the conclusion I came away with is that by simplifying language, you’re not exposing yourself as someone who’s not competent. It’s actually just the opposite. You’re not dumbing down the content, you’re outsmarting your competition. Simple. That’s why I call it simple is the new superpower, and that’s very counterintuitive, but I think it’s an important concept to get across.

Pete Mockaitis
I totally connect and resonate with that. That’s huge. And Grammarly is a cool tool for that as well as Hemingway. I also like the writing.

Carmine Gallo
I use Hemingway as well.

Pete Mockaitis
To me, interrupting phrases or too long the sentence length, that’s tricky. So, those are some easy ways we can get some more simplicity. Any other pro tips for boosting our simplicity?

Carmine Gallo
Speak in metaphors. Use metaphorical language and analogies as much as possible. Two people in particular, Jeff Bezos uses metaphors constantly, as does Warren Buffett use metaphors. So, when you have complex information or information that’s new or maybe unfamiliar to your audience, great communicators tend to rely on metaphorical language more often than not, and that’s an advanced skill.

You really have to think through the metaphors that you use. But what I’ve noticed is that I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are in the startup community or in Silicon Valley where I live, and they use a lot of, in conversation, they use a lot of metaphors that they don’t even realize came from Jeff Bezos and Amazon. One in particular is called two-pizza teams. And you may have heard of that, the two-pizza team.

The two-pizza team means, “Let’s break down these projects into smaller teams of people who can…” And they say, “Well, how big should a team be?” Jeff, many years ago, and he said, “Well, when we started at Amazon, we could feed an entire team on two large pizzas, so let’s call them two-pizza teams.” And that stuck, it stuck and it pervaded the organization, so there’s two-pizza teams. And people who I’ve talked to who have left Amazon, who now are in higher positions or even CEOs of other companies, still use those. They use the metaphors that they learned from Bezos and other communicators.

Pete Mockaitis
So, sixteen tiny people are two large pizza is what I’m getting. Is that right?

Carmine Gallo
The other one is day one, the day-one mentality. Jeff Bezos is famous for calling everything day one, which is simply a metaphor, it’s a shortcut, which is exactly what metaphors are. And it’s a shortcut for thinking like an entrepreneur, “If this were day one of the startup, how would we be looking at this project?”

You can write an entire book on what it means to have a day-one mindset, that’s kind of a growth mindset, well, there’s a whole book written, like Carol Dweck on the growth mindset. But this whole idea of just day one, have a day-one mindset kind of took hold, and people understood intuitively what it meant.

And then it became a symbol, and that’s another fascinating area that I studied as well – symbolism as communication. So, day one not only became a mantra but it became a symbol. So, now there’s the Day 1 building, or the Day One Awards at places like Amazon. So, you can turn metaphors into symbols as well, again, which I think is a very fascinating aspect of communication, but those are advanced skills.

You really have to think through metaphors and the stories you use ahead of time. It’s not as easy as just putting up a slide and throwing up some bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. These are advanced skills but it makes a difference if you want to advance and flourish in your career.

Pete Mockaitis
And I hear you that a metaphor can simplify something complex. Although, if what you’re saying is already simple, metaphor might actually get in your way, “Customers are mad because they have to wait too long to get stuff.”

Carmine Gallo
That’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
“The customer is a pot on the oven, boiling over.”

Carmine Gallo
The kind of metaphors, though, has got to be Warren Buffett. Jeff Bezos is good, he’s pretty good, but Warren Buffett is the king of metaphors because I watch CNBC, like in the background. Every single day, I hear a stock analyst say, “Well, we like this company because it has a moat around it.” Yeah, where did they get that?

Well, that was years ago, about 40 years ago, Warren Buffett said, “I look at investments as economic castles. And if they have a moat around them, which means it’s hard for competitors to enter the industry, that’s a great investment.” So, this whole idea of, “Oh, yeah, economic moat. Does it have a moat?” it catches on.

Pete Mockaitis
It does.

Carmine Gallo
So, that’s the fascinating thing about metaphors is you start looking at language and what catches on and what resonates with people, more often than not, it’s a metaphor or it’s some kind of an analogy that allows people to think very differently about a particular topic but it also cuts through everything and gets right to the point.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. A moat is much clearer to internalize than a proprietary competitive differentiator that gives us a strategic advantage likely to preserve long-term profitability.

Carmine Gallo
Did you just come up with that because that sounds like pretty much every press release I hear?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I mean, that’s what a moat is. It’s like you’ve got a patent, you’ve got huge market share, you’ve got screaming loyal fans, you’ve got a novel design that you just can’t copy, you’ve got the best lawyers who are going to sit in defense of, there’s something but moat sort of captures all that, like, “Yeah, it’d be harder to take over a castle if there’s a big body of water around them,” and so that’s cool. So, metaphors, simplify, low-grade levels. Beautiful. Tell me, any other top takeaways you want to make sure to gather here?

Carmine Gallo
Humanize data. Again, I spent years getting into data. Your listeners probably know about data visualization. They’ve heard of data visualization before. But this whole idea of taking data and making it simple to understand, how do you do that? Not just in the animation, but how do you do that when you explain it? And it’s actually a very easy technique, which is simply add one sentence that puts the data into context. People will remember you for it.

But let me give you a very quick example. True story, I was working with a country manager, this was several years ago before I started researching this book. But I was working with a country manager for a big company that every one of our listeners knows and probably consumes their products daily. Big company, one of the biggest in the world.

So, he’s in the middle of the totem pole, maybe upper level, and he had aspirations to grow within the company. He was preparing a yearly presentation to the rest of the managers, which was simply an update. They’re just a simple update, “Here’s what we’ve been doing this year.” One of the big things was they launched a big tree-planting campaign for environmental reasons. Obviously, everyone has to talk about, “What role are you taking to solve environmental issues?”

So, on a bullet point on one of his slides, like the last slide, “And we launched a tree-planting campaign this year, and our employees loved it. They found it very satisfying.” A little bullet point, I said, “Wow, okay, that must not have been much but you probably just threw that in.” And he goes, “Oh, no, no. This was a major thing. We planted like 200,000 trees.” I’m like, “Well, hold on. That sounds like a lot. Now, I don’t know. Is that a seed? Is that a seedling? Maybe it’s more than I think but it sounds like a lot. How can we put that in perspective?”

So, we started brainstorming, we started being a little bit more creative rather than just putting up a bullet point, and we came up with a solution that, or the idea, because the presentation was being given in New York near Central Park, we did some quick calculation, and he said, “We planted the equivalent of one Central Park every month in my region. That was all because of the employees. Because Central Park is 18,000 trees, we did the math.”

“Hey, take a look outside. After you leave the conference, after you leave the event, take a look at Central Park when you walk back to the hotel. We planted the equivalent of one Central Park every month this last year, and we’re really proud of that,” and then show a PowerPoint. Then you can show a PowerPoint with faces and people planting trees.

That particular country manager was recognized for delivering a great presentation. He is now second in line to become the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, and I’ve kept in touch with him for years. So, he gives me some credit, which is interesting, because he realizes that you can be really good at your job, and this is the big takeaway for everybody now, you could be really good at your job, you can be very competent, but it’s your communication and your presentation and your storytelling skills that will get you noticed. That’s the takeaway.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now let’s hear about a few of your favorite things. Can we hear a favorite quote?

Carmine Gallo
I’m going to go to a Daniel Kahneman quote and one that I used in this book that applies completely to what we’ve been talking about. So, Daniel Kahneman, a great behavioral psychologist, Nobel Prize winner, “If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”

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

Carmine Gallo
Anything Daniel Kahneman. Go back to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow which is the great behavioral psychology book. But one piece of research that I think really applies today, you can look this up, it’s a scholarly research paper, and it’s got a fun title called “Bad is Stronger than Good.” And it’s one of the most quoted and cited research papers of the last decade.

And “Bad is Stronger than Good,” by a guy named Baumeister – Baumeister is an Australian scholar – explains almost everything that’s going on today. And it simply talks about the negativity bias that we all have. So, we do tend to skew toward the negative, which explains why, in our social media feeds, we tend to get things that make us angry or frustrated or anxious. It explains why, before you give a presentation, you get nervous because you’re focusing on the bad outcome rather than the good, because, as we evolved, it was more important for us to focus on threats than the positive, as a species, so it makes sense.

But now, those very same things are used by social media companies to keep us in a constant state of anger. They put a lot of pressure on you, they make you nervous when it’s public speaking. So, just understanding that bias that we have toward the negative is actually very empowering if you can learn to kind of reverse-engineer that and start focusing on positive. It’s hard to do but you got to start somewhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Carmine Gallo
My favorite book. The other day I did a TikTok. Believe it or not, Pete, I’m doing TikToks. I love TikTok. I’ve become a monster on it. I love it. But I talked about a book, I love history books. So, this is called Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And the reason why I like it, it’s one of my favorite public-speaking books, and it doesn’t have public speaking in the title.

Because she looks at great leaders throughout history, obviously, it’s a US history book, but she looks at all these great leaders, mostly US presidents, and she talks about them through the lens of mostly communication and leadership. So, you learn why Lincoln was a great storyteller, or why Franklin Roosevelt was a great simplifier. So, it’s my favorite public speaking book that’s not a public speaking book, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. I got you. And a favorite tool?

Carmine Gallo
I’ve got several but, recently…I love Canva now. Canva makes design so much simpler. And I’ve interviewed Melanie Perkins. She has an amazing story, an entrepreneur behind Canva. So, I like Canva. And, recently, I’ve been using Vid Studio which kind of makes video editing easy. It’s kind of like the Canva of video editing. It makes it very easy for anybody to quickly edit things that then you can send out via email or other platforms.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Carmine Gallo
Because I have ADHD, diagnosed ADHD, which is a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I have so many ideas. Curse because it’s hard for me to stay focused, even during these interviews, you probably have noticed. But the habit is a lot of ADHD people know the Pomodoro technique, and I found that, I think, a lot of business professionals use it, which is if you’re having a hard time getting started on something, set aside 20 or 25 minutes. Pomodoro technique, technically, is 25 minutes which is too long for me, so I start with 20 because you can do anything for 20 minutes.

And, as a writer, when you’re staring at a blank sheet of paper, that really helped. I’m just going to set aside 20 minutes today as that task. And before you know it, you’re writing for more than 20 minutes. But if that’s all you do is just write 20 minutes that day, that’s success. So, it kind of breaks down bigger projects into these smaller timeframes.

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

Carmine Gallo
There is. I wrote a line in a previous book called Talk Like TED, and I started that book by saying ideas are the currency of the 21st century. And I get that requoted a lot, and I think it’s more relevant now than ever because you’re only as valuable as your ideas. So, you need to become the best and the most persuasive person you can because you can have a great idea, but if you can’t get it across in a way that’s actionable and convinces people to join you on whatever your initiative is, then it doesn’t really matter that much that you have a great idea.

You have to be able to communicate it as well. And so, I think this whole idea of ideas are the currency of the 21st century, use that currency and become a more powerful communicator, I think, it’s an important subject.

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

Carmine Gallo
CarmineGallo.com. Just go to my website. But if you’re on LinkedIn, look for a good Italian name, like Carmine Gallo. I think I might be the only one in California. So, LinkedIn has been a very engaging platform, and if you contact me, connect with me and send me a message. I get back to everybody. I like LinkedIn. But CarmineGallo.com if you’d like to learn more about my books or get in touch with me.

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

Carmine Gallo
Communication, public speaking is a skill. And like any skill, you can get better at it if you apply yourself to it and you practice it. So, I get a little frustrated when I hear, especially clients say, “Well, I’m not good at public speaking.” Okay. Well, I can show you people like I’ve written about – Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and many others – who, early in their career, were not very good at public speaking either.

Public speaking is a skill, and like any skill, you can improve, and you can become one of the top speakers in your company and in your field if you apply yourself to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you, Carmine. This is good stuff. I wish you much luck in all your communications.

Carmine Gallo
Thank you. Thanks for inviting me back, Pete. Appreciate it.

Communication Archives - Page 5 of 26 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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