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May 04
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295: The Value of Awkwardness with Melissa Dahl

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Melissa Dahl says: "The ridiculous in me honors the ridiculous in you."

Melissa Dahl discusses embracing awkward moments and turning them into valuable learning experiences.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When self-consciousness can be helpful
  2. A quick exercise to instantly make you feel less self-conscious
  3. How to effectively navigate an awkward conversation

About Melissa

Melissa Dahl is a senior editor at New York Magazine’s The Cut, where she leads the health and psychology coverage. In 2014, she helped launch Science of Us, NYMag’s popular social science website. Her writing interests include personality, emotions, and mental health. Outside of New York Magazine, Melissa’s byline has appeared in Elle, Parents, and the New York Times.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Melissa Dahl Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Melissa, thanks so much for joining us here at the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re going to have a whole lot of fun in this conversation. I think we both had our fair share of awkward moments. Could you tell us a little bit about a time you once ran into a light pole?

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, you heard about that too. Yeah, okay.

This happened a few years ago. I am very much not a morning person, but sometimes I kind of like to pretend to be one. I was meeting my friend, Marie, for like a 6 AM jog on the East River. We had just started and I do not know how it happened, but I like ran straight into a pole, like a light pole. To this day I have no idea how it happened.

I write about this in the book and how you’re instinct when these sorts of things happen is to just play it off and say, “Oh, I’m fine. I’m fine. It was fine,” even if you’re like really, really hurt.

The funny – we can kind of get into this later I guess, but the funny thing about that was I didn’t tell my friend Marie I was putting that in the book. When she got to it because I gave her an early copy, she was like, “Oh, I mean I kind of remember that, but I don’t remember it in this much detail,” so yeah, it didn’t have as much of an impact on her as it did on me.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I guess emotionally in the memory and physically.

Melissa Dahl
Physically. Oh my gosh.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh mercy. Yes, that is an illustration of an important principle that we’re going to get to. But maybe you can orient us first and foremost, so your book, Cringe Worthy, what’s it all about?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, so the book is about – so I am a senior editor at The Cut, where I cover – which is a New York magazine website. I cover health and psychology there. I’ve written about psychology for a long time. I’m really interested in emotions, kind of relationships, how we understand ourselves, how we understand each other.

This book is sort of an outgrowth of that I wanted to understand the feeling of awkwardness, which is something that, I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot.

What I’ve always really liked about my job is it’s like almost like highbrow self-help. I’m reading these academic studies and there’s some kind of just nugget in there of “Oh, I could apply this to my life and it’s going to make me better at this or it’s going to make relationships go more smoothly,” or something like that.  I just kind of couldn’t find anything that applied to awkwardness.

That’s what the book kind of is, just me trying to understand this feeling and what the purpose of it might be. I actually have to tell you, it started as a book about how to avoid awkwardness, how to kind of overcome it and protect from ever feeling this way. By the end, I kind of came to really like this weird little emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. First of all, for those who are curious or intrigued, what’s there to like about it Melissa?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, a few things l think. One of the things is – the subtitle of the book is A Theory of Awkwardness. My sort of major theory is I think that awkward moments happen when the version of yourself you’re trying to present to the world is shown to be incompatible with reality in some way.

I would like to present to the world that I am not the kind of person who runs into lamp poles and then I do. Or a good recent example of this is at the Winter Olympics a couple of months ago, there was this picture that went around of a – I think she was a Russian athlete – wearing a shirt that said something like, ‘I don’t do doping,’ or something like that. Then it turned out she failed a drug test.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, bugger.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. I remember someone at my job put that into the chat and just wrote ‘awkward’ on it.

I think it kind of shows you that there’s a gap sometimes between the version of yourself you’re trying to present to the world and the version of yourself the world is actually kind of seeing.

If that’s true, then I think one good thing about these kinds of moments is that it kind of maybe shows us some places where we need improvement if we’re open to it. It’s going to show us some places where we can grow. That’s sort of my main theory of awkwardness.

But the other aspect of it is that I came to really love is these moments feel isolating, it feels like you’re the only one who just feels like an embarrassing idiot, but of course we all feel this way. If we are a little more open about it, it’s a way to kind of connect with people.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh that is good. Well, I want to follow up on a couple of those points there. First you say that the awkwardness happens when there’s a mismatch between sort of your self-perception or the version of yourself that you have in mind versus what is picked up by others.

Would you say that this is a mismatch in sort of the net disappointing direction, like, “I think of myself as someone who doesn’t dope and yet, here I am being found out as someone as dopes,” but can it happen in the opposite as well, like, “I think of myself as just sort of like a normal guy, but then people are telling me that I’m a genius.” Does that also feel awkward?

Melissa Dahl
I actually sort of think – I think we certainly think of it more in the negative direction. If you think you were having a pretty good hair day and then you see a picture of yourself and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, actually my hair was super greasy or something like that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and no one told me. That’s happened before. It’s like, “We were talking for more than an hour, you didn’t think that this worth a mention?”

Melissa Dahl
Exactly. I think it’s typically in that direction. I don’t know.

I sometimes think it might be – I think we feel weird whenever – I think we feel unsettled a little bit whenever we realize the self you’re trying to present to the world is not the way other people are seeing you.

There’s a story I read about in a book. It’s anthropologist story from the late ‘60s. He went to this tribe in Papua New Guinea. He had reason to believe that these folks had never seen their reflections, that they’d never seen a photographic image of themselves. They’ve never seen themselves in a mirror.

He kind of came and his arrival changed all that. He brought mirrors, he brought Polaroid cameras, he brought tape recorders. As he writes it – he wrote this report about it later – they all just kind of cowered and kind of just like clenched their stomachs, and kind of gritted their teeth. I think you could say they cringed. They cringed at the way they looked, at the way they sounded.

I’m not sure we can say they all thought like, “Oh, I’m uglier than I thought,” but just like oh, there’s just something existentially weird about thinking there is the you that exists in your own head and there’s the you running around out there who other people actually see and that those are often the same, but sometimes they’re not. Yeah, I think that’s kind of a part of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s true I guess. It would be unusual if all of those villagers were disappointed.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Because I guess some of them would probably be surprised like, “Oh, I’ve got some good muscles.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s paying off all that work I’ve been doing.

Melissa Dahl
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I just think there’s something strange about the fact – confronting the fact that – I don’t know, you don’t just exist in your head that other people see you maybe a little differently than you see yourself. It’s just a little strange to reckon with even if it is in a positive direction.

Pete Mockaitis
It is strange to reckon with. One thing I find strange to have a hard time reckoning with is when you’re in the midst of a situation and someone actually explicitly says the word, “Awkward.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s up with that? Any research insights on that one?

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, I know. That was such a thing when I was in college. Oh my gosh.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m glad it’s died down a little bit. I don’t hear it as much anymore.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I know. I feel like it’s kind of migrated to people like my mother now says it a lot, although she might just say it because I wrote this book.

I think that term kind of has become kind of a cliché and almost kind of annoying. But I think that it’s – what it was supposed to be, what it was intended for actually helped a lot. I think there’s something about calling attention to the awkwardness of a situation, but if you do it right, it can kind of diffuse it.

Your listeners want to be awesome at work, there’s a lot of awkward situations at work. You maybe have to give someone feedback and you don’t know how to say it or maybe you have to tell someone they didn’t get this promotion they put in for.

I think sometimes it can help kind of cushion the blow a little bit or make it a little bit less uncomfortable if you just kind of acknowledge this is going to be a little hard to hear, this is going to be a little uncomfortable, maybe even this is going to be a little awkward. I think that’s where it came from a good place, but the awkward thing worked into something very annoying, so don’t do that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. I like that because I think if you just sort of declare in advance, “Hey, this is what’s going on,” that really can be helpful as opposed to just saying, “Awkward.” It’s like, “Ah, shut up.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, don’t do that. That’s annoying, but the impulse makes sense. I think the impulse is a good one, so kind of digging that out of the annoying

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. Thank you. I also want to hear a little bit about the awkwardness vortex turn of a phrase. What does this mean?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, so this is something I discovered in the research. There is all this psychological research linking nervousness and self-consciousness. Basically if you are nervous, you become more self-conscious. If you are self-conscious, you become nervous. The two kind of exacerbate each other and it goes round and round and round. I called this the awkwardness vortex.

It’s the kind of thing where if you’re going in for a job interview and you sit down and suddenly you can’t remember like, “Wait, what am I supposed to do with my legs? Should I cross my legs? Should I cross them to the side? Should I go to the other side? Should I just not cross them? What should I do?”

You’re nervous, so you’re kind of like zeroing in on your body, like “What am I doing? What is my arm doing?” Then focusing in on yourself makes you more nervous and it just goes around and around and around. Yeah, that is the awkwardness vortex.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. That’s intriguing. Can you give us a couple more examples of how that can play out and sort of if you find yourself emerging or beginning to enter that, how do you escape?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, well another example because it’s kind of a pop culture example, but – it’s like a silly example – but it’s in one of the Austin Powers’ movies. I think it’s like the third one, which is not a good movie. But there’s a part where there’s like a spy or a character or something who has a really big mole on his face.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes.

Melissa Dahl
And Austin is trying to say anything but calling attention to the mole. Then it just kind of comes out, like, “Oh mole, mole.” It’s a funny scene.

But I think that sort of could be applicable here. If you’re trying so hard not to offend somebody, but then all you can think about is what you’re saying, what you’re doing, and how that might offending them, and then that’s making you nervous you’re going to offend them. It’s just that link between nervousness and self-consciousness is a really established thing in the literature.

The good thing is because it’s so established, the folks who study this say that there is a pretty clear way out, which is if self-consciousness is part of the thing that triggers this, the way out of the awkwardness vortex is to focus on anything but yourself. Just focus on trying to get to know the person in front of you.

To go back to the job interview example, maybe do some work beforehand and think like, “Okay, these are the three things about myself I’m going to get across in this interview.” Just focusing on anything but yourself, calling attention to the weather, calling attention to, I don’t know, some third party thing, that should help.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. That notion of fixating on what not to say causing problems just reminds me of a scene in The Simpsons where Principal Skinner is addressing the student body. He doesn’t know what to say regarding girls and math. He’s just trying so hard not to say the wrong thing and he just breaks down and says, “Tell me what you want me to say.”

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, yeah. I think that – this is kind of a lot what I was writing about. The book is kind of aimed at people who are acting in good faith, who don’t – that chapter about the awkwardness vortex is people who don’t want to offend someone, not in a politically correct way, but just don’t want to be offensive. They’re people who want to be kind and make other people feel respected and welcome.

Sometimes I think focusing so hard on that, it just causes us to clam up and get more nervous and get more self-conscious. Part of this is kind of just taking a few steps back and not doing in so hard on yourself. It really helps.

Pete Mockaitis
You say we have good reason to feel less self-conscious. Can you unpack that a little bit, if you’ve got a handy exercise?

Melissa Dahl
Well, a really interesting thing about self-consciousness that the psychologists who study this say that it doesn’t exist to torture you. The point of self-consciousness is to help you learn.

A baseball player or something who is working on his swing he has to be – or someone who’s learning to play a sport like tennis or something like that. That’s maybe a better analogy. You are being pretty self-consciousness. You’re zeroing in on your actions, on your body, and that’s a good thing. That’s what you have to do to learn.

That’s actually helped me too to talk about kind of why we feel self-conscious. It’s there to torture me. It’s there for a purpose.

But that said, ways to not let it completely run your life, one of them is the focusing on other people. Then the other thing is just realizing that nobody else is as self-conscious of yourself as you are.

No one else is as focused on you as you are, which I know we all know in our heads, but you forget that when you’ve done something really silly. You think everyone’s looking, everyone’s – like the example with the lamp post. My friend didn’t even really remember that. She kind of did, but not really.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Now you suggest an exercise right in terms of really kind of checking that out with a best friend with regard to your awkward or embarrassing memories.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So can you unpack that a bit?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing. It’s the opposite version of my friend Marie not remembering me crashing into a lamp post.

We’ve been friends for a long time and I kind of can’t – I’m trying to call to mind something embarrassing she’s done. She’s someone I see all the time. I know I’ve seen her do something or say something embarrassing, but I really can’t remember anything. Now I’m trying to think of my college best friend, like I’m sure I’ve seen her do a million dumb things. We’ve been friends for a really long time.

To me that’s a good exercise. Your brain will come up with some things if they’re funny stories or if you’ve repeated them a lot, but I think for the most part it’s pretty hard to remember something that – I don’t know, something dumb your coworker said last week that she might be still really punishing herself over, like, “Oh, I can’t believe I made that stupid joke in the meeting. I’m such an idiot.” I can’t remember any of that.

Yeah, trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and trying to call to mind an embarrassing thing someone else has done is a pretty good exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Thank you. Now I’m curious, if we are going to enter into some territory that sounds like it could be awkward, you mentioned one pro tip is just sort of kind of setting the stage of the context and admitting what’s there, calling a spade a spade. Do you have any other perspectives on what is the optimal way to go forward into a conversation you perceive as likely to be awkward?

Melissa Dahl
Okay, so I have a chapter in my book about awkwardness at work. One kind of like underrated awkward thing at work is friendships. We work with people but we’re also friends with them. We’re kind of playing these two roles with them.

I don’t about you, but I’ve certainly been in plenty of situations where I’m friends with my co-worker but also she is not pulling her weight. I don’t know what to do. I feel like I need to – I don’t know how to have that conversation.

Or something like – this is a real thing that happened to a friend of mine. Her coworker just disappears to go to the gym for a couple hours in the afternoon and she has to cover for the coworker and it’s really starting to make her mad. I think work friendships is a place where it can be pretty awkward.

Talking about how to deal with it. I think one thing that helps – I think sometimes awkwardness can come from a feeling of uncertainty. I don’t know what to say next. I don’t know what to do next. That’s such a common thing when you’re feeling awkward.

To use this example of a problem with a friend at work, the best thing you can do to cut through that discomfort I think is just to be as direct as possible, just as straightforward as possible, which can feel uncomfortable, but it’s actually I think the kindest thing to do. You can say it in a kind way, but it’s better to just say it to your friend that “You’re doing this. It makes me feel this way and you’ve got to knock it off.”

I think that straightforwardness and directness can help cut through some of the awkwardness actually. I think we think that the answer is to kind of dance around a subject and like, “Oh, I can’t say that. I can’t say that directly. I can’t bring up this problem,” but I think it would be better if we all got up the guts to be a little bit more straightforward.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny. I think you’re dead on and it makes it more awkward when you’re dancing around it.

I remember one time I was coordinating this youth leadership seminar. It so happened that there was another group in the same facilities that I was familiar with. There was this dude who was like a hero to me that I had heard of from afar. I read his book. It was like, “Oh my gosh, that is Curtis Martin,” which means nothing to most people, but for me it was like well that guy is a big deal.

He’s in the room. Actually, me and my staff we all need to get in this room and sort of set things up because we’re going to have a bunch of students coming through here soon. I was like, “Oh my gosh, how do I boot almighty Curtis Martin out of this room.”

I remember I went in there. I felt super awkward. I was like, “Oh hi, so we – hi, I’m Pete and I’m a big fan. We have also a need-“ He was like, “Oh, you need the room?” I was like, “Yes, please.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It was merciful that he directly said what was there. I think that’s a good move. I guess there’s a fear associated with going there like they’ll be offended or they’ll lash back, or sort of terribly negative things will unfold if we say what we really think.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, but I think there’s a way to do it with kindness and I think that sometimes the simplest way is the best way to do it. Yeah, I think you kind of have to either – you either have to have the awkward conversation, you have to kind of be straightforward with the person or you just have to live with the thing that’s bothering if it’s a work situation especially, but probably in any situation.

Pete Mockaitis
That will do it. I’d love to hear what’s your verbiage that you settled upon for the gym situation or the friend/coworker not pulling the weight situation. Can we hear it? Flashback, you’re back there in the scene, what were the words you said?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. Well the gym situation is a friend of mine.

The other person not pulling their weight, this was years ago before I went through my exercise in studying awkwardness. I didn’t say anything. I never said anything. Actually the resentment grew, and grew, and grew and I don’t consider this person a friend anymore, which I guess that sometimes happens with coworkers.

Looking back I have a really negative feeling about it. I think that I could have stopped that and we could have had a much better working relationship. That’s kind of an example of I just was afraid to have the conversation. I would tell everybody else, like, “I can’t believe I’m doing all the work,” but I never said it to this person. I’m sorry that I didn’t.

I write in the book about I kind of had a spotty track record of rising to the moment of awkwardness. There was a time I was a brand new manager and some folks had kind of complained to me about one of my direct reports. He’s kind of rude. He’s making more work for others. We’re having our weekly one-on-one and I literally had written down in my notes ‘address attitude’ and I didn’t do it. I didn’t know how to bring it up, so I didn’t do it.

I have fallen. I have not stood up in moments of awkwardness. It’s hard. It can be really hard. However, I think since kind of studying the heck out of this feeling I have kind of become less afraid of it.

This is pretty awkward at work I guess. We went through a reorg here last summer as I was kind of finishing up the book. All the sudden I didn’t know who my boss was, which is like a really embarrassing thing to have to admit because I kind of let it go on for a couple of weeks. It was like, “Um, like who is-?” like that Dr. Seuss book like, “Are you my mommy?”

But I just asked directly. I just went into my old boss’s office and I was like, “Hey, this is kind of weird, but are you still my boss? Is this other person my boss?” He was like, “Oh, yeah you should know that. Okay, here let me,” going through ….

I am just so a fan of being direct. The things you do that you think are saving you from awkwardness kind of just dig you in further sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s kind of what’s connected for me in terms of we fear these negative outcomes if you go there directly, but there are other negative outcomes if you don’t with regard to one, you may have the resentment that resulted in the disruption of the relationship or two for the rude coworker with the bad attitude, if you never address that for him, I don’t know where he ended up, but-

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I’m not doing him a favor in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, he could get fired.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And he’s broke because you didn’t go there. Not to heap the guilt on you Melissa.

Melissa Dahl
Right, right.

Pete Mockaitis
But yeah, negative outcomes can happen for not going on there that far exceed the negative outcomes that you fear for going there.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. I also sometimes think we think we’re avoiding an awkward conversation because we’re trying to protect the other person’s feelings, but I think it’s more often we’re protecting ourselves. We don’t want to come off as a critical negative person.

If it’s a boss situation, you want to be the cool boss or whatever or you want to be the cool coworker, like, “I’m chill. It’s fine. Do whatever you want,” but I think it kinder in the long run to have those conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say cool boss I don’t know why I’m thinking about, what was it A.C. Slater or Will Riker, always backwards chair. “What’s up?”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That’s how I have my meetings, take a chair, turn it around backwards, “Hey, …”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you’re so cool.

Melissa Dahl
You want a cigarette?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh that is cool.

But that’s a great perspective when it comes to you’re protecting yourself as opposed to their feelings. In a way if you think about what we’d call a hero or a person who is really loving or generous, it’s a person who takes a personal risk for the benefit of another.

It’s like, you’re scared of what’s to come but you know that they’ll be enriched by you sharing it potentially if they receive it. They might just reject it. But there’s a chance of them really being enriched and there’s a risk of you suffering some kind of a consequence. It might be just an awkward feeling. It might be a damaged relationship or …. So in a way you going there makes you a hero.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. I should say, it’s not like it’s guaranteed that these conversations will always go well. The person might not react well, but I think that you can only control what you can control.

But the other thing I kind of wanted to say is sometimes you’re on the receiving end of the awkwardness, someone is pointing out something about you won’t want to hear, someone is saying to you like, “Hey, I’ve been doing all your work for you the last three weeks or something.” You’re like, “Wait, that’s because I was – that’s because of this, that’s because of that.”

I think when we’re in that situation our natural reaction is to be pretty defensive. I think if, as I kind of think awkwardness comes from, in part at least, from that gap between how you see yourself and how others see you, this is an example of that that someone is showing you, like “I see you in this pretty unflattering light.”

It’s our natural reaction to kind of push that out, but I think it’s really useful sometimes to kind of sit there in the awkwardness and hear what the other person has to say about you. It’s not always necessarily true, but sometimes it is. Sometimes other people’s perspectives about you are worth hearing because other people can see parts of us that we can’t really see. That’s the other side of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah. Do you have any pro tips if you’re feeling defensive, you’re hearing something, you don’t like it, you’re getting those defensive vibes bubbling up inside, what’s the best practice?

Melissa Dahl
All I can think is – something that helps is maybe kind of to take a third person perspective almost of the situation or just kind of distance yourself from the situation a little bit it helps, just think, “Okay, this is what this person thinks of me. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It doesn’t even mean it’s necessarily true, but this is one opinion of me. This is one viewpoint on me. Let me see if I can look at this, step outside of myself and look at this from their perspective and kind of try to evaluate it subjectively.”

Trying to kind of tap into a cooler mindset rather than the kind of heated response I think helps. Then just to me kind of having a mindset of, “This could help me grow. This could help me become a better person. If what this person is telling me is true and if it is something I can improve on then thank God they told me.”

Like the direct report I had who was pretty rude to people around the office, he was a nice guy. I’m sure he wasn’t doing it on purpose.

If I had had that conversation with him, I would hope he could have just let that in and let that perspective of himself in and let it clash with how he sees himself, I don’t know, and maybe use that perspective and use that feedback to maybe become a little closer towards that person he thinks he is or you think you are to turn it back to you. Anyway, I hope that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is good. Certainly to focus in on like, “I don’t like this. I think this is bullcrap,” etcetera to, “There might be something worthwhile within this to facilitate my growth and so I will receive it.”

That third-person perspective sounds handy. Then maybe even just spending some time with it after the fact in terms of, “I thought that was outrageous. They don’t have the right context for it, but this huh. I’ve never heard that before.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. It’s sort of back to the analogy of having a picture taken of you where you look really unfamiliar to yourself. It’s true that maybe it did catch you at a bad angle or it’s just a weird look on your face or something, but it shows you a side of yourself you couldn’t see.

You don’t have to take it and be like, “Oh that’s me. I always have that weird look on my face,” or, “My hair’s always doing something weird.” But sometimes I think it’s good to see those unflattering aspects of yourself that you can’t really see on your own.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you. Tell me, Melissa, anything else you really want to make sure to cover before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things.

Melissa Dahl
Let’s see. I guess maybe just kind of going back to the part about how these moments can help us connect with each other. I did Jordan Harbinger’s podcast. He also had a story about running into a lamp post, which was like, “Wait, what?” I was so surprised to hear that.

What I have come to really love about these moments is if we look at it in the right light, it’s like these little moments where a very real, vulnerable part of you can connect with a very real vulnerable part of somebody else.

As I’ve done interviews and stuff, people have kind of broken in with their own stories like, “Oh my gosh, that reminds me of this time. That reminds me of that time.” There is something very cool about this little feeling and these little moments that just – they have the power to kind of connect us in a way that I didn’t really appreciate before I started working on this.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Melissa Dahl
I don’t know if this qualifies as a favorite quote, but something I keep returning too lately is ‘constant vigilance’ from Harry Potter, which is the Mad-Eye Moody says this. It’s about keeping on guard against the Death Eaters or something like that.

But I’ve just been thinking about that in terms of I’m trying to get back into shape. The only way to do it is – I think the way I’m interpreting that quote is the only way to do something really is the hard way if you want to do it well.

I’m trying to get back into shape and I’ve just kind of been halfheartedly doing some workouts. I’ve had this quote in mind. It’s kind of helped – this is so stupid, but it’s kind of helped me stick to – yeah, I have to stick to this workout plan. I said I was going to run three miles today; I’m going to run three miles today.

Just the idea of – I think it says to me that little efforts made every single day add up to something. It’s the constant work that adds up to big results, which is not what it means in the book, but that’s what it means in my head right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well great. Thank you. But how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, I have so many of these.

One of them, this is a good one to really what we’ve been talking about. In my work I have covered, I don’t know, hundreds of studies or something like that. Most of them just kind of leave my brain the second the story is done, but this one has stayed with me.

There’s this cool study by a Harvard Business School professor. You might have heard about this. People talk about this one.

Basically, you can do this very cool magic trick if you’re feeling nervous. Basically if you tell yourself you’re actually feeling excited, that is supposed to help you perform better because the theory kind of goes that to your body nervousness feels the same as excitement.

Your blood is pumping. Your heart is racing. That’s just your body knowing that you’ve got something big you’ve got to do. Your body’s like, “Here we go. Here. Here’s all this extra energy. We’re ready. We’re ready.”

If you interpret it as nervousness, it can make you kind of screw up on the thing you’re about to do, but if you interpret it as excitement, it’s supposed to help. I have thought about that so many times since I read that study five years ago. I find it so helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Think you. How about a favorite book?

Melissa Dahl
There’s so many books. Let’s see. Okay, I don’t know if this is a favorite book – I don’t even know if I have a one singular favorite book right now, but maybe it’s this. I don’t know. Something I return to again and again is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s a classic. It’s the kind of thing I’ve just pressed on all my writer friends over the years. That’s how I found it. An older writer friend at a newspaper I worked at was like, “Here you go. Read this.”

It’s writing advice, but it’s also just kind of wisdom and advice for life. Just reading that book – I’ve reread it so many times. It has such … advice for writing. She has the idea of the shitty first draft, which is just like letting yourself write the bad version of the thing and you have to do that before you get to the good version of it. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful book, especially if you’re a writer.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. How about a favorite tool?

Melissa Dahl
I guess maybe we could say Slack. We use that at my work. A lot of people are using it now. There’s ups and downs, but I think it’s helped make work feel a little more fun. It’s helped make my team feel more like a community or something. We’re just chatting all day and it’s helped us get to know each other better. Yeah, I guess I’ll say Slack, although sometimes it’s annoying too, but for the most part it’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. How about a favorite habit.

Melissa Dahl
I think that there really is something to the making your bed everyday thing. I’d actually love to do some kind of psychological analysis of that of maybe it’s sort of easy to do, but it’s something that you do in the morning and it really does just kind of set your day. It just kind of organizes things right away.

That one and writing my to-do list for tomorrow at the end of the previous day. I love doing that. That’s probably better than the make your bed thing because I don’t even do that every day. I want to switch my answer to that.

Writing your to-do list for the next day at the end of the previous day is so helpful because then you wake up and you just are like, “Oh yeah, these are my priorities today.” You can just jump right into that. That’s really helped.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you do that at the end of the workday or at the end of the ‘I’m about to fall asleep’ day?

Melissa Dahl
I do it at the end of the work day, but I recently read about some study. It was a pretty small study, but interesting though. It claimed that it helped people fall asleep faster if you write your to-do list right before you go to sleep.

I don’t know. I feel like there probably is some truth to that. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to sleep and my mind is just going over like, “Oh, I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do that. Don’t forget that.” Right now I do it at the end of the workday, but maybe I should try moving that back a few hours.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued because in some ways – I can see if you’re ruminating, that’s great to stop that and relax. But I think for me, if I brought my attention to that which tomorrow holds, I would start getting excited and fired up and the opposite of sleepy. I’d be like, “Oh yeah, these are the things I get to do tomorrow.” I don’t know.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I can see that too. I can see that too.

I’ve tried it a couple times and I don’t know. Maybe it’s only applicable if you like me are constantly going through your to-do list in your head when you’re falling asleep. The times I’ve tried it there is something nice to just being like, “Oh, you know what? I’ve already got that. I don’t have to worry about that. I’ve already got it. Calm down.” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote you back to yourself frequently?

Melissa Dahl
There’s a couple lines in the book people seem to like. There’s one – it’s just a throwaway line my editor actually wanted to cut, but it’s, “Being human is exhausting and embarrassing.” People have quoted that back to me.

Then there’s a line people seem to like that I also really like. It’s also from the book, which is, “The ridiculous in me honors the ridiculous in you,” which is kind of how I feel about these embarrassing moments.

Now when I see someone – I don’t know. Yesterday I saw someone fall over on the subway. She mistimed her getting up and I just felt this kind of sense of connection to this stranger, like, “Oh, you’re a dummy too just trying to make your way through the world.” People seem to like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s funny, “The ridiculous in me,” acknowledges or greets, what is it?

Melissa Dahl
I think it said honors.

Pete Mockaitis
Honors. Yes. “Honors the ridiculousness in you.” I guess that – isn’t that what Namaste means? The light in me honors the light in you.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Sometimes I just end up saying Namaste for no reason. I think it’s because people have wet hands and they can’t shake my hand. I end up bowing and saying Namaste. I don’t know if that’s offensive to any hard core yoga lovers. Apologies.

Melissa Dahl
I’m sure it’s a nice sense of it.

Pete Mockaitis
It feels good and I mean it. Hey, I’m honoring them. We have a laugh because it is a little ridiculous. “No, I just have wet hands. There’s no need to revert to these practices.” Cool.

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

Melissa Dahl
Probably Twitter is the place I am at way too often. They can also buy my book. It’s called Cringe Worthy: A Theory of Awkwardness available on Amazon.com or wherever you buy books, had to put that in there. But, yeah, Twitter, I’m on it way too much, so if you say hello, I will definitely see you and say hello back.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh cool. Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeing to be awesome at their jobs?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I think that fear of awkwardness at work is something that holds people back from, “Oh, I can’t have that conversation with my coworker. It’s going to be too weird.” “I can’t ask my boss this thing that I should have figured out three weeks ago. It’s going to be too weird.”

Maybe your challenge is to think about the problem you’re having or a few problems you’re having at work and if the thing holding you back from solving it is just you’re afraid of it being a little awkward, push through that. You can do it. You can get through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Melissa, this has been a whole lot of fun.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, it’s been great.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you for taking time and-

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well good luck with the book and all you’re up to.

Melissa Dahl
Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Feb 28
0

267: Managing Self-Doubt to Tackle Bigger Challenges with Tara Mohr

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Tara Mohr says: "Playing big is being more loyal to your dreams than your fears."

Tara Mohr offers deep insight into how our fears and inner critic operate–and how to optimally respond.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key drivers behind fear and self-doubt
  2. A handy Hebrew distinction for thinking about fear
  3. How to consult your inner critic–and inner mentor–wisely

About Tara

Tara Mohr is an expert on leadership and well-being. She helps people play bigger in sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and in life. Tara is the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, named a best book of the year by Apple’s iBooks and now in paperback. In the book, she shares her pioneering model for making the journey from playing small–being held back by fear and self-doubt–to playing big, taking bold action to pursue what you see as your callings.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Tara Mohr Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Tara, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Tara Mohr
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I learned something fun what about you, which is that as a child your dreams were analyzed each morning with your parents along with breakfast. What’s the story here?

Tara Mohr
Yeah, I think I was very fortunate to grow up with a mom who was very interested in psychology and self-improvement, and believed she could start conversations about those things with me as a young child. And so, at a very young age she would say, “Did you have a dream last night?”, and then she would ask me about it and she would explain to me that the different characters in the dream could be different parts of myself, or they were symbols. And she would get out a yellow pad and we would diagram it, and she talked to me about architypes. And that’s how I grew up; that was just one example of how she brought the kind of conversation you have on this podcast. I was really lucky to grow up with that as an everyday matter in my house.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool. Tara, last night I dreamt that I got shot by a gun twice in different places. One was in just a value priced hotel, and the other was in my childhood home, recovering from the first gun shot.

Tara Mohr
Okay, that’s very interesting. We could really dive into that. And how did you feel in the dream after that?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I didn’t like it. Actually I woke up at 4:30 am against my will, and I was a little riled up. It took a while to calm down and fall back asleep.

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Have you ever heard the Buddhist phase “the second arrow”? Have you heard that?

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, no. Tell me about it.

Tara Mohr
So it sounds very much related to what happened in your dream. So there’s this idea of, in life there are things that wound us, or there are feelings we have that are hurt, and that’s the first arrow. But then we often impose the second arrow of our reaction or the story that we make up about what happened, or the shame or guilt we have, or the self-judgments we have for having the feelings we have. So, that whole idea of being shot twice is interesting, and of course I would ask did something that hurt or wounded you, and then you went back in your literal childhood home or kind of in your family self? Was there something in the recovery process that wounded you further? That would be the first place I would look.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, nothing is leaping to mind, but I’ll definitely chew on that and see what happens as I explore, because we could spend a full conversation on that alone.

Tara Mohr
We could. And that’s actually dream interpretation, although part of my childhood is really not the center of my work now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us about your most recent book – Playing Big. What’s the main idea here and why is it important?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, I found when I went into the working world, I had come out of graduate school, I had had the benefit of a good education, I was an academically-oriented and achievement-oriented person, and I was very surprised to find that I didn’t feel confident in those first years in the working world, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing my ideas or my voice, and I also wasn’t really going for what I really wanted with my career. I was kind of in a job that was fine but not great, but didn’t really relate to the creative dreams or the entrepreneurial dreams that I had for myself.
And I was really curious about why I was getting so stuck around that. And then I knew I wanted to do work in the personal growth world, partly informed by how I grew up, and I got trained as a coach and I started coaching people just in the early mornings before I would go to work, or sometimes in the evenings, on the weekends, around my regular job. And I saw again and again actually at all stages of career my clients grappling with the same thing – self-doubt, not trusting their ideas and their voice, not really going for what they really wanted to do and believing there was some reason they couldn’t.
And I got really interested in this question of why do we play small and how can we play bigger? And my definition of playing big is it’s being more loyal to your dreams than your fears. So it’s whatever that means to you. It’s not necessarily anything that would look “big” in the eyes of the world, but you know it’s the real challenge, the real work for you to live that life or do that work. It’s an individual matter of discernment. And so I started to make that the focus of my coaching practice – how can people play bigger in that way, what are the tools and ideas that help us?
And I found there really were a set of things that made a transformational impact. And so that became kind of an arc that I would take my clients through, and then I started teaching large groups that all around the world, and then it became the topic of the book. And now for 10 years of really being immersed in working with people around defining what “playing big” means for them, and then most importantly doing the day-to-day practices and work to bring that vision into reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, I like that simple distinction then – more so about your dreams than your fears. And it really kind of puts into focus in a hurry, in terms of what’s my thinking right now, the patterns, who’s sort of got the upper hand. And so, I’d love to get your view then, when it comes to these fears or lack of confidence and self-doubt, what are some of the key drivers behind it? Why is that there and what should be done about it?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, I think that we all have a very strong safety instinct inside of us. And the safety instinct is a primal part of us that is a very deep part of our wiring to be on the lookout for any possible danger or threat, and make sure that we avoid it or we fight it, right? And our fight or flight instinct is there to make sure that if we see any possible risk to our survival, we go into fight or flight mode and we make sure we’re conquering in some way, or we’re avoiding.
And what we know now is that in our contemporary lives that same safety instinct gets misapplied to the emotional risks in our life. So, the safety instinct that should be very conservative and over-reactive if it’s trying to ensure the physical survival of people who are threatened by lots of predators or warring tribes or poisons, as our predecessors were – that instinct is now operating when we face everyday risks, like the risk of failure, the risk of feeling really uncomfortable, the risk of worrying.
We might feel like a beginner or feel clueless or be embarrassed or do something that really rocks the boat among our friends and family. And that safety instinct then tries to do everything it can to get us to stay in the comfort zone of the known or the familiar, and that includes making up a lot of narratives that feel believable but then aren’t true, like, “You aren’t qualified for that. Who do you think you are? You’re not enough of an expert in that. There’s too many other people doing that.” All those inner critic narratives we hear are really manifestations of the safety Instinct.
And the good news about that is it means that our inner critic is not going anywhere. And I know you have many listeners who are a little bit more in the earlier phases of their careers, and I think it’s so game-changing to understand early that confidence doesn’t actually come in an enduring way with experience.
There was just a study done through KPMG that looked at confidence levels among professional women, and they looked at how many women early in their career would say they’re confident, and then how many executive-level women, senior women, would say they feel confident in their work. And the difference between those two groups was only about 10%, in terms of how many indicated they were confident.
In other words, experience didn’t change it, because when you get into a new senior role – sure, you’re more confident about some things that you did a long time ago and you’ve been doing for a long time, but you have a new edge, and the voice of the inner critic and self-doubt comes up again because that safety instinct is perceiving more emotional risk, no matter what the situation. And so we’re really not looking to get rid of the inner critic or find some unfailing sense of confidence. The “playing big” process is in part about learning how do you hear your inner critic, let it be there, know it’s always going to be there when you’re doing important work, and just not take direction from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So that is powerful, to assimilate that really inside your psyche there. The inner critic, as you said, it doesn’t go away – the KPMG study is pointing to that. And in a way, that kind of unmasks everything.

Tara Mohr
It does. And there are so many lies we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves, “Well, when I get to this stage in my career, then I’m going to feel confident.” We also tell ourselves, “If I get that additional certification or degree, then these uncomfortable feelings of self-doubt or uncertainty or fear will go away.” We tell ourselves, “If my weight changes and it’s this amount, then I’m going to feel confident getting up and sharing my point of view in front of a group.”
We fill a lot of things into that blank, and what we’re really doing there is making it convenient for ourselves to put risks on hold, put playing bigger on hold, put really stepping into our gifts and using our natural talents and gifts more, which is actually a very vulnerable thing – put that on hold thinking something is going to come along that’s going to bring confidence. But it doesn’t. And what we want to do is really learn to work effectively, live effectively with the voice of self-doubt, letting it be there but not taking direction from it, not letting it make our decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful. And so then the implication is that you’re going to feel some lack of confidence and some self-doubt till the day you die, right?

Tara Mohr
Hopefully, right? And I say “hopefully” because it comes up most strongly when you are on the edge of your comfort zone. So for those who might be sitting there right now thinking, “I don’t really hear my inner critic that much”, I would ask you two things. One – make sure you’re looking across all areas of your life, because sometimes people think, “I’ve kind of got it down at work”, but then they’ll realize, “Oh my gosh, in my dating life, or in my parenting, or my body image” or, “I’d love to play music again but I have that voice in my head saying…” So look across all areas of your life.
But second – notice where that lack of inner critic is just kind of a dead-end part of your life, where you are not pushing yourself to an edge, you’re not doing what really matters to you, you’re not being loyal to those dreams. The inner critic will come up when there’s vulnerability, and so if you’re doing something that is 100% in your comfort zone and routine to you and not very important to you, you might not hear it, but that’s not a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you there. And so then, I also want to get your view – now, there’s a bit of a postponement factor – the way that the inner critic can sound, in terms of, “Hey, if this changes – if I lost the weight, if I got the certification, if I had a certain preparation – then I would feel confident.” And so now, for the most part that seems like that is often a lie. It is a deception that is destructive, but at the same time there are times in which no, you really are not prepared for that opportunity or that dream that you’re thinking about, and some action, some preparation is necessary to get there. So, I’d love your view on, how could we prudently discern the difference, and what’s a wise means of thinking through that, so that you get the valid prep steps done but you don’t delay yourself till it never happens?

Tara Mohr
Yeah, yeah, and it’s so funny that you are asking that specific question, because I just got off of our course call and we were exactly talking about this piece today. So there’s a few things I’d offer around that. One is, pay attention to the evidence that you’re getting from the world. Are you getting clear repeated information from the stakeholders that matter to you, that you need more preparation? In other words, maybe you want to offer a support group for moms, and you do a trial day where you invite a few moms in your community to come together, and you put together a great little program for them or whatever.
And then you hand out feedback forms and you notice there’s really a theme on the feedback forms, that people felt like they wanted more content or more expertise. And you hear again and again that your audience is asking for a different level of preparation and knowledge for you – okay, then you have some evidence. But most people never get to that stage of even asking their intended audience for information. They make up a story in their head and it’s usually a convenience story that allows them to hide a little bit that they need to do a lot more preparatory work. So that’s one piece – is it coming to you in real information and evidence from the outside world?
A second is, what’s the energy that you have or the beliefs that you have around that preparation? If you notice that in a very sort of joyful, light, abundant kind of energy you feel like, “I’m going to go learn more so I can do even more here, and this is going to be an enriching process for me” – that can be a great thing to follow. But if you notice that you’re feeling, “I don’t know enough until…” or, “There’s no way I could contribute any value until…” – the sort of like “This will complete me.” It’s like the equivalent of the romantic “He or she will complete me” feeling. Notice that, and that’s kind of a clue that you’re probably putting a story there that is more about fear than about the external thing itself.
And then a third thing I would offer is… A real issue in our culture is that we tend to put all the emphasis on expertise, and have a kind of cultural narrative that the people who contribute value around a topic are the “experts”. And that’s a view that’s really enforced by our educational system, reinforced by our educational system that says if you want to do something in X topic – if you want to do something around history – go get your degree in history. If you want to do something in serving kids, go get X degree. We’re looking for, what information do I need to absorb to be able to contribute value on that topic?
And that is certainly important, and you’re talking to someone who really values education and has a graduate degree and I believe it’s very important that we have those places to get expertise and we have experts in our culture. But on any given subject there are people contributing value as the expert. Let’s take for example breast cancer. So we have our experts who have PhDs in breast cancer treatment and prevention and rehabilitation and so on. And they’re playing a certain role.
But then we have other people – we have people who are survivors, who have different insights and a different sensibility and can contribute something different, in terms of sharing a message, inspiring people, improving upon services, innovating. The experts can never bring what they can bring.
And we have other people who I would call “cross-trainers”, who come from a completely different type of expertise – maybe they come from the design world or the business world or the activism world, and they can take their lens and their expertise and look at a new topic. And because they don’t have formal training in it and they’re bringing a fresh lens, they add value in a different way. And I think we really deemphasize those things.
So that’s another question when you’re discerning, as you’re asking, Pete – do I get more training? Part of it is, who do I want to be? Is my calling to be the expert on this, or is my calling to contribute value in a different way? And really we can’t discount how significant the value is that people contribute, who are coming from that cross-trainer or survivor perspective, not from the formal expert perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so much good stuff. Okay, so we’ve amassed a big lie, we’ve got a nice distinction here associated with, is preparation necessary, and some indicators how the inner critic can be a useful indicator, in terms of maybe pushing harder toward the edge. So, that’s a lot of great stuff. So now I’d like to zoom in sort of in the heat of battle. You’re trying to do some bigger things, and tell us, what are the particular fears that arise and your pro tips for responding to them?

Tara Mohr
Well, I’ll share a little bit about how I look at fear. And in the book I call this “a very old new way of looking at fear”, because I’m drawing here on two terms that are actually Old Testament, ancient Hebrew terms. These are two words that are used in the Old Testament to describe types of fear. And when I came across these I kind of fell off my chair, because I felt like they were so illustrative of what I was seeing with my coaching clients, but I had never heard about them before. So let me walk you through the two.
So the first word is “pahad”. And pahad is defined as the fear of projected things or imagined things. So this is when we imagine the worst case scenario of what could happen. It’s when we project the movie of how things might play out. And most of the fear that you and I and our friends and colleagues experience on a day-to-day basis is this, right? We are imagining a potential outcome and feeling afraid. It’s an anticipatory feeling; it is not usually about what’s happening right now, in this moment, but about what we fear could happen.
We know – not from the Old Testament but from all the biological and neuroscience research that has come since – that this kind of fear is generally over-reactive and misleading. We know for example that when we learn to fear a particular thing through conditioning – let’s say we get bitten badly by a dog and then the way the human response to that works is we learn to fear being bitten by a dog. We also know that we have a very generalizing response to that experience, so we won’t just become afraid of that dog; we might become afraid of dogs in general.
And in the foundational experiment that was done on this in the 1920s, they could actually see how by priming a baby to be afraid of a small white mouse… The baby initially was not afraid of the white mouse, but then they paired it with a very loud startling noise, and so then the baby started to associate the two and would see the mouse and would have a fear response. But then the baby also became afraid of a white rabbit and a white cotton ball and a man with a white beard.
This is what we’re also doing in our adult lives, right? Whether that’s you had one negative relationship experience and now you’re generalizing that a certain type of relationship or a certain type of person – you’re going to fear that. Or maybe you did something in one professional environment that was met with really painful feedback, and then you come to fear a whole set of associated things. So that associative quality of our fear response means that fear misleads us, because of course that white rabbit and the white beard and the cotton ball are harmless, as are many of the things we come to fear.
Another way fear misleads us is that we learn what to fear not just from our own experiences but also by watching what the people around us fear. And that of course happens in early childhood for a lot of us, and happens in problematic ways because many times the fears that those around us have are based on their own false stories. So all to say when we have pahad kind of fear, we do not want to believe it or let it be in charge; we need to know, “Okay, I’m in pahad, I’m in that anticipatory fear. It is probably not accurately guiding me and I want to shift myself out of it.” And you can do all kinds of practices, whether it’s calming your nervous system through meditation or shifting into another energy. I like whenever I’m afraid to just focus on, “What can I be curious about in this situation? What can I get really interested in?” Because if you’re in curiosity, you can’t simultaneously be in fear. So we always want to be looking at shifting out of pahad.
Okay, the second kind of fear that is mentioned in the Old Testament is something we really don’t talk about in our culture, and the word for that is yirah, is the ancient Hebrew word. And that has three definitions. Yirah is what we feel when we are inhabiting a larger space than we’re used to. It’s what we feel when we suddenly have more energy, when we come into possession of more energy than we normally have. So think about in your life, like what lights you up, what fills you with energy, your passions, using your gifts, telling your truth – whatever gives you that infusion of energy. That kind of exhilarated, scared feeling that can come with that – that’s yirah. And the third definition is this is what we feel in the presence of the sacred. So in fact when Moses is at the burning bush, yirah is the word used to describe how he feels when he’s at the burning bush.
So this was very significant for me to see as a coach and as a human being, because I understood that when I was working with people and they really told the truth about what they wanted, or they made a momentous decision that really resonated with the core of them, this was the feeling they felt. And it did include fear; it also had awe and exhilaration in it. And yirah is really different that pahad. We don’t need to shift out of yirah; we kind of need to learn to tolerate it and breathe into it and not find it such an electric infusion of energy that we block it or numb out or avoid the things that bring it. So that is the framework we use in the “playing big” model for working with fear.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so interesting when you say yirah, if I’m pronouncing it correctly. When you say “inhabiting a larger space”, this is kind of both literally and figuratively?

Tara Mohr
Exactly, exactly. So certainly when people step onto a bigger stage, speak to a bigger audience, maybe stand at the front of a bigger conference room, or whatever that might be. There’s literal spaces and then there’s the figurative, like I am reaching more people or I am being willing to take up more room. You can look at it that way as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool, because I really do find if I have a speaking engagement and I arrive there early, I actually love it. When I’m in the room and it’s completely empty but there are hundreds of seats there, there is a sensation – and now I’ve got a word for it, thank you – and I love it. It’s just so full of possibility. And it’s interesting you say “presence of the sacred” because it does often prompts me to pray – not because I’m terrified, but it’s just like there’s a bigness to it, and that’s just sort of a natural response for me. And that’s so cool and I think really eye-opening, because maybe my personality is I’m just like, “Oh yeah, I love that. Bring it on! I want some more of that in my life!” But you’re saying that for many of us, “Oh no, that’s just too big and I can’t even sort of abide there for very long without getting into maybe like a freak out type of sensation.”

Tara Mohr
Yeah, that’s what I find, that it’s both wonderful and it often feels wonderful when we’re in it, but there is a quality to it of, it’s a heightened state, it does take us out of our comfort zone a bit, it does have that component of fear or almost breathlessness in it. Sometimes it asks us to change, right? Like you could imagine that if you were in a different career and you were only doing speaking once a year or every 18 months and then you felt that feeling when you were speaking, when you were doing public speaking –that’s telling you something about your life and your career, which you may or may not want to hear at that point, because it might ask you to make some changes that require courage or trade-offs and so on. And so we do sometimes try and block the yirah or turn away from it.
I think also yirah, for a lot of people there’s kind of transcendence of the self that comes with it, and you may find when you’re doing that public speaking, you get into the zone, you get into flow state – you kind of lose the sense of Pete and you’re one with the words or you’re one with the audience. And then at the end it’s like, “Oh, where did I go? I went fully into that.” And that happens for a lot of people. The things that bring them yirah – they lose their normal sense of self while they’re doing them, and that’s that flow state, that kind of immersion, what Martin Seligman calls our “gratifications”. And that can be a little bit threatening to our ego sometimes, because our ego likes to be, “I’m Tara”, “I’m Pete”, “I’m in my mundane sense of self.” It doesn’t really like that transcendence of self, and so that could be another reason we resist it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent, thank you. So then you say that’s kind of the different prescription then, in terms of with the projected things and fear. It’s a matter of, “Hey, slow it down, calm it down.” And with yirah the big stuff is being able to hold on for a bit.

Tara Mohr
Breathe into it, lean into it, notice what brings you it, pursue those things. Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So now thinking more a bit about self-doubt and it popping up – you say that confidence is not the prescription or the answer to self-doubt appearing. Tell us a little bit more about that, and what is?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, just as we were talking about before – if confidence isn’t coming and if the inner critic is always going to be speaking up when we are on the edge of our comfort zone, we certainly don’t want to wait on confidence to do our most important work. And instead of looking for aiming for confidence, I believe we need a new relationship with our self-doubt. And so that has a couple of components. The first is being aware when you are hearing your inner critic.
For so many of us the inner critic is the background noise that we live with, it’s the music that has been playing in our head for a long time, we don’t even hear it anymore, it’s the water that we’re swimming in. It’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve never been good at that kind of thing”, “Oh, those people over there are the ones who have it going on and I’m the outsider, “Oh, my body this and that” – whatever your inner critic lines are, many of them become just so habitual you don’t hear them anymore, or you hear them as those are true facts.
So step one here is starting to be able to notice and name your inner critic, so that in those moments you can say, “I’m hearing my inner critic right now.” Now, a lot of times that’s enough; it’s just like a mindfulness practice. That’s enough to let you go, “Oh, if I’m hearing my inner critic, then that’s certainly not the part of me I’m going to listen to.” But sometimes we do need a secondary tool, and there’s a whole range of things that can be effective – sometimes for people creating a character that personifies the inner critic so they can actually see, “Okay, my inner critic sounds like the perfect housewife”, or the stern old mean professor, and really getting a visual, so that when you are hearing your inner critic line you see it as coming from that character. And all of a sudden then there’s humor and you can have perspective on it.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some names that you’ve heard given to inner critics?

Tara Mohr
Oh gosh, all kinds of things. I feel like there was a year there where everywhere I would go and speak, the inner critic was always a Downton Abbey character. I’m trying to think of the name. The evil folks downstairs in Downton Abbey, and Harry Potter characters, and sometimes it’s a random name that comes to people and then I always have to hope there’s no one else in the class with that name. Sometimes they won’t write it down because it’s their colleague from down the hall and they don’t want that their worksheet from the program is seen by anyone later. So yeah, creating a character can be useful.
I really like using another tool, and I’ll share an example of how I used it for myself. When the Playing Big book was coming out, about six weeks before the publication date, I got an email from my editor at Penguin and she said, “Oh Tara, great news – we’ve piqued the interest of the editors of the Sunday Review section of the New York Times. They’d like you to write an essay based on Chapter 6 for their consideration for the Sunday Review.
So I see that and my mouth kind of fell open because I didn’t even know they were pitching them, or I had no idea that was even on the table. And my very first thoughts were, “Oh no, this is going to be a huge waste of time. I have an actual book launch to prepare for and a lot to do, and now I’m going to have to spend all this time writing this piece, which we know is never going to be published, because people who write for the Sunday Review section sound very grown-up and articulate in their writing, and Tara, you know you’ve never sounded that way.”
That was what the voice in my head said. And that voice and those thoughts pretty much stayed cycling that way for a few days. And then there were some other ones that got added in, like, “You can’t write about this for a co-ed audience because the book had been directed at women”, and, “There’s no way you can translate that chapter’s topics into an op-ed; it won’t make sense.” I had piling on every problem and excuse.
And on about the fourth day of this, somewhere there was a little graced thought that flew into my head that said, “You know, Tara, maybe that’s your inner critic talking.” Now, this is like a primary subject of the book that I had just written, but it took me four days because in our own minds the inner critic always sounds like truth. But on the fourth day… And that’s what I think we can get with practice – it might not be immediate but it didn’t take me six months at least. On the fourth day the voice said, “Maybe that’s the inner critic.” And of course internally my response was like, “No, no, no, it can’t be the inner critic. There’s no way you can pull off this piece. Your writing and your voice is just not mature enough.” But another voice said, “You know, this kind of sounds like an inner critic.”
And then I used this tool, which I love, which is to say, “Well, what does my safety instinct not like about this situation?” Because I know that my inner critic is always going to be a strategy of my safety Instinct. So, when I asked myself that question: “What does my safety instinct not like about this situation?”, the whole picture looked so different to me. I could suddenly see, “Wow, this is basically the worst nightmare of an emotional safety instinct”, because in one scenario here I’m going to write a piece that my editor thinks is not good and I’m worried she’s going to write back and be like, “It’s not good enough; I can’t pass it on”, and that’s going to be painful. Another scenario is the New York Times editors say that, and that will be painful because that will make me feel like I don’t measure up.
And even in the best case scenario, what’s my big reward? It’s that 3 million people are going to judge what I write and have opinions about it. And that’s scary for a part of us, for sure. And it can be especially, I would say, even more so often for women, because we are really socialized to not rock the boat and not do things that bring criticism. And I knew if I write an op-ed about some of these issues in the New York Times, they’re some controversial topics, there’s going to be a mixed reaction.
So then I could see, “Okay, I get it. I get what my safety instinct doesn’t like here.” And I’m going to lovingly parent that part of myself and say, “I get it. This feels really big and scary to you. We’re going to be okay. I’ve got this, and you’re allowed to be here with all these fears, but there’s another part of me that wants to be in charge here – the part that loves writing, that wants to get these ideas out, that likes taking a seat at the table in this way.” And that allowed me to proceed.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. That’s a great illustration, and talking about the second arrow – coming full circle here. You’re beating yourself up maybe, associated with, “I’m supposed to be the expert on this and I can’t even…” There may be a risk of some self-judgment even when you’re trying to apply the tools and are aware of this wisdom here.

Tara Mohr
Yeah, and luckily I do. That part I feel very clear on, and I would offer that to people too, that I never have felt I need to be an expert on these things and be flawlessly playing big in my own life. I feel the opposite – I feel the only way I can stay interested in these topics and have something relevant to say about them is if I’m really grappling with them and I am compelled around these topics, because I’m a fellow traveler. And so I proudly use all these tools myself and always try and work my own playing big edges myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you. Well, Tara, tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some your favorite things?

Tara Mohr
I do want to mention inner mentor for a minute, because I think that’s such an important topic, and it’s really kind of the antidote to the inner critic; it’s the other voice in us that we talk about a lot in Playing Big. And the idea with the inner mentor is that rather than always seeking external mentors and looking for that person out there that has the answers for you, you come into contact with a sense of your own older, wiser self. And so in the book we do a guided visualization, so you can meet yourself 20 years in the future.
And what people find is they don’t just meet their older self, they sort of meet their elder, wise self, their authentic self. And then you can really consult and dialogue with that part of you as a mentor. And it is absolutely the best mentor you will ever have – all its answers are customized for you, it is always available to you. And so, that’s just been such a powerful tool and I want to make sure people know about it, because I’ve watched it be really, really pivotal for so many people now.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so interesting, and I’m right now imagining an older, wiser Pete with a cane, sitting on a log on an autumn day.

Tara Mohr
Well, we can do that right now. Yeah, so one thing that you are finding a
dilemma right now – just ask him for his perspective on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. Well, so the silence there… Yeah, I was just thinking about, I just have a new baby. Yay! My first son.

Tara Mohr
Congratulations!

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And so, I’m just thinking about, what’s prudent, in terms of kind of growing business without spending crazy hours, in kind of a way that would be troublesome for a family living. And so, it was only a few seconds, but what I’m picking up is the notion that there’s no need to sprint, rush, rush, do more, is kind of a wisdom nugget I’m starting to unpack there.

Tara Mohr
Yeah, and it sounds like… So did he kind of give you a vibe or a perspective around this question that was a little different than what you were holding in your mind before?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, kind of, yes. Because my instinct is to, “Alright, strategize, let’s figure out what is our optimal point of leverage”, as opposed to having a bit more of a calm, spacious, patient view of the matter.

Tara Mohr
Yeah. So Pete, it sounds like you tapped in really quickly, which is wonderful. Even without doing a longer visualization you could just call up a picture of him and then connect with a voice that was different than that of your everyday thinking, and that’s exactly it. And usually that inner mentor voice is more spacious, it’s more calm, it’s more loving, and it does give us something really different. I can’t tell you how many times people will come with like, “I don’t know, is it A or B? Is it A or B? And I’m stuck between A or B.”
And they check in with their inner mentor for a second and there is a C option that comes that they didn’t perceive before, that feels really right and gives them kind of a new path forward. So, it’s an amazing tool and it sounds like you have it right there at your fingertips. For people who feel like they need a little more help or if you just want to have a deeper experience with that, there’s an audio that you can use and a written form also in the book. But it’s a great tool to tap into.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wonderful, and I’m glad you highlighted it before we moved on to the next phase. And it’s so funny, I’m tempted – you tell me, is this a good idea or a bad idea – when it comes to the visualization, one of my knee-jerk reactions was, “Oh, I bet there is a website where I can put a photo of myself and see what I look like when I’m old.” And it was like, “Hm, on the one hand that could be interesting and help bring about a picture, but on the other hand, maybe I won’t like the picture.”

Tara Mohr
Yeah. I would say, let your subconscious mind do it because it’s sort of going back to our dream conversation – you’re going to see where this person lives, how they live, how they carry themselves. You want your right brain and your intuition to bring all that to you, rather than some computer-generated literal thing. So yeah, I’d say let your mind’s eye dream it up.

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

Tara Mohr
Oh, sure. Well, one of my favorite quotes comes from Marianne Williamson, and it is, “Ask to be a representative of love.” So, in any situation that you’re feeling stressed about… And I have used this in professional situations, including before I was an entrepreneur – very traditional professional situations – with amazing success and results, like going into a tense meeting where there was a lot of conflict and my prayer and inner intention was, I want to be a representative of love in the room. And what that allowed me to do was get out of myself and my fear and my ego, and contribute so much more value and be such a more helpful, mature voice in the room. So that’s always for me like a mantra, a favorite quote, a favorite practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Tara Mohr
I have so many, but I just finished one that I think is outstanding and that your listeners will probably really enjoy. It’s called Einstein and the Rabbi. It’s by Rabbi Naomi Levy and it’s really a personal growth type book that is just very compelling and helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you be awesome at your job?

Tara Mohr
One of my favorite habits is surrender, by which I mean remembering that I’m not supposed to figure it out all on my own. So when I’m feeling overwhelmed or unclear, I can very consciously say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do in this situation.” I physically open up my hands to the world, the greater space and say “Help!” And then I kind of go through my day with a sensitive listening for the insights and answers. And I find that that surrender and asking for help really changes everything.

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

Tara Mohr
I’m at TaraMohr.com. And the Playing Big book is available on Amazon and everywhere that books are sold.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Tara Mohr
I do. I would invite everyone to circle back to that idea we started our conversation with, and ask yourself are you being more loyal to your fears or your dreams? And what’s one thing you can do today to be more loyal to your dreams?

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Tara, thank you so much for sharing this. I wish you lots and lots of luck in your coaching and your book and all the cool things you’re up to!

Tara Mohr
Thank you! Likewise.

Jan 17
0

250: Powering Up Your Professional Presence with Magdalena Yesil

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Magdalena Yesil says: "There's no one more important for your career advancement than your current boss."

Technology mogul Magdalena Yesil shares how to boost your gravitas, results, and ability to be heard at the workplace.

You’ll Learn:

 

  1. What is the professional ask and why you should do it
  2. How to access and convey greater gravitas
  3. Tips for being heard better in meetings

 

About Magdalena 

Magdalena Yeşil is a founder, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist of many of the world’s top technology companies, including Salesforce, where she was the first investor and founding board member. Yesil is a former general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, where she oversaw investments in more than thirty early-stage companies and served on the boards of many. A technology pioneer, Yeşil founded three of the first companies dedicated to commercializing Internet access, e-commerce infrastructure, and electronic payments.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Magdalena Yesil Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Magdalena, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Magdalena Yesil
Thank you. I’m very excited to do this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I am, too. And I’d love to kick it off, if you could share with us, the story of when you had to take the SAT you got there via a ride from a fisherman. What’s the backstory here?

Magdalena Yesil
Yes, not the most traditional way to go to the SAT exam. So, I have to take you back to 1975, in the late fall. And so, women and men in high school in Turkey did not think of going abroad to university, so the SAT exam was something incredibly unique. I had never really heard of it and I certainly had never seen a multiple-choice test before. It was being offered on the European side of the city, Istanbul is a city that is built on two continents, Europe and Asia. I happen to live on the Asian side. And it was being offered starting at 8:00 a.m. which meant that I should be on my way about 5:00-5:30 a.m.

Well, it turns out we did not have ferries running that early, so what ended up happening was that my boyfriend took me to the narrowest part of the Bosphorus, and we knew that in that narrow part of the Bosphorus, which is the waterway that divides the Asian from the European side, we would find some fisherman who usually spent the nights so they could go out fishing with dawn, and we were able to wake one up and when we offered him enough money and told him what the reason was, he was kind enough to actually take us across on his little baby motorboat, fishing boat, to the European side.

And then the exam was up a really steep hill in a spot that today is the Bosphorus University, but in those days, it was a school, it was a boys’ high school. And not only did we cross the Bosphorus on a fisherman’s boat but then we actually had to hike our way up to the exam venue. The biggest shock, though, wasn’t crossing the Bosphorus to get to the SAT on a fishing boat; the biggest shock was actually seeing that you had to answer by coloring in circles, the exam questions. I had never seen anything like that before. That was just amazing to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what a story. And I think about, whenever we’re tempted to say, “Oh, I don’t want to inconvenience that person,” or, “Oh, I guess I’m out of luck. I can’t make it,” just that sheer resourcefulness and determination. And I don’t know if you can recall, but at the time, just what was the amount of money it takes to get a sleepy fisherman to give you a ride across?

Magdalena Yesil
Probably it was, you know, five or six liras, probably no more than with the local, at the time, exchange rate maybe about a dollar, but that was big money for a high school student.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah. And then you put forty-ish years of inflation there and, okay, I’m with you. So, I’ll try it out if I find myself in that situation which is very specific with another urgent need. Now, SAT is behind me except in scary dreams that come up from time to time. I guess I’m naked and unprepared for it. Cool.

Magdalena Yesil
Well, it just shows, first of all, I had a very nice boyfriend who was willing to help me out to make that journey to the exam, and that we were very resourceful. We actually were able to think of a way to get me to the other side of the Bosphorus.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Well, so, I want to talk about some of your resourcefulness. You’ve packed a whole lot of it in your most recent book called Power Up. What’s the main idea behind the book? And why is it important here and now?

Magdalena Yesil
Yeah, so Power Up: How Smart Women Win in the New Economy is really all about being resourceful and how I, in my career, was able to take advantage of the opportunities and really embrace them with both hands, and make do with whatever I had. And it wasn’t just me but also was other women, 27 others that I interviewed for the book – our learning, our experiences, our advice to the next generation.

What’s really heartwarming is that a lot of the reviews I read on the book are actually coming from men. I want to say maybe even more than 50% of the reviews are written by men. So, even though I originally wrote this book for young women, I feel that the advice applies across the board. It’s supposed to be incredibly pragmatic, incredibly easy to apply because when you are resourceful, when you don’t have very many resources in your hand, you make do with whatever you have. A lot of that actually translates to other generations, other geographies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you, and so I am eager to dig into some of these items. Your table of contents is so tantalizing. And so, I just want to just jump into the pieces that I found most intriguing. So, could we start off by sharing what is the power to flow and how do we get that?

Magdalena Yesil
So, I open the book with the most traditional way to basically send someone off on a journey, which is exactly what my friends and family did, as well as my neighbors, as I embarked on my journey to come to the United States. What people do is they take buckets of water and, as the individual is departing, they throw these buckets of water after the person as they’re driving away or walking away or taking a ferry.

The idea is that water always flows and gets to a destination, and they’re wishing the person leaving the ability to flow and get to where they want. Water flows around rocks and boulders, and if there’s a big barrier it usually finds cracks. Sometimes it goes underground and becomes underground streams. And that concept of flowing and when you’re faced with difficulty, sometimes when you’re faced with absolute no’s, and to be able to maneuver your way around has really helped me a lot in my career.

I’ve actually used that imagery for myself, and I do think it’s a strong imagery. What it means is that no one can stop me. I might not end up exactly where I wanted, I might not end up taking the journey I thought I was going to have, but I’m going to get to the other side one way or the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it’s about mindset and a visual and metaphor that sort of triggers that sense of conviction and motivation. That’s great in terms of starting in your brain. And so, then, when it comes into practice in terms of like the day-to-day, what are some things that you’re, in fact, doing, actions you’re taking to keep that flow of power going?

Magdalena Yesil
Well, some of the simplest things to do is when you want something to actually ask for it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Magdalena Yesil
You know, very often we want something and, for some reason, we are feeling like we cannot actually specifically put it on the table and ask for it. A good example, actually I share this in the book, is I wanted to be a speaker at a invite-only conference years back. I was the co-founder of a no-name company, I was a no-name person myself, and this was a conference that was really for the elite of the industry, of the technology industry.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re elite now.

Magdalena Yesil
Well, maybe so. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, those types of names would get invited, not a nobody startup founder. And I had the opportunity to actually have a meeting with the organizer of the conference, and as we were talking about this startup and the new technology, and as he was leaving I said to him, “Do you know my birthday is coming right up.” And he like looked at me like, “What does that have to do with anything?”

And I said, “Do you know what I want for my birthday more so than anything else?” And he took my bait and said, “What?” He probably thought, “What is she talking about?” I said, “What I want for my birthday, more than anything else, is to be a speaker at your conference.” And I said that because I knew that I would never get an invite as an attendee. The only way I would get invite is if I could actually bring something of real value that would allow me to be a speaker.

So, he laughed, he thought it was a cute joke, and that was the end of that but I put my request on the table. And, literally, about maybe four-five months later, I got an email from him. He was putting together a panel. One of the panelists was Scott Cook the founder of Intuit, a couple of other people from the financial industry, and he was very excited to invite me as well because I had a company that was creating a product called CyberCash which was an electronic payment for the, at the time, emerging e-commerce industry.

So, the bottom line is: ask; you may receive it. You may not, but if you don’t you didn’t lose anything. That’s a way to flow forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s excellent. And I’d love to zoom into the psyches of your readers and as you’ve engaged in conversations. What are some key reasons why people don’t ask? And what sort of the mental antidote to those excuses?

Magdalena Yesil
I think the hardest thing for people and the biggest barrier for not asking is being turned down. They feel that if they get turned down that will really be depressing, they will lose face, and they just don’t want to go there. So, the most important building block to being able to ask what you want is to actually convince yourself that if you are turned down that’s totally okay. It actually is not a disaster and it doesn’t take anything from your self-esteem. Once you convince yourself of that it gets much easier to ask.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, as I’m thinking about some things I’ve been a little bit hesitant or slow to ask for, I think it’s been kind of like I really, really want it and there’s not any direct urgency, and so I have maybe this conception that somehow I will be more worthy or impressive or persuasive if I do so at a different or later time. And I’m starting to think that that’s BS, that’s not actually true.

Magdalena Yesil
Yes, I totally agree with that. I think a lot of people feel that, “Well, tomorrow I might be in a better position to get a yes, so let me just hold off. Let me just wait until then. I might be in of higher stature or somehow things might have worked out for me and I might be in a much better position to get the final answer that I want.”

You know, that would be great but life doesn’t usually work that way, and if we postpone, tomorrow, who knows what will happen tomorrow, what will it bring. So, in my life, a sense of urgency has always been in me and with me. I have always had this desire to do it now, partly also I’m a very impatient person. So, asking today, I just want to get it over with. I want to put it on the table. Let them think about it now.

Pete Mockaitis
You know that’s a great point in that it’s sort of like upon what evidence or data do we have to suggest that delay will be good because there’s plenty of data points, from my own life, in which delay is bad? It’s like, “Oh, I was going to ask for that opportunity from that person I know who likes me, but that person no longer works there or no longer holds that title or role or position in order to extend that offer to me.” And so, it’s like the delay hurt me and the delay, it’s like there’s not much hard proof or evidence that it will help me.

Magdalena Yesil
Absolutely. And I think my impatience actually comes in handy here. I always feel like this is the best time now. Now is better than ever before or ever later so I embrace things that way. Sometimes I’m full of it, it doesn’t work out. I was just too premature. I just didn’t have the credentials or it wasn’t the right timing. But I’d rather step forward now than wait. And that’s usually working out for me.

You know, I’m doing a new startup right now so I’ve gone from being a venture capitalist and an angel investor with the power of the checkbook to being a very needy entrepreneur again. And this desire to just ask for things and put it all on the table so that others are thinking about it on my behalf as well, I’m back to that mode and it’s working out.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I know this is hard to pin you to a number, but I think it’s helpful context. So, when you ask for something, and maybe if you historically have thought, or others that you’ve advised thought, “Well, you know, I really have no business doing this. I’m not worthy yet. They don’t like me enough. I don’t have the credentials,” or whatever sort of. How often do you think people get yeses when you just put yourself out there person-to-person, face-to-face?

Magdalena Yesil
Yeah, let me tell you, more than 50%.

Pete Mockaitis
Booyah. Awesome.

Magdalena Yesil
Yeah, so it’s more than average. So, the good news, I feel, and the reason why I keep doing it and I recommend it to others, is that the probability of getting yes is actually much higher than you thought. And if that is, in fact, the case for others as well, then it becomes you get that positive feedback and you do it more.

Because I’ve asked in the past and I’ve gotten what I’ve wanted more than half the time, then I’m more likely to ask. If you never ask you’ll never get those statistics and you’ll probably just assume that, “Well, the probability is probably less than 5% I’ll be given what I’m asking for.”

I’m not talking about outrageous stuff, I’m not talking about going and asking for a big house or a big car or any of that. I’m talking about in your career, asking for a meeting, asking for the audience of someone, asking for feedback from someone you care about, asking to be included at a conference.

The professional ask, that make a lot of sense for your career even though it’s a little early for you and your career, extend yourself. If you’re not a VP of sales, act like you’re a VP of sales. If you’re not a director of engineering, act like you’re a director of engineering, so have that chutzpah to go ask for what you really feel maybe in the future you’ll deserve. Ask for it today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yes. That’s so good. And I’m thinking about I remember one time I met with someone who asked me, just randomly, didn’t know him at all, about when it comes to some advice about consulting or getting involved in it, and I said, “Oh, yeah, sure.” So, we chat and then I noticed he had this like detailed notebook of all the people he had reached to and talked to. I was like, “Wow, could you tell me how often total strangers like myself have said yes and agreed to meet and chat with you?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, let me crunch those numbers.”

And he told me that amongst total strangers it was about 28% of the time. And so, you put into context, you’re talking about a professional ask and someone that you have some kind of a connection or relationship or like-mindedness, affinity and affiliation in some way, that can really skyrocket past 50%, so that’s encouraging.

Magdalena Yesil
Yeah. The other thing I just would like to say is if you feel like you’re asking for something and it’s going to be really one-sided, meaning you’re going to be the beneficiary and the other people are really giving you, extending themselves for you, then think of what they will get out of it, and then make the ask. Because it’s almost much better to approach someone with something you want but also be able to articulate for them what it is they’re going to get so always think about it from the other side’s point of view as well, “If I make this request, are they actually going to benefit from giving me what it is that I’m asking for?” If you put it in that context, the probability of getting a yes goes up significantly.

Pete Mockaitis 
Perfect. Okay. Cool. Well, now to totally change gears, I wanted to get your take on how one goes about developing gravitas?

Magdalena Yesil
Oh, okay. Well, gravitas is a word that I truly use over and over again that I really feel has guided my career as a woman in technology, and it’s a concept that I like to promote especially for young women. What is gravitas? Gravitas is your dignity and your seriousness all combined together in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Magdalena Yesil
What it is is the way you carry yourself, the way you dress, the way you make eye contact with someone when you first meet them and shake their hand, it’s your openness, your friendliness, and yet your seriousness, your professionalism. Put it all together and you create a package which is basically communicating to the person across from you, “I am just as serious as you. I mean to win just like you do. I am your equal. And I may be just a tiny bit better.” That is a great place to start.

I think that I did that as a kid, I did that as a young adult partly because I really grew up in an environment where things weren’t necessarily being handed to me. I didn’t always feel like I was the equal of other people but I wanted to make sure that other people knew that I felt I was their equal. So, communicating that very, very early in relationships in your workplace is so important for young women because it sets the tone. It basically subconsciously sends the message to those that are working with you that you mean business and nothing else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so now, I’d love it if you could maybe just really break that down in terms of you mentioned the smile and the handshake and such. So, could you give us some examples that you see frequently in terms of gravitas-conveying versus gravitas-destroying behaviors you see time and time again as you meet and interact with people?

Magdalena Yesil
So, I think gravitas, let’s just start with dress because that’s the external packaging and it’s easy to decipher what it communicates. I have my whole professional career, and you have to realize at 21 years old I was a semiconductor design engineer in a semiconductor company back in the early ‘80s, and the world was quite different.

I mean, it was technology industry was extremely male dominated especially in semiconductors. I was the only woman almost always in my work environments so, for me, it was very clear that I had to communicate a real professional image. And dress actually says a lot about what your intent is, why you’re there.

I know that as we’ve gone to casual Fridays, and then we’ve gone into casual dress, it has become the acceptable norm for dress has become much wider. And with that actually there’s a lot of confusion on the recipient’s end. So, personally, for me, my dress going to work has looked very different than my dress on the weekends or my dress going out at night.

My going-to-work dress has always been extremely serious, extremely professional, and I’ve always looked to see if I can dress as if I’m someone at a higher level in the organization than my current level. So, as a young woman, as a 24-year old, 25-year old, I really wanted to look much more like one of those VPs. Now, it happens to be there were no female VPs in my company but there were female VPs in adjacent industries, other industries, so I wanted to dress for a role I was aspiring to not just dress for my role of today.

And I know it sounds very old-fashioned but it certainly has made a very big difference for me. Also, I think, when you meet someone, to really have the posture of standing up really on your own two feet, to have a firm handshake, to put out your hand first, especially if you’re with a man, shaking their hand. For the woman to extend their hand first, what it shows is power. It shows actually affirmative behavior. It shows, “I am choosing to shake your hand versus I’m reacting to you.”

And pretty much everything, it’s taking that first step. It just replete with so many subtle messages. And gravitas means that, as a young woman, you are leading. You know what you want in that relationship, and you’re taking charge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I’m thinking when you talk about so many subtle messages, I think a lot of it is even below the realm of our consciousness in terms of what we’re doing and what we’re putting out there. And yet, I think if you have that sense of belief, I guess I’m also thinking kind of method acting here in terms of rather than an actor fixating on, “Okay, I can do this with my eyebrows, and this with my hands, and this with my chest,” and sort of hitting a series of movements that they want to convey an emotion. Rather they just get into the place where they feel that emotion.

Magdalena Yesil
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, all these things flow naturally. So, I guess, I’m thinking maybe a central sort of belief or attitude is, “Does someone really believe and feel that they are equal to the people that they’re speaking with or engaging with, or that they are just a worker and someone so much more impressive and influential and amazing relative to them?” So, how do you think about, I guess, just the fundamental mindsets self-belief stuff there?

Magdalena Yesil
Yeah. Well, I think it, unfortunately, usually starts very early in our lives and, therefore, if we have children it’s very important to ingrain in them that sense of self-confidence, and we can talk about that some more. But it’s that self-confidence that comes through. You’re absolutely right, and the advice I give in Power Up: How Smart Women Win in the New Economy is all about dressing and stuff that makes you feel powerful, because if you do, if you are walking out of your house, and you say to yourself, “Wow, I really look good. I feel powerful. I feel just so great today,” you’re going to communicate that to people.

I have a story in the book about my college classmate, Christy Wagner, who basically had nothing to do with the computer industry. She had a great degree in biology, but she got a computer industry job. and I said, “Christy, how do you do it? You don’t know this stuff.” I had a double degree. So, it was like I was just amazed she had so much self-confidence she got a job. She said, “You know what, I put on my bitch in clothes and I get out of my house, and I walk into that office and I feel so good.” And, sure enough, she was incredibly successful because she had that attitude. It didn’t take her very long to learn.

She obviously was a smart woman, she was a quick study, but it was that attitude that carried her forward. She didn’t walk in saying, “Well, I’m not good at this, I’m not good at that. And these other people, please, let me sit all the way in the back and not get noticed.” No, she put herself out there and people took her lead. She looked like she knew what she was doing and they believed that she knew what she was doing.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I really like how you’ve zoomed in on clothes and how they make you feel. And I’m kind of reflecting on I remember there was a number of occasions I went on a speed-dating event in sort of the same event, same place across multiple years. And one year I had some shirts that were sort of custom-made to my measurements, and so I just sported one of those. And what do you know? That year I had like three times as many women interested.

Magdalena Yesil
Isn’t that the truth? Because you felt so great.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. And I’m sure part of it was, “Hey, it looks good,” but a huge part of it is that I felt a sense of comfort and confidence. And, for me, I think, when it comes to clothes, fit is really king. It’s like, “Is it kind of pinching and tugging or billowing? Or is it just, ‘Hmm, perfect.’?”

Magdalena Yesil
Perfect, yes. And the key is, of course, whatever it is for you, figure that out. Put on those clothes. See which clothes make you feel better. It might not be your clothes. It might be your hair. It might be something else. But whatever it is, embrace it, because if you feel great about yourself, others will think the same.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. You know, I also think it’s really powerful to be able to reflect upon victory moments and accomplishments and achievements, and so that those are more top of mind than the times that you totally screwed up in a similar context. So, any other quick tips on the confidence game?

Magdalena Yesil
So, I always feel that what works for me is projecting myself in a winning position that I really want. So, if I really want to close a customer or turn a prospect into a customer, I will think about them six months out and we’re having a celebration dinner because actually our software has really increased their sales, and they’re telling us how fantastic it has been.

So, I do these mental imagery that makes me feel like I actually have made my customers’ life so much better, I have increased their business, I have solved the problem that they couldn’t solve before, I brought efficiency. And when I create these images for myself, I start believing that, in fact, our software can do that. So, when I meet them, I am talking to them with so much more passion, with so much more conviction.

And same thing when you’re fundraising. When you’re fundraising as an entrepreneur you’re sitting across from venture capitalists, they’re all powerful because they happen to have the money. But are they? You are actually the one who’s going to make them money. You actually are the one that they should be chasing because if they’re not an investor in your company but others are, they’re going to feel so sorry. They’re going to feel so left out.

So, getting yourself, doing these pep talks with yourself, “I’m going to meet that investor but, in fact, that investor, you know, I’m giving them the opportunity to invest in me. I’m giving them the half hour that they might not have then deserved, but I will give it to them.” And let the other side feel that it’s really an honor to be with you. It’s really an opportunity to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so fun. And I think there’s some gurus about pitching, and I’ll find them and have them on the show one of these days. That’s kind of a huge part of their whole approach, and people say, “They don’t ask for the money. They just take the money.”

Magdalena Yesil
Exactly. And, listen, I have done a lot of pitching at Salesforce where I’m the first investor and founding board member. We could not raise a penny of venture capital, and it’s hard to believe that with Salesforce now building the tallest building west of the Mississippi. But it’s not always easy, and yet we never got discouraged just because VCs didn’t get it. We just said, “Hey, they’re not just as smart as we thought they would be.”

So, it’s that attitude really comes in and helps you out when things are not going your way, and that ability to flow. So, we went and found money from private investors. You know, it took a lot more work because we raised it in small chunks but so be it. We were going to persevere.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, once again, to dramatically change the topic, but I think there’s probably some good overlap at the same time. I’d like your perspective on how can one be better heard at meetings? And I’m thinking about some scenarios where it’s almost comical or enraging where two people sort of say just about the same thing, and one is just sort of, “Eh,” brushed aside, and the other one, people sort of vigorously nod, like, “Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I’m excited about what you’ve said.” So, what’s behind that? How are you better heard there?

Magdalena Yesil
Yeah, I’m going to address that, but before that, I want to say something else. And that is if you’re sitting in a meeting and you’re thinking something, which we all do, but you’re holding off on saying it, don’t hold off. Say it. Because if you’re thinking of a thought that you think the rest of the team should hear, this is actually value-add to the group, but you’re holding off. There’s a chance every minute you hold off, there’s a chance someone else will say it before you.

So, again, it comes back to that, you know, be bold. So, rule number one is if you think of something that you think is worthwhile in a meeting, don’t just talk to hear yourself talk. You’ve got to have something to say that’s really worthwhile. But if you think it’s worthwhile, don’t hold off. Don’t be musing in your head how you should be saying it, and repeating it. Also, the more you think about a thought and try to say it just the right way, the less you’re listening to whatever else is going on in the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Magdalena Yesil
Right? So, it’s much better to get it out of your chest so that you can actually pay attention to what’s going on. Now, number two, the question you asked me, and that is you have said it and the conversation continued as if no one even really heard you, or maybe someone said something. And then, about five minutes later, if you’re a woman, it’s usually a man, who says something almost exactly the same or very, very similar, and people say, “Wow, that was great, Greg. Good for you. That is a very good observation.”

Now, what do you do? You sit there, usually just do and feel so horrible, and really start saying, “Oh, life is so unfair. Women, we will never be able to have an equal chance to be heard.” You know, don’t go there. Don’t make yourself a victim. Instead, what I recommend you do is you say, “Greg, thank you so very much for amplifying what I said a few minutes ago, and I really appreciate it. Thank you, because when I said it the team didn’t seem like they picked up on it, so I really appreciate you underscoring what I said.” What did you do? You just took the credit back. You didn’t get angry, you didn’t get sour, you didn’t start saying, “Oh, gosh, I will never get recognition. Look at this guy. He copied me.”

Okay. So, the other thing that I say about meetings is if you’re kind of a timid person, and not everyone is as aggressive as sometimes these companies require you to be, if you’re sort of on the timid side, find someone who can actually be your amplifier in a meeting, one of your colleagues. If you’re female it’s probably better to find a male colleague to be your amplifier. What do I mean by that?

When you make a comment that is worthwhile, your amplifier would say, “Just like Magdalena said, I agree,” and give you credit and repeat what you just said. That person just amplified you, gave you credit so that the rest of the team doesn’t forget that was your idea, and put it back on the table when maybe you weren’t getting as much attention to your point.

An amplifier is such a great tool to use in your career. And what do you do for that amplifier? You become their amplifier. You become the one that does it for him, and it’s a symbiotic relationship. And, especially if you’re the timid one, you learn how to speak up to second your friends’, your colleagues’ ideas. And sometimes it’s easier to second someone else than to come up with your original idea, so it’s great practice for public speaking as well, speaking up in a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, in your example, in which you said, “Thank you, Greg, for amplifying what I said previously,” I’m wondering if there are some sort of misbehaving professionals who are kind of credit-stealing or just would feel furious if you sort of reasserted your claim to the credit for the idea in the meeting. Any pro tips on navigating those waters?

Magdalena Yesil
So, I think that if you have the right, and if you are feeling like you are in control, and someone maybe belittles you for what you said, or they don’t give you credit, or they just actually still walk over you, that’s okay. You’ll do it again in the next meeting. It’s just a practice. You’re not going to win each one so you have to have some patience as well that you’re not always going to get the credit, but to hang in there and to make a practice of it. And, over time, people will actually learn to listen to you because they’ll realize that if they don’t give you the time of day you’re going to come back and ask for it.

Pete Mockaitis
And along these lines I’m wondering about environments in which sometimes Dr. Evil who inquired, “Why must I be surrounded by idiots?” I think there are times when there are professionals who are good and smart and sharp, and yet it’s like both their bosses and their colleagues all seem obliviously unaware of something that’s just so clearly true and right and good and necessary. And it seems like they don’t even get or appreciate how you are raising critical factors.

And so, I have a number of ideas are coming to mind whether it’s people are doing some group collaborations and trying to win over a big customer or grant. And it’s like, “Hey, you straight up have errors or inconsistencies in this proposal that you’re putting forward. Like, come on now.” So, I think that’s a uniquely tricky situation. But I’d love your view on that one, too.

Magdalena Yesil
Well, first of all, if you don’t have a supportive boss, if you have a boss who is minimizing you or ignoring you, it probably is time to find another boss because there’s no one more important for your career advancement than your current boss. And I cannot stress that enough, and I do talk about a boss as potentially a sponsor where they are actually trying to open up doors for you and help you advance in your career.

Now, we cannot always find another job, we cannot always find another boss. Sometimes we’re just stuck with a situation. And there, what I would do is I would pull my boss aside, and say, “What is it that I need to do to actually have you hear me better, to actually have you give me more credit? Because you know what, I work for you. If I win, you win. I’m here to make you look better. So, how can we collaborate more? How can I actually really move your career forward?”

So, you put it always in terms of the other person. What can you bring to them? How can you make their career better? How can you help them get the recognition from the CEO? Then they’ll actually listen to you because you’re giving them a very personal reason to collaborate with you. Then it’s no longer about you; it’s about them. And then, over time, they might actually start confiding in you and coming to you, asking you to do certain things. So, it’s that level of collaboration with your boss and with some of the higher ups in the organization. If you think everyone that’s around you is kind of an idiot and they just don’t get it, you’re at the wrong company.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got it. Well, Magdalena, I think we can go for hours, but I might need to push fast-forward a little bit. So, can you tell me, is there anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear quickly about some of your favorite things?

Magdalena Yesil
Yeah, so I think the most important thing, and I open the book with this, is not being afraid to fail, because if we are afraid to fail we will never really be able to take risks. We’re always going to go down to the common denominator. The ability to fail, to accept failure, and say, “You know what, I’m going to probably fail multiple times before I get to where I want to go.” That is really an important mindset. And I certainly have failed multiple times in my careers. They were painful processes but they made me much stronger. And the one thing I knew was that no failure was ever going to stop me.

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

Magdalena Yesil
I don’t know if it’s inspiring, but a quote that I think very often, that one of my old bosses used to say is, “You get nothing for trying.” It’s kind of a harsh quote, but he’s absolutely right, and the first time he said that to me I was very taken aback, “I get nothing for trying?” Like, Americans like saying, “Nice try. Good try.” But he said, “No, you get nothing. There’s no result. Okay, maybe you’ll learn something.”

So, I often say to myself when I think about him, “I have to get whatever I’m going after. Just that I tried and I didn’t get there is okay. I failed. I’m not afraid of failure but it is not a good try. It’s the goal that I’m really after.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Magdalena Yesil
Well, my favorite study is actually one that I did very many years ago when I was looking for a job and I couldn’t find one, and I was trying to figure out how I could be an entrepreneur because I couldn’t find an employer. I did the very first internet user study, and that really put me on the map. I actually got a speaking spot at a conference at the very first internet conference, I presented, and I went from being a nobody to being somebody and actually someone who got regarded as an expert. And then I found my co-founder for my first entrepreneurial company.

So, doing the user study at an area, you’re going to learn a lot. If you can fund it yourself, great. If not, study up with others, but I do actually think conducting studies is a great way to gain expertise in some of the new fields that are emerging.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Magdalena Yesil
Alice in Wonderland.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And a favorite tool?

Magdalena Yesil
My favorite tool ever is a smile. It really works.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And how about a favorite habit?

Magdalena Yesil
Asking every day as I drive to work, or as I commute to work on ferry, or walking to work, whatever it is I’m doing, I always ask myself, “If there was only one thing I could accomplish today, what would they be? What would that be?” I want to everyday establish the most important task for myself, and then tell myself that I cannot leave that office until I’ve accomplished that.

It’s amazingly hard to accomplish even one simple task sometimes because the day gets so crowded and you become so reactive especially if people are working for you and they’re constantly coming to talk to you. So, making that decision every day there’s one task, I have to get this done, it’s the highest leverage, and if I don’t get it done I’m not leaving that office until I get it done.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you share in your book and speaking and working with folks that seems to really connect and resonate, getting them quoting it back to you often?

Magdalena Yesil
I think the biggest quote I have gotten out of this book is people telling me that they themselves have started using the imagery of flowing especially when things don’t go well for them or they don’t go as they predicted or wanted. That thought that, “Okay, I will find a way around this because I’m like water. You cannot stop water. It might stop for a little while but then it’ll become a roaring waterfall on the other side.”

So, it’s amazing how I thought no one would really embrace that, they would think that the whole concept of people throwing water after you as you depart is some arcane habit of a different culture, but it really seems to resonate with people.

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

Magdalena Yesil
To Magdalena.com. Also, you can find me on Twitter, on LinkedIn as Magdalena Yesil.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Magdalena Yesil
Never be a victim. Never. Never let anybody make you feel like a victim. And take the word “hurt” out of your professional vocabulary. The workplace is never a place to feel hurt.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Magdalena, thanks so much for sharing this perspective. Powerful stuff. It served you well and I think will serve many listeners as well, so please keep doing what you’re doing, and it’s been great chatting.

Magdalena Yesil
I hope it will help very many especially young people push forward in their careers and get to where they want.

Dec 06
0

238: The Ingredients of a Great First Impression with Ann Demarais

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Ann Demarais says: "Always try to find one thing to tweak, one way to be just slightly better, and be mindful of that."

Executive coach Ann Demarais highlights ways to become more socially generous and how to make an awesome first impression.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The most common interpersonal flaws–and how to fix them
  2. Four universally-appreciated social gifts that you can give
  3. How to bounce back from a bad first impression

About Ann 

 

Ann Demarais, the founder of First Impressions, has more than 20 years of experience in applied psychology, specializing in interpersonal communication, impression management, social skills, and executive coaching. She works with senior executives who want to enhance their leadership impact.  She was a consultant to the Social Intelligence Program at Columbia University Business School; her client list includes Verizon, Hilton Hotels, Disney, Bank of America, Xerox, CitiGroup, JPMorgan, and the FBI among many others.  Ann is co-author of First Impressions: What You Don’t Know About How Others See You, which was published by Random House and translated into 24 languages.  Ann holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from New York University.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Ann Demarais Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ann, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Ann Demarais
Oh, I’m so excited, Pete. Thanks for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think we’re going to have so much fun at the end of this. And I understand that there is an interesting backstory behind your company First Impressions. Can we hear it?

Ann Demarais
Well, I started First Impressions from doing a lot of executive coaching and leadership workshops in the corporate world, and I realized that the core skills that actually make you awesome at work and in life are interpersonal skills and self-presentation, so I took some of the corporate methodologies to the personal world as well, and give people feedback by how they come across not just in business settings but in job interviews and even simulated first states. And we do seminars on these topics, so it’s really a deep dive into self-presentation.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, simulated first states, is that something that you came up with as a means of helping folks improve their skills? Or how did that emerge?

Ann Demarais
Yes, we realized that this kind of methodology of giving people feedback about how they come across is really, really powerful but was only available to people in the corporate world or actually in the other end in like psychiatric hospitals, but for the average man on the street there wasn’t an opportunity to get feedback about how they come across socially and interpersonally.

So, my business partner at the time, Valerie White and I started this business where we would thought, “Who will be most interested?” and we thought people on the dating world, so we actually did create and launched the very first – others are doing it now – but we had the very first simulated first state business model.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. And so, then, I have some friends, we’ve talked about how some people could use some help and we’d be happy to give it to them, so that must’ve been interesting.

Ann Demarais
Yeah, and it’s awkward to give it to your friends so that’s why it’s helpful to go to a professional. So, yes, it was really interesting, met fabulous people, and people learned a real lot. They have blind spots they never knew before. They got that kind of feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, yeah, that’s exactly what I’d like to go next in terms of these blind spots. What are some of things you see over and over again, that people, they just don’t even realize others are perceiving or inferring about them?

Ann Demarais
Well, there’s so many ways that we do some things, Pete, that are positive and send a positive message, and then there’s some things we do that send unintended negative messages, and so there’s a lot of ways that people kind of blind spots. We just don’t see ourselves the way others do. Like when we hear ourselves on audio or even video tape, it seems awkward, so there’s lots of these blind spots.

So, some of the common ones, which I can share a little bit of, is, well, one is called conversational narcissism, and that means talking a lot about yourself, using “I” statements, and talking about your world, your family, your work, etcetera. And it’s actually more common than you realize, and people just sometimes aren’t aware that they’re going on about themselves just because it’s interesting and top of mind.

But it’s an easy fix if you know you have this tendency or you find yourself speaking a little bit more, a little bit longer than you intended about yourself. You can just shift and say, “So, tell me, Pete, about you and tell me about your world. I was just talking about X. You share what you’re doing in that area.” So, it’s a common flaw with an easy fix.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. What else?

Ann Demarais
Well, another one, there’s people that do research, interestingly, about topics and which are the most appealing and least appealing. The least appealing topic is what they called negative egocentrism. That’s complaining about one’s problems. Again, these top of minds, like the big ones, “My computer glitched.” “My iPhone has this problem.” These kinds of things are really, really boring to other people, especially people you’ve just met.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Ann, I really appreciate you saying this because sometimes people do this, and I’m thinking, “I don’t care,” and then I feel like, “Oh, Pete, you should be more compassionate. You should be more kind in listening.” But you’re telling me, “No, Pete, it’s universally people don’t really want to hear it.”

Ann Demarais
We could talk about how to turn that more positively but it is a universally-unappealing topic, and you’re reacting the way most people do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m not jerk.

Ann Demarais
But sometimes we all might fall into a pattern of whining about this so it’s a good thing to have a little self-check about, “I’ve complained about a problem I might have.” It’s good to remember that it’s really an unappealing and it’s a real downer.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ann Demarais
So, another thing that research has shown is, again, this negativity thing. speaking negatively about other, so if you describe someone as being like lazy and tedious, or boring or something, we have this mental modeling, they call it, where we sometimes leave the conversation confused, and sometimes remember you as the person with those negative traits.

So, if on the other hand you describe someone, your colleague that’s like really creative and strategic and fun and all these things, after the conversation, people might project those qualities on you, so it’s in your self-interest. First of all, it’s more interesting and not as boring as this negative, but it’s in your self-interest to speak positively about other people. It creates a good vibe and it actually makes you seem more awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Oh, I like that. So very, very helpful stuff there in terms of narcissism as me, me, me, me, me, complaining about a problem that I’m experiencing, speaking negatively about others are all sort of, it sounds like are some universal things that are not a winning approach. And so, then, I’d love to get your take then when it comes to some of the particulars that we have, our own blind spots, by definition, I guess we don’t know about them. So, how can we know how we’re making other people feel? I understand you got a framework associated with four ways to focus.

Ann Demarais
Yeah. So, at any conversation with, say, two people, there’s different ways we focus. The first is how I’m feeling. So, if I’m meeting a new client I might be feeling nervous or confident or uncomfortable or whatever, just pops to my awareness. It’s a natural focus. But then, after a little while, I might think, “Okay. Well, how do I think about this other person? What are my thoughts or feelings about them?”

And then the third way is, eventually if I know I’m being evaluated like I’m on a client pitch or a job interview, I might think, “What’s this person? What’s Pete thinking about me? I’m kind of curious about that.” But the one way we don’t typically focus is on how is that person feeling about him or herself, and how is my interaction with them impacting them, with the aim to like be more socially generous.

So, if you use it as a framework to be socially generous, make other people feel better about themselves, you’ll make a more awesome impression.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Ann, I dig that because I was chucking along, I was like, “Okay, this is like a little two-by-two we’re talking about here in terms of us and them and then the feelings.” And you’re right, how are they feeling about themselves is not active question that I’m pursuing in my internal dialogue very much. And so, I guess I’m wondering, how could we even know how they’re feeling about themselves? And what are some key things that we can do to, I guess, help them feel better if they’re feeling bad in certain ways?

Ann Demarais
Well, it’s a good question. Yeah, it’s a really good question. People are saying, like, “Well, I’d like to be more socially generous. I give money to charity but I don’t think about giving to other people.” And people have different things they like out of interactions but there some universals. We call them social gifts, things that most people like.

So, there’s four of them. The first one is feeling appreciated. So, if you have a colleague that said something that you think is interesting or does something creative, and you point that out rather than remaining quiet, then that people feel good and they feel like you respect their talents or accomplishments. It’s just a universally positive thing to feel respected in that regard.

The next one is feeling connected. We all like to feel part of a larger, connected, interdependent group. So, if you say something, and I say, “I feel the same way, too,” or, “I share that value,” or, “I have that experience,” or, “I agree with you.” That makes that, that’s a gift of connection.

The third one is just making people feel a sense of elevation, a little levity. We probably all know people that when you talk to them, they put a smile on your face, you’re happy. Most people it’s kind of neutral, and then there’s kind of the Debbie-downers, so it’s good to think about, “What about you? Do you like…?” It doesn’t mean you have to be a jokester, but just having more kind of uplifting manner and mood about you is a gift. Most people like to feel elevated.

And the last is what we call enlightenment, like providing information, sharing your ideas, or having new information, or putting things out on the table there. It makes you more interesting, and it’s enlightening them with more fun facts and things. So, having these four things, if maybe you know someone offhand that kind of provides you with these things, makes you feel smart and puts you in a fun mood, and they’re interesting, very charismatic, really strong leadership qualities.

But if you’re like most people, you may have a stronger suit like you might be really informative but you don’t get out of your way to make people feel appreciated, so you might be depriving them of that kind of feeling and warmth, and you’re not as generous in that area. If you think about maybe where you are strong and weak you can tweak that and go out of your way to say, “Gee, I don’t really go out.” Think about complimenting people, and, “Maybe I should, in a genuine way, and that will make them feel better, and so they’ll feel better from having interacted with me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I’m right now thinking about my former roommate, Dave, who just everybody loves, and I think he very much does some of these things in terms of appreciating and respecting, feeling connected, and then the levity and enlightenment. And sometimes I’m just thinking about a time where I was playing some old-school dorky computer game that I love in my childhood called Master of Orion, and I was all fired up because you’re trying to take over the galaxy and that’s the idea, it’s like, “nobody really cares if you start talking about this to people.”

So, I was playing the game and I went back to the kitchen, and he’s like, “Hey, how are you doing?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m awesome because I’ve got all these missile bases, they can’t touch me and I’m just smoking the other guys.” And he’s like, “Well, how many missile bases do you have?” I was like, “Well, I’ve got like 120.” He’s like, “How many do they have?” And I was like, “Forty.” And he’s like, “Wow! You’re going to destroy them.”

Ann Demarais
So, he was like generally interested and totally engaged in your world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I don’t think he was really interested, but in a way there was that levity in that he’s going to appreciate and respect me in so far as he’s like, “I know you’re excited about this right now, and I think that’s cool. I like that you’re excited and we can sort of connect about that a little bit.” And then we can just have a little bit of a laugh associated with, “Well, what if those missile bases have some crazy shields. What do I do?”

[00:12:12]

And so, I thought that was just noteworthy because, well, everyone loves Dave, and Dave engaged me in that conversation in a way that most people really don’t. It’s like, “All right. Good luck, dude.” So, they just conclude it pretty quickly.

Ann Demarais
Right. So, he was connecting and elevating and actually respecting how many bases you had or whatever, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I think the levity in particular is just like I don’t know how you teach or to deliver that, but I guess part of it is smiles and laughs and eye contact and a vocal intonation, that’s like, “Oh,” that sounds a little kind of interested. But what are some of the key ways or practices, I should say, that folks who bring that?

Ann Demarais
Part of it is being in the moment. I mean, he was in the moment. He was listening intently. He was engaging and really exploring that, so that’s a really good thing. And also finding fun in something, like sort of the positive, “Hey, this is so great. Pete is having a great time.” Like you said, he’s like just feeding off of that positive mood and giving you back more of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s great way to say it, feeding off the positive mood and giving back more of it. And I think when it comes to the appreciation, sometimes, I recall once I was on a date and it wasn’t so great, and I was wondering, “Why is that?” And maybe one or both of us could’ve used your services to have improved it. And I think it was like I would say something and she just sort of said, “Okay.” It’s almost like the opposite of improv, “Yes, and…” instead of entering my world. Maybe it was silly. Maybe it was different. I don’t know. Maybe it was odd. I don’t know.

But instead of entering that world, she just sort of put the kibosh on it as opposed to even just acknowledging something that someone said and then taking another step into it, I think, it feels like you’re being appreciated.

Ann Demarais
Yes, it’s a strong feeling, right? It feels really good. And, back to that, asking open-ended questions, which was what your roommate was doing, like, “How many?” and just exploring. And rather than having this sort of superficial conversations where it just ends or asking a close-ended question, that shows a genuine curiosity. And cultivating that actually yields unexpected results.

Like sometimes we don’t think this person is going to be interesting. And if you explore a little below the surface you find really interesting things in people. And so, if you can let go of our self-focus, really explore, discover other people, you can find lots of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share, maybe in terms of that curiosity, I guess maybe some of the questions that you ask yourself to stoke the curiosity, as well as questions you ask your conversation partner to get into more intriguing realms of conversation?

Ann Demarais
Yes, so showing interests is one of the most important fundamentals of making a positive impression. And if you remember nothing else from this, this is one of the most powerful techniques to use, is to show interests. There’s a physical focus in the eye contact, these open-ended questions, and then one of the easiest things to do is to say, “Oh, that reminds me of me. I used to play this other video game, and let me tell you about that, and this fantastic time when I blew up all the galaxies.” It’s very easy to segue back to our own world and steal the spotlight away.

So, it’s one thing to be super mindful of even if you’re dying to share your story to try to keep the spotlight on the other person, and that means really managing your distractions and being able to stay in the moment with that person and relate to what they’re saying. It’s not that hard to do. It just takes a little bit of practice and a little bit of checking some tendencies of segueing.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Ann Demarais
Sometimes people even segue back to themselves as a way to showcase some positive qualities about themselves, so they sometimes do it deliberately to like talk about themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
“One time I conquered the galaxy when I was outnumbered five-to-one.”

Ann Demarais
Exactly. So, that’s a really, really important fundamental of making an awesome impression. So, part of what we do – and, by the way, we have a book called First Impressions – What You Don’t Know About How Others See You – is break it down into what are the key things that make people have a strong impression and come across awesomely, that’s one of the big ones. Making yourself accessible with your body language and mood, being more proactive in introducing yourself rather than passive, is it allows people to kind of connect with you and feel more comfort around you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s just a matter of walking right up to folks and saying hello and shaking hands. Or any particulars to note there?

Ann Demarais
Oh, you know, we’ve all walked into a party or a conference where we really don’t know anyone, and there’s a sort of the choice between sort of standing in the corner with your cocktail or going up and introducing yourself, and it’s a discomfort that lot of us have to overcome. So, having that, you’ll look better and you’ll look more confident and you’ll feel better if you take the active versus the passive approach. Go up to a person that’s standing alone who’s probably dying to talk to someone.

Be okay with going up to other people. Invite other people to join you. It makes other people feel more comfortable around you. You’re easy to connect with. Now, obviously, in some situations people are going to be having an intense conversation that you can’t bust into. But if you practice more often, just going up and saying, “I’m Pete. I’m with this organization, blah, blah, blah,” it just makes everyone more comfortable around you and then they could see you in that light.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got that showing interests, we got the accessibility. What are some of the other key fundamentals?

Ann Demarais
All right. So, then, you’re at a conference and you’d have to figure out what to talk about, your mutual blank slates. What do you talk about? Do you jump into your position on gun control or politics? So, generally, you want to like sort of ease in. You want to like establish trust and comfort with someone before you jump into like more heady things that are even more interesting but it really sounds kind of banal but talking about just the moment, the weather, the situation, the music that’s playing, that just makes people feel like you’re a nice and normal person and we’re sharing the same space.

Then talk about the facts, like, “Hey, what’s going on in the company?” or, “What’s going on in this conference?” and just sharing those kinds of things. And then, if you have that kind of trust and rapport, then you can talk more about opinions, “Hey, what do you think about that speaker?” or, “What do you think about what’s going on in the office politics, etcetera?” You can go into that. Then if you disagree you still have such a foundation of maybe connection that you can work through those things and really enjoy that person rather than jumping into things.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s’ why I like that segmentation there in terms of a) the situation, b) facts, and c) opinions, because opinions, even if they’re not like, I don’t know, gun control, abortion, Donald Trump, insert high-controversy matter. Even if the opinion is like the speaker, that does feel a little bit, well, I guess maybe significantly more sensitive in so far as, “Well, I don’t know, is that speaker like your cousin? I thought they’re really boring,” that might be offensive to you.

Or, if this is a high point of passion for you, and I say that, “I thought it was dumb and completely unnecessary,” that could be destructive. So, you’re right, like the opinion, even if it’s maybe potentially innocuous, like the speaker or the food, that is more sensitive than facts or the situation.

Ann Demarais
So, it’s just easing in and establishing trust and connection, and then you can go a little bit further. And it’s important in the beginning to kind of be brief and then make sure that you’re not talking at people and you’re talking with them. Sometimes people fall into a pattern of sermonizing, trying to convince people of their way of thinking, Lecturing. Men tend to do a little bit of this. They know something out of topic and they like to talk about it, male-pattern lecturing.

When I talk to men after they do this, they often say it makes them feel good. They feel like they’re informing people. They feel smart. And so, it’s just you have to remember that you’re pinning someone as an audience member, depriving them, again, of those other social gifts. Women have a tendency to tell long stories about people that other people don’t know, “My friend is having this relationship problem, blah, blah, blah,” that is unappealing in a lot of situations.

So, you want to be careful not to go into kind of talking at people, not getting too heavy or banal. So those are some ways to sort of think about topics of the world. Then another thing that’s helpful to know is to self-disclose. We all sort of know that we should share basic demographics about ourselves. The more you do, I mean, there’s this whole movement towards being authentic at work, right? So, you want to be like a whole person and be honest.

And then, if you do share parts of yourself, then people feel more trust and psychological safety with you, they’re easier to collaborate with you. Of course, there are some guardrails. You want to keep it, again, having some levity and you don’t want to go into something that’s too deep and personal and making people feel awkward. But if you can give people portals to talk to you about things other than work they feel more comfortable around you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good.

Ann Demarais
So, things that are good to share are like your passions, what really sparks you, what galaxies you like to go to, etcetera, vulnerabilities are humanizing, “You know, I screwed up on this. I feel like such a dope or whatever.” It just makes you feel – it makes people feel comfortable around you.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then, I’d love a couple of guidelines there with regard to how much is too much. It seems like my hunch is you could probably disclose a bit more vulnerability than you feel like you can disclose, hence the word vulnerable and what it means. But do you have any kind of clear don’ts with regard to your self-disclosure?

Ann Demarais
I don’t know if there’s any hard or fast rules, but you might want to sort of match. So, if you share something, and someone shares something back, that’s giving you kind of the green light, but if people seem uncomfortable then you might be oversharing. And, again, a lot of like negative stuff, you had this knockdown dragged out fight with your significant other the night before might be uncomfortable for people to hear so you might want to be kind of careful about that. But that said, the more people feel complimented if you share things about yourself than they wouldn’t know unless you share with them. It says, “I like you.” It says, “I trust you.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s really true. I’m thinking about some people, and it’s like, “Man, you know what? I feel like I’m really close with that guy.” And then I come to learn, “Wait a minute, he discloses that with everybody.” So, I guess I’m still close with that guy but I guess I’m not like special.

Ann Demarais
You thought he was your closest buddy.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. But I had inferred that we had a pretty privilege relationship based upon, “Well, he really just sort of shared what was going on with that girl and her moving and all the implications of how it’s tough.” It’s like, “Man, me and this guy, we’re tight.” And then it’s like, “Oh, I guess he’s shared that with many people.”

Ann Demarais
But you had that experience, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, yes.

Ann Demarais
The compliment, “He likes me enough,” right?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Ann Demarais
So, I mean, I think the more better, you have to sort of understand that the culture of the workplace that you’re in, which is going to vary, but, yes, it makes people feel more comfortable around you.

So, the next fundamental is kind of the dynamics of the conversation, like the rhythm, the speed, the intensity, who talks more, etcetera. You’ve probably all been in meetings where you notice that some people talk a lot more than other people. The natural extroverts are going to just narrate their thoughts and ramble, and the natural introverts maybe need a little bit more time to speak and will speak less.

So, these things really affect how people show up and how much that they share and how they make other people feel, so it’s really helpful to think about yourself. Like if you’re in a meeting of four people, you should probably be speaking, on average, a quarter of the time. Are you someone that typically speaks more than your quarter or less than your quarter, kind of thing? And so, being able to synchronize with the other person will really increase the quality of your interaction and how they feel around you.

So, some tips for this. If you’re an over-talker, before you go into a meeting, give yourself a budget, “I only get X number of minutes,” whatever the math gives you, and kind of like highlight the key things you want to speak to. If you’re someone that kind of under-speaks, make sure that you think in advance of some things you want to introduce so that you’ve kind of teed them up, and try to speak earlier in the meeting, try to say something even procedural, like, “Hey, thanks for the agenda, Pete,” and just get yourself kind of as a presence at the table.

And so, it’s about the speed, intensity, whether you pause for others, how you synchronize. Another key thing, it’s almost inevitable that two people will speak at the same time in some interaction, I think you and I already have, and it’s just part of life. And then whether you yield typically or regain the floor sends a message. If you yield, it’s like saying, “Pete, whatever you have to say it’s way more interesting than what I wanted to share.” But if I over-talk you it sends the opposite message.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I’d be very careful not to talk at the same time. But if I did I would yield to you, Ann. I would yield. I’ve learned. I’m learning.

Ann Demarais
It’s okay. It’s part of nature to speak at the same time. All right, my next fundamental is perspective. That’s kind of the psychological self-presentation you make, whether you show flexibility, how positive or negative, whether you present yourself as a victim, blame your boss for things or superior or inferior. All these things can come out and may or may not serve you well.

In general, as you probably would guess, it’s better to be flexible and positive and sort of equal with people rather than blameful or negative. But some people have a blind spot, they think, “Well, I’m not complaining. I’m just explaining. It doesn’t mean that I’m being negative about this.” So, it might be something to be aware of if your patterns are sending a message you didn’t intend.

And the last one is your physical presentation, and that’s really about how you kind of show up physically. And regardless of how you look or your age, whether you show pride versus shame in your body really affects kind of the confidence that you project and whether you have impact.

Pete Mockaitis
Pride versus shame.

Ann Demarais
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, can you give us some examples of what a prideful versus shameful presentation looks like?

Ann Demarais
Well, the classic example is Superman or Clark Kent, right? Same body. And you can see women that would be considered like large or not sexy, like Queen Latifah, shows up like, “I am the queen.” She has this incredible confidence, wears form-fitting things, and she’s just magnetic, right? So, there’s people that can just show up and have all the confidence in the world, and there’s some people that can be fabulous-looking and just sort of recoil. So, there is an expansiveness about pride, and a sort of recoiling about shame.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, what I’m thinking about power posing, Amy Cuddy, like you say expansive poses. And what are some of the other ingredients there?

Ann Demarais
Yes, so Amy Cuddy’s work, as you may know, has gotten some scrutiny but I’m actually an advocate and find it personally to be beneficial. So, if the listening audience doesn’t know, she proposes expanding your body for two minutes before you have a presentation in like a starfish or like a Wonder Woman, and it can give you more confidence and you feel stronger and less nervous in new situations.

But there is data that I’ve read before she came out with hers, that when you naturally assign people to superior versus inferior role just randomly like with subjects in and experiment, the teacher or the superior roles naturally spreads their arms further and takes up more physical space. It’s almost ingrained in our behavior, in our role-taking, and the subordinate would be more kind of smaller, make one’s self smaller.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s one sort of ingredient or dimension associated with presentation, is do you feel like, “Oh, I don’t deserve to take up this space”? You’re very timid versus, “I am the queen,” or just sort of occupying that Superman and Clark Kent. What are some of the other dimensions or ingredients associated with sort of a strong presentation?

Ann Demarais
So, strong body language, and there’s a lot of research that are unfounded but there are some things that are really strong and are supported with projecting power. So, having a good physical posture. So, you can notice, and actually before you give a presentation, use your little devices and videotape yourself. Do you have a strong, you know, your shoulders out? Or do you slouch it all? That makes a really big difference.

Leaning in slightly versus leaning back, even in a meeting, shows interest and power and engagement. Eye contact really matters a lot. So, there’s data showing that most people make eye contact about 50%-60% of the time. If you go above that it’s still even better because it shows really like you’re focused and all that charismatic kind of attention on someone.

If you go below that, you can look distrustful or uncomfortable. And when I work with people that don’t make the average amount of eye contact, they often don’t know because they look away before others so they don’t really get the data, so to speak. So, if you have any sense that you might be like that, or you’re not sure, it’s really helpful to ask somebody to give you some feedback on that because it really makes a difference and it’s something that you can train yourself over time to just go past your comfort point and just in eye contact with someone.

And then smiling.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, okay, just because we’re on the eye contact point. When it comes to that, I would love your take on should you look right at the person’s eyeball or pupil or eyebrow, their nose, the left eye, the right eye? Is there an optimal means of making eye contact?

Ann Demarais
Most of the studies I’ve seen shown that people actually sort of scan around that space. They don’t necessarily lock left eye to right eye, etcetera. But looking around that person’s facial area constitutes eye contact. It’s when people look at the walls. People kind of feel that they need a blank visual to think, and that like a face is sort of like visually noisy. So, you don’t have to worry about the percentage of time you’re looking at the brow versus the eyes, but looking in that general area would do, would give that impression.

And then the smiling one, which we talked about before, it’s so powerful that it affects people’s behavior, that the study that they have people smile upon people, or not smile upon them on the street, and then later have someone drop something. The smiled-upon people are more likely to pick something up for the person than the ones that didn’t get smiled upon. A very like brief, like one-second smile affects people’s mood and their actual behavior.

So, when you smile, you’re kind of projecting that physical confidence, and you’re projecting that presence, that pride, that you’re happy, that you’re safe, and that you’re a positive person, and it affects the world around you in this really nice way.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s nice. Thank you. All right. Well, so then, I’m wondering now, these are a nice sort of set of great ingredients for making a solid first impression. Any particular tweaks or emphasis you’d put on this when it comes to in the work environment so that it’s really coming across in great ways with the people you see not just once but again and again and again?

Ann Demarais
Sure, I have some tips. Well, one thing that’s so fabulous about being in the workplace compared to the social is you can get feedback from these things. Your boss’ job is to give you feedback, and if you solicit the feedback it even makes you look really proactive and development-oriented. So, if you have any suspicion that maybe you could be better at any of these things we talked about, you can go to your boss and say, “Hey, I’d love to know how I come across when I’m presenting. Do you have any feedback about my body language? How about my communication style in meetings? Do you think I speak the right amount? Should I speak more or less, etcetera?”

In the social world, no one will give you this. And when you were on the date that didn’t go well, no one gave you any feedback, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Ann Demarais
So, it’s so wonderful that it actually affects the bottom line, and your manager would probably love to tell you this, or you could get a mentor, or ask a trusted colleague. But the key things you want to do that really are going to make you awesome is making yourself accessible. There’s something about this now, this big movement towards psychological safety so that you can make people feel comfortable around you, comfortable to raise ideas, to maybe debate things.

So, when you make, by disclosing things and making people feel good around you, you create that kind of feeling of trust and safety, and that fosters much better collaboration and much better workflow in environment, so that’s an easy and really helpful thing you can do. Again, being interested and coming in to meetings with, yes, you’ve got some ideas, but really opening your heart, being other-oriented exploring.

If someone says something that you think is really a bad idea, challenge yourself to say, “Hey, I never thought of that way. Can you tell me more about that point of view?” That can help you to cultivate that curiosity that will make you actually available to more ideas and are more comfortable as a collaborator.

And then, again, being careful to present yourself as a whole person and making sure that people feel that they know you – this is why they do a lot of team building – that you’re someone that they can go to and trust and feel that you care about them. So, going back to being like my social generosity framework, being generous to people so that they feel good about themselves from interacting with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s interesting, even as we’re chatting, I’ve heard you used the word awesome several times, and I don’t know if that’s just part of your common vernacular or if this is a conscientious choice on your part with the name of the show How To Be Awesome At Your Job, and word choice. Is there something to that when it comes to using a social gift and being endearing using the words that the person you’re speaking with uses?

Ann Demarais
Yes, very good catch there, Pete. Yes, if you use other people’s vocabulary, if they call something and it’s as not the word you normally choose to use, adapt to the other person’s vocabulary, so that does make people feel more connected to you. Try to make it easier for them, use their words. So, I was using the word awesome, I like the word awesome a lot but I was adapting it to your awesomeness in your podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s like I’m endeared each time you say it, so it’s working. Well, so then, I’m wondering if, let’s say, the first impression is not so good, and we’ve made some mistakes, failed to be generous, violating some of the fundamentals of a good first impression. What can we do if we have a suboptimal first impression? Is it possible to overcome it?

Ann Demarais
Yes, and it happens to the best of us. So, it’s, again, part of life. Yes, you can, if you’re going to see the person again, if they’re going to be a new colleague or client. If they’re someone you’re not going to see again it would be inappropriate to track them down to try to correct it. But if it’s someone that you’re going to see, you can sort of do a little bit of a correction. You can send them an email.

I prefer sending an email rather than calling them and putting them on the spot, and say, “Hey, you know, I was really tired when we met the other day, and sometimes when that happens I do acts, it’s like I talk a lot more. And I apologize, that’s not how I really am, and I’m really want to get to know you, so I look forward to learning more about you in our next interaction.” People often feel endeared by an apology, and it can help to reset things more quickly.

Like, of course, you have to correct your behavior the next time or you dig yourself deeper. But you can do that and I think not putting them on the spot is more comfortable than saying that directly and having them having to react to it in the moment. If you’re uncomfortable doing that, over time your future positive behaviors will tip the scale and they’ll see you as this really great person that you really are and not that one annoying-style person that you were that first time.

It takes working kind of uphill. As I said in the beginning, we form impressions kind of quickly and unconsciously, and people expect us to behave in the same kind of way all the time, so you’re fighting that but you can overcome it. Or you can be using the social generosity framework. If you know that person likes a lot of levity or they like lots of information, you can adapt yourself to what they like and give them more of the kind of the social gifts that they like, and then you might tip the scales more quickly. So, it is very possible to recover.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Ann, this has been so much good stuff. Now, tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Ann Demarais
No, I think those are the key things, there’s a lot here. Of course, we have this book that I mentioned. And on our website, we have these tables that are a great tool that are like positive behaviors that you do with positive impact, and then some that you do that have an unintended negative impact, and you can print them out and kind of self-evaluate, “Do I do that? Do I do that sometimes? Often? Rarely?” It’s kind of a little self-awareness tool that’s really helpful and then it can inspire you to try to experiment so that you come across more positively.

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

Ann Demarais
Oh, I have this. It’s actually on the end of our book. It’s Goethe, and I don’t know if I’m pronouncing his name correctly.

Pete Mockaitis
Goth?

Ann Demarais
Goth? Yes, Goth.

Pete Mockaitis
I never know either. Goethe?

Ann Demarais
Something like that. I’ll use your word. Goethe or Goth? And he wrote this, it says, “I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it’s my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or deescalated, and a person is humanized or dehumanized.” So, I think it’s really helpful to realize how much power we have to impact other people around us.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s excellent. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Ann Demarais
A favorite book. Well, I’m a huge fan of Dale Carnegie’s How to.Win Friends and Influence People       which I think is just a great classic. If you haven’t read it, it’s like 100 years old or something but it’s brilliant. There’s been so many great writers on this topic and it is something that which I find interesting is it’s not complicated or hard to understand, but it’s just not intuitive. So, there’s many, many people that have spoken about it in really interesting ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Ann Demarais
So, I think this tool that I mentioned of using self-analysis on how you behave, and I also am a huge fan of asking for feedback. And it’s something you can do with people and you have to practice, saying thank you and not debating it, and just processing it and taking note of it, so that’s a really great tool.

Another tool I use with my coach-ees is think about how much you respect people, like in your heart of hearts. I call it a respect matrix. All the people, some of them are eight, some of them are twos, some of them are fives, with ten being high. Then thinking about how transparent are you. To the people that are eights, they probably know that you like them because you behave so positively to them. But to the people that are like twos and fives, do they know that? Do you show how much you truly respect people? Or do you aim to show a higher respect than you really feel?

And then my next kind of question on that is, “What’s your goal?” And I would argue that if you try to make everyone feel like a ten in your eyes, like they’re your favorite child, that you see something really positive and that you respect them for who they are and where they’re coming from, that you have a really positive impact on people.

And so, sometimes with people that you just naturally aren’t drawn to or don’t like is just part of human nature, seek to learn more about them, try to find something that you really would genuinely find interesting about them, and there’s people that have lots of depth.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Ann Demarais
So, I think that – and since I’m in the personal improvement industry – if you try to think about just one thing that you want to improve on yourself and make it kind of like a goal, it could be something as simple as smiling a couple more times per day, and focus on that for a while until you make it a new habit.

And so, make it something like you put down in your calendar or your to-do list or whatever it is, and challenge yourself, because these little tiny things that you do, even if you do them, especially if you do them early in your career, will pay you huge dividends. And sometimes a slight effort or a little bit out of your comfort zone that really not only is good for you but think again with the pay-it-forward. The more you do these things and make other people happy around you, the more you spread like really positive vibes, so think about the people around you as much as yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And is there a particular nugget or articulation of your message you share that seems to really connect with folks in terms of they’re taking notes and nodding their heads all the more vigorously when you say it?

Ann Demarais
Well, I think I go back to my generosity thing in thinking about that you can give money, and you can donate your time, and you can walk your walks for different medical conditions. We all do all these things all the time, but we sometimes forget to just be enlightening and make someone feel happier, and that it’s such an easy thing to do. And that, again, it can sort of spread and there’s this like contagion of it. And that, if we all were more socially generous, it would be a happier and warmer world.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And is there a place you’d like to point people if they want to learn more or get in touch?

Ann Demarais
Sure. We have a website, of course. It’s www.FirstImpressionsConsulting.com, and we offer coaching, we have those tables, we have seminars, other information, etcetera.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ann Demarais
Call to action is to find that one thing that they want to work on and commit to it and ask for feedback and make it part of your everyday life or throughout your career. Always try to find one thing to tweak, one way to be just slightly better, and be mindful of that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ann, thank you so much for taking this time. This has been very informative and I appreciate it and I hope you have tremendous first impressions with whomever you meet.

Ann Demarais
All right. Thanks so much, Pete. It was a lot of fun.

Oct 18
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218: The Science-Based Paths to Massive Self-Confidence with Louisa Jewell

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Louisa Jewell says: "Just thinking about all the things that could go wrong can stop us... go and do it anyway."

Positive psychologist Louisa Jewell discusses ways to become more confident and eliminate self-doubt to be able to pursue bigger goals.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How self-doubt holds us back
  2. The mindset that prevents failures from impacting your self-esteem
  3. Best practices for boosting your self-confidence

About Louisa

Louisa Jewell is a speaker, author, and Canada’s leading expert on the topic of positive psychology who has facilitated thousands of people towards greater flourishing, both at work and in their personal lives. In 2012 Louisa founded the Canadian Positive Psychology Association, an organization that brings together leading-edge researchers and practitioners from across Canada to disseminate the knowledge of positive psychology to improve the psychological health of all Canadians.

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