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KF #20. Interpersonal Savvy

Oct 05

1186: The Hidden Cost of Undersharing with Leslie John

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Leslie John makes the compelling case for why we need to open up more in work and in life.

You’ll Learn

  1. The surprising upsides to oversharing
  2. The easiest and loveliest thing to overshare
  3. Why it’s a good sign when people cringe

About Leslie

Leslie John is the James E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Her award-winning research appears in top academic journals and media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. She is the author of the new book, REVEALING: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. A Canadian-born, professionally trained ballet dancer, she now calls Boston her home, where she lives with her husband and two young sons.

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Leslie, welcome!

Leslie John
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about oversharing, and could we start at the beginning? Could you make the case for oversharing? I think even the word itself seems like it’s a bad thing, oversharing.

Leslie John
I know, I know it’s off putting, and it’s a cheeky title, my book, The Underrated Power of Oversharing. It’s, “Ooh, la la.” So let me just disarm things right off the bat. There is still such a thing as TMI, as oversharing, and there’s lots of oversharing that is not good.

The point of the cheeky title, and my cheeky point, is to say that, oftentimes, what we think is oversharing is just sharing, and sharing is incredibly helpful for our relationships, for our well-being, and, of course, in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what we think is oversharing could just be sharing. This reminds me, we’ve had guests who’ve said, “What you’re calling micromanaging is really just managing.”

Leslie John
That sounds like rationalization that a control freak would use, but I’m kidding. No, but when I’m teaching my PhD students, it is true, like, to really teach someone, you got to get really micro. So I agree with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so tell us, then, could you maybe orient us with an example of what’s something that some might call oversharing that you think is just great level of sharing?

Leslie John
Well, so here’s something that I shared at work. which was, and I was junior, too. So I was a baby academic, just starting out, and it was a conference, a work conference, and it was late at night, a party, and we were all gathered around, myself, a bunch of junior people, and then two super grand poobah senior people, who we were all desperately trying to impress.

And someone came up with the great idea of saying, “Let’s go around the circle and…” it never ends well, right, “…and share our most embarrassing story ever.” So most people, you know, they started, they’re like, “Oh, you know, like, I worked too hard and, like, one day I got caught working at an odd hour of the day,” or, “Oh, my gosh, there was a typo in this abstract of a fancy academic paper I published. The horror!”

They’re just these, eyeroll-y, like humble brags, right? Like, they’re not actually embarrassing moments, what people were sharing. They were just kind of trying to present themselves in some, there was like a form of posturing, right?

But, for whatever reason, I decided to go for it and share my, actually, most embarrassing story ever, which is also in the book, you’re welcome. But it basically entails me going into grand detail about an episode where I peed myself on stage in the front of, like, a thousand people.

And so I told that story in lots of graphic detail, and people cringed afterwards. And the next morning, I woke up and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’ve been canceled. That was career suicide. It’s like I poured gasoline all over my body and lit a match, like, the end.” So it really felt like a tremendous overshare TMI moment.

But, thinking back, those two grand poobahs, they became my closest mentors. They opened doors in academia that I didn’t even know existed. And, you know, they’re close, I’m close with them.

And they said, “It’s not, ‘in spite’ of what you shared that night, it’s partly because of it, because you were real and you were actually funny, even if it was at your own expense and you weren’t a robot. And we want to work with people, we’re drawn to people who are actually human and maybe have the humility to joke about themselves.”

I don’t know. I don’t want to flatter myself too much, but that’s an example of something, like, sharing an actual embarrassing story in a work context to people that are way higher status than you. Like, they didn’t even know I existed. That was the first thing they knew about me.

So I think that’s, like, a pretty strong example in the sense of, like, pushing some skepticism that we may actually have about this idea that oversharing is redeeming.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that says it so well, right? Well, I’ve accidentally had an accident as a grown-up as well.

Leslie John
Tell more.

Pete Mockaitis
It was, um, we had a lot of luggage, and a young child, and a long mass transit ride.

Leslie John
Yep, this is a setup. This is, yep.

Pete Mockaitis
And it didn’t seem like I had an opportunity to exit, and so that happened. No one else seemed to notice.

Leslie John
And to be clear, it wasn’t your child.

Pete Mockaitis
No, no, it wasn’t. Okay. So it happens to the best of us. And to your point about we like working with people who are actually human.

Leslie John
Yeah, that’s apt today, right? Whew, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that says a lot, because I have, even before AI, I remember back in the day when I was on the other side of the career fair for the first couple times, you know? So I was with Bain & Company back at the University of Illinois, trying to get some sharp young associate consultants in the mix.

Leslie John
Yep, fancy schmancy.

Pete Mockaitis
And whenever I heard people say, “Well, hello, I am looking to merge my interests in accounting and finance in a high-impact…” And I was, like, “Are you really? Is that, like, what’s in your heart of hearts, your burning desire?”

Leslie John
Yeah, I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so I’d be like, I would much appreciate, even if it feels offensive. I was like, “How on earth are companies paying half a million plus a month for a team of five, young folk like you to do stuff?” I’d be like, “Now that’s a real question.”

And I would find that person memorable and interesting and want to have a closer look at that resume application.

Leslie John
Right. And, in fact, there’s data to support this, too. There’s research on job. I love this example of job interviews because job interviews, you know, it’s easy to say when you’re in a high-status position, everybody loves and respects you. You have a lot more leeway of what you can share often, except for immoral things, which is we’re in a higher-standard category, but setting those aside.

But when you’re junior and you’re being evaluated, and it’s super competitive, like a job interview, even then, it can benefit you from being a little bit more open. Not talking about, like, your rashes or like trauma. Like, not… like a little bit more open. A little bit of authenticity, a little bit of humanity. And that’s a great example.

And so this research study, they got transcripts of people in job interviews, and then they looked at, they analyzed the transcripts, and they looked at what predicted getting the job. And they found that among the people that were qualified, it was the candidates who were real that got the jobs, who answered the question, like, you know, that dreaded and kind of unfair question of, like, “What’s your biggest weakness?” And people are, like, usually, “Oh, I work too hard.”

The ones that answered, and a real weakness, like, or a real perceived weakness like, “You know, sometimes I’m quieter in meetings, that’s because I spend a lot of time listening and processing.” Like, something, “So sometimes I’m misunderstood,” right?

So that kind of answer is what I mean by being a little bit more open in that situation, right? So key, of course, is reading the room and understanding the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is a juicy bit of research. Do you have more like that?

Leslie John
Well, in fact, I do have lots of juicy research. I actually insulted the Harvard prof that was interviewing me in my Harvard interview. So that research, when I read it, I’m like, “Oh, redemption, there’s method to my madness.”

Because when I was interviewing, I, inadvertently, sassed the interviewer. I, inadvertently, made a comment about his weight. And so, like, super meanie move. But it’s kind of sassily delivered in the moment.

And, again, one of these, like, my face turned bright red. I’m like, “Oh, my God, they think I’m a horrible person. Why did I do that?” You know, sometimes when I’m nervous, I just blurt things out. It’s a tick or something. I don’t know.

But then three days later, they called me. It was Harvard. And they said, “When you sassed us like that, we thought you’ll fit right in here. Our students are tough, so you got to have the hutzpah.”

So, you know, it easily could have gone the wrong way, but the point is these things are not as risky as we often perceive them to be. And even when there is something negative that comes out of it, like, you know, you’re at a party, you say something a little bit offside, you feel, or like you’re in the workplace and you feel like you insulted someone.

You can always go back to them and say, “Hey, I’m worried about how my comments went over, right?” So it’s not like this one-shot thing that it’s oversharing. And then you can see, even there’s a benefit to that because now, okay, maybe you shouldn’t have said the thing, but now by approaching and talking, now you’re forging a relationship with the person.

The person respects you because you’re asking them questions, you’re hearing them out, you’re learning about each other, right? So it’s, like, even those moments that feel cringe-y and overshare-y, there can be an upside.

And when I was writing the book, it made me reflect on all these funny moments in my life where I thought, “Oh, my God, what did I do?” And looking back, I realized the long game. There was always some amazing redemption to them, so much so that like every single one of these things I would do them all over again.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this is eye-opening. And we’ve heard the acronym TMI, too much information. You also introduced the acronym TLI, too little information. How should we be thinking about the concept of TLI?

Leslie John
I think TLI is way more common and way more problematic, actually, than TMI. TLI, too little information, you know, we didn’t even have a word for it. That’s how, like, much we’ve ignored this problem.

It’s not to say TMI isn’t real. For sure, there’s still TMI, but the more I learned and the more I really practiced opening up more, the more I realized, “Wow, this societal fetish with TMI, or the societal, it’s like the greatest social sin, TMI, right?” That’s how we treat it.

But it’s really not the bad, like, of course, sometimes you really can. You can get canceled. You can get fired for telling your boss, “You have a hidden disability,” whatever. All these things. Of course, of course, of course.

But on the whole, in so many circumstances, we hold back when it would benefit us so, so much to open up a little bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So that’s handy to remember. There’s a foil, an alternative set of letters to think about when TMI fears are in our brains. So can you maybe give us some guidelines in terms of, in a way, it’s an art. You can have too little information. You can have too much information.

We might be calibrated a bit too conservatively, and it’d be in our interest to share a bit more and to be a bit more disclosing and revelatory and human. But how do we gauge things and get that dial where we want it to be?

Leslie John
Yeah, great question. So the first, I love where you started in that revealing wisely, figuring out how much to share, what to hold back, how to share it, there’s a lot of science to it, but it’s also an art and I think, most of all, it’s a skill. But, oddly, it’s not a skill we’re, like, taught in school.

My kids just started school. It’s not a skill we’re taught. We’re taught math, arithmetic, but yet, this is really important, figuring out what to share and what not to share, because if we do it well, the rewards are so great.

We get well-being, we get friendships, we get close relationships, we get influence in the workplace, for example, we get respect, admiration, all these things.
So, yes, it’s a skill, and so the first thing to say is that, like any skill, you have to do it to get better at it. You have to practice. And what typically happens is we don’t even open up at all. Like, we don’t even get to practice because we don’t even consider saying the thing.

So we have to start doing it more so that, then, we can learn, like learn by doing. So that’s number one, it’s a skill. And it also means, like, when we do screw up, like have some self-compassion, to get all therapy-y. Have some self-compassion because you’re going to get it wrong because you have to fail to learn how to do it. Okay.

But, in terms of, like, if I was a listener, I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But give me the tools, give me the tips.” So what I would say is one really good guide that you can use in any situation almost, the time when I would say it doesn’t apply is in, like, a very close established relationship where kind of these norms of reciprocity fall away, but I digress.

The tip is the principle of reciprocity, which is, essentially, what it sounds like. You want to be aware of, “Is there a back and forth of information exchange? If I start revealing something, is the person, my acquaintance, my colleague, my boss, are they saying something back? Or are they just saying nothing? And am I continuing to go on and on and on?”

You typically don’t want to be in a situation where you’re doing all the sharing and the other person isn’t reciprocating. If they’re not reciprocating, that is information. I mean, unless you’re in a unique context where, like, your boss is interviewing you and asking for feedback or whatever.

But, typically, in a given conversation, you want to follow this principle of reciprocity. And it also means, when someone says something to you, like, I’m thinking you’re on the playground and the kids are playing and they’re happy and they’re smiling, and they say, what I would say is a little reveal.

Usually, in these situations where, like, we make small talk and we just say, “Oh, they’re having so much fun.” But that’s super boring. What would it mean to reveal a little bit more there? What it would mean would be to say something like, “They’re laughing so hard. I don’t even remember the last time I had a big belly laugh.” Like that’s a little reveal, okay?

And so that’s like an olive branch. And then the person I’m with, ideally, they’re going to then share, like, the last time they belly laughed, and then maybe I’ll share some, like, mildly embarrassing story, right?

You see, you want to go back and forth mutually, gradually getting deeper and deeper. So the dynamic of reciprocity is really key. So, anytime, we’ve all been in those situations where, like, you’re on the receiving end, and someone’s just like dumping and dumping and dumping and it’s like dysregulated, you don’t want to do that.

So reciprocity is a principle that you can, like, use and apply tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really handy in terms of you’re offering a little bit at a time instead of all at once and observing the response and seeing, with the reciprocity. And what’s interesting is, sometimes, even then, if you’re not getting much back, that doesn’t necessarily, I’m thinking about my own experience.

I don’t think that necessarily means, “Oh, you’re dead in the water. Don’t share anything with this person.” It could just mean they’re tired, they’re distracted, they’re bored, they’re not that interested in what you had to say with regard to laughter.

And yet, you might very well share more, and it’s totally cool. So I guess my thought is the reciprocity guideline is a handy one, and I’d say, well, you tell me, expert, it’s a fairly safe and conservative one. Does that sound right?

Leslie John
Yeah, that sounds totally right. And, yeah, it’s also a guideline. And like any guideline, sometimes it behooves us to break it. It’s also worth noting that, in that situation where you’re saying something, you reveal something and they don’t say anything back, that’s a moment where we are prone to overreacting where we’re like, “Oh, I said too much.”

Like, we think we attribute it to something we did or said, maybe we said too much. And that is so, like, unless you said something really clearly offensive, it’s usually not the case. It’s informative. You should take note of it.

It could be that they’re tired, it could be that they’re bored, it could be that they don’t want to start another friendship, or, like, all kinds of reasons, and they’re all legitimate. And it, most importantly, gives you information. It’s like, “Okay, maybe they’re not down,” or, “Maybe it’s not interesting. Maybe I’ll ask them a question.”

Like, asking a question is a really good way of, then, if you’re kind of trying to understand and you sense that they’re, maybe, you could bring them into a dialogue with you. So question-asking is another great tool you can use to kind of prompt.

Like, if you say something and you feel like you’re kind of stonewalled, you could ask a question like, “How did you experience that?” or something like this, and see what they say. And if, again, they’re like terse, that’s more evidence.

It’s kind of like we’re amateur scientists going through the world and trying to figure it out. And I think this is to the point that, like, being really cognizant of the situation and how people act and using that to guide our behaviors is really important.

There’s also certain things that people often ask me, “Okay, are there things that are TMI that I should just never share?” Of course, we all know what the taboo topics tend to be, you know, sex, politics, finances, religion.

I wouldn’t say those are off topic, per se, because there’s really a situation for anything, in my view. What I would say is, so it’s really hard to give like topical advice, but what I would say is one, two red flaggy things. One is gossip, especially at the workplace.

So gossip, even though it can be fun and juicy to do, I don’t advise it because it’s not so nice. And it actually makes you look bad. So when you say negative things about other people, people implicitly associate those negative things with you as well. It’s one of these kind of subconscious biases we have.

So it makes you look bad. So don’t gossip. It’s unkind. It’s not your information to share. So that’s one rule of thumb I give.

One of the things that people often ask, “What are things that we tend to undershare?” Like, “Hey, I hear you that you’re saying we should share a little bit more a lot of the time, but what the heck does that mean? How do I do it?”

And one really easy low-hanging fruit way to start is with praise. So think about the things, positive things that come to mind. Like, for me, as a nerdly academic, I’ll be walking down the hall at work and I’ll see a colleague whose paper, academic paper, I just read, and I’ll think, like, “Oh, I love that study. I love the study design. I love the paradigm. Like, yes, I’m a real nerd.”

But we often keep those things to ourselves. But if we say them, so praise, say, “Hey, Josh, I love that paradigm. Mwah! Chef’s kiss.” Like, a specific and sincere piece of praise, that’s a kind of sharing that is very much low-hanging fruit, that we so frequently undershare.

And it’s kind of a one-two punch because, one, the person will feel good. Again, must be specific, must be sincere, right? I’m not talking about vacuous praise. Specific and sincere, they feel good.

Also, you can then start to be strategic, right? Like you can reinforce good behavior as a leader by praise. And it also makes you feel good. Tons of research on this. The giver. It also makes you look good. Again, the same principle with gossip, how saying negative things makes you look bad, saying good things makes you look good.

And then what I have found is that when I’m doing this, applying this, again, because like I’m my own guinea pig in all of this, I have found that it makes me a more positive person. And at the risk of sounding toxically positive, like I am happier because I notice the good things way more often because I’m so in the habit of, like, praising people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and it is just a good feeling in terms of you say something and then they’ll have a response, a reaction, like, “Oh, thank you.” You know, like they were surprised. They weren’t expecting that. There’s some delight and it’s just great. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, that was a nice moment of connection we got to share together and I feel good that I helped someone else feel good and, yay, you know?”

Leslie John
Yay! That’s right. Yay all around.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know what’s really interesting about when say praise is, I think it gets to this core emotional resistance here that… because, in a way, like praise doesn’t feel super duper disclosive. Disclosive? Disclosing? In that, in terms of, for me, personally, all I have shared is an opinion and perhaps among the safest of opinions. It’s like, “Hey, this thing you did, I thought was good.”

And yet, there’s still a similar emotional internal sensation going on with resistance to doing a praise versus resistance to sharing a thing. I suppose vulnerability is the approximate English word we’d use. Can you talk about this emotional stuff here?

Leslie John

So I think of vulnerability is, like, kind of it’s really deep sharing. It’s emotional openness. It’s saying, “Oh, I feel really anxious about public speaking. I’m really nervous to give this presentation. My mouth is feeling dry. I’m feeling anxious.” That’s vulnerability.

Most of the time we’re not being vulnerable at work. Sometimes, it behooves us to be vulnerable, but we still need to be very cautious because it is a very risky talking about feelings, negative feelings. Anxieties can be very risky, especially at work, but there’s also huge reward when done the right way.

What I think is a great low-hanging fruit in the workplace is transparency. Transparency is cognitive openness. Transparency is sharing how your mind works, how your thought process works, kind of bringing people under the hood of explaining why you think the way you think, how you came to a certain conclusion.

That’s the kind of revealing that is, really, you get a lot of bang for your buck because it’s relatively safe because you’re not, like, talking about deep, difficult emotions, but you’re opening up because you’re opening up about how your mind works.

So, imagine, for example, your boss comes to you and says, “Hey, I noticed you were really quiet in that meeting,” which I guess is a criticism. And one of the reasons you were quiet is because you’re nervous about speaking up and you don’t know if your ideas are good.

So you could say, you could be vulnerable, and you could say exactly that. I don’t recommend that because that would diminish you, potentially, in the boss’ eyes. But what you could say to them instead, so instead in these situations, we think we either have to do that or just kind of, “Uh, okay, you’re right,” grin and bear it, which also is not great.

Instead, what I’m suggesting is transparency here would be really helpful. If you said something like, “Yes, I realize that and, you know, the way my mind works is I really like to spend time listening and really processing what people are saying. And that’s why I’m a little quiet at first because, then, I have more to contribute when I feel I’ve really processed it. Now, I’m happy to speak off the cuff if you’re telling me you’d like me to get in sooner. That’s great feedback.”

That’s what I mean by being transparent, right? And this is a way where the default, the standard is to just be like, “Okay, boss, yep, you’re right.” That doesn’t really advance you. Saying, “I have anxiety and I don’t think my ideas are good,” that’s dangerous.

But being transparent and saying, “Huh? Well, it’s good observation. The reason why is because I need to process my thoughts,” that actually strengthens you and makes you come across as thoughtful, you know, as mature, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a handy distinction there in terms of vulnerability versus transparency. And it seems the key difference there is you’re not sharing the deepest emotional secrets of your inner life, but you are sharing something real and of significance about you and your operations.

Leslie John
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m curious, any other key things you want to be on the lookout for as you’re observing people, their receptivity, their dynamics, their openness? You clued us into checking for reciprocity earlier, which is pretty handy. Are there any other things we should be on the lookout for that could give us some handy indicators?

Leslie John
Well, I think that checking for the feeling of TMI actually is important, or the feeling, or the cues that you’ve crossed the line, you know, which we’re quite exquisitely attuned to. You know the cringe-y face or the averted gaze, shocks even, gasps.

And the reason, I think, we should pay attention to that is not because we should avoid it, but I think we should learn from it. And I think we spend too much time beating ourselves up and feeling ashamed over it when, instead, if you sometimes get there, if you sometimes get that reaction, this may sound crazy, but it’s kind of a cause for celebration because you know you’ve gotten there. You’ve gotten to the limit.

So often, so many of us, we’re in this restricted range of how much we share. We share a very restricted range and I want us to widen up and expand our range.

But if you never experience that, you’re not going too far. And the goal in the end is like, for me, I’m like total emotional intimacy, like with my spouse. I can tell him anything, like that’s the goal. And total guardedness in, say, like a deposition, right? You want the full range. And most of us are kind of stuck in a really small range.

Interestingly, there’s that one analogy is one piece of career advice I got about negotiating, was if you always get what you want in a negotiation, you’re not asking for enough. Sometimes, it’s good to not get what you want because you know you’re pushing it, just like that with revealing. Sometimes, it’s good to feel like you’ve pushed it because then you know where the line is.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much. I’ve got a friend who just recently has been, you know, landed two above $50,000 consulting engagements.

Leslie John
Sweet.

Pete Mockaitis
And before, he had never asked for that high a price. And so we’re like, “Oh, great job. Great job.” And it is, it is sort of like eye-opening for him, like, “Whoa! This is possible? I guess this has probably been possible for years, I’ve just never asked. That’s really interesting.” And you see the world.

And I love that you don’t know the boundaries until you hit them, and they may very well be far beyond your world. And when you told that story, it’s like, it’s funny. What came to mind is, and I haven’t thought about this in years, but I was at a gathering. We were on a beach.

I was at a gathering, and we had a lot of college friends. We got together because we were in the same academic minor program. And so we had a lot of classes together back in the day. It’d been years. We all got together. I thought, “We’re all friends here, you know?” Something came up, so I shared a story of a pretty wild, well, supernatural healing miracle, which is, I guess, that’s in our zone, right? Religion?

Leslie John
What? Wow, can you tell it? Everybody wants to know now. Can you tell it? Very meta.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, a friend and I had a series of visions appear to us, and then we prayed for someone to be healed, and she informed us that she was.

Leslie John
Wow! What was her ailment? Like, what?

Pete Mockaitis
Suicidal depression and self-harm. So it was wild. It was perhaps the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.

Leslie John
Wow! Wow! That is amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so very cool. And so I was just excited to tell the story because it’s something kind of related came up and I thought, “Well, some people don’t want to hear this, but, hey, we’re all friends here.“

And so I went ahead and told the story. And there was, like, it was exactly what you described, and it caught me off guard because people kind of looked away and it was like, “Uh.”

Leslie John
Because are they like, “This is like woo-woo”?

Pete Mockaitis
I guess. I don’t know. It was weird, I thought, “We’re all friends here. What’s going on? We go way back.”

Leslie John
Yeah, I think it’s cool. I have so many follow-up questions.

Pete Mockaitis
“We go way back.”

Leslie John
And I think we don’t know anything. Like, time travel is, like, we do not know the half of it, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, but what was so fascinating, to your point, it’s like the people were looking away. It was like, “I guess maybe I shouldn’t have shared that. Oopsies!” And then I actually got a follow-up text message hours later from one person who was in the group, but she didn’t say anything. She was like, “I really appreciated the story you shared. It meant a lot to me.”

Leslie John
Amazing, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was so fascinating because it’s, like, “I guess I did the wrong thing here. But for her, it was very meaningful. So I guess I didn’t,” but she didn’t say anything and it’s so fascinating, like, what’s under the surface. Yeah.

Leslie John
Right, because it would take so much courage for her in that context. You know, a dear colleague of mine, his name is Amit Goldenberg, and he does work on, like, emotional contagion, and he’s done this fascinating work on how your reaction is anchored to the most negative reaction in the group.

Like, implicitly, we act as if the one negative review is representative, but it’s just that, an outlier. It’s really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So it’s really intriguing what can be happening beneath the surface. And I love what you have to say, is you got to bump up against the wall a few times to really know the boundaries because who knows?

Leslie John
Yep, do it. Right. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, if I never shared certain things, I could be, much like our consulting friend, leaving all kinds of money or value or benefit or goodness on the table.

Leslie John
Money on the table. I know. I was thinking the same thing. Totally. Totally. And, you know, I’ve also found it gives me more kind of self-compassion, and also like the right mindset, which is that, “I’m going to fail sometimes. It’s okay.”

And sometimes it’s actually hilarious, the failures, right? Like, it’s less serious than we need it to be, than we often think it is. It’s not this high-stakes zero-something.

Sometimes there are very high-stakes reveals, but the vast majority of the time, it’s very low stakes, which makes it a great place to practice, right? You know, most of our disclosure decisions are pretty low stakes. The accumulation of our lives, it matters, but this is a great way to practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really rings true. And I might suggest, it’s good for us to be humbled a few times just for our own, just so we’re not too, you know, puffed up, chest, annoying, obnoxious, in the course of living our lives and relating to people, as well as, of course, finding the boundaries, the true limits of sharing.

Tell us, Leslie, any other big things you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Leslie John
We talked a little bit about how when you’re in a job interview or like you’re not necessarily a manager and it’s a little riskier to open up. But as you kind of move up the ranks, as you become more managerial, more in a leader position, you have a lot more latitude, generally, to be more reveal-y.

And we found that when managers open up a bit more, like say to their teams the things they’re working on, as in weaknesses, like, “I’m working on my organizational skills,” or whatever, it doesn’t occur to managers to share this, but when they do, their employees are far more motivated to work for them.

And bigger picture, the dreamy version of saying this, is that people, when you are in a higher status role, you have a lot of power to change things for better. And the examples I’ll give you there are the heavy-hitter ones of Magic Johnson and Angelina Jolie.

So Magic Johnson, in the early ‘90s, some of us might have like flashbulb memories, some of us may be too young. But, essentially, you can still watch it on YouTube. Magic Johnson suddenly had an announcement to make, everybody was waiting, nobody knew what it was going to be.

Superstar Lakers player comes into the hotel conference room and announces that he’s retiring effective immediately because he has HIV. And, at the time, you know, the early ‘90s, this was like very stigmatized disease. It was “the gay disease,” and there was a lot of stigma that got in the way of, you know, acceptance and compassion and help.

And when he did that, he de-stigmatized it and he motivated people who would, otherwise, not get tested to get tested. There’s lots of studies on how, when after that announcement, the uptick, major upticks in testing.

Similarly, Angelina Jolie, that op-ed she wrote in the Times about 20 years ago, about how she had decided to have a double mastectomy because she has the breast cancer gene. And that, in and of itself, caused many, many, many more people to get screened and detected and to get the preventative care they needed. So it’s really life-changing stuff, it can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yes, thank you. And now can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Leslie John
One that I recently encountered that I love, it’s a quote by Dolly Parton, seems very apt, a journalist who, Jad Abumrod, who interviewed her a lot, he said that she told him, “You can ask me anything you want, and I get to answer it however I want.”

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

Leslie John
So one of mine is this crazy awesome, a crazy thought, seemingly, crazy, I don’t know, a thought experiment where I put people into a dilemma, where I made them make a choice. And the goal of the study was to see just how important it is to open up and just how much we hate people who, or distrust people, who withhold information.

And the idea was to show that, sometimes, it can be better to say, to reveal, even really bad things about yourself relative to opting out of answering, to refusing to share. So what we did in this study was, if you were a participant, I’d give you two prospective dates, two dating profiles.

And imagine one of the dating profiles, the person had been asked, “Have you ever had any STDs?” And the person answered it and said, “Oh, I have had so many STDs, I can’t even count. I’ve made new STDs, I’ve discovered.”  So all the STDs. So, like, super bad.

The other person. I know this is a super weird experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
This will be the clip we use to share for the episode, Leslie.

Leslie John
But there is reason behind the madness. I love my job. Okay, so then the other person, they were asked the same question about their STD history, and they said, “I’m not answering that question. Just not answering.” So who would you rather date? Who would you rather date?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I saw you deliver this at a keynote, Leslie.

Leslie John
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you know, both are very concerning.

Leslie John
You wanted that on the record, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
But I guess that’s the thing is you’re forcing me to make a choice. So, I mean, I suppose I’ll take the one who owned it, because, then, at least, I figure, “Okay, we can have a conversation about this.”

Leslie John
“We can work with it,” yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to the other one, it’s like, “I guess this is off the table, and it’s probably not good and you were not allowed to talk about it. So I guess I have to pick the one,” yeah.

Leslie John
Yeah. Right. And so that’s what most people pick. First, when we first got that, it was to my astonishment, because I’m like, “Wait, you’d rather someone who is admitting like the worst possible thing relative to someone who’s just like, ‘I’m not answering’?” Like, maybe they’re not answering because, out of principle, that they’re like, “This is a ridiculous question.” We don’t know.

But, yet, that’s not the inference we make. The inference we make is like, “Ooh, we can’t trust them. They’re a hider.” And so we distrust people who hide, who conceal, so much so that we’d rather date someone, we’d rather hire someone, we’d rather be colleagues with someone who admits to things, even if they’re kind of bad, relative to someone who, like, very conspicuously withholds.

And I think that’s because revealing sensitive information, revealing personal information, is a way we show the other person that we trust them. Because it’s like, “I wouldn’t be sharing this if I didn’t trust you. I’m sharing you this because I trust you,” right? That’s what it’s saying, the meta communication, right?

And so when we’re on the receiving end of that, it feels so good that someone has trusted us, and then we trust them back. And that mutual trust is the spark of colleague-ship, friendships, romances, and so on. And so it’s so important that when someone doesn’t do it, we really treat them with contempt when they don’t open up.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s a really great counterpoint to remember, is that if they happen to already know the answer, we will distrust those who hide. I remember once, I was working, and I happened to know this juicy little piece of gossip that a manager, my manager of the project, was moving in with his girlfriend who also worked at the company.

Leslie John
Ooh, scandal.

Pete Mockaitis
So this was, like, that was happening that weekend. And so, you know, on Monday, we were just chit-chatting, and I was like, “Oh, how was your weekend?”

Leslie John
“How was your weekend?”

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “I don’t think he’s going to tell me this,” you know. But he might say, “Oh, moving, you know, it’s rough.” Okay, you know, maybe leave out some of the details.

Leslie John
And say, “Where did you move?”

Pete Mockaitis
But he’s just, like, in less than a quarter of a second after I asked the question, I was like, “Oh, how’s your weekend?” “Had a steak dinner.” It’s, like, “Okay, someone was ready.”

Leslie John
Oh, wow. Shut down. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
He was ready to answer the “How was your weekend?” question. And so, I mean, we weren’t pals, we weren’t tight. I didn’t expect him to say, “Well, you know, my girlfriend and I were taking the next step.” I didn’t expect, but I thought he’s like, “Oh, I moved, and it was kind of a pain how moving is.” But because he shared even less than I thought he would, I was, like, I don’t know, I felt more distant from him afterwards.

Leslie John
Yeah, that’s so well put.

Pete Mockaitis 
Okay. And a favorite book?

Leslie John
I am loving, I just finished it, well, there’s one that I’m reading right now, but the one I just finished was Unreasonable Hospitality. It’s so good. I love it.

And then the one I’m really in, I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I’m really into true crime right now. One of the books I’m into is Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. I don’t know what these preferences say about me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was just going to recommend The Onion comedy podcast called “A Very Fatal Murder,” which spoofs the whole genre of true crime podcasts.

Leslie John
Oh, I got to listen to that. There was an SNL a couple years ago, one of their music videos that was “Murder show, murder show, I’m going to watch a murder show.” And it was, like, girls’ night in, and they’re getting all excited because they’re going to watch a murder show. So awesome. So true.

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

Leslie John
This is such a boring answer, but I’ve recently encountered zeeg, Z-E-E-G. It’s an amazing scheduling tool. It’s way better than Calendly.

Pete Mockaitis
How so?

Leslie John
Well, so to get nerdy about it, you can make it so that your schedule only opens, only lets people book back-to-back. You can have different meeting types that are easy, like, “Days I’m in office versus Zoom” is a different, like it has a little bit more, a lot more flexibility, actually. I’m not really selling it, I’m sorry, but I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Impressive. And a favorite habit?

Leslie John
Sleep. Is sleep a habit?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great.

Leslie John
It’s so, so, so important. Like, I know people say it’s important, but, like, I think there’s not many people that actually prioritize it the way it needs to be prioritized. At least, for me, I’m a wreck if I don’t have enough sleep. Like, my emotions I can’t regulate, I can’t think as well.

And so it’s, like, I’m just very…And with that one amazing tool that I love, I look really weird, but blue light blocking glasses. I don’t know that they actually, it might just be placebo, but, like, I swear by them. I got them on at 7:00 o’clock at night.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, Harvard Business Review featured a human random control trial, showing that it got the job done.

Leslie John
Really?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, better sleep and better performance ratings from colleagues at work.

Leslie John
Oh, wow. Is that new? I haven’t heard this. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s been around for some years. And is there a key nugget you share that folks seem to really connect and resonate with, they quote back to you often?

Leslie John
Yeah, about my work, one that keeps coming back is to the advice, the guidance. Two things. One, that revealing is a skill. And second is to share a little bit more a lot of the time.

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

Leslie John
My website ProfLeslieJohn.com, or you can follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn @ProfLeslieJohn.

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

Leslie John
Praise someone. Give them a specific and sincere piece of praise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Leslie, thank you.

Leslie John
Thank you so much.

Jul 16

1167: Mastering the Three Elements of Charisma with Olivia Fox Cabane

By Podcasts No Comments

Olivia Fox Cabane reveals the behaviors and practices that help develop your personal charisma.

You’ll Learn

  1. The number one myth surrounding charisma
  2. How to amplify your presence in just a few seconds
  3. The master key to looking and feeling more powerful

About Olivia

Olivia Fox Cabane is a leading authority on the science of charisma and the bestselling author of The Charisma Myth and The Net And The Butterfly, translated into 36 languages. 

Formerly Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford StartX, she has lectured on charisma, leadership, and innovation at Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Marine War College, and the United Nations. As cofounder of the KindEarth.Tech Foundation, she supports foodtech companies advancing environmental sustainability. 

Her clients include the leadership of Apple, Google, TikTok, Deloitte, UBS, and JP Morgan as well as founders of Airbnb, Brex, Paradigm, and Presight. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Olivia, welcome!

Olivia Fox Cabane
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you about charisma. And, in fact, I mentioned earlier you’ve been on our list for a full decade. And now here we come. Your Charisma Myth book got its second edition now. And I’d love it if you could hit us with it straight up, what is the charisma myth or kind of the main thing people misunderstand about charisma?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The single biggest myth about charisma is that it’s this innate magical quality that you either have it or you don’t. And, in fact, as researchers have shown in controlled laboratory experiments, they were able to raise and lower people’s level of charisma as if they were turning a dial.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, I think many of us would say, “Hmm, I would enjoy turning up my charisma dial from time to time.” Can you share with us what went down in these experiments and what were the results?

Olivia Fox Cabane
It turns out that charisma is nothing but behaviors. And the reason that we think that it’s innate is because, usually, the “naturals” at charisma learn these behaviors so early that by the time we meet them, usually in early adulthood at the earliest, it looks as if they’ve always had them.

But, in fact, there are people who consciously learn charisma step by step, and Steve Jobs is one of the most public examples. You can see, if you look at his videos from 1983 to 2011, he learned each of the three elements of charisma, presence, then power, then warmth, one at a time. And it’s fascinating to see his charisma grow over the years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that’s a fun fact. I was unaware Steve Jobs was originally not so charismatic. Can you unpack the story for us?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So if you look at Steve Jobs in the ‘80s, he really is coming across as nerdy, as having trouble with eye contact, for example. And if you look at it from a charisma science perspective, he is low on all three of the measures. He’s low on presence, he’s low on power, he’s low on warmth.

And the first thing he learns is presence. You can see him being able to be more still, more focused on the audience. He fidgets less. He then gradually learns power where you can see how much more space he takes on stage. You can hear in his voice the way his inflection drops in the right places.

And, eventually, the last piece that he learns is warmth. And what’s interesting with Jobs is that it’s not warmth towards the audience, it’s enthusiasm towards the product that he is presenting and the topic he’s speaking about. Steve Jobs, as Carmine Gallo once said, “Steve Jobs doesn’t sell computers. He sells the promise of a better world. He spoke like a prophet.”

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Okay, so you’ve observed this by viewing the evolution of his performances in keynote speeches and presentations over time?

Olivia Fox Cabane
I have, yeah, but one of the fascinating things with the new edition is that I was lucky enough to have Dr. Oliver Niebuhr, who’s the guy in vocal and digital charisma. And he and his team actually analyzed the vocal charisma of CEOs, and they just compared Steve Jobs to, for example, Mark Zuckerberg.

And in the later years, you can see Steve Jobs clocking in at 93% on their formula of the elements of charisma. Zuck, his max was 57% on the charisma metric.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you’ve got these three components, and could you share with us perhaps a story of someone you’ve seen up close and personal go through a transformation in their own charisma levels?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, one of the most interesting areas where I’ve seen this personally has been in Silicon Valley, where you see young founders who have to learn charisma because it really is the number one investment criteria. In fact, not in theory, people always think that investors fund the right idea, the right product.

Personally, what I’ve witnessed is that investors fund the right person. And one of the best studies on that was actually in 2008 when the MIT Media Lab was able to predict with over 80% accuracy the outcome of negotiations, sales calls, and business plan pitches without listening to a single word of content.

They were analyzing the ratio of speaking to listening, they were analyzing the voice fluctuation, and they were analyzing the emotions that were emitted. And so this is something that, when I was at StartX, I had to teach the young founders of, “Listen, if you are agonizing over every single word in your PowerPoint, it’s going to be a great PowerPoint, but realize how little impact it’s going to have compared to your body language.”

And one of the most vivid examples of that was actually the story of Marilyn Monroe, who took a photographer and a reporter one day to Grand Central Station because she wanted to prove that she could flip from Norma Jeane Baker to Marilyn Monroe at will.

And so it was fascinating to hear from the reporter that she was first Norma Jeane, and she went down into Grand Central Station, boarded the subway car, and even though there was a camera clicking the whole time, no one noticed her.

Then she emerges back onto the street, and the reporter said there wasn’t a grand gesture, “It was just she fluffed up her hair, struck her pose, but gradually, it was as if she transformed into Marilyn under our very eyes, and the crowd went nuts within a few minutes.” They had to shove people to help her escape the growing crowd.

Pete Mockaitis
This is after she was famous?

Olivia Fox Cabane
This was after she was famous. She was able to go down into Grand Central and not be noticed by anyone just by turning off her charisma, then re-emerged onto the streets and show herself as Marilyn just by a conscious effort, because Marilyn wanted to prove that the Marilyn persona was something that she could turn on and off.

And this is just an illustrative example of what the studies have shown that charisma is nothing but behaviors, and that in these lab experiments, the researchers, by instructing the participants to display certain behaviors, were able to get them to be more or less charismatic.

Pete Mockaitis
This is mind blowing in so many ways. And so, well, let’s really get into the nitty-gritty here then. So, all right, we’ll start with Marilyn Monroe. What are the key levers or switches or moves that transform one from Norma Jeane Baker into Marilyn Monroe?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So here we’re operating on guesswork because we, unfortunately, don’t have a video recording of that episode. But my best guess would be that what she was doing in the subway was making herself look small, and it was emanating the “I’m no one, don’t look at me.” So this is a question of how you keep your eyes down. It’s a question of how little space you take up, versus if you are going to make yourself the big gorilla in the room.

And one of the really interesting practices that I’ve seen really help with students, particularly for women, is when they start doing martial arts because that will genuinely change the way that they move through space.

And it was really interesting when Stanford’s boxing coach, at one point, gave his students the exercise of walking through crowded areas, learning how to display a body language such that other people would move out of their way, because he was explaining that the ability to portray dominance was one of the keys in pre-games.

And so if you look at studies, the power component is sometimes called power, sometimes confidence, sometimes dominance, sometimes assertiveness. It’s all a component of power. It isn’t actually the real power to command an army because, as humans, because we evaluate people in just so few instances, we’re always inferring.

And so we infer that someone who is displaying confidence must have something that they are confident about, must have a reason to be confident. And that is why, if you look at the cues from which we read dominance, assertiveness, social status, they, really, a lot of them come down to how much confidence your body language displays.

Here’s the irony. Have you ever had a conversation when you say something and your brain goes, “Ooh, that was stupid?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure.

Olivia Fox Cabane
What happens to your face?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe a wince. It’s just kind of like a “Yikes!” kind of a face, yeah.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah. So two things happen at that moment. First, one piece that might be obvious is that the human brain, being terrible at understanding the difference between imagination and reality, which is the reason why when you watch a scary movie, even though you know it’s just a movie, your brain sees blood and guts on the screen, sends you straight into fight or flight mode, adrenaline rushing through your system.

And the sympathetic nervous system sends the body’s resources to the important survive-the-next-10-seconds things, like muscles, vision acuity, etc., shuts down the unnecessary parts like digestion, immune system, and cognitive reasoning, the expensive part of the brain.

When you attack yourself in that way, what’s really interesting is that the brain isn’t great at understanding that that is a self-attack, that there’s not a real saber-toothed tiger. But here’s the other thing. Even though that was a self-directed criticism, self-directed coldness or judgment, the other person doesn’t know that.

All they know is that, while you were looking at them, listening to them, talking to them, and, therefore, presumably thinking about them, they accurately read coldness, criticism, and judgment on your face. So, naturally, they’re going to assume it’s about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I think that that is deep inside of us, just associations. And just yesterday, I was in a physical therapy appointment, and someone was, she seemed perfectly charming, friendly. We did some strength testing, and then she used this device called a shockwave on me. And it hurt, and I actually yelled. I was surprised.

And it was so funny, I had, generally, positive associations with this person, like, “Oh, what a friendly professional.” And then after this, it’s just like, “I don’t like this person.”

And I knew this is not rational. But because she caused me physical pain in an intense, surprising fashion, I was just like, “I don’t really feel like chit-chatting with you anymore.” It’s just there. We just associate and we can’t help ourselves.

Olivia Fox Cabane
One of the absolute truths of charisma is that it’s not just how you make people feel about you, it’s also how you make them feel about themselves. If you make them feel good about themselves, they will associate that feeling to you. If you make them feel bad about themselves, same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so Olivia, please, lay it on us, in terms of what are these behaviors that are going to make us super duper charismatic, persuasive, and funded and sold and all the good things?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So presence, power, and warmth. With presence, the interesting thing is that this is where, in today’s day and age, you can gain the biggest bang for your buck, if you will, because presence really comes down to being able to stay fully focused on the other person in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Olivia Fox Cabane
And with an increasing amount of us distracted every minute by our phones, watches, rings, whatever it is, if you can be one of the few people who can stay fully focused on the other person, you would be amazed at the outsized impact that just a small increase in presence has.

And my favorite trick here is, if you ever notice that you’re in a conversation, but only half your brain present and the other half was busy doing something else, realize that that has a real cost, because there’s a good chance that your eyes glazed over, your facial reactions were a split second delayed, and people can catch that so fast. It’ll come across as an incongruence and you’ll come across as not quite authentic.

Instead, if you can focus on your toes for a split second, that’ll get your brain to scan your whole body from head to, of course, toes and get you very physically present back in the moment, get back in the conversation right after that. So presence, that’s step one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, my toes. And I’m also curious about eye contact? Is there optimal amount, approach, style?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, so eye contact is an interesting one. If you’ll notice in conversations, often the speaker is the one who will look away while they’re constructing their sentences, or halfway through a sentence, whereas, the listener will tend to have more sustained eye contact.

Now, this is where, of course, neurodiversity comes in, and for people for whom eye contact is less comfortable, you can try looking between the eyes, sometimes at the forehead. But eye contact has one particularly interesting effect, which is deep sustained eye contact can send phenethylamine, the same chemical that is known for producing the phenomenon we know as love at first sight.

Pete Mockaitis
So sustained eye contact can produce love at first sight chemicals. Interesting. Can sustained eye contact also feel weird, uncomfortable, jarring, threatening, off putting?

Olivia Fox Cabane
It can, depending on what other signals are happening at the same time. Sustained eye contact with an aggressive body language can absolutely create a feeling of belligerence. Sustained eye contact with a warm, accepting Dalai Lama kind of body language can get people to melt into a puddle of tears. So it’s just one element.

But one of the most hilarious studies was one in which participants were asked to look at each other and count the number of blinks while they were…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Right? And after the research, it turns out the researchers didn’t actually care about the number of blinks. They just wanted people staring at each other without feeling self-conscious. And a staggering number of participants reported increased affection, and some even passionate feelings for one another. It happened fast.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay, so with presence, not so much fidgeting, fully focusing on the person. If your mind is elsewhere, you’re probably sending that message somehow through your face or something. So a quick thought to the toes can get you back in the groove. Maintained eye contact in a warm, Dalai Lama-ish non-threatening format is handy. Anything else we should cover on presence before moving on?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The honest answer is that mindfulness is the single best training for presence. There just is no better way, and mindfulness is hard. If you’ve ever gone on a silent retreat, I’ve always found that the silence is the easy part. The solitude, honestly, you don’t get enough of it. The stillness in the mind, that’s the challenge. So being able to keep your mind centered is a very difficult but a very worthy challenge.

The good news is that even a small increase in your level of presence can really have a big difference. And one of the fastest ways to get that is when you’re saying goodbye to someone in person, pay attention to the way you’re ending the conversation. Are you already, in your mind and with your body language, focused on something else as you, for example, shake their hand and turn away?

Or can you, in the last couple of seconds, while you’re shaking their hand, sustain eye contact, hold their hand for a minute longer with full eye contact, and then turn away? It’s really just one second’s difference. That’s all it is. But it’s the difference between giving the feeling that you were fully focused on them the whole time and the feeling that you were already moving into your next phase of whatever you’re focusing on while still officially looking at them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, with the listening, assuming you got the right body language, posture, curiosity, warmth, etc., going for you, can we overdo it? Do we know how much is too much?

Olivia Fox Cabane
You can overdo it. There’s a couple of downsides. So people usually don’t believe me when I tell them that there’s real downsides to being charismatic. They often think that I’m talking about, “Oh, you can become very powerful and do bad things.” Yeah, sure, that’s obvious.

The less obvious one is that people genuinely can become addicted to your presence. Charisma is a high that people can become addicted to. But the bigger one is that, with the intensity of attention, you kind of create a cocoon within which people can end up spilling their guts.

And then, afterwards, when they realize just how much they’ve shared, comes the ego backlash of, “Oh, God, what have I said?” And that’s when they can associate with you the shame, embarrassment of what they said, the resentment that you somehow got them to spill their guts.

So there are some real downsides to too much charisma and to too focused a state of listening. It can turn into therapy if you’re not cautious, which is where it can be useful to, occasionally, interject your own stories to give them a sense of, “Here’s what you’ve shared. Here’s what I’m sharing.” That can give them a sense of just how much they’ve been self-revealing, and also it can give them a chance to back off if they want to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super thank you. All right. So that’s presence. Let’s talk about power.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, with power, as we were saying, the interesting thing about power is, because it’s read through confidence, the counterintuitive point is that the way to confidence is usually less about building yourself up, and it’s usually more about learning how to remove the obstacles, such as self-criticism and self-doubt.

Because self-criticism is so powerful, because the brain reads it as a real attack, ironically, strength, and power will often come from self-compassion and self-forgiveness. Because the ability to move on quickly when you’ve just decided that you messed up, that is one of the most important routes to sustained confidence and strength in your body language.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. The ability to move on quickly when you discover you’ve messed up, How do we get that skill of that quick rebound?

Olivia Fox Cabane
A couple of steps. The first thing is de-stigmatize. Whatever it is that is happening, let’s say you’re getting an attack of the imposter syndrome. So with the imposter syndrome, we know now that it’s a fairly common phenomenon, that the vast majority of people experience it at some point or another, that even though it feels like you’re an imposter, it’s just a matter of time before people expose you as a fraud. This is really just a normal experience. De-stigmatize that feeling.

Or if it is the feeling of having failed, it can help to remember that some of the best baseball players or soccer players have occasionally failed eight times out of ten, in some cases nine times out of ten. De-stigmatizing to detaching. The brain, as we’ve just said, does its best to present us with an accurate view of reality but it can’t because there’s just too much going on.

So our brain is almost always going to present us with a distorted view of reality. Sometimes it’s a little distorted, it’s pretty accurate, sometimes it’s widely distorted. So just because a thought is in your head doesn’t mean it’s true. So de-stigmatize normal experience. Detach, just because a thought is in your head doesn’t mean it’s true.

Your brain’s job is to make up thoughts. Just because you have an ugly thought doesn’t mean that you are a terrible person. So de-stigmatize, detach, and then rewrite.

So the most useful tool for me of all in this is cognitive re-framing. So imagine that you’re driving to a key pitch, a presentation, and you’re focused, you’re locked in, you know your stuff, you’re on the freeway. All of a sudden, a huge black SUV cuts you off, waves in front of you, almost runs you off the freeway, and then exits. How does that make you feel?

Pete Mockaitis
Mad, scared, disoriented.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Right. You completely have lost your focus, you might have your sympathetic nervous system activated, adrenaline. But you need to get back into a good state. Now, what if through a total fluke coincidence, you learned that the driver of that big black SUV wasn’t an asshole driver?

It was a distraught mother whose baby was choking in the back seat. And it was all she could do to even keep the car on the freeway while trying to save her baby’s life. Would that immediately change how you feel about the event?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so anger disappears in terms of like, “Okay, I am not wronged by a jerk. But, rather, I unfortunately, was in the wrong place at the wrong time in the midst of this situation.” So the anger goes away. I could still be kind of shaken up and scared, but the anger’s gone.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Sure. But the anger is gone, and then it is much easier to get back into a state of focus if you don’t feel that you have been personally attacked by. And so in most situations in life, you’ll never find out whether it’s an idiot driver or a distraught mother. Choose the version of reality that gets you into the best mental state.

And the reason this is critical is because there is so much body language emanating every second that you cannot control it consciously. The best and really the only way to emanate charisma is to control your mind. Charisma originates in the mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Choose your version of reality. What’s funny is, sometimes, it can be a little far-fetched. And as long as it’s remotely plausible, it does work. So, for example, I know this is not likely to be true, and yet, it does wonders for me.

There have been a couple of times I was disappointed that I wasn’t invited to a wedding. It’s like, “Oh, I thought we were kind of close. I thought we were pals. Well, what’s this about?”

And I say, “Well, Pete, the bride doesn’t want to be seeing you on her wedding day and be filled with regret that she doesn’t get to marry you. That’s going to put a damper on the day. So, of course, she’s not going to invite you to her wedding.”

So now that is so far-fetched, and I’m not that narcissistic to believe that, you know, every woman wishes they could marry me. And yet, I’ll tell you what, in the moment, I feel so much better about not being invited to the wedding. I chose that version of reality, rather far-fetched, but it got the job done for me emotionally.

Olivia Fox Cabane
If it can make you laugh, and if it can get your brain to entertain a different possibility, even for a few minutes, you’ll get the neurochemical change in your brain, and that will get you the body language change you need. So from my perspective, it’s really whatever is the most adaptive, whatever works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. All right. Well, let’s talk about warmth.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So warmth is another one of those you can’t fake it, you have to genuinely feel it. And so sometimes it’s easy because these are people you like. But sometimes it’s harder because sometimes you’re dealing with difficult people.

So with people that you like or people who are just strangers, it’s the fairly easier route of the best way to make a great first impression is, before you walk into the room, knowing that first impressions happen so fast, they happen in just a few seconds, imagining that the person you’re about to meet is a long-lost best friend.

And, really, to make it real, learn from Olympic athletes. Visualization works best when you get the five senses involved. So taste the s’mores that you ate together around the campfire, hear the songs they sung so badly off key. Imagine it vividly.

And then you walk into the room with all that warm and friendly body language. And because, “Hey, thanks, mirror neurons,” one of whose jobs it is to replicate in them what they see in you, they will, in general, people will accept whatever you project.

If you’re projecting confidence, presence, and we’ve been friends for ages, subconsciously, some part of them is going to be feeling, “Oh, this is a warm and confident guy, and it feels like I’ve known him forever.” Why? Because that’s the body language you’re emitting, right?

What if it’s a total jerk or someone with whom you have a long history, or someone who’s really difficult? There’s a couple different ways here. If it’s in the moment, go nuclear. I don’t care what you have to imagine.

You think that your example with the bride was far-fetched. I want you to imagine that they got a terminal illness diagnosis, their dog got run over, their spouse asked for a divorce, whatever you have to imagine, just for a few seconds to get a biochemical shift to get you the right body language.

But if this is a long-term situation, again, let’s use the ability to hijack the brain, the best tool I’ve ever seen, and it works extraordinarily, you wanted to know what has worked the best with the students, this is the one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, first, you write a letter from you to this person, longhand, with all the things you ever wished that you’d ever said to that person. This is not surprising, you may have done this already. Second, you write their answer to you with everything you ever wished they had said to you, recognizing how wrong they were, anything you wish they had said.

That’s the letter that you read every night for a week. Night one, it’s going to feel weird and awkward. Night seven, you’ll be stunned at how a part of your brain says, “Oh, well, I know I got emotional satisfaction. I know they admitted they were wrong.” The brain is so hijack-able, use it to your advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is striking! I believe it. It’s taken me a while to come around to these principles. I think I have no doubt now that they are effective. I guess I’m wondering, is it dangerous or wrong in some way to be flirting with falsehood in this fashion, Olivia?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes to both possibly. And that’s why I always want to be upfront with when people ask me, “But is it manipulation?” Yes, it is. But then from my perspective, anytime you are trying to convince someone of something, you’re literally trying to change the inside of someone else’s head. How is that not manipulation?

From my perspective, the two guardrails that I look at are intent and impact. Is your intent good? And is your impact good? If the answer to these two is yes, go for it.

Pete Mockaitis
In some ways, like the lies we tell to ourselves for our benefit, I guess there’s another moral distinction there, as opposed to lying to them in terms of like, “Oh, this product can absolutely do that thing that you want,” when you know that it can’t. It’s like, “No, bad move.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes, though I do want to give a caution, as many others have said about visualization. It is important, when you are using them for a future outcome for yourself, that if you’re visualizing the outcome, this will only change things if you previously didn’t believe it was possible and if that belief was key.

So, for example, you can visualize yourself winning the lottery all you want. That is not going to change anything. It is the visualization of the behaviors. Visualizing yourself. You know, the studies that were fascinating, when people were actually strengthening muscles by just visualizing themselves, playing the piano, for example, or doing certain motions, and not just the brain changes, but actually the body change.

So visualizing the behavior is key if the behavior has to change. Visualizing the outcome is great, but only has an impact if the belief about the outcome is what was holding you back before.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So that could shift belief, it’s like, “Oh, it’s impossible that I could ever start my own business.” But then you visualize it many times, it’s like, “Well, now it’s suddenly I don’t believe it’s impossible because I’ve had the practice of the visualization.”

And so I guess what you were saying is the transformation that is occurring here is an internal one as opposed to The Secret. We are secreting and manifesting to the universe to bring into our whatever.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes, sorry, no. You can visualize yourself marrying whoever it is, becoming king of whatever you want, and winning whichever lottery you want, all you want, that will not actually happen just through your believing enough.

And this is something that, honestly, pisses me off quite a bit because there’s so much of a, “Well, if it hasn’t happened, it’s because you didn’t believe hard enough.” No, it’s not. You also have to look at the actual real-world data.

Visualizing and using the brain’s shortcuts to your advantage is really useful, really key when those limitations are what were holding you back. If what was holding you back from being a prima ballerina was not being six foot three, you can visualize it all you want, you’re not going to grow taller through visualization.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So these bits operate in the real world. And so tell us what we know digitally, because in some ways I’m thinking the game must be changed insofar as subconscious signaling things like pheromones, whatever, in our fear sweat or our tears, or, you know, there’s fasting studies on this that we pick up on that.

So when you’re, you know, hundreds of miles away, working on a Google Meet or a Zoom or whatnot, those aren’t in the mix. So tell us, what do we have to keep in mind in this context?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, so, indeed, when you’re online, because of the limitations of telecommunication, you’re going to lose so much of the smells of pheromones, but also the microexpressions, which, to the best of my knowledge, aside from Cisco Telepresence, no online video conferencing system can catch.

And so what people don’t realize is that your voice has a much bigger impact than it would offline. And the problem here is one of the key findings that Oliver Niebuhr’s team had was that, if there is too high a rate of compression, there is a risk of emotional confusion, with emotions like excitement being read as impatience or even anger.

And so their conclusion was, whenever there’s a risk of compression, turn off your camera, because your voice is so important that that is what must be first.

Pete Mockaitis
Very, very practical tip. And I’ve been there. So I love it. You’re increasing the bar, not just, “Are my words audible to you?” but, “Is there compression occurring?” And I guess then there’s also some basics, like, on your side, make sure you have, you know, good, strong, reliable internet connectivity bandwidth, working in your favor so it’s not tempted to do the compression.

In terms of specific media, tech tools, are some more prone to compression than others?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So I’m going to have to pull up the actual data here because we’re going to get very technical. All right. “Specifically, at high compression rates, MP3 and Speex codecs demonstrate a higher rate of emotional misclassification and a reduction in perceived charisma, particularly for female speakers.”

So women’s voices are more affected by the negative effects of compression, which is one of the two pieces of bad news that his team had found, along with the fact that women are more impacted by the rate of how formal or informal their clothing is and how impressive their titles are.

So to simplify things, a male founder can show up in a hoodie and be fine. And a female founder, to get the same level of respect, will have to dress a lot more formally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, duly noted. I guess I’m also wondering, okay, so MP3 compression, I don’t know if there’s a difference between Google Meet versus Zoom versus Teams on default compression settings. Or is that a setting that we can readily change in the platforms? You and I are using Riverside right now, which is, podcasters love for this very reason. We have local recording, full fidelity, no compression.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So you’d have to ask Oliver. His recommendation is usually use the high fidelity or music mode if it’s available.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, music. Okay.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Choose the original tone function, if that’s available. And, of course, the quality of your mic is really, really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. What I’m thinking about, and echo cancellation is sometimes a thing or reduce background noise, sometimes those, well, now we’re getting deep into, I also own a podcast production company, into my dork down here.

But with regard to equipment, I mean, you can go wild here. There are so many microphones that I’ve spent, literally, dozens of hours of my life listening to Bandrew over at Podcastage review different microphones, so no need to do that. But any quick tips from your perspective on microphones?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So a key feature of the microphone’s transmission quality is the frequency response. And what you are looking for, ideally, is a large diaphragm condenser microphone. And what you’re looking for is a mic with a curve that is as flat as possible, as unbiased as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, totally. And I would say my favorite, this is, well, I’ll just go and name a specific one. This is the microphone we send to podcasts guests who don’t already have a microphone, is the Maono HD something, which we’ll link in the show notes. And that’s a nice one, you know?

It’s under a hundred bucks. It includes a stand and a pop filter, and you can get nice and close. It eliminates background noise. It’s not built to last for a decade like some of our nice little Sennheiser goodies that we’re playing with right now. But, yeah, it’ll get you done.

And then, on the camera side of things, I’ve got to believe that has an impact in terms of what we’re seeing less visually. And what I love is I’m working with, and again, not that to go, no one has to set up a whole podcast studio, but I’ve got an SLR, like a wedding photographer camera camera behind a teleprompter situation, the Elgato prompter, which I love because, Olivia, I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this, but the lens is right behind the prompter, which is also a screen.

So as I look at you, I am looking at the camera, which is also the display at the same time. So I think that’s really cool. And some people have mentioned, “Wow, I really feel like you’re talking to me.” So for that eye contact presence stuff, I imagine that’d be a little bit of a boost.

But lay it on us, in terms of any do’s and don’ts in your web conferencing situation? Good microphone, dress appropriately, don’t get compressed, watch your tone, mute the video if necessary. What are some other do’s and don’ts here?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So gestures, even if they’re not picked up by the camera, are worth doing because they impact the fluctuation of your voice. And to give a broad generalization, more fluctuation better. But in addition, you’re completely right about the eye contact.

And Oliver’s suggestion was tape either the photo of someone you like or even a stuffed animal above your camera and speak to that because that will automatically give you a warmer, more present, and better focused eye contact.

You do want to be as close to the camera as is comfortable, because, in general, the larger your face appears on screen, the more people will feel that you are present and attentive to them. And, finally, this was, for me, one of the most fascinating discoveries is, in the new edition, I had assumed, along with everyone else, that lower voices are more charismatic. And the signs prove me wrong.

And one of the best examples, I’m going to say a sentence, and I’m going to ask you to pay attention to your emotions while I say it, okay?

“The key for most people’s level of happiness is absolutely the color of their toilet paper. And if only they changed from pink to blue, their problems would be over.” So, eventually, your brain kicks in and says, “Hang on.” But it takes a while.

Meanwhile, your emotions are like, “Oh, sounds credible, authoritative. Yes, this is someone who knows what she’s talking about.” And if you pay close attention, the specific piece that has this impact, which in terms of presence and power especially, is a determining factor.

The one that communicates confidence, competence, authority, and trust is the rate and the speed of the drop, “It’s toilet paper. It’s blue.” Instead of, as unfortunately so many teenagers these days have, you know how their voice goes up even when it’s not a question, the up talk? That’s a killer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I see. So a quick drop is what brings it.

Olivia Fox Cabane
A quick drop. The speed and the depth of the drop turns out is what has the key in how much authority and confidence you convey.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I do that now, I feel kind of silly. Like, I’ve got a voice modulator. Is that like within reason or am I overdoing it or is it all good? Just lay it on.

Olivia Fox Cabane
The way I always recommend it is, listen, when you’re trying a new behavior, do it in situations when it doesn’t matter, like when you’re ordering coffee or when you’re chatting with an Uber driver. And stay close to home in the moments when it’s high stakes.

But by practicing new behaviors in low-stakes environment, you can see what feels natural and what doesn’t and, gradually, slightly expand your comfort zone.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, when you were doing those drops, what I felt was, “Whoa! Intensity.” And so I think that could be good or bad, insofar as, so it seems powerfully awesome in the sense that it’s, like, “Whoa! This person really, really means what she’s saying about this toilet paper.”

And I guess it’s about congruity again, in terms of it’s, like, “Why on earth would anyone have such intense feelings about toilet paper? This is odd,” then that’s off as opposed to, if you say, “When our clients implement this technology, they tend to see an 80-90% impact on sales.” It’s like, “Oh, shoot, he really was serious about that impact on sales.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
For example, but also think about politics. What if instead of toilet paper, for which I chose a deliberately ridiculous example, what if I’m saying, “And, really, the problem here is redheaded people. And just getting rid of these redheads would solve all our issues”? That’s when it gets into danger territory.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, and I think that what’s so funny then is, not funny to endanger the lives of redheads there. They’re very precious. I’ve got some in the family. We love them. What’s funny is when those shades of gray, the danger zone, in terms of, like, if you already like a politician or speaker or whatever, you’ll be inclined to give them all kinds of grace.

Like, “Well, obviously, he was just joking.” It was like, “But, no, seriously, if you look at the research on redheads, it’s kind of concerning,” you know, versus someone who already dislikes that speaker is, like, “Can you believe this? This is a call to violence. This is outrageous.”

And then folks who are in the middle, I think, may very well be curious and potentially persuaded, like, “Huh, what’s the deal with the redheads? Maybe I should look into this.” Is that a fair reading or am I making stuff up?

Olivia Fox Cabane
That’s an excellent reading, and that is exactly the danger of humans going along with things emotionally, and their reason kicking in belatedly, sometimes honestly, if at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I also have to get your take on 80% predicted that folks would get sold or funded or whatever based on a few variables. And we’ve mentioned a few of them. I want to cover any that we didn’t, because one you mentioned briefly was the ratio of speaking to listening. What’s ideal there?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So this is really just confirming the idea that charisma is even more how you make people feel about themselves than it is how you make them feel about you. And, for me, the best illustrative story for that is when Benjamin Disraeli was running against William Gladstone for the post of Prime Minister to the British Empire.

And one young lady who happened to be the future mother of Winston Churchill just happened to go to dinner on consecutive evenings with both men. And so the British press asked her afterwards what impressions they’d made, and she said, “After dining with Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. After dining with Mr. Disraeli, I thought I were the cleverest woman in England.”

And, of course, Disraeli won because he had the ability to make her feel interesting and intelligent. And so what I desperately try to get into students’ heads is, “Stop trying to impress people. Let them impress you, and they will love you for it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s so funny, it’s so true. I’m thinking about, well, back to this physical therapy yesterday. When I asked a question, and when the doctor said to me, “That’s a really important question,” it was like I felt great.

And so it’s like I like him more because of it. And it wasn’t because he said something brilliant. It was because he just, you know, said something that… I like to think I asked good questions as a podcaster, so you know, he struck a nerve, like, “Yeah, good. That’s nice.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
It’s the tiny things, like saying, “You know…?” or if ever you need to get them a feeling of impact, it’s saying, “You know, I’d never thought of it that way.” Now, of course, as we said, because humans are so good at catching up on incongruence, if you don’t actually believe what you say, one, you’re going to pay a penalty because incongruence is expensive in the brain.

And two, there’s a good chance that your macro and micro expressions will clash and then you’ll come across as inauthentic. So this is one of the cases where, again, charisma begins in the mind. You have to believe what you’re saying. And this is where I want to be upfront and frank. There’s a reason why there’s a positive correlation between charisma and narcissism.

It’s not necessarily that charisma makes you narcissistic, but it is a reason that narcissists do sometimes have an easier time being charismatic because they’re genuinely convinced that they are the best, most interesting, most fascinating, and, therefore, that is what their body language absolutely genuinely and congruently communicates.

Pete Mockaitis
Fabulous point there. So with listening, the overall idea is to make them feel special and important and clever and wonderful. But is there a number? Is there a ratio of listening to speaking that the science says is pretty good?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The point at which they say, “Am I talking too much?” is when you know you’ve done it right.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the other side. Okay. So plenty, I mean, it sounds like.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So plenty. So for the second edition, we had the book reviewed by a Gen Z panel, and one of them was a founder and he said, “You know, I’ve noticed every time when we were selling customers that if they had spent 80% of the time speaking and we had spoken for less than 20%, we were going to close.” That was his ratio, 80-20.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Olivia, this is so good. I could talk for another hour. But, tell me, anything critically powerful that we got to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Olivia Fox Cabane
In terms of the best practices to increase charisma, one of the most uncomfortable, but one of the most impactful is improv, improv theater, because it is a fabulous way in which to practice different modes of being, different ways of body language, different characters, in a way.

This is one of the best and fastest ways to increase your comfort zone socially. So even though it can feel really uncomfortable at first, improv theater is one of the best investments you can make in your own professional development.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Okay. I’ve done an improv course. I thought it was so cool. Agreed. Well, now could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research we haven’t talked about already?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Well, the research that changed everything, the first study that in 1989 showed that charisma was nothing but behavior, I think I’d have to choose because it was the turning point when charisma started becoming a science.

But in 2011, when Antonakis and his team showed that not only was charisma behavior, but that behavior was teachable, that’s when charisma became an applied science. And that’s when people realized that charisma can be learned.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So you don’t actually need charisma to succeed. You don’t even need charisma to get people to do what you want them to do. If all you’re looking for is compliance, read Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It is the Bible of mind manipulation.

The limitation is that those compliance methods really only work while they are in play. And what you don’t get is the ability to inspire people, the ability to lift whole teams. In an almost radically opposite direction, because one of the most transformative paths to charisma is actually self-acceptance.

As we’ve seen, the path to more self-confidence is often through self-forgiveness and self-compassion, is Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance. So on diametrical opposite pieces of the scale, you would have Cialdini on influence and Brach on acceptance and self-compassion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And a favorite habit?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, it’s incredibly uncomfortable. But if you’re willing to, Metta meditation, M-E-T-T-A, especially self-metta, which is the self-compassion meditation. And I think there’s actually an audio recording on my YouTube channel of a short metta meditation.

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

Olivia Fox Cabane
AskOlivia.com.

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

Olivia Fox Cabane
For job interviews, use the visualization techniques to imagine that the interviewer is a long-lost friend. That will change the first few seconds of the interview. And because of the primacy effect, everything that happens afterwards will be filtered through that first impression. And you never get a second chance to make a good first impression so you might as well get it right the first time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Olivia, thank you.

Olivia Fox Cabane
My pleasure. It was great being here.

Jun 15

1161: How to Build Stronger Relationships through Emotional Attunement with Nidhi Tewari, LCSW

By Podcasts No Comments

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW reveals the secret skill behind better trust, connection, and collaboration: attunement.

You’ll Learn

  1. The next evolution of emotional intelligence
  2. How to improve collaboration and performance with the CHECK-IN framework
  3. How sharing your own experiences can unintentionally shut others down

About Nidhi

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW is a 2026 Thinkers50 Radar award recipient and keynote speaker on work culture and wellbeing, drawing on 13 years of clinical expertise with high-performing leaders. 

She has worked with LinkedIn, Warner Bros. Discovery, TED, and NPR, among others, and presented at the World Economic Forum, Cannes Lions, TEDWomen, and TEDNext. Featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Inc., and Fast Company, she serves on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council and Harvard T.H. Chan 2026 Creator Cohort.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Nidhi, welcome!

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Thanks so much for having me, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat here. Can you tell us what does this word attunement mean, first of all, because we’re to be saying it a lot?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, we are going to be saying it a lot. Attunement is our moment-to-moment responsiveness to our emerging needs and the emerging needs of others. It’s our ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to the emotional, social, and functional needs of ourselves and others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, you’re giving me flashbacks to psychology courses in which I remember the way that I was such a hack, the way I got through learning a lot of definitions. And for the multiple choice, I was thinking, “Okay, is this psychological word a good thing or a bad thing?” because then I can cross out, you know, half of the answer responses. Like, “No, no, this is a bad thing. Cross out good things. I’m left with two choices.” So it sounds like that’s a good thing, Nidhi, is that correct?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
It’s a great thing. It’s what we want to aim for. Think about when you really are vibing with somebody, you feel in sync with them, they get you, you feel understood and heard. That is the essence of attunement, except it goes a little bit deeper, and I’m sure we’re going to dive in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that sounds handy. Is it possible to overdo it, on attunement?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, you can be overly attuned. This is what I typically would see with some of my clients back when I was a therapist. A lot of my clients that had a trauma history were overly sensitized to people’s cues.

So, for example, like a subtle change in eye contact or a shift in body language or tone of voice would, all of a sudden, signal to them that, “Oh, my God, I must have done something wrong. They’re mad at me.” When in reality, it was just, they were tired after a long day of work and had nothing at all to do with them.

So, yeah, there are instances where we can be hyper-attuned and, of course, everything in balance, just like with most things in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and could you share with us, you know, your book is called Working Well, how is this attunement relevant at work? What does it do for us?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so it’s imperative at work. If you have learned about emotional intelligence, which is all about how we pay attention to our own empathy, how we regulate our own emotions, how we’re showing up in our interactions, attunement and relational intelligence is the next evolution of this.

It’s not only how we’re paying attention to what’s happening within ourselves and how we’re showing up. It’s what’s happening between us, between us in an interaction, in a conversation, in a difficult moment.

And it’s really handy in terms of a skillset to develop so that you can relate better with your colleagues, have a better relationship with your boss. And, of course, it extends beyond even the workplace to our romantic relationships, our friendships, our familial relationships, etc., too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share a story with us in terms of someone who was not doing so well in the attunement and that had some consequences at work, and then they upgraded it and what happened for them?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, this is where I have tons of examples. There’s lots of people that are really well-intentioned and think that they are self-aware and are connecting well with people. And then, in reality, it’s a total mess.

So one experience that I can share is of my own. I once had a boss who was teaching me how to teach. So I’m an executive coach, and part of her process was we had to submit these verbatim transcripts of what was said in a coaching session. And then she would review it and criticize us basically in front of the group.

So what I need in those moments is I need a little bit of a softening of the feedback. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. I can handle criticism. I can handle somebody telling me what I need to do better. But she went in on me.

I remember so vividly, she said to me, “Nidhi, you’re doing it wrong. Why do you keep doing it this way? You’re giving the answers to your coaching clients way too easily and you’re not letting them struggle enough. Like, I don’t understand why you’re not getting it.”

And I wanted to completely, like, turn off the Zoom camera, hide in a corner, eat some Häagen-Dazs. I wanted to cry my eyes out. I was like, “What is happening right now?” That was a moment of misattunement.

Now, sadly, she’s not a leader who necessarily learned how to do it better, but I can share an experience of somebody who got it right. There was a time in my life where I lost my best friend to stage four brain cancer. And this happened within a month of me taking a new position.

Previous employers had started off being really understanding and empathetic, but then something shifted and they told me to compartmentalize my grief. And so with this new team that I joined, I was absolutely dreading sharing this loss with them because I just assumed that they were going to can me, that they were going to say, you know, “Too bad. So sad. Here’s three days bereavement leave and you got to come back in.”

But this leader, her name was Cathy, she was so attuned to me. Her first response was to, first of all, call me. I texted her. She immediately called me. She asked me, “Nidhi, like, tell me about your experience. Like, I know how devastating this is. You were with your best friend as she was transitioning.” And she really connected with me on an emotional level.

And then, more importantly, when I came back to work three weeks later, because they donated their paid time off to me, I had zero hours accrued. They gave me three weeks. They didn’t check in on me to see about KPIs or to be able to get a sense of how I was delegating my workout. They instead really asked me questions about Laura, who was my best friend, about how I was grieving. And they gave me a space to help maintain her legacy.

So that’s an example of a leader who’s really attuned, they’re connected, they’re in-sync with what you need. And it made a tremendously healing impact on me and became the impetus for the work that I do today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very beautiful. And I’m certain, in terms of the dynamics of the team and your relationships and your ability to trust them and to disclose and to collaborate, I would imagine, get a real big boost from that kind of thing.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
A hundred percent. Yeah, I mean, it really showed me how imperative it is to be connected and caring in the workplace, and what attunement can really do. And it’s interesting because we, like, talk about attunement in the context of parent-child relationships or even our romantic relationships, but nobody had studied it in the context of the workplace.

Yet I saw, time and time again, through the work I was doing with Fortune 500 that this was the skillset that was really the linchpin for connection at work. And yet nobody had studied it and nobody had examined it or definitely was not teaching it.

And so we’re the first ones to do it. And that’s why I wrote the book and do so much speaking on this topic now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. And I’m thinking about, we had a great conversation with Michael Sorensen on the podcast, who wrote a book called, I Hear You, all about validation. And he is just, like, “Everybody is just starving for this stuff. I feel like I have this wild superpower when I do it, like at work, with my friends, you know, with romantic relationships. It’s powerful.”

And it sounds like there’s a healthy overlap between these two concepts. And I would love to get your take on, you’re the first to do some of this research and work at work, do we have any hard-hitting data insights about this stuff?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, absolutely. So, first, let’s dive a little bit deeper into attunement, which is really broken down into four key skills. So this is, like, the brass tacks of this concept. And we studied this in the context of a bunch of different outcomes: psychological safety, individual and team productivity, connection and team trust. We looked at so many different factors here.

And so those four key skills are flexibility, reading cues, self-regulation, and collaboration. So flexibility, being our ability to adapt and be agile in our interactions. So, for example, if a colleague has something that’s top of mind and you also have something top of mind, that you’re able to shift gears a little bit, adapt to what their need is in that moment. It doesn’t mean that you don’t eventually circle back. It just means that you’re flexible with them.

It also means that you’re able to adapt your intervention. So, like, let’s say that a colleague of yours is struggling with anxiety, and you have another colleague who also has an anxiety disorder. Recognizing that no diagnosis is a monolith, and that we need to be adaptable in terms of how we support each person. So that’s what that flexibility piece is.

Reading cues, being able to notice what’s not said in an interaction. Somewhere around 60% of our interactions are based in nonverbal cues. So we’re looking at body language, demeanor, leaning in versus leaning away. And also, of course, the cadence, the tone, and the literal words that are being used in an interaction. So being able to read those cues and shift gears accordingly, super important.

Next, we have self-regulation. So this is your capacity to manage your own emotions so that you can connect with another person’s emotional state. And there are some helpful tools that we can get into like 4-7-8 eight breathing, being able to just ground yourself and be present in this moment so that you can then maintain connection with the other person.

And then the last is collaboration. So this is basically letting the other person know that we’re an allied front, we’re on the same team. And I think, even more importantly, that you’re going to be learning from them just as much as they’re learning from you.

So what we found is with mastering these four key skills – flexibility, reading cues, self-regulation and collaboration – all of those main outcomes that I just mentioned – psychological safety, team and individual productivity, connections, so cohesiveness within the team – all of that improved as a result and it ended up being the key to working well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I like that clear rundown there. And so let’s hear it, what kinds of results do we see when folks upgrade these four skills?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so, I mean, their productivity improved significantly. So not only were they able to focus and do better work individually, but now they were working better together as a team. The ability to trust and have confidence and have faith that the people on their team actually have their back improved.

All of these different factors are absolutely the crux of a healthy work culture. And, ultimately, it affects the bottom line, right? When people are disengaged, distrusting, they feel disconnected from people, it cost the global GDP $8.9 trillion. So that’s 9% of the global GDP being missed as a result of this level of disconnection.

So if we can leverage these skills of attunement, we start to close in that gap and bridge the gap to fostering better connection and just better team relationships overall.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s tick through some of each of these here. With regard to flexibility, are there a couple key flavors or varieties you recommend engaging for folks? I think I had a guest who she said, “I might write a book about we need to have an inner monk and an inner David Goggins in terms of just the calm, deep, and then the screaming.”

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
And so those would be two of the extremes, I suppose, with regard to the flexibility and how you may adapt in your approach to someone. How do you think about the different varieties that we might flex into?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
I mean, for somebody like myself, I’m a very open-book person, right? Like, I wear my heart on my sleeve. And so somebody would need to adapt to that. But there are lots of people in the workplace that don’t necessarily have that trust or don’t feel safe opening up.

And so part of being flexible is taking it at a slower pace and just meeting them where they are in that moment. Like, we can’t dive super deeply into connection and relationships without first building that foundation of trust. And sometimes we get frustrated when we’re trying to ask questions and check in with somebody, and they’re giving you kind of cursory answers.

I think part of that flexibility element of attunement is recognizing, “Okay, this is just the stuff that they bring to the table and that’s all right. They move at a slower pace than perhaps I would. I can be adaptable and just take it slower. And, eventually, they will get to a place where they feel comfortable opening up to me.”

So that’s kind of an example that I can give you about how flexibility typically will look like amongst colleagues or even between a boss and an employee.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So that’s one domain of being flexible in terms of how disclosing and open we’re being in a given moment or stage of a relationship. What are some other domains of flexibility?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so I think that you need to be able to adjust your body language. So sometimes people, you know, paying attention to how you’re showing up in your interactions. Some people like closer proximity. Other people like to keep you at a distance. You have to kind of read what’s going on with the other person.

Another example with flexibility would be being able to shift gears to adapt based off of what their particular needs are in that moment. So the most common example I would see is, in the give and take of a conversation, we kind of come in with our things that we want to share and maybe different touch points in the workplace of this project and where we are with this level of communication with the client.

But if the person that you’re interacting with has something else that’s top of mind, just being flexible means, you know, adapting based off of where they are in that moment. So perhaps in the beginning of the meeting, or in the beginning of the conversation, you start off with where their concerns are. You validate, you listen, you actively listen in specifically.

And then you might be able to shift gears towards the end of the conversation to bring it back full circle to where you want it to begin. But being flexible means that it’s not always about you, right, in the conversation, that we need to be able to shift as needed based off of where they are in that moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And to the notion of flexibility, I guess this whole attunement business, it seems very generous, kind, attentive, giving. And I suppose I’m thinking one side of flexibility is there’s a time to give and I think sometimes there’s a time to take. And so how do you think about that dimension?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
A hundred percent. Absolutely, there needs to be balance in relationships. Attunement is not about, “Let me self-sacrifice to meet everybody else’s needs.” And this is the biggest pushback that I typically get when it comes to this framework is they’re like, “But what about my boundaries? And what about my mental health and wellbeing?”

Uh-uh. Nobody’s telling you to become somebody’s therapist. Nobody’s telling you to abandon your own needs and service of others, but there’s a way to be able to prioritize both, right? So we need to be adapting to other people’s needs, but also it’s okay to ask for help, ask for support from other people. And they then need to be attuning to you in that moment, right?

So there is that give and take that is absolutely critical for any type of relationship and, I would argue, is imperative for a healthy relationship. Otherwise, it becomes very unbalanced and you feel like you’re giving, giving, giving, and nobody is there to support you in your time of need either.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear about some of key cues to read.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so part of the reading cues is going to be really paying attention to the non-verbals. So what’s their body language doing? Are they closed off or are they open when they’re speaking to you? Sometimes we even subconsciously cross our legs, which can signal that, “Hmm, I might not be as open to what you’re saying as you might think I am.”

Often, even the cadence of the delivery, right, influences how what’s being said is being interpreted. So if somebody, when you ask them, “Hey, how’s it going?” and they’re like, “Oh, I’m fine. Things are great. Just another day in paradise.”

“Hmm, are you actually fine? Or are you just trying to skate past through this conversation so that we can get to the moving past it and talk about business now, right?” which is often what I would see in the workplaces.

You know, people are so quick to try to not open up. And that, in and of itself, is a signal to you that they are actually more stressed than they’re letting on, that perhaps there’s actually something going on underneath the surface that they’re not disclosing to you.

Another element is, literally, when we are in conversation and we’re uncomfortable, we will lean away to put distance between ourselves and the other person. We do this subconsciously and it’s our way to be able to try to protect ourselves and create space. So pay attention to those cues.

As you’re sharing something with a colleague or with a leader, are they literally putting distance between yourself and them because that might mean that you’re evoking discomfort within them and you might need to shift up the way that you’re sharing feedback or sharing the information that you’re disclosing to them in that moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fun. I’m reminded we had an interview with an FBI interrogator, Joe Navarro, who wrote about body language. And he suggested a number of things here, but he said, “The feet can often be one of the biggest tells in terms of once those toes are pointed away, that kind of means, ‘Yeah, I’d like to be out of here now.’” And it’s seems to be a pretty good reliable indicator of that kind of thing.

I’d love your pro tip here in terms of flexibility and reading cues, combine them together.  You said if someone seems like they’re in a rush, “I’m fine,” and they’re kind of want to move on to the business, well, now here we are.

On the one hand, we could accommodate what appears to be their desire, “Let’s go ahead and move on into the business.” Or, you could note, “Oh, it sounds like this person feels rushed or stressed,” so you could attempt to delve into that.

But then it seems like, well, I see that there’s branching possibilities that might not go so well. It’s like, “Hey, the cue was, ‘I didn’t want to go here.’ And now you’re trying to go here. Don’t care for that.”

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I agree with you. I think that we have to be respectful of people’s boundaries. But what I would push back on is that it all doesn’t have to happen in that exact moment, right? So you ask this question around, “Are you okay? How are you doing?” They give you the cursory, “I’m fine.” Okay, they want to move into business. We respect that. That’s great.

But then how about at lunchtime, we stop by and we say, “Hey, I know that you’re working on XYZ Project. How do you feel like it’s been going? Has it been stressful? Are there certain elements that you feel like you’re doing exceptionally well in? Can I support you in some way?” Right?

So now we’re asking a different kind of question. We’re not just, I also feel like, “How are you doing?” it’s not a great question. It just is too broad. I don’t feel like people, overall as a society, I don’t feel like we’re very open when people ask us that.

So if instead we can ask something specific and get a little bit deeper and a different interaction with them, they may be more obliging towards you, they may be more willing to share a little bit more deeply.

And, typically, it takes three goes at it before somebody really opens up to you. So don’t get discouraged if at the first interaction, they’re a little bit guarded, a little bit putting distance. Follow up a couple more times. And if they continue to be, like, cursory, okay, then respect that. But if they start to dive a little bit deeper, roll with that. Be curious. Ask more questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, and then self-regulation, what are your favorite moves here?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so self-regulation, this is what I think most people are not great at because our own discomfort is evoked in our interactions. Like, we often think about triggers in the context of our friendships, our family relationships, our romantic relationships, like that annoying friend that only hits you up when she needs something from you, which gets on your nerves, it really irks you.

Yes, that’s a trigger, but we are also triggered in the workplace, right? So think about the times where you’ve come up with a good idea, you’ve shared it with a colleague one-on-one, you’re about to share it in a team meeting, and they beat you to it. They take credit for it. Really, really frustrating.

Or that leader, where every time that you receive an email from them, your body tenses up because you just know it’s about to be some sort of criticism or some sort of you being underneath the microscope. And so those are also triggers at work.

So if we can self-regulate, meaning we manage our own emotional state and we are able to manage our emotional responses in the moment, that ensures that we’re not reacting and we’re instead responding. So a couple of tips to use here and a couple of techniques that I can share.

One is 4-7-8 breathing. This is a science-backed technique that has been proven to reduce your blood pressure, provide more oxygen to your brain and to your organs, and it helps to reengage that critical thinking center that tends to go offline when we’re stressed and when we’re triggered.

So the way that it works is you breathe in through your nose for four seconds, you hold in the breath for seven seconds, and then you exhale through your mouth for eight seconds. And what you’ll notice is if you do this three, five, as many times as you need to, to calm down, you really feel a bit more grounded, and it gives you a bit of space between reaction and response.

Another really easy one that you can do if you’re just sitting at your desk and you’re just like, “Oh, my God, I’m feeling really stressed out,” is you could just rub your arms, you could do a quick stretch. Things like that bring you back into your body and helps you to get out of your thinking brain and back into your physiological state, right? It helps to regulate that nervous system response.

The last one that I’ll share that’s really simple is you can just turn your head from side to side and scan the room for threats. And what this does is it helps to orient you because the orientation centers of your brain are located in your eyes, ears, and neck.

And you’re basically signaling to your nervous system and to your brain that, “Hey, nothing is physically threatening. I’m okay in this moment. Like, I can take a deep breath and I can relax.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, the word threats, there are so many. I see a printer light just flashing and I find that slightly annoying. I didn’t even notice it before. I guess I’ve scanned and identified the smallest of threats. I suppose what we’re trying to accomplish here is you realize, “Oh, hey, there’s no one coming after me to do an attack.”

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Right. Exactly. Yeah, and even that you’re emotionally safe in that moment, it’s like, “Okay, this moment might feel really bad to me. I got an email from HR. That sucks. Nobody wants to get that email, right? As long as it’s not a layoff email, that’s a different story.”

But let’s say that HR is like, “Hey, I want to touch base with you,” and you have no context of what that means. And so you immediately jump to the worst conclusion possible, which is, “I’m getting fired,” or, “I’m being reprimanded in some way.” When in reality, they just want to do your onboarding or they need you to do this yearly training, right?

That’s the type of threat that we’re scanning for. And if we could just take a moment and be like, “Okay, what are alternate explanations for what’s going on?” Like, once we soothe, then we can start thinking it through. And that will help to deescalate you emotionally when we jump to these negative conclusions in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then collaboration?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Collaboration, super simple. It’s just simply letting the other person know that, “I’m on your team. I have your best interests in mind. You also have my best interests in mind. And we’re going to be working together to a mutually agreed upon outcome.” So this is where we’re going to be reciprocating in a relationship. That give and take that we referenced earlier is going to be part of a collaborative approach.

It’s also making sure that you’re in a learning position. Even if you’re in a position of leadership or, you know, let’s say you’re the team lead or somebody who’s heading a project, that you’re also opening up the conversation to learn from the other people on your team, because that collaborative approach helps to foster psychological safety and trust amongst yourself and the people that you’re working alongside.

Pete Mockaitis
So I understand that sometimes, when we’re trying to help, to encourage, to fix a situation with somebody that we’re doing it with the best of intentions, but that, with this attunement world, can totally be a miss. Can you unpack some of this for us?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, absolutely. It is well-intentioned, right? When we jump in to give advice, it’s because we feel helpless and we want to be helpful. And so what ends up happening, though, is before the words even leave the other person’s mouth, we’re like, “Well, have you tried this? Did you try setting better boundaries? Have you tried using Trello as like an organizational tool for you because you’re feeling overwhelmed?” Right?

Like, we offer all of these solutions to people. And what ends up happening is that, one, we’re trying to bypass their emotions to get them to a logical state of mind. And that’s not what they need in that moment. Two, it also feels very presumptuous. Like, we’ve somehow gotten the other person’s dilemma figured out better than they have it figured out.

And so instead of it feeling validating or feeling as though we’re being helpful to that person in the moment, it actually creates distance between us and creates what I call connection gap. So we don’t want to jump towards fixing. And there are a couple of other traps that we tend to fall into as well. Like, we tend to avoid.

So we either change the subject or what I see more commonly is we offer platitudes like, “Don’t worry, it’s going to get better,” or, “You’ll be fine. You’ll get through this.” Once again, well-intentioned, but we’re emotionally bypassing, and it invalidates the other person’s emotional struggles in that moment. And then the third most common connection gap or misattunement style that I see is people that are connectors, which sounds really good, but it’s not actually the style that we want to aim for.

Because connectors are the ones where, when we share something with them, they immediately jump in with, “Oh, my God, me, too. Totally get it. You’re struggling with burnout? I’ve been burnt out for seven years. You have a toxic boss? I dealt with a toxic boss for over a decade. Let me just tell you all about him, right?”

And what happens is, yes, well-intentioned, we’re trying to relate to the other person, but, unfortunately, the spotlight that was supposed to be shown on them has now shifted to you. And they go from a place of needing support to caretaking you.

So those are not the ways that we want to show up and support people in the workplace. Instead, what we want to do is we want to be an explorer. We want to be a person who is connected, who asks great questions, uses curiosity as a way to be able to dive a little bit deeper, that we’re good listeners, we hold space, we actively listen to what the other person is saying.

And if we can just explore, go a little bit deeper, it really does help the other person to feel seen, heard, validated, and they feel much more connected to us as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that sounds lovely. I’d love your take, when folks are trying to do this, where do they fall short?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
When they’re trying to be an explorer, what ends up happening is that their own discomfort is what gets in the way, which is why we default to being a fixer, an avoider, or a connector. And it goes back to that self-regulation piece of things, right? Our own discomfort is what often leads to the connection gaps.

So if we can just manage our own feelings of helplessness, our own feelings of, “What do I say right now? I don’t know what to do. Like, they are coming to me sharing about how they have mental health concerns. I’m not a therapist. I don’t know what to say in this moment.” That’s our own discomfort bubbling up, right?

And subconsciously, that’s then going to be read by the other person because they’re attuning to you in that moment. They’re going to pick up on it and they’re going to pull back as a result. So we just simply need to manage our own discomfort, manage our own emotional state, regulate. And that’ll help us to stay connected and be in step with them in those moments of uncomfortable conversations that come up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think you really zeroed in on something there. And I’m thinking about, when someone dies, I think it’s very common, I’ve discussed this with my mother, that folks, they’re uncomfortable. They don’t know what to say or what to do. And so they might just not show up at all. Or it’s just awkward because they don’t know what to say. Because, in fact, there is nothing you can say.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s just going to say, “Oh, you know what? I am not sad anymore.” Like, there’s no such words that exist. And so it is uncomfortable. And so your message here is, well, you know, that that’s kind of a you problem, kind of learn to manage that discomfort. And do you have any pro tips on what do you say when it’s just hard and you have no idea what ought to be said?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
In those situations, it’s less about what you say and it’s more about how you show up, right? So you’re exactly right. There are no perfect words. There’s nothing that you can say when somebody’s parent passes away that’s going to make it better for them.

So that can’t be the goal at the end of the day. It’s not, “How can I alleviate your grief for you?” It’s instead, “How can I, literally, just be present with you in this moment, listen, and if you’re willing to share, for me to ask some really good questions, right?”

Like, “Hey, I know that this loss has hit you really hard. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing right now to take care of yourself? Or, what’s been the hardest part for you losing your parent in this moment?” Sometimes just simple questions like that open up the dialogue.

And sometimes there are moments where people don’t want to talk about it at all. And instead, if you’re going to attune to them, then, okay, then you just show up, you watch Netflix with them, you order some takeout, right? You talk about anything else under the sun besides the fact that they just lost this person that they love so desperately. And sometimes that’s the most attuned response.

And so I just want people to take away that it’s not the words that you’re saying, there’s no perfect statement. It’s instead, “How can I be present and pick up on what’s really needed by the other person and show up for them in that way, in that moment?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s great, and I like the range of things you shared there. And I’m reminded, my mom, she’s told me this story several times. When my dad died, she had a good friend, and there’s a lot of this going on, like, “I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry for your loss,” right?

She had a good friend, it’s like, “You know what? You’re going to have a lot of people showing up bringing you food. How about I just clean up and organize your refrigerator and freezer?” And she’s like, “That would be amazing. Thank you.”

And, I mean, it was perfect for her in that moment because that was not on any of our minds, but it was an outside perspective, and it was so useful and considerate. Well, you know, we remember it decades later, so, yeah.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Absolutely. Yeah, and I think, to build on that, what your mom did in that moment, or what she received in that moment rather, was exactly what I would recommend as well. Just provide people a menu of options.

Like, if you don’t know what to do and you want to do something, better than not showing up at all, better than just, you know, “Oh, I’m just going to ask them. Hey, what do you need right now?” which people don’t know what they need in a moment of grief, they just don’t.

You can just simply say, “Hey,” like your mom received from whoever that person was, like, “I notice that your fridge might need a little bit of help. Can I pop in and take care of that for you?” “Hey, I noticed that groceries might be something that is difficult to run while you’re dealing with all of the logistics of funeral planning. Can I take care of that for you?”

“Hey, I noticed that you might need a little bit of vacuuming around, like, the basement. Can I take care of that, right? Which of those sound like a good option to you?” It reduces the decision fatigue that people feel, and it still is showing up in a way that’s meaningful to the other person.

And most importantly, it gives them agency and empowers them with choice in a moment where they feel completely out of control. It gives them some level of control over how you’re going to show up for them as well.

Pete Mockaitis
I also want to hear about your check-in framework, some sophisticated use of acronym there. Can you give us the quick rundown on these? What is it for and what are the steps?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so it’s for conversations just like this, right, where you’re dealing with somebody who’s disclosing something difficult with you. They’re burnt out, right? They’re struggling with depression. They just lost somebody. They’re caregiving for an elderly parent.

And so CHECK IN, as the acronym, C is for curiosity-based questions. So questions that are open-ended, like, “Tell me more about,” “Could you help me to better understand?” “Would you be willing to share a little bit?” Right? They just are an invitation to the other person to share a bit more about what’s going on.

Then when they’re sharing, H is for hold space. We need to be open, not judgmental. We want to listen intently, and we want to resist the urge to jump in or to fix it. So we just need to be present in that moment.

E is for exploring support. So once you’ve heard what the challenges are, you’ve been able to hold some space for them. Now you need to empower them. So this is where that menu of options is very helpful. And one of my favorite questions to ask is, “What’s been working for you in the past? What has worked for you in the past? And what hasn’t worked for you?” so that you can now explore support that’s going to be meaningful and advantageous to them.

Once you explore the support, then you have to Congruently respond. So that just simply means follow through. If somebody says that they need more frequent check-ins, give them more frequent check-ins. If they tell you that part of what will help to alleviate their stress is you covering a meeting for them, cover the meeting for them, or communicate effectively that you won’t be able to do it.

Because if you don’t follow through and if you don’t communicate, it’s going to be detrimental to the trust that exists between you. So that’s what congruently respond is all about. And, inevitably, when we drop the ball, we have to, K, know how to repair. This is little bit of a stretch with the K, but that’s okay. We’re going to know how to repair, meaning we have to acknowledge the misstep, validate the feelings, and create a plan for how we’re going to prevent this from happening again.

So acknowledge, simply saying, “I know that I dropped the ball uncovering that meeting for you. And I’m really sorry. I know that that set you back in terms of your workload.” Validate. “I can imagine that was really frustrating for you. Like, you probably feel even more stressed now because I dropped the ball and now you’re having to do double time to make up for that.”

Plan. “What I’m going to do going forward is, if I’m not able to cover a meeting for you, I’m going to make sure to give you at least 24 hours notice so that you can make adequate plans for somebody else to cover that gap. Boom! It’s as simple as that. That’s how simple repair can be.

You notice how I didn’t give excuses. I didn’t try to explain away what happened, why I didn’t cover the meeting. I just simply acknowledged, validated, and planned. And then I-N is interrupt discomfort. So using all those emotional regulation tools that we just talked about earlier, and reset, which is another framework. But basically, it’s about being able to move from reaction to response.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love your hot take, with regard to our emotion regulation, do you have any novel, wild, emotional regulation tricks?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, the most helpful one that I can share with you is it’s by the acronym RESET. So super easy, but this has been a game-changer for me. It’s been a game-changer for my clients, both therapy clients and Fortune 500 clients. It just helps you to pause a little bit so that you can respond.

So the R in RESET is for reaction. Just noticing your physiological response. Do your muscles tense up? Do your palms get sweaty? Is your heart racing? Did your breathing get ragged? Because our physiological cues are going to precede our emotional or cognitive cues, meaning what you’re going to notice physiologically is going to come before what you’re thinking or feeling in that moment, right? So just notice what’s happening there.

Then we have to notice the emotions. Dr. Daniel Siegel, who’s written many a New York Times bestselling book, talks about name it to tame it. And the research has found that if we can just simply put a label to an emotion, it helps to regulate our nervous system.

So something as simple as just acknowledging out loud, “I’m feeling embarrassed,” “I feel caught off guard,” “I’m feeling stressed,” “I’m feeling fearful,” anxious, numb, exposed. That will help to regulate your nervous system.

What I don’t want you to do at this step is to try to think your way through it. Because, once again, that critical thinking part of your brain is offline and we need to do the next step, which is soothe before we’re able to explore.

So soothing is that 4-7-8 breathing, grounding techniques, rubbing the arms, scanning your environment, body scans, those are all going to help to soothe your nervous system and help to reduce that physiological activation.

Now we’re finally going to explore. So we’re going to notice past, present connections, because the way that we respond in this moment is not actually just about what’s happening in this moment. It’s often linked to past experiences. And a mentor of mine once told me that if your reaction is hysterical, its roots are historical.

So just pause for a moment and think about, “Okay, hmm, how does this look like, sound like, and feel like a past experience? Have I been caught off guard before? What does this remind me of?” Just linking and connecting those dots is really helpful.

And then, finally, the last, T is for tell. Just talk to somebody about it, process it. Being in connection and in community is also a nervous system regulator. And if you’re at work in your cubicle and you can’t, journal about it and then share it with somebody when you get back home that you’re able to trust and can feel like you can be vulnerable with.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
You know, I think that the biggest thing that I want the audience to really be reflecting on is where do you fall on the spectrum of interactions, right? Like, are you the fixer? Are you the avoider? Are you the connector?

And how can you start practicing some of these key attunement skills to move towards becoming more of an explorer? I think if we’re able to just develop the self-awareness, become more in tune with ourselves, we will naturally become more in tune with others.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, there’s a quote from Prentis Hemphill that goes, “Boundaries are the distance with which I can love you and me simultaneously.” And I love this quote because it really speaks to the fact that there is a way for us to hold both, hold ourselves and another person simultaneously, but we need to be able to protect our space and create that distance that will help us to facilitate that.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, something that I quote a lot in my keynotes is shocking, actually, statistics from Forbes, where they found that over 50% of employees would forgo a 10% pay increase to be able to just feel more connected at work, which was just mind-blowing to me, because you always think about how people just want to get paid more, which is important.

But people, if they were making $100,000 a year, would give up 10,000 extra dollars in their pocket just to feel like their boss or a colleague cared about them and was connected to them. It just really blew my mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
One of my favorite books is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. I love it because I think it really gets to the core of why we’re doing the work that we’re doing. And he’s got so many great examples and case studies in there. It just is a masterfully written book.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
I personally have a routine that I do at the end of my day. I think that my after-work routines are what helps me to be effective in my work. So I do like a virtual commute because a lot of my work is remote.

So I’ll go for a long walk. I’ll physically change out of my clothes. I’ll make sure to sit down and watch my trashy reality TV. They’re all just part of my after-work routine that helps to signal to my brain, “You’re done with work.” And then when I do show up for work the next day, I’m able to be in the zone and focus.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks, they quote back to you often?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I’ll share two little gems. One is that, “We’ve confused communication with connection.” People love that quote because we have Slack channels, we’ve got all-hands meetings, we’ve got email exchanges, Teams meetings, but those are just focusing on communication. They’re not actually forging connection and bonds with people. So people really like that one.

And then the second one is that, “We don’t slow down because stillness feels unsafe.” We have these go, go, go schedules because we think that that’s how we’re going to avoid all of the stuff that exists within us. And if we did slow down, we would have to face the anxieties, the worries, the stress that we’ve been staving off.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
So two places, one, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. The second is through my website, NidhiTewari.com. You can find my speaking offerings there, and reach out to me through a contact form.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I think that, ultimately, we all want to be doing better at work. We all want to be working well. But what gets in the way is these moment-to-moment exchanges that we have. I think every opportunity is a choice.

You can choose to build trust or diminish it. You can choose to be connected or be disconnected. You can choose to attune or misattune. And the choice that you make in that moment is going to determine whether you’re working well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nidhi, thank you.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Thank you so much.

Mar 26

1140: Bringing More Laughter, Fun, and Connection to the Workplace with Chris Duffy

By Podcasts No Comments

Chris Duffy discusses how to find the humor in anything—and why that’s important in the workplace.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why to take humor seriously at work
  2. The simple habit that makes you more magnetic
  3. How to find humor in the most unlikely places

About Chris

Chris Duffy is an award-winning comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts the hit podcast How to Be a Better Human. You can watch his comedic TED talk, “How to find laughter anywhere” online. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC News, NPR, and National Geographic Explorer. 

Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas on HBO, executive produced by John Oliver. He’s the creator/host of the streaming game show Wrong Answers Only, where three comedians try to understand what a leading scientist does all day, in partnership with LabX at the National Academy of Sciences. 

Chris is both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Chris, welcome!

Chris Duffy
Thank you so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about humor, and not just for the fun of it, but how it can actually enhance our experience of career and job and be an asset in that zone. But could you kick us off with a fun story about some of your most memorable moments in your career as a comedian?

Chris Duffy
Probably the most memorable moment I’ve ever had in my career as a comedian is I was a fifth-grade teacher before I did comedy. And so I never had use for LinkedIn because, listen, like you don’t get a job as a fifth-grade teacher through LinkedIn, like business networking, and you don’t get a job as a comedian through LinkedIn networking.

So I never had a LinkedIn profile, but I’d always heard about it, and I was curious about the world. So one day I went on and said, like, “Okay, I’m just going to make a profile.” And the first thing I realized is you could just say you work wherever. If you say you work for Nike, they don’t, like, email a Nike hiring manager, which struck me as completely bizarre.

And so I wanted to see how high up I could go. So I made my job on LinkedIn, the CEO of LinkedIn. And I thought, like, when I click save, it’ll say, “Error. You can’t do that.” But instead, not only did it let me do that, it sent an automated email to everyone in my contacts list that said, “Congratulate Chris on his new job. He is now CEO of LinkedIn,” which is, to me, that’s the funniest joke that I’ve ever been involved in. And I didn’t even make it. It was just LinkedIn’s like automatic emailing thing.

And then, I was the CEO of LinkedIn on LinkedIn for a full year. And at a year, it sent another email to everyone in my contacts list saying, “Congratulate Chris on his one year work anniversary as CEO of LinkedIn.” And that started going a little viral.

And so I got a message from someone on LinkedIn’s Trust and Security team. My account was frozen. And you can’t make this up. The person on the Trust and Security team, her name was Faith. And Faith said, “Your account has been locked due to concerns about its inaccuracy.”

I didn’t want to let the joke go because I love the joke so much so I sent her a photo of my license, front and back, and said, “There’s proof that my name is actually Chris Duffy.” And Faith said, “The problem is not that we don’t believe your name is Chris Duffy. The problem is you are claiming to be the CEO of LinkedIn.”

And I said, “Faith, you are taking a pretty disrespectful tone for someone who works for me.” And five seconds later, she permanently deleted my account. And so that was the end of my time on LinkedIn. But a very memorable moment in my comedy career.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Okay. So one takeaway I’m gleaning right away is, “Go ahead and lie about how senior you are on LinkedIn, and the odds are pretty good, you can skate by for a good while with that.”

Chris Duffy
You know, if there’s one message I have for people, it’s, “Commit some light fraud.” No, that’s not my message. You know, I think the heart of what I like about that is that no one was going to hire me anyway from LinkedIn. So I think the thing that I encourage people to do is to think a little outside of the box, to not be afraid to play around and to have fun and to do something that is silly, even in a place where it’s serious.

And LinkedIn is a great example of a place where people tend to take themselves so seriously. So I think the more that you can be human and playful and fun, the more that things stand out. You definitely can’t and shouldn’t do what I did because, actually, one of my lasting contributions to society after me, they did make it so you can’t do that anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, congratulations. Your ripple…

Chris Duffy
Thank you so much. We all want to have an impact, you know? We want to affect the generations after us.

Pete Mockaitis
…it reverberates. That’s beautiful. All right. And so it’s funny, I’m thinking I actually do follow a couple satire accounts on LinkedIn, and it’s really funny in terms of the difference, like the contrast when there is sort of a vibe, a tone, a subculture, a script. You know what I’m saying?

Like, there’s a little bit of a feel for how a LinkedIn post is “supposed to go,” like one-sentence hook grabbing you like, “I had to fire someone today.” Like, “Huh? What? Why? I had to know the rest, you know.”

Chris Duffy
Yeah, “Here’s what my wedding taught me about peer-to-peer marketing,” you know, something like that. It’s like, “What? What? What are you talking about?” You know, I think it’s true, in a lot of our lives, professional, personal, social, there are these like scripts that we’re supposed to follow or we think we’re supposed to follow, I think is a better way to put it, right?

Where it’s like, someone says, “Hey, how are you?” “I’m doing pretty well. Yeah.” “Oh, crazy weather,” right? Like, you just kind of, like, that’s what small talk is supposed to go like. And I think the thing about when we get into autopilot like that is that things just blur into the background. They’re not memorable and we don’t make real connections and we’re not actually our full human selves.

And, to me, the beauty of humor is that it lets us laugh about and acknowledge these, like, ruts that we get into that we don’t even realize are just like our habits. And the thing that I love about laughing with other people is, like, when you connect with them, you are actually genuinely connected. But also then people like you more, they feel attracted to you. And I don’t mean romantically attracted, like they want to spend time with you.

And there’s a lot of great studies that we can talk about that show that from a professional standpoint, if you are acknowledging things in a funny, humorous way where you’re willing to laugh at yourself, people respect you more even if what you’re acknowledging is your shortcoming.

They did a psychological study where they looked at people in job interviews. And people who acknowledged their shortcomings, like the things they didn’t know but made a joke about it, were much more likely to get hired than people who didn’t acknowledge it at all, or than who acknowledged it in a serious way. Because we like those people, we trust them, and we want people to admit that they’re not perfect, because we’re not perfect either.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really interesting. And I’m just speculating as to the why behind that. And it feels as though, if someone is capable of acknowledging their shortcomings in a fun, lighthearted way, it kind of gives a subtle implicit permission that, “It’s okay to talk about those kinds of things with me and maybe it’s okay to talk about a broad range of things with me.” And so there’s just a little bit more of a vibe of comfort and safety. I’m totally reading a lot into this, but this is how I’d speculate are the underlying kind of facets that make it go that way.

Chris Duffy
I think that’s totally plausible. And I think another piece is that if you’re willing to laugh about the things that you don’t know or that you’re not good at, it probably means that those are places where you would be able to improve as well because you’re open to feedback on them. You’re open to growth.

Whereas, the things that you get defensive about that are like no-go conversation topics, it’s really hard to then grow in those because you’re locked in to like your idea that, “I already know everything there is to know about this.” And none of us do.

You know, I’ll give you another study that I love psychologists at a number of universities looked at, they did a study where people evaluated job candidates. And so they didn’t know that the people they were evaluating were actually research assistants reading from a script.

But when they were evaluating these candidates, of course, everyone rated the people who were qualified more highly than people who were unqualified. No surprise there. But between the people who were qualified, there were two people who were exactly identical, except one of them spilled a whole cup of coffee on their shirt before they came in for the interview. And they said like, “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry, I spilled coffee all over myself.”

And that person, the coffee spiller, was consistently rated higher, was rated more confident, and was the one that people thought they should hire for the job. And, for me, the big lesson that I take away is not, like, if you’re applying for a job, dump a scalding hot cup of coffee on yourself. That’s not the lesson.

The lesson is that we have this idea that we’re supposed to be perfect, that people want us to be flawless and perfect and have no mistakes and just impressive. And, in fact, when you’re like that, people can’t latch onto you. They can’t relate to you at all.

People much prefer someone who is a little bit of a mess, but is still good at their job and good at the things they need to be good at. And so, to me, I think lowering the bar in that way makes you so much more desirable as a job candidate, but also just as a person to work with.

I mean, think about it, Pete, like I’ll give you an example. In your real life, I think there’s an intuitive example, is if you, Pete, walk into a room and you meet someone and he goes, “Hey, by the way, Pete, nice to meet you. I have a six pack. I make a million dollars a year. I give to charity every single day, and I work at a soup kitchen. And, by the way, both of my kids went to Harvard, and I think I’m probably going to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.”

Like, you don’t like that person. You know what I mean? At best, you’re intimidated, and more likely you’re like, “I hate this guy. I never want to see this guy ever again.” That’s certainly how I would feel. Whereas, if you meet someone who’s like, “Hey, can you do me a favor? I think that my pants might have just ripped, right?”

Like, you have a lot more to talk about, a lot more to relate with that guy, even though it’s a little weird because they’re not perfect and you’re not immediately intimidated and are jealous and have all these other feelings about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And what’s coming to mind right now is, internet personality. Her name is Elyse Myers and I just got her book.

Chris Duffy 
Oh, I love her.

Pete Mockaitis
She’s so delightful. It’s so funny, everyone loves her. That’s kind of where I’m going with that. I think her moniker is like the internet’s best friend or everyone’s best friend on the internet, something like that. And she’s repeatedly sharing her shortcomings, and her foibles, struggles with mental health and more, but she’s clearly very smart and very funny and very insightful and very personable. And when you bring those two things together, yeah, she’s the internet’s best friend.

Chris Duffy
Well, you know, I think the fact that you said very smart is actually, I think, really a huge and important piece here. I, for years now, have hosted a comedy show with the National Academy of Sciences, where we interview scientists about their work.

And, you know, I’ve interviewed Nobel laureates, I’ve interviewed MacArthur geniuses, all these really incredible people. And the number one thing that I’ve noticed is that people who are willing to say, “I don’t know,” or to be funny or to laugh at their own research, those are the people who are actually super intelligent, right?

Like, the people who don’t have a sense of humor and aren’t willing to admit that they don’t know some things or get defensive and blocked off, those are rarely the real geniuses. Because when you actually are exceptional at something, you have a level of confidence and comfort with admitting the limits of your own knowledge and also with trying to explain it simply and not just relying on jargon.

And so I think there’s a real piece there of, like, smart people, you can signal your comfort and your intelligence by laughing and by the things that you’re willing to laugh at and be open about.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I like that a lot. So can you give us maybe a story, an example, of someone in a professional context who upgraded some of their humor skills and found that genuinely helpful or transformative for their career?

Chris Duffy
One that immediately comes to mind is I talked to a former Navy SEAL, Joe Choi. And Joe was in very extreme life-or-death situations often. Even just the training for Navy SEALs can be really, really dangerous.

And when Joe was promoted so that now he was leading a team, he realized really quickly that the way to actually have people respect him, the way to have the men trust him, and know that in these life-or-death situations that he was someone they could rely on wasn’t to be super serious all the time.

The way he put it to me is that the best leaders that he had encountered as a SEAL, the best leaders took the work really seriously, but they did not take themselves so seriously. And so he found that he was able to motivate his team and to get them to be much more connected to him by being willing to laugh at himself.

And he told me probably the most dramatic laugh-at-yourself story I’ve ever heard, which is he was doing a training exercise where you were supposed to grab onto a ladder hanging out of a helicopter while you were in rough ocean waters.

And Joe managed to grab onto the ladder, he was going to demonstrate what to do. And he managed to grab onto the ladder, but he grabbed onto the wrong side. So instead of being able to climb up, he was actually getting dragged under the water. And he was struggling to breathe. He was about to pass out when he finally was able to pull himself up and flip over the ladder and climb up into the helicopter.

And when he got up, he was kind of gasping for breath and struggling. And it had really been a dire situation. And he says that all the guys who he’s supposedly leading are looking at him after this, like, scary and also, you know, not really like great example of how you’re supposed to do it. And one of the guys just said, “Wow, that was some real frog man shit.” And then they all looked at Joe and they saw if he would laugh, and Joe laughed really hard.

And he said that that became this moment for his group where they came back to it and it was like a bonding thing, but it was also a moment where they trusted that he was confident enough and honest enough about what had happened, that he was willing to laugh and acknowledge that he hadn’t done it right. And he said that that was something that really came back again and again in the group trusting him.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really nice. Well, can you share with us, I think we like humor, humor is fun, the points you’re bringing up makes sense. They check out. So what are some things that we do with that knowledge? Do you have any sort of key pro tips or questions or ways you recommend we go forward and do more good humoring?

Chris Duffy
I will say that, I think, the biggest thing that people get wrong about humor is, I think, people often think that having a great sense of humor means you are the one on stage with the microphone or in the circle at the party or at the water cooler where everyone is around listening to your story, and you’re the one that’s getting all the attention.

And I would actually say that not that that’s not good humor, but the people with the best sense of humor aren’t always the ones performing it. They’re not always the ones getting the attention. Often, the people with the best sense of humor are the ones who are laughing the most. So they’re generously giving their attention to other people.

They are noticing things that are odd and unusual and delightful throughout their day. They’re laughing about it, even if they’re not sharing it with other people. And I think that when you broaden your definition of good humor and what good humoring looks like to include that kind of humor, you avoid a lot of the pitfalls.

Because one of the big things that people always say is like, “Well, how do I make a joke that doesn’t offend people? Or, what if I cross a line?” And the answer that I would say to them is the safest way that you can bring more humor into your life is to not be the one making the joke, to find people who make you laugh and to laugh with them. People love that, right?

I mean, like, the number one way to make someone like you is not to talk more, it’s to listen more. So I think if you can bring humor into your life in those other ways, that will really make you magnetic to other people because you’re having fun.

And so something I would ask you is, like, “Who are the people that already make you laugh? How can you spend more time with them? What are the ways that you are naturally laughing already?” So maybe one thing, one exercise that I really encourage, which is really simple, but I think can be transformative is just keep track of everything for a week that makes you laugh, or a month, however long, but write it down.

Write it down on a piece of paper or in a notes app on your phone. And what you’ll find is that just the act of paying attention makes more and more things surface, right? Anytime we direct our attention towards something, we find more and more.

And so having more of that humor and that laughter in your life is going to make you the kind of person who laughs more and has more fun. And that has all these benefits, both professionally and personally.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s a theme that’s come up elsewhere in terms of like gratitude. If you are identifying things that you feel grateful for, or that turned out better than you thought they might in the course of the day, you are more inclined to notice more such things and feel more gratitude.

Chris Duffy
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in like fashion here, by taking note and attending to that which is funny, you’re having more of those good humor vibes going on.

Chris Duffy
I think this is kind of true of anything, right? Like, I talked to a guy recently who is a roofer. And he was just kind of telling me about, like, the good, what a good roof is versus a bad roof, and, you know, the kinds of roof that he likes working on and all that.

And then I was walking around afterwards, and I noticed all these roofs, right, these things that have been totally invisible to me. All of a sudden, I was like, “That’s like a nice roof. Oh, that roof needs some repairs.” And I have no ability to actually, like, repair a roof or know about it, but just having talked to someone who had a real passion for it and knew a lot about it, all of a sudden, this piece of the world that was invisible became really visible to me.

And I think the same is true kind of for anything, right? Like, if you’re always looking for professional chances to connect, you’ll find more chances to connect. And I think what I love about humor is that it offers us the ability to take ourselves less seriously, to make other people want to be around us, and to have a better time all at once.

Because it’s, like, without trying to think like, “I should have social connections.” If you focus on laughing, people want to be around you. You’re a magnetic person. And so just by noticing more of this stuff, you get those side benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, to do the noticing, I’m just going to pay attention. I’m going to write it down. Are there any key prompts or internal questions you recommend that can generate more of this good stuff?

Chris Duffy
So, for me, for more than a decade, I’ve been a professional comedian, both like writing late-night comedy shows and telling jokes and as a standup, and doing all sorts of other stuff. And what I found is that, actually, the most interesting part of comedy is not the performing.

It’s actually the generating the ideas and the noticing the material because that’s the part that I think anyone can do regardless of whether you perform or not professionally, right? Like everyone can have more laughter in their life.

And so the first thing that I would say is the seed of something funny is something that is a little unusual or off or different than expected. The gap between how things are supposed to be or how we think things are going to go and how they actually are is where comedy lives.

So one of the things that I would do is focus really small. The artist, Sister Corita Kent had a practice that she did where she would, literally, carry around a rectangular frame made of cardboard, and she would just, for her art, would hold up that frame and just look at what was inside the frame, everything else, narrow her field of vision, and that’s where she would find the art.

And I think you can, literally, do that for comedy. Just look at a corner of your house and just spend five minutes noticing all of the small things in that, what are the things that are a little off or a little weird or a little different. And you’re not going to find something laugh-out-loud funny right away, but you might find something small and odd that then you can think about and is the seed of it.

Or, a more relatable way, I think, is, Pete, when you go to someone’s house for the first time, and you go in their bathroom, you notice all sorts of stuff about their bathroom, right? You notice, like, “Where is the toilet paper? Is it hanging over? Is it hanging under? What kind of soap do they have? Do they have a hand towel? Do they have paper towels? Is there a pile of books next to their toilet? Do the books kind of seem weirdly wet? Is there a candle? Is there a little spray?” All this stuff in their bathroom.

But if you go to their house a few times, that fades into the background really quickly. It just becomes a bathroom. So the more that you can switch into that new bathroom mindset where you’re actually noticing the things in your life, the more that you can see the things that are odd and unusual and delightful. And that can really make you laugh.

So can we do an experiment like in real time rather than having this be a…?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I was just about to go there in terms of looking at a corner for five minutes, how might that turn into some chuckles.

Chris Duffy
So, okay, so right now you’re in a hotel room, right?

Pete Mockaitis
I am in a hotel. I’ve had some flight cancellation action.

Chris Duffy
Great. So a hotel is kind of one of the most kind of stereotypically antiseptic places, right? Like, all the character has been taken out of it. And sometimes that can be hard to find something funny, but sometimes that in itself is the funniness, right? Like, that they’ve tried so hard to make no design choices, that it is bland in a way that is exceptionally bland.

So I would look around and be like, “Is there any art on the walls?” Hotel art is often funny to me, because it’s like, “What is the choice? Why is that the art?” What strikes your interest right away? Or what do you notice right away?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what’s interesting is there’s these vases on top of inside-floating shelves that are tapered and they’re like pierced. It’s almost like it was a dagger that punched through this hanging shelf.

Chris Duffy
That is already incredible. I mean, that’s already really funny. Like, to think like the person who was like, “I know what they need. They need shelves that have been stabbed by a dagger. That will be our brand.” Like, that. And that’s a good example of, like, you could spend a week in a hotel room and never notice that, I think, but then you see it and you think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I like what you did there because, in a way, because what you said is like, “The seed is something that’s a little off, unusual, unexpected.” And that was that, but you didn’t bring me into the chuckle zone until you went that extra step associated with imagining the people who were discussing this, and deciding, “Ah, yes, this is what’s necessary.”

Chris Duffy
“This is our masterpiece.”

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s just funny because, but, really, who had this conversation? How did this come about? It’s genuinely silly.

Chris Duffy
Well, it’s also one of those things where, like, I think about this a lot where, like, when I’m in my own house and trying to find things that make me laugh. One thing that I always think is so funny is, like, on my washing machine, it says like, “Bright Whites. TM,” trademark.

And I’m, like, I love the person who was there who was like, “Listen, LG is going to own the phrase bright whites. That is our phrase. That’s really important.” And I’m like, “I think that that is not actually a trademark. Like, you might technically have that trademark, but Bright Whites is not memorable for anyone else. That’s just the white setting on my washing machine. I don’t think that you needed to trademark that.”

And, like, thinking about the person whose job that is, like this was probably like a series of interviews. There’s this, like, in an interview, they’re like, “I have a vision for naming the white cycle, something that we can own that will be like part of LG’s brand.”

And then they had a bunch of meetings and they filed paperwork and there was a lawyer involved. That kind of stuff, thinking about like the world behind the things that you’re seeing that are odd is often where I find things the most funny.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good, yes. And so, once again, it’s sort of like you’re noticing the thing and then you’re going deeper into it. I’m sort of imagining the lawyer there bumping into Bright Whites on like a GE washing machine, and said, “What?”

They just become utterly furious. And he, like, calls up their lawyer and starts cussing them out and screaming. It’s like, “If you think you can pull this stunt, you got another thing coming. I’m going to see you in court.” And they duke it out.

Chris Duffy
“You think you could screw me like this? Oh, you can’t. I will not allow this. No one messes with me.”

Pete Mockaitis 
Yeah, “Bright Whites. The trial of the century.”

Chris Duffy
It’s true. And that often is called the trial of the century. A lot of people don’t know that, but that was the real trial of the century. Something that is a trick that we often do to make something funny in comedy, in professional comedy, but I think you can apply this to your own life, too, is to take an observation and then layer on top an emotion.

So if you’re writing a joke, like one of the ways you can write a joke is, “I find it so scary that…” blank. “I find it so exciting that…” blank. “I am so happy that this thing happened.” Like, putting an emotion tells the audience how to feel about it. And often that, like, “I’m happy that this thing happened…” is what makes the audience laugh, because then you’ve set up like, “Here’s what I expect.” And then you can turn it in another direction.

And I think anytime we’re communicating, letting the people we’re communicating with know how we feel about something, and then the specific detail that we feel that about, that really lets them latch onto something really clearly.

So, like, “I am so confused by the vases in my hotel room,” or, “I absolutely love the way the vases in my hotel room were pierced by a dagger.” That is a sentence that people can latch onto emotionally.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, I’m sort of combining these things. I’m thinking about, if you have an emotion associated with a thing that is unusual, it feels like we’re in comedic territory, per your previous notion. So I’ll throw this out here. When I have all of my laundry done, folded and placed in the dresser, I feel a sense of power.

Chris Duffy
That’s great! Yeah!

Pete Mockaitis
Like, I am unstoppable. So I feel like that’s a little bit unusual to feel a really strong emotional association with these somewhat ordinary occurrences in life. So it feels like we’re in fertile comedic territory here, Chris, but nothing hilarious is coming to mind.

Chris Duffy
Oh, I think that is hilarious. I completely disagree. I think that you feeling like, “I am powerful and I am the master of my domain because I folded my laundry,” is so funny and so relatable and wonderful. And I actually think this hits at a thing that is, you know, talking about how to be awesome at your job.

You just naturally did this piece, which is you took that noticing and then you put it onto yourself. So now we’re laughing at ourselves and the fact that you’re like, “The most powerful I ever feel, the most in control I ever feel is when I finish folding a towel. That towel is perfect,” right? Like, there’s something hilarious about that, and also very relatable, but it’s also that you’re laughing at yourself.

And this, again, like from a professional standpoint, being willing to laugh at yourself, being willing to like give people that in, that lets people connect with you. It lets people not feel intimidated by you, but also be impressed by you because it is really impressive to have this kind of self-knowledge. And so I think you just naturally did it in a really beautiful way. And I think that’s genuinely very, very funny.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Interesting. So that’s funny for you.

Chris Duffy
This is an important thing. Like, it’s funny for me, but often the things that are funniest for other people are actually quite obvious to us. They don’t seem funny because it’s like, “Well, that’s just me being genuine and honest.”

But our authentic, genuine, honest feelings are often very funny to other people because there’s this gap between how we actually feel and how we’re supposed to feel, right? You’re not supposed to feel powerful and in control when you finish folding the laundry, but you actually do.

So for you, it’s kind of like, “But, yeah, that’s how I feel.” And for me, it’s really funny because I haven’t ever thought about it that way.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, you’re illuminating a decade plus mystery for me. And that is the TV show, The Big Bang Theory. I’m not really a fan. I don’t find that amusing. And so we got Sheldon who expresses his ideas in a very, you know, scientific-y, multi-syllables, big words, whatever kind of a way. And then the laugh track always hits.

And I’m just like, “The dude is just expressing his mind. This is not actually a joke at all.” And the funny thing is, in some ways, I, at times, can speak like him. I have a friend who’s like, “Oh, my friend is like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.” So, for me, it’s not funny because it’s not unusual because I am also talking weird in a way that’s sort of like Sheldon.

And maybe there’s a level of self-insight, self-awareness to be had from that. And that’s really intriguing in terms of, “They think it’s funny, I don’t, because I think that’s just how some people talk and that’s normal-ish, but apparently that’s very…”

Chris Duffy 
What is funny about Sheldon? He is a normal, attractive, intelligent man. He’s a totally socially normal, intelligent, attractive man. I think he is the peak of masculinity and I don’t see anything funny about him. Like, that is a really funny perspective to have, right?

Pete Mockaitis 
Yes, that is what… well, I wouldn’t call him masculine, etc. But, yeah, that’s intriguing that other people will find, and that’s just a good heads up. It’s like, “Hey, don’t get angry if folks are laughing at that. It’s not hostile. They’re just appreciating something that’s kind of special or unique or different about you, relative to perhaps the human norm.”

Chris Duffy
Yeah. Well, I want to unpack that, if it’s okay. I want to unpack that a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Chris Duffy
On the one hand, sure, most times, I think, people laughing is not something to be offended by. It’s actually like a point of connection. But that doesn’t mean that people can laugh and be really mean in bullying you. So I think it’s possible to, like, you should be offended sometimes. So I think it really depends.

I think one of the things that is challenging about humor in terms of, like, the context that we’re in is there’s no such thing as a universal joke. There’s no such thing that’s always funny. Humor is always subjective. It’s always context-dependent.

So you strike me, I mean, we just met, but you strike me as like a confident, socially-adapted and successful person.

Pete Mockaitis
Handsome.

Chris Duffy
Handsome, charming, wealthy, powerful. You know, I could go on and on.

Pete Mockaitis
That checks out. It checks out.

Chris Duffy
But as a result, like, if we laugh about how you’re like Sheldon in some ways, I don’t think that’s hitting at some sort of like deep insecurity. And so, as a result, it is funny and it’s not bullying. But if that wasn’t the case, and you actually did feel like maybe you were getting, you had like a deep insecurity about how you fit in and that people were always laughing at you, and then we laughed about how you’re like Sheldon, that could actually be a really cruel, mean thing that wasn’t.

So I always go back to, like, “Is the laughter forming connection or is it pushing the person away? Are you trying to exclude them or include them?” And the kind that is really successful in our social lives, in our friendships, in our relationships, in our work is the kind that brings people in and makes people connect to us, not that pushes people away. And that’s always context-dependent. You can’t just have a universal role.

And speaking of that, like laughing at yourself is great in a professional setting, but there are these, like, lines. If you’re the leader of a company, people want to be able to connect to you. But also, you know, I’ve learned about the concept of selective vulnerability, which is like, if you’re a leader and you go into a meeting and you say, “Hey, everyone, the economics are really bad and we’re going to have to lay a bunch of people off, and I’m really terrified and I have no idea how this is going to go.”

Like, that might be really authentic and honest and vulnerable, but it’s not the right thing to say. People are going to be terrified and scared after that. Instead, you might want to be selectively vulnerable. So say like, “Hey, I’m aware that we are going into a really hard time and I just want to say, we acknowledge that and we’re going to figure out the way through together.”

So you’re still kind of acknowledging. You’re not denying the reality, but you’re not saying like, “I’m terrified and I have no idea what to do next,” because that’s not a helpful form of vulnerability. And even if that would get like a laugh in my context, it’s not worth the laugh.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any thoughts about humor in terms of boosting resilience, ability to bounce back from mistakes, failures, these kinds of things?

Chris Duffy
Totally. I think this goes back to, like, my core message, which is that we think we’re supposed to be perfect. And in fact, you’re not supposed to be perfect. The most resilient people understand that, like, a mistake is part of the process. For me, in my work, right, like if I go up on stage and I tell a joke and it bombs, no one laughs at all, if I say, “Huh, that means I’m a terrible comedian,” then I’ll never tell jokes again.

Instead, what I need to say is, like, “Oh, that was information.” And because the goal isn’t to have one perfect night of comedy, the goal is to, over time, get better and better, then I say, like, “Next time I tell that joke, I will try clarifying it, or I’ll phrase it in a different way.”

And I think that’s kind of true for all jobs, right? It’s, like, if you view it as an iterative repetitive thing where you can laugh about your mistakes and not feel like it’s indicative that you are some huge disaster or failure, then you get better and better because the point is to have the hundredth time be better than the first, not for the first to be perfect.

And laughter, I think, really helps us with that process because it takes away the judgment and shame and it makes it so that it’s, like, fun to share how badly something went and it’s fun to laugh at it rather than to think, “This is like a thing I need to sweep under the rug and not let anyone see.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Chris, tell me, any key do’s or don’ts, top things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Chris Duffy
Well, you know, the number one things I want people to do are keep track of things that are making you laugh naturally, pay attention to the world around you. And I would say that, you know, the number one other thing that you should do once you’ve done those is try taking a small social risk and sharing something that makes you laugh with someone else.

Don’t just have the same regular conversation you have every day, “Pretty hot outside, huh?” or, “Whoa, crazy weather.” Instead, try telling them like, “The other day, on the way to work, I saw a squirrel try and jump from one tree to another and it fell. Have you ever seen that? A squirrel missed the tree?”

Like, even if the other person doesn’t laugh, you’re going to have a different conversation than you would have had otherwise. And I think that is both the seed of connection, but also the seed of so much laughter and joy and comedy.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. What’s funny with that squirrel, you’re right, that that opens all sorts of avenues of conversation in terms of…

Chris Duffy
What does it make you think? There’s something boiling around in your head right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I was like, “Well, was the squirrel okay? What happened afterwards? If you plummeted a long distance, you know, was it grass? Was it concrete? Like, did it get up and keep moving? Or was he done for?”

Chris Duffy
Oh, wow. Okay. You know, Pete, that is just indicative of what a kind, caring human being you are. And I will tell you, this is a true thing that happened to me. The squirrel I saw fell a small distance onto grass. It got right back up. But then it looked at me like, “You saw that. Oh, you weren’t supposed to see that.” And then it ran away.

So we just shared a really beautiful interspecies moment of, “Don’t tell anyone about this.” And here I am telling all of the listeners of How to be Awesome at Your Job, and that squirrel is furious somewhere, who is also, by the way, a listener. I could tell. He seemed like he’s listening to this podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, now that makes me laugh because I’m imagining a squirrel with headphones that are, you know, pushing in the squirrel cheeks, you know, even more to make them even more fat and squirrel-like.

Chris Duffy
Yeah, and he’s wearing some of your merch, right, like he has like a T-shirt with your face on it, and he says, like, “That’s nuts.”

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. All right, man. This is your life. Like, all day, your brain gets to play here.

Chris Duffy
As excruciating as that joke was and a terrible dad joke, that is my life. That is for sure.

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

Chris Duffy
I’ve been thinking about George Orwell talking about humor, and he said, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Chris Duffy
One of the best books that I read is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I think that’s a really relevant book to our world today and also just a beautifully written book.

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

Chris Duffy
Oh, I want to say a microphone. That’s probably the only tool that I use regularly. And anyone who’s seen me try and do home repair will tell you this is the only tool that I’m safe to be around. So a microphone.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you sound good, so I’ll ask what are you working with there?

Chris Duffy
Okay, this is a, hold on, I got to look at it. It is an RE320, an Electro-Voice RE320, baby. Oh, yeah, that smooth radio sound. Hello.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. And a favorite habit?

Chris Duffy
I’ve been trying to do the 7 Minute a day Workout app. And when I do that, I feel a lot better and it only takes seven minutes. So that’s a good habit.

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

Chris Duffy 
When people yell something back at me, it is often, “Sir, you need to move or out of the way.” Probably the key nugget, I think, from all of the work that I’ve done on humor is to be willing to laugh at yourself and to connect with other people through laughing more and taking yourself less seriously. I think even in hard times, finding something to laugh about.

And it could be as simple as watching a clip of outtakes from The Office, or going on Reddit’s contagious laughter Subreddit, or it can be an inside joke that you’ve laughed about with friends. But I think that idea that when you’re having a hard day, going back to something that reliably makes you laugh can transform part of the day, that’s something that I think is the biggest thing, and also kind of an obvious and intuitive one, but that we forget to do so often.

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

Chris Duffy
ChrisDuffyComedy.com. That’s the place.

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

Chris Duffy
At your job, find the person who makes you laugh and spend more time with them this week. And then share something with them that made you laugh. I think that connection, connecting on something that’s lighthearted and fun is going to make that person want to be around you more.

And it’s also going to make them feel really honored that like you’re the person that laughs at them the most in a positive way. And I think that those connections pay dividends in ways that we can never expect professionally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chris, thank you.

Chris Duffy
Thank you.

Feb 02

1125: How to Reclaim Your Presence, Increase Your Influence, and Build Relationships that Last with Ravi Rajani

By Podcasts No Comments

Ravi Rajani shows you how to build meaningful relationships, one conversation at a time.

You’ll Learn

  1. The Three C’s of building trust
  2. What makes people say, “Tell me more”
  3. Why compliments come across as insincere

About Ravi 

Ravi Rajani is an international keynote speaker, transformational coach and LinkedIn Learning instructor, with over 65,000 people having taken his courses on Conscious and Charismatic Communication. Widely seen as one of the world’s top communication experts, mission-driven leaders, entrepreneurs and organizations such as Oracle NetSuite, T-Mobile, and Sherwin-Williams have engaged Ravi to help them and their people become masterful communicators so they can build meaningful relationships that amplify revenue growth and cultivate a culture of trust.

Off stage or camera, Ravi lives just outside of London, UK, with his wife, son, daughter and furry little West Highland Terrier. He loves the movie Limitless, a good stand-up comedian and a quintessentially British suit.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Monarch.com. Get 50% off your first year on with the code AWESOME.

Pete Mockaitis
Ravi, welcome!

Ravi Rajani
You nailed the name. You nailed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I practiced.

Ravi Rajani
First, there wasn’t even, like, “Cut. We’re going to have to run that back.” You nailed it. And because of that, I’m feeling good, I’m feeling great.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, maybe that’s our first communication habit, perhaps, for limitless influence right there, say people’s names right.

Ravi Rajani
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom about relationships, the communication, and influence. So could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and communication over the course of your career studying this stuff?

Ravi Rajani
The one that rings the most true for me right now is us humans spend a lot of time trying to be interesting versus leading with trying to be interested in the human being opposite us.

Now, for credit, Dale Carnegie said something along the lines of, to be interesting, be interested. And I do find that the more conversations I have with others, especially in the noisy world we live in today, which can create a lack of clarity and all of the side effects that manifest as a result of that, we can be busy, we can be running from meeting to meeting. And as a result, we lack presence.

And when we lack presence, we can often revert to, “Okay, reactive behavior.” And the way I look at reactive behavior is pulled from the spiritual wisdom of Kabbalah, which is any behavior that is grounded in lack, scarcity, or fear. So, me, meeting you, and leading with my accolades, awards, and credentials would be a form of reactive behavior. And that’s me trying to be interesting in the hope you will find me interesting.

But, actually, what I really should lead with is asking impactful, meaningful, and genuine questions. For me, I found that to be one of the most impactful ways to begin building rapport and meaningful relationship. But what about you, because you’ve had a lot of people on this show? What have you seen?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I think that’s a really fun and solid one right there. And I liked the part you said about trying to be interesting. The word trying, just sort of the effort level required because it’s, in some ways, it’s much simpler to make eye contact, ask some questions, as opposed to, “Oh, yes, I was studying for my sommelier exam.” It’s like, “Oh, that sounds hard to, like, do stuff to be interesting.” Whereas if you’re just interested in people, then that’ll get the job done easier and feel better to them.

Ravi Rajani
Right. I mean, isn’t it hard to figure out what somebody cares about if you are dominating a conversation, doing all the talking?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Ravi Rajani
And, really, when we figure out what somebody cares about in this season of their life, that builds a beautiful foundation for a meaningful business relationship, and in life as well. But, yes, my friend, I subscribe to what you’re saying. I subscribe to what you’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so you got this book, Relationship Currency, what’s the big idea here?

Ravi Rajani
Well, the big idea is that, in a world obsessed with automation without intention, conversations that lack connection, and also growth without introspection, leaders, teams, entrepreneurs, and professionals are really engaging in short-term behavior that kills our long-term reputation.

And what I believe, more than ever before, is what we’re craving is human connection. We’re craving human connection, and we’re craving real relationships grounded in trust. And this book teaches five habits which will help people communicate in a way that builds trust in a conversation and earns meaningful relationship so they can receive more of what they desire in the long term.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds handy. Tell us, what are a few super common short-term behaviors that kill long-term relationships that you see all the time?

Ravi Rajani
Well, tell me, I’m curious, from your perspective, in the arena of business, what is your pet peeve when it comes to conversations which you know are grounded in, let’s go back to the concept of reactive behavior, lack, scarcity, fear, short-termism?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the first thing that comes to mind for pet peeve and business conversations is customer service things, in terms of, if I’m making a call to a company because I have a need, then it’s pretty drastic, right?

Like, I couldn’t ask the AI chat bots. I couldn’t find it on your website. I even used the Google and site colon website name. I mean, I need to talk to a real human who knows something about the thing by the time I call. And yet, they’re going to every length possible to push me away from having a real human who knows the stuff, talk to the thing.

It seems frequently. And, of course, some businesses do this excellently, but that was my first thought. Like, I saw that I had a package that couldn’t be delivered because they had to have a signature. I saw the email just before we got here, I was like, “Oh, boy, that’s going to be a process.” It’s, like, I think that’s probably my top pet peeve is that.

Well, if you talk about short term behavior, I guess it’s a matter of the organization, because I’ve worked with call centers before. The organization is looking to minimize costs as much as possible in terms of, like, dealing with all those customers and their issues. And so, yeah, the biggest pet peeve is customer service interactions with businesses.

Ravi Rajani
Isn’t it funny that when a company is trying to reduce costs, they forget at what cost? And it’s funny, you know, Pete, I had this experience just recently. So, I bought some electrolytes and amino acid supplements from a company here in the UK six months ago. And I recently realized, I was like, “I never received that package, yet they said it was delivered.”

So I dropped them an email, thinking that, “Nothing’s really going to happen here, but let’s see.” And it was incredible, the service. A human on the other end, emailing me fast, saying, “Hey, we want to make this right. This didn’t work out. Fill in this form really quickly, we’ve done most of it for you. We’ll get one out to you.”

Literally, I filled that form out two days ago and the supplements arrived today. And they’re like, “We’re really sorry for your inconvenience.” I’m now a customer for life. But I went into that being skeptical about if I would be a customer again. Within 48 hours, I’m now a customer for life.

And it’s so funny how these imperfect moments are actually gifts and opportunities for connection. Yet, as a society, we run away from imperfection. But actually, to be perfect would be denying our humanity. It’s just a funny world we live in.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And, well, now I’m thinking about business in terms of, if you look at, in the universe of sales and marketing, folks can spend great sums to shout out to the universe, “Hey, somebody, maybe, please pay attention to us,” and they’re delighted if, I don’t know, one in a thousand people who hear an ad, you know, click or take some sort of an action.

And then, yet when you’re actually in there, it’s like, “Here I am. I showed up. I gave you money. I could be delighted and won over forever.” It’s like, “Nah.”

Ravi Rajani 
Right? The best way to explain it, as I see it through my lens, is nightclubs. Back in the day, nightclubs were a thing. And you would see certain nightclubs, the queues would be, it would feel like a mile long. You’d look at it and you’d go, “Damn, Pete, that looks awesome.” You wait in the queue for one hour.

Pete Mockaitis
“It must be cool if there’s a line.”

Ravi Rajani
It must be cool. It must be great. There’s a line, it must be good. One hour goes by, “Oh, it’s cold outside. But you know what? It’s going to be worth it.” Two hours goes by, you get to the front, and you’re like, “Oh, yes, I’m about to go in,” and you get there, it’s empty. The service is subpar. The drinks are awful. You see what I mean?

And I feel like we live in a world where we are prioritizing width over depth. We really are. And a big part of this book is coming back to a world where we prioritize depth.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think that example is fun with regard to, you said there’s a line and then you get in and it’s empty, you’re like, “Oh, wait,” because then you know, and I remember there was a bar when I went to college, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, there was a bar that pulled this stunt all the time.

And it just made me hate them because as soon as you enter, it’s like, “Oh, I guess I was lied to. You were not actually at capacity. You just wanted to deceive us, you know, to create an illusion.”

And I think that it’s quite common to have just little…It seems like, in marketing, for example, we’re not outright lied to, but we’re misled. It’s like, “Okay, technically your AI software product can sort of, kind of, do the thing that you say it can, but, really, it doesn’t actually save any time for the purpose for which you’re marketing it in a real-world scenario.”

So I feel, like, that’s the case with a lot of things, it’s like, “I’m not getting a full-blown lie. Like, being told yes when it’s really no. But there’s key omissions that allow me…” there’s probably a great word for this. Is it dissemble? I don’t remember the word. To be led, to be very deliberately said a number of things that lead me to infer that which you want me to infer, though you know it is not entirely true. There’s got to be a word for that.

Ravi Rajani
There must be. I mean, I don’t have one for it, but what is coming up, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
But it ain’t honest. It ain’t honest, it ain’t candid, it doesn’t make me trust.

Ravi Rajani
Well, the key word there, like you said, trust. So how I see it, is trust, yes, is a buzzword overused by politicians, business leaders, companies, marketers, the list goes on.

But I’ve been really thinking for some time about, “How does one establish trust?” And when I tapped into my intuition, my story, and my experiences, I came up with something called the three Cs, the three C’s of trust. And when we earn that, we’re to earn trust, so the first C is connection. The second C is character. The third C is competence. So let’s take a look at each of them.

So connection, for me, is the emotional glue that forges a bond between two human beings. Then you have character, which is the invisible values which travel with your energy, verbal communication, and nonverbal communication. And then, we have competence, which is one’s ability to signal their ability to solve somebody’s problem and, ultimately, increase or decrease their credibility stock.

And we live in a world where, “Okay, I’m going to connect with you. I’m going to pitch you the right story.” “Great, I’m bought in.” But now, like you said in your example, I haven’t really received what I paid for, per se. So, actually, I don’t believe you have a character of integrity. Done.

Now, even if you connect with somebody, and they can solve your problem, but they have a shady character, are you going to be in business with them for long? No. Even if you connect with somebody and they’ve got great character, but they’re just likable, but they can’t solve your problem, that’s only going to get you so far. I mean, you could play this in several ways, but you see where I’m going. You really need all three singing and dancing at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. It’s catchy, easy to remember, and it’s in order. It was like, first, “I like this guy.” Second, it was like, “Okay, it seems like they’re being straight and direct and following through, just like the way they said they would. And sure enough, they’re getting it done nicely. I like what I see in terms of the product service delivered on the other side. That’s cool.” So you’ve also got five communication habits. Could you run us through these?

Ravi Rajani
Yes, so habit one is transform your story. Habit two is ask conscious questions. Habit three is unearth your charisma. Habit four is tell stories that inspire change. And habit five is become the trusted guide.

Pete Mockaitis
I love this. Now, can you tell me, if I develop and do these five things well, what will happen for me? What kinds of results? Could you share a cool story to illustrate?

Ravi Rajani
Magical things, Pete. But the way I see it is, when one is able to embody these five habits, and by the way, it doesn’t happen overnight. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts, magic bullets, quick fixes. This is a process where you ascend the competence ladder until you get to unconscious competence.

But really, the outcome of this is, once again, being able to build a meaningful relationship through communicating for trust, and the outcome being, yes, increased revenue, yes, leadership growth, but a culture of trust and an environment where people actually want to belong, which is important.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds good. Well, can I hear a story of someone who did just that, that they saw a transformation when they started doing this stuff?

Ravi Rajani
Okay, let’s talk about a specific transformation that happened to me. Let’s talk about this, okay? So, this, by the way, connects to habit number three, which is unearth your charisma. But let’s start with this.

So I believe that we have charisma all wrong in society. I believe I had charisma all wrong for many, many years because I used to think, Pete, it was about receiving accolades, awards, being the smoothest talker, being in the spotlight, etc.

Now, I’ve got to thank my younger self for doing the best he could with the awareness that he had at the time, but how I look at it now is an innate superpower that allows somebody to feel significant in our presence, meaning communicating in the way that makes somebody feel like they matter.

And inside of the book, something I talk about is how imperfection equals connection and how it can break down barriers. So get this, I can’t remember the exact year, but I have a feeling it was like summer ‘22, summer 2023.

But, anyway, I’m on a Zoom call with the COO of a SaaS company headquartered in Singapore. Now, he had heard me speak, you know, a couple of months back, Pete. So, he has some context on me. I had very little context on him.

So we kicked off the call. We get the corporate niceties out of the way. And I see a picture in his background, and I thought, “Okay, what a beautiful opportunity to build rapport.” So I say, “Oh, hey, man, that picture over there, oh, that’s an incredible picture of your daughters over there. How old are they?”

Thought nothing of it. I hear a pause. And he’s confused. He looks back and he looks at me. He looks back again, but this time his head is stuck looking at the wall and I’m thinking, “Is this dude going to turn around?” And he slowly turns his head around, but this time he’s smiling like a Cheshire cat, and he says, “Ravi, that’s not my daughter. That’s my wife.”

Okay. So I’m squirming, right? I’m squirming like a looney tune, and I’m thinking, “I’ve blown this. This sucks, oh, my gosh. That’s all folks,” right? That sort of energy. The best thing happened. It instantly humanized the conversation. It instantly broke down barriers, and that conversation went on for an hour long, an hour plus long. And we really deeply connected.
And here’s what happened at the end. He said, “Hey, I’d love for you to come in and deliver a storytelling workshop for our sales and customer success team. Are we doing it?” I said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And here’s the thing, here’s what I find, Pete, is so much of the time through life, we try and deflect imperfect moments, cover them up, already shy away from owning our mistakes.

And I’m finding, more so than ever before, that when you feel or see a mistake appearing, pause, smile, and say, “This is a gift. This is a gift,” and use that imperfect moment as an opportunity to showcase your humanity, because, otherwise, we can just end up being corporate robots.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well said because it feels so rare that someone, especially if you’re proactive, in terms of, like, if they let you know about the mistake in advance, like, “Hey, just so you know, unfortunately, we made this mistake. We’re so sorry. Here’s how we’re going to fix it.” You’re almost taken aback, like, “Oh, okay. Well, understood. Thanks for letting me know.”

And then it’s like, “All right, I know this person is not trying to hide something.” It’s a good feeling. So, lovely. I hear you that that is a great trust builder and we can feel better about mistakes as a result, as they come about. Well, could you then share with us a couple of your top tips or perspectives for putting these five habits into practice?

Ravi Rajani
Yeah, you know, each habit has a practice. And the idea is, when you engage in the practice, you’re engaging in a new behavior, which substitutes an existing behavior. And when you engage in that behavior long enough, what will happen, a proportion of those behaviors will turn into habits, hopefully positive habits, which point towards the North Star that you care about in this season of your life.

Now, one of the most popular practices sits inside of habit two. So habit two is about asking conscious questions, Pete. And, by the way, when I say conscious, what I’m talking about is asking questions that are grounded in positive intentionality.

Now, when I say positive intentionality, there’s a difference, Pete, between me asking you a question because I’m secretly trying to lead you to a product or service that benefits my bank balance at the expense of yours, versus asking you a question that’s designed to actually get to the heart of your truth. So that’s really what we’re talking about here.

Now, there are different types of conscious questions that I teach, but one of them I’d love to share now is empathetic questions. Now, empathy, a bit of a buzzword, let’s be real, so let’s define it. How I see it is being interested in what somebody is emotionally invested in, in this season of their life, aka, as we said at the top of the show, caring about what somebody else cares about.

How do we show that? Because I can tell you, Pete, “My friend, I care about you. I care about what you care about.” And it’s like, “Okay, cool, show me.” How do you show somebody without shoving it down their throat? Well, I’d like to introduce you to what I call the what, feel, who method.

So picture this. Okay, you’re a leader. You’re busy. It’s a noisy world. Meeting to meeting to meeting and you’re late for a follow-up meeting with a new team member. You walk into the room, you slam the door, you’ve got a sandwich in your mouth and you say the following words, you say, “Ah, hey, Pete, how are you?”

Harmless, but here’s my truth, they’re lazy. That’s lazy. It’s unintentional. It’s unintentional and it’s lazy. What we’re looking to do is build depth and intimacy in a relationship. So the what, feel, who method. Instead, what I could say is, “Pete, the last time we spoke, you mentioned that you and your wife were moving home, but you were feeling super stressed because your daughter was feeling really unhappy about the change. How has she settled in?”

All of a sudden, you are sharing a story with me about how things are in your personal life. I’m showing you that I care about what you care about by remembering what’s important to you in this season of your life, moving home, how you felt about it, stressed, and who it’s impacting, your daughter. I’m showing you that I care, that I have empathy without shoving it down your throat.

Now, that is, for me, anyway, so much more potent and powerful than, “Hey, how are you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s good. And it’s interesting how it’s easy to do and it’s easy not to do exactly this, because you’ve heard that’s what’s going on in someone’s life, and yet, in the course of living our own lives, when we re-encounter that person, it just doesn’t seem that top of mind.

But it’s quite possible to, I don’t know, take notes, have a pause before you begin the conversations, to say, “What is probably important to this person right now in the background?” It’s like, “Oh, of course. Well, they had that big date, you know? Their kid went away to college.”

And so it’s, like, it takes, for me at least, a stop-and-prompt-myself moment to actually execute that because I have found myself in so many conversations, where someone brings up the thing that they brought about their life that they had brought up previously. It was like, “Oh, jeez. Duh, I should have asked you about that.” So, yeah, it’s easy to do, it’s easy not to do.

Ravi Rajani
It is. My question to somebody who’s feeling that way is, “If it was working for you, you wouldn’t still be listening. You wouldn’t still be listening to this part of the show.” So, I often feel there can be resistance around trying something new.

And here’s what I would say to the listener is, look, this is my truth. It doesn’t have to be your truth, but try it on for size.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you get pushback when you suggest people do this? Because it sounds like, “Duh, of course, we should all do this, but we just forget. So maybe be conscientious and thoughtful about not forgetting.” But are you telling me people say, “Oh, Ravi, I could never do that.” Like, what’s that resistance sound like?

Ravi Rajani
Well, the resistance doesn’t sound like that. It’s a lot more subtle, I find. And it’s not necessarily related to this specific practice and habit, but, in general, what I find is when the cost of making change outweighs the cost of just staying as is, aka, the status quo, people are happy to sit in the status quo. So when you introduce something new that challenges their way of doing things, their viewpoint of the world and belief, you can often get resistance, right?

And it could be through disengagement in a workshop, you know, a corporate workshop where somebody may not have actually paid out of their own wallet to be there, right? Their leader’s paid, they’re getting told, “You should come in here.” They’re like, “Ah, I don’t want to listen to this. I don’t want to try this,” or whatever it could be, “I don’t want to try something new.”

And really, what we’re, I believe, anyway, that we’re selling, whether you’re selling a product, a service, an idea, or a vision, you’re actually selling change. You’re asking somebody to depart from a current set of behaviors and adopt new ones. And that is hard. If change were easy, my friend, everybody would stick to their New Year’s resolutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, I’ve also got to hear, you’ve got a tip for pitching yourself in 12 seconds. What’s the story here?

Ravi Rajani
Oh, gosh, where did you get that? Where did you get that? That’s brilliant! Where did you get that from? Is that AI?

Pete Mockaitis
We stalked you for hours. We stalked you for hours before we have this conversation.

Ravi Rajani
Did AI stalk me or something? Because that’s brilliant.

Pete Mockaitis
No, human beings.

Ravi Rajani
Wow, I like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Shout out to my team, yeah.

Ravi Rajani
Kudos. Kudos to the team. Okay, cool. So there’s something I don’t even talk about in the book, but it’s something called the magnetic message. And some of you will be thinking, “What are you talking about?” Let’s take it back to when Steve Jobs first released the iPod.

Now, he didn’t come out on stage and pitch the features and the functionality of the product. No. He did something different. He said something along the lines of, it’s like having a thousand songs in your pocket, “Rah! Rah!” That’s the crowd going wild, right? And it became viral worthy. I don’t even know if virality was a thing there, but if it was, he would have gone viral.

Now, that’s a metaphor. What I’m talking about with the magnetic message is something which embodies that energy, but through an analogy. So, a couple of years back, I was working with a SaaS company in the US, and for one area of their business, they worked with product leaders. And if I had to describe what they help them with in one word, it would be innovation.

But they can’t go to events, well, they can if they want to, I wouldn’t suggest it, but they can’t really go to events and say, “Well, we help product leaders with innovation,” right?

Or, we can’t say, “Well, on this one fine day in 2006, our founder…” like you can’t lead with a story. We need to earn the opportunity to share a story. So how do we do that? By sharing a 12-second magnetic message, aka, an analogy.

And one that I came up with for this team is, “So, you know how Blockbuster struggled to innovate and just allowed Netflix to crush them? Well, what we do is help product leaders prevent their company from becoming the next Blockbuster.”

Pete Mockaitis
I love that Blockbuster example because it’s really emotionally resonant and reminds me of Vince Gilligan, who’s my favorite show is “Breaking Bad.” He’s got these high-concept pitches, like, “Breaking Bad” is, “I’m going to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.” Or, “Pluribus is the most miserable person on earth must save the world from happiness.” And it just makes you go, “Huh, what? I got to know all about that.”

Ravi Rajani
Isn’t that brilliant? Like, that’s something that punchy, because you are really, what you’re trying to do is earn the following question, “Tell me more.” You know, I worked with a hotel, a large hotel group last year, and they were thinking about how can they pitch their wedding venues.

And one thing that we came up with was comparing it to flying on a first-class flight and how everything is taken care of so you can focus on the journey, really, and the thing that really matters the most. And we created an analogy around that, that’s sticky. It’s universal. It hits.

And, really, with that Blockbuster analogy, what it’s really grounded in is something which every human being can relate to, which is a fear of being left behind. Nobody wanted to be left behind in the tribe back in the day, right? So a fear of being left behind, a lack of evolution, we can all relate to that. So. for me, anyway, that’s how I look at it, often entering a conversation with something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right. It’s like… It’s the difference between conceptual, theoretical, talking about something versus, “Oh, yeah, I understand.” It’s, like, we’re connecting to stuff that’s already nicely lodged in our brains and has some emotion. Like a product manager is like, “I don’t want to be like Blockbuster,” you know, or, it’s like, “Oh, I remember Mr. Chips and I remember Scarface, and, whoa, that’d be a crazy transformation,” right?

So, we’re sort of latching onto some embedded emotional associations and language that’s really meaningful. Whereas, sometimes, when I see kind of corporate speak is sort of like, “Well, we provide a diverse array of advisory services for the mid-tier business leaders.” It’s like, “Huh?” As opposed to, you know, “We make sure you don’t run out of cash.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, we’re worried about that. That sounds helpful. Tell me more.”

Ravi Rajani
I hear you, my friend. And I also feel as though there is a journey with that. Often, we have to start with the corporate spiel to get to realize this is not connecting to eventually get to something which is a little bit spicier. So what else you got up your sleeve, because that was a good question? What else you got up your sleeve? I’m curious now.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I would like to hear about your thoughts on compliments and awkwardness.

Ravi Rajani
I love how you say awkwardness, okay? Here’s how I see it. So, interestingly, there’s a dude called Professor Norihiro Sadato. And in his piece of research, he found that when we receive a compliment, it actually activates the same part of our brain that lights up when we receive a financial reward. Cool, huh?

So compliments are great. Compliments work, but don’t be Mr. Creepy and start giving too many compliments, inauthentic compliments, inappropriate compliments, and say, “Yeah, Ravi told me to do it.” Don’t weaponize what I’m about to share. Okay, disclaimer.

So I could say to Pete, “Great presentation. Good presentation.” Great intention, but the delivery lacks, once again, intimacy and depth. Or, I could say, “Pete, that was one of the most impactful presentations I’ve heard at this trade show, literally all day.”

“In the first three minutes, when you shared that personal story about imposter syndrome as a new CEO and how you overcame it, wow, that was super powerful. And you know what, funny enough, you’ve actually got me thinking about how to use more personal stories in my own presentations. Thank you for that.”

So, the difference there is what I called the ASI framework. The second compliment had authenticity, specificity and impact. Authenticity, what I’m talking about here is leading with a genuinely positive observation. S is specificity, so avoid being generic. And I is impact, sharing how this specific moment has impacted you personally.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That’s all the difference between great speech and the real deal. That’s good. All right. Well, tell me, Ravi, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ravi Rajani
I’m very excited about the audio book of this book. I don’t know why I just felt like saying that. But anyway, hit me with these questions. You’ve asked incredible questions today. So I’m looking forward to some curve balls.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, it’s pretty straightforward. Tell me about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Ravi Rajani
Okay, so are you a Christopher Nolan fan? Batman? I mean, Batman?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Among the best. Among the best.

Ravi Rajani 
Incredible. Incredible. So, Bruce, aka Christian Bale, is on his jet with his butler, Alfred, and he says, “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. And I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh, I’m blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed, but as a symbol, as a symbol, I can be everlasting.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ravi Rajani
Let me give you one which I haven’t finished yet, but Essentialism by Greg McKeown. So love the idea of less is better.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Ravi Rajani
I’ve recently been digging deeper into Claude AI and I’m liking it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ravi Rajani
Telling stories that inspire change, aka, habit four inside of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that folks really connect and resonate with and they end up quoting back to you often or retweeting, etc?

Ravi Rajani
One I’m hearing recently is, I’ve heard recently, was “The depth of your questions dictates the depth of your relationships.”

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

Ravi Rajani
Where I hang out the most right now is LinkedIn. So what I’d love to know is, if you are listening to this right now, drop me a DM and let me know what impacted you the most in this episode. I’d love to know.

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

Ravi Rajani
Well, if you are looking to be awesome at your job, I’m biased, but I will say learning how to communicate with influence should be high on your priority list.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ravi, thank you.

Ravi Rajani
Thank you, my friend.