Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome.

Michael Hoeppner
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into some of your wisdom that you’ve packaged in your book, Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. We love all those sorts of things. And it’s funny, as we’re chatting, I’m going to be so self-conscious about saying “um” in this whole conversation.

Michael Hoeppner
You know, I am not the “um” police, to be clear. So, I promise you, I’m turning that off, that awareness right now. But, truthfully, the point of the book, of course, is not that you can never say “um.” The point is, they should not skyrocket when you’re thinking more about yourself and less about your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I was going to kick us off by asking if you could share a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made from many years of training so many folks on communication. What do us, humans, need to know about communication that we tend to not know?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, it’s a simple idea, which is this, we think, all too often, that talking is all about thinking. Like, if I have smart ideas and I think of smart stuff, I’m going to say smart stuff, and it’s simply not true. Speaking is physical. If you put your hand on your throat, and you say, “Communication is a physical art,” you’ll feel your hand vibrate. If you pound on your chest a little bit, “Communication is a physical art,” your voice changes.

So, the idea communication is all about thinking, messes us up badly. And instead, what we should do is use physical tools and use kinesthetic learning to get better at speaking.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, I love this idea a lot. And this is a bit of a theme that’s come up a few times in different domains, in that many solutions are not thinking or cognitive-based in order to get to. And here you’re saying that communication is not about thinking but it’s a physical art, like pumping iron, or dancing.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. And the thing that’s so liberating is, just like pumping iron or dance or any kind of physical or athletic discipline, you can build muscle memory and get better very, very quickly by doing the right exercises.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with regard to communication is not about thinking, it sounds, maybe if I could distinguish that a little bit, I suppose the formulation of that which we intend to communicate is a thinking activity. Fair enough?

Michael Hoeppner
Totally fair.

Pete Mockaitis
But the actual projection, performance, delivery of those ideas, that prior preparation, is a physical art.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood.

Michael Hoeppner
I mean, we all can relate to that idea of, if I have all these great ideas and then I open my mouth and they all tumble out in a completely disorganized jumble, and then as they do, I become chronically self-conscious about that, and that self-consciousness actually makes the whole job more difficult.

So, I’m not suggesting we don’t need our cognitive faculties to think of smart stuff to say. What I am suggesting is that if you completely remove the physical part of it and just remain in the cognitive category, you are absolutely shortchanging yourself. And the fastest way to improve is by addressing the physical.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you mentioned fast improvements. Could you tell us a fun story of a client who made some fast improvements and what that before, after, and journey looks like?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, for sure. I’ll mention the one, I actually write about this in my book, I changed a woman’s career in four hours one time. Now, that sounds like I’m bragging and advertising about myself. That’s not the case. What determines if people improve and improve quickly is much more them, what they bring to the situation, more so than what I do, and this woman was ready to learn, and she came in completely brave and ready to jump in with both feet.

Now, “feet” is the operative word there, and I’ll tell you why. She thought that she had a problem with blushing. She had stage fright. She would begin speaking, and instantly she would turn bright red, and this self-consciousness about her blushing was absolutely intolerable. So much so that she would begin to brush her hair back from her face over and over again, putting her hair behind her ears, but what she was really doing was trying to hide from the audience how red her cheeks were.

And so, she would fall into an absolutely compulsive habit of doing this with her hands over and over again. As she did this, she would become so self-conscious, she literally could not even think of the next word in a sentence because all her brain was occupied with was, “Don’t blush, don’t blush, don’t blush, don’t…” You get the idea. But I said feet earlier. The miracle was this. We didn’t focus on blushing. We didn’t even focus on hair smoothing with her fingers.

What I noticed right away was that she constantly shifted her feet back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, almost as though she was looking for somewhere to stand that was solid ground. So instead, I simply put my hands on her feet, and, in fact, I even went further. I tapped the top of her feet as though I were putting little thumbtacks through her feet into the floor. I made her feet anchor into the ground. And, all of a sudden, when she did that, it unlocked a virtuous cycle in which her delivery tools, meaning how you say stuff, not just what you say, her delivery tools totally transformed.

Her breath slowed. Her mouth opened. Her spine got longer. Her hands opened up and got freer, and, all of a sudden, her body began to operate in a way that set her up for success. She calmed down, the cheeks didn’t blush, and she could actually think of a next word to say, and we did this for about four hours. She built a brand-new muscle memory, and she literally got over her stage fright in four hours.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, the feet. And I recall, when I was nervous with interviews, back in the day, I found that when I planted both my feet firmly on the floor, I just said to myself, “Ground,” or something, that just sort of made me feel solid. And I don’t know, I thought it was maybe a me thing, but maybe you’re finding some universal insights here, Michael. What’s up with the feet?

Michael Hoeppner
Well, your body is evolutionarily designed to do some things. I mean, think about the sacrifices, in terms of evolution, we had to make to be able to stand on two feet rather than four. They’re massive. If you do martial arts, do you stand all crisscrossed and slouched over and constantly move your feet? If you’re learning a dance step, do you constantly shuffle your feet? No. We are built to have a stance in which we’re stacked as tall as we can, anchoring our feet into the floor so we’re balanced, so we can do all kinds of things, like even have our hands free to implement tools, and our voice unlocks very powerfully when we are as tall as we actually are.

And your feet being grounded is the first foundational step of that. So, it’s not just you. In fact, folks out there who are listening, the next time you’re giving a speech or any kind of presentation in which you’re standing, see what unlocks when you just ground your feet into the ground, just like Pete is talking about doing.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think you can even ground your feet to the ground when you’re sitting and it does something.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, you’re exactly right. But I’ll add a layer to it. Anyone who’s ever taken a yoga class and heard the yoga instructor talk about your “sits” bones, that’s if you sit on your hands and you feel this kind of bony part of your pelvis, that’s the bottom of your kind of hip girdle, would be one way to think about it.

Here’s the sentence, “Those are the feet of your torso.” I’ll say that again, “Those are the feet of your torso.” So, even if you’re seated, you can think about those anchoring into the chair just as your feet would anchor into the ground.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re talking about tiny adjustments and posture, I think I’ve also noticed the… in college I took one modern dance class just to keep enough credits to keep my scholarship, was actually a really cool experience. And we talked a lot about “pulling up,” which for a while, it took me a while to say, “What are we talking about?” And we had to read a whole article entitled “What does it mean to pull up?” which was actually very useful.

And so, they suggested imagining, like, a rope attached to, I think it might be called the suprasternal notch. Am I using these words right? Like, in the middle of your chest, like above your nipples, like right in the middle, if they were to cleave you in two, by maybe four or five inches above the nipple line, like you could feel a little notch. And I have found, sure enough, that when that area is, like, hunched just a little, versus it’s truly elevated as though a rope were pulling me upward, it’s like night and day in terms of the alertness or the with-it-ness. Michael, can you explain this much better than I’m doing now?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, I’d be happy to try, all right, for sure. Look, yes to that adjustment, and I’m even going to add another one. Imagine you had another string on your back. So, think of yourself almost like a marionette, a puppet, and you have one on both sides, and those strings are gently pulling you up so you almost can feel that full circumference of a circle around that widest part of your chest.

Now go even further, because in the chapter on posture in the book, I actually give a different image, which is imagine your head is a helium balloon and it’s gently floating up to the sky, and your spine is a long string on the end of the helium balloon, and you’re getting taller and taller and taller, not through muscle effort but through ease and release and grace. This is important because the way we learn posture is dead wrong. We hear all these conventional wisdom phrases like, “Sit up straight,” or “Pin your shoulders back,” or “Pull your shoulders back.”

Now, the problem with all of those things is they actually fit in a weightlifting class. Your spine is not straight, so you should not endeavor to sit up straight. Your shoulders should not be pulled back or cranked back because that’s using a bunch of muscles that are about building muscle strength rather than what posture should come from, which is balance and alignment.

Now the reason this feels so miraculous to you when you do it, I mean, first of all, there is a bit of just an endorphin rush from using our body in big physically expansive ways, but as it applies to speaking, if you’re not being as tall as you are, your diaphragm does not have as much room to drop down and push your guts out of the way so you can actually take a full, big, deep, relaxed breath. So, very often when I coach people on posture, the first thing that happens when they begin to be as tall as they actually are is they yawn.

And the reason it’s not because they’re tired, but the exact opposite. Because for the first time in that day, all of a sudden, their diaphragm has a space to actually drop down. What happens? Their lungs begin to inflate with air automatically, and they go into a yawn, and the whole body relaxes and releases a little bit. So that’s a tiny bit of an explanation of some of the things you might be feeling when you allow yourself to have that taller, released posture that your body is craving.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot with regard to the helium balloon floating situation and it’s not a matter of muscles, because I was just about to say, Michael, sometimes it feels like when I’m standing up really straight and my posture is great, I’m getting tired. Is there a certain set of strength training exercises I should be doing in order to improve? And it sounds like you’re saying, absolutely not. Just change the approach to your posture.

Michael Hoeppner
There is no strength training. Who has the best posture in the whole world? Once they’ve learned to sit up, put a baby on the ground, and watch them balance flawlessly. Anyone who’s had a young kid, call it zero to two years old, you plop them on the floor and you cannot believe how they can stay balanced like that the whole time. Here’s another image for it.

Remember holding a broom on the tip of your finger? You put the bottom of the broom there and you keep the thing perfectly aloft by moving your hand around, and the stick is completely straight and the head of the broom, which is much heavier, by the way, stays totally vertical because you’re working to keep it in balance. That’s how our posture works, from balance and ease and release. It does not work from muscle effort.

So, if you’re walking around the world, trying to pin your shoulders back, or essentially treat your day like a physical therapy session, you’re going to get exhausted. The wrong muscles will be recruited. They will get exhausted and fatigued. You will collapse, and then what happens is even worse. Then the voice in your head will kick in and begin to critique you, like, “Ugh, how do you have terrible posture?” “Ugh, why can’t you fix this?” “Ugh, why don’t you stand up straight?” “Ugh, I’m so tired,” “Ugh, it’s not worth trying to change it. Ahh…” then you collapse. So, instead, embrace release, breath, freedom, balance, and see what changes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. So, are there any other key prompts you recommend in terms of getting our bodies in a comfortable groove that is excellent?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. Well, here’s another one. Unlock your hands and let them talk. I’m not suggesting that you, need more hand gestures. That’s not my point. My point is, I bet you make more hand gestures in real life than you realize. And then you go into high-stakes presentations or board meetings or client situations and, all of a sudden, you have a bunch of garbage in your head, like, “Don’t make distracting hand gestures,” and you completely restrain your gestures. But in real life, your hands have a story to tell, too, and they want to speak.

Now, the reason this is a problem is not because I actually don’t care all that much about what you’re doing with your hands in terms of gestures, but I do care a lot about how free you’re being with your overall communication instrument. And when I see people constrain their gestures, very often what they do, too, is constrain their breath, constrain their jaw, constrain their enunciation, constrain their vocal variety, and soon they speak like a tremendously diminished version of themselves. So, let your hands actually do what they want to do, which is help to emphasize and tell your story.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Okay. Well, so we talked about body stuff a fair bit, which I think is warranted given your notion that communication is not about thinking and it’s a physical art. So, tell us, when it comes to the actual words that we’re using, you’ve got some perspectives in terms of conciseness, articulousness, enunciation. Can you work us through approaches to improve these domains?

Michael Hoeppner
So, let’s take conciseness first. If you’re trying to be briefer with your remarks, say better stuff in fewer words, in other words, as opposed to just telling yourself one more time, “Keep it brief,” or “Keep it simple,” or “Take a 30,000-foot view.” Instead, pick up a stack of LEGO blocks, or any other stackable objects, and go through your content, but say one thing at a time.

And at the end of each idea, in silence, place down a LEGO block. Pick up the second LEGO block and say the second sentence, or second idea, and at the end of that idea, in silence, kind of like where the period might go, at the end of the sentence, click the LEGO block into place on the previous. Pick up a third one. Say the third idea. At the end of that idea, in silence, again, kind of like where the period could go, click that one in place with the previous. And slowly but surely, thought by thought, sentence by sentence, create the tower of your communication.

Now the reason this can be so dazzlingly effective for people is that, in that moment when you’re doing the activity of clicking the LEGO in place, something miraculous happens. You’ve given yourself a moment to pause and to think, and maybe even to breathe. So, you’ve given your brain the two things it needs to actually think of smarter, briefer stuff, which is time and oxygen.

This is how great impromptu speakers have built the discipline to speak. They share just one smart idea at a time, and at the end of that smart idea, they consider, “Do I need to say something else, or am I done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And in the process of actually stacking these LEGO blocks, it sounds like we may come to some realizations, “Oh, I don’t need that at all, or that at all. I guess it’s shorter than I originally planned. How grand.”

Michael Hoeppner
In fact, I can’t say who, but I’m working with a political candidate who is running for office. This particular candidate typically goes on way too long when answering questions. So, we’ve been working with these LEGO blocks relentlessly to get answers down to 30- or 45-second sound bites. It’s a very fast way to do so. Now, you can’t stack LEGOs in real life, but if you practice this, what happens is, very quickly, you build that muscle memory of tolerating thinking time between ideas, and very soon, you don’t need the LEGO blocks or the stackable objects at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Michael, help us out with this muscle memory notion. I think some of us fear silence because of any number of dimensions, but when you mentioned a political context, I’m thinking about, oh, man, when you have multiple guests on a news show or a debate stage, it just feels like, “Oh, if there’s a split second of silence, someone’s going to grab it.” So, how do we think about these environments or even just the mental state and associations and emotions we have with the discomfort of letting there be that gap between our sentences and our thoughts?

Michael Hoeppner
It’s a big question. So, opposite of conciseness, I’m going to give you a thorough answer, okay? Because there’s a bit of a multi-step process I’ll offer here. The first is to recognize what the highest priority is. Most people are not on a Sunday morning political food fight talk show. Most people are living their lives, and the much bigger error they make is not having comfort with silence. So, recognize which the bigger one has in terms of a payoff for you and focus on that.

Next, this is a tool that’s so useful, The Wall Street Journal did a little piece on it. To build some comfort with silence, particularly when asking questions, you can do a simple thing, which is draw an invisible question mark with your finger at the ends of sentences, imperceptibly, where no one can see this, either just gently in a tiny microscopic way on the side of your leg, or if you’re remote, on a video call.

Why? We talk past the ends of questions all the time out of a sense of discomfort, and we don’t want to live through that silence. But if you actually shut up when you ask a question, guess what might happen? The person you’re asking the question might say something useful. I mean, think of that in a sales or a negotiation situation.

So, this idea of tolerating silence is not just crucial for being brief or being concise, it’s crucial even just in the reciprocal activity of having a conversation. Those are thoughts about building that muscle of tolerating the silence. But we can also get into how to avoid being interrupted if you want to. You want to go there?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it, yeah.

Michael Hoeppner
So, the first thing is, throw out that garbage advice of never have it be silent because you might get interrupted, because it might make it more likely you get interrupted. Why? Well, if someone hears that I’m talking to a person who never shuts up, no matter what’s going on, there’s never a single bit of silence, it actually encourages me, “You know what? I better get my voice in the conversation because I’m never going to if I don’t, so I’m just going to interrupt them midstream.” They might feel more inclined to interrupt you because they never see an opening.

And if you’re talking without ever giving yourself a moment to think about what the heck you’re saying, there’s a good chance you’re saying kind of dumb stuff. So, if you say dumb stuff, people are more inclined to interrupt you because they think, “No, I have to contradict what you’re saying.” So, contemplate that it might be making the possibility or pattern of you being interrupted worse.

If you’re afraid of being interrupted, instead, work on what’s called laddering, and, supposedly, Margaret Thatcher studied this to try to figure out how to make sure that her political adversaries would not interrupt her. And what it means is that you build, using all five Ps of vocal variety, not just pace, all five Ps of vocal variety, you build your way through a bit of speaking so that people recognize you’re not done yet, and I’ll do this in one sentence so you can see it.

Laddering would be a tool in which you use ever-accumulating vocal variety to let your listener know that you have not reached the end of your sentence. Now I’m doing it in a very exaggerated, absurd way, but you hear my point. You can show people you’re not done speaking yet with the adamance and forcefulness with your speech, and it doesn’t have to be by talking as fast as humanly possible.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you said there’s five P’s. What are the five P’s?

Michael Hoeppner
Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what do you mean by power and placement?

Michael Hoeppner
Power is volume, that’s loud and quiet. And placement means where the sound is placed in the body. So, as an example, if you have a friend with a really nasal voice, the placement of their voice is primarily in their nasal passages, and that’s where the sound is amplifying. Our voice amplifies throughout our body. So where is it placed?

Now the key thing with all of these five P’s is to, for the most part, use more. More variety. Because, typically, when we’re in a fraught communication situation, we contract and use less.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, different placement would probably imply a different pitch, but it’s possible. So many P words. It’s possible to have different pitches in the same placement.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, you’re right about this. You could disentangle them from each other, but they’re incredibly hard to do so because they work together organically to create emphasis and drama and surprise within what we’re saying. If you don’t believe me, just imagine trying to get a dog interested in a stick that they’re allowed to chew, but not the cell phone that they have found, and imagine yourself comparing those two things for the dog.

You would use all five of your different dynamics of vocal variety to make one thing  seem really cool and exciting, and one seem really boring and silly and uninteresting. They work together, these five pieces.

Pete Mockaitis
I like the dog example. I think you’d also use a small child.

Michael Hoeppner
I have a 10-week-old golden retriever puppy right now, so dog is front of mind. That’s what’s going on. But, yes, it works for kids too, for sure. And, by the way, if you want a quick way to unlock this, try an exercise I call “silent storytelling.” And all that means is you have to speak, but exaggerate every single part of your speaking except for your voice. In fact, put yourself on mute and think of this like lip-syncing.

Mouth the words, move your hands and your gestures like crazy, allow your face to be terrifically expressive, but do it without any sound. It’s as though you’ve been muted on a TV. Do it for a minute or two, and then, all of a sudden, let your voice back into the equation, and you’re going to hear, all of a sudden, so much more expressivity come out of your voice because you’re moving your body in a much more dynamic way. It’s a very quick hack to unlock a lot more vocal variety for people who struggle with at times being more monotone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, we talked about conciseness, then we had a fun little detour through some five Ps. How about articulateness and enunciation?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, let’s look at both. Again, I’ll jump right to something very tangible and very practical you can do. There’s an exercise in my chapter on articulateness called finger walking. And in case you’re just listening, what I’m doing is walking my fingers forward, choosing each and every single word that comes out of my mouth.

Now, I invented this exercise originally with a balance beam, or a piece of masking tape stretched along a floor, and would have clients walk along this balance beam choosing every single footstep. But then, of course, I wanted to find a way to make it instant for people, even if they didn’t have room to move around, and you can do the same activity walking your fingers forward.

Do not get hung up on “Am I choosing word by word or syllable by syllable?” Instead, simply focus on walking your ideas across the table. And if you don’t know what to say next, pause your fingers, consider what you do, and then slowly take your time to commit to each word you’re sharing. Now, the reason this can be very powerful for people gets at the title of the book, “Don’t Say ‘Um’.”

The way to be more articulate is not to obsess about all the worthless words you’re saying, like, kind of, sort of, um, but rather to be laser focused on which words you’re trying to choose. So, the exercise of finger walking brings your attention to, “I’m going to actually take the time to choose my words.”

Pete Mockaitis
And the idea, as we do the finger walking, is that each finger-fall, footfall, step, if you will, corresponds to one word that I’m saying.

Michael Hoeppner
Well, listeners, I’m sure you could just hear that Pete was practicing just now. So, thank you for practicing, Pete. It’s not quite that rigid. If you do it for a few minutes, what you’re going to discover is that it doesn’t actually correlate to every single syllable, nor each and every word. What begins to happen is the activity helps you choose words or phrases, but it forces you to actually choose those ideas, as opposed to just opening your mouth and letting words fly out. So, practice it a little bit. You’ll develop your own rhythm, and it doesn’t have to be quite as rigid as you’re talking about.

A different way to think about this is, imagine you were a ballerina, or your hand was, and the ballerina is trying to tiptoe through a field of tulips and not disturb a single flower petal. That’s the kind of specificity I’m talking about with your fingers. And what happens, like magic, is you become that specific with your language, too, and it unlocks what I call linguistic precision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so we’re sort of physically and visually representing, with our own bodies, a rhythm or groove between speaking and pausing.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes, thank you for that synthesis. Here’s the crucial thing. You won’t have to finger walk for the rest of your life. If you try it right now, by the way, it’s challenging. But it’s challenging on purpose. Because you may right now be very accustomed to just opening your mouth and letting a bunch of words fly out, fully 40% of which are not that useful. So, it forces you to really, almost obsessively, think about, “What the heck am I actually saying?” Well, you don’t have to do this too long, and, all of a sudden, you will have a much greater awareness of choosing words and ideas than just kind of free-form letting them fly out of your mouth all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And in the process, we’d naturally say fewer words and have more silences, is my experience right now, and it sounds like your assertion is that’s totally fine.

Michael Hoeppner
To a point. To a point. It’s going to feel a little bit too rigid at first. A little bit too much. What I’m suggesting is this is a radically different way to learn a behavior. Most people try to get rid of filler and useless words and be more precise and articulate by doing the advice of the title of my book. “Don’t say ‘um.’ Don’t say ‘like.’ Don’t say ‘kinda.’ Don’t say ‘sorta.’ Don’t talk too fast.” A whole bunch of thought suppression. It doesn’t work.

So, this is a different way to learn. You practice this a little bit, you bring a hyper-awareness to which words you’re actually choosing, and this uses what’s called embodied cognition. You’re learning with something besides just your brain. You’re learning with your body. You do this a little bit a few minutes each day, very quickly, you’re going to build some muscle memory with linguistic precision, and you won’t have to walk your fingers at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, this slow, halting, extra pause thing going on, as I’m being more linguistically precise, is almost a bit of an awkward intermediate stage that will, in time, with practice, disappear, and now I’m just artistically fluently precise at a good pace without those awkward silences and pauses.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, absolutely. Now, in my experience, in 15 years of coaching this exercise, this exercise is like a magic bullet, transformative for about 60% of people. Forty percent, it is legitimately too complex. It’s too much of a cognitive load. It actually kind of throws them off. But I will say something about this book that no author anywhere has ever said. I don’t care if you read the book. I really don’t. I do care if you read one chapter.

So, find the area of communication that has historically been a bugaboo or a challenge for you and get better in that one area. This exercise may not unlock precision or articulateness for every single person, but there’s chapter after chapter, so, yes, practice it. Yes, it may be awkward at first, and even if it doesn’t work, there are other sort of arrows in the quiver, to use a metaphor.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s hear about enunciation.

Michael Hoeppner
Enunciation is the only category in the book that I offer a tool for that I can take no credit, because the tool is something I learned from an amazing voice and speech teacher named Andrew Wade, but he learned it from someone, who learned it from someone, who learned it from someone. And the first historical example of this goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. So, the principle here is you practice speaking with an impediment. Yeah, go ahead, what?

Pete Mockaitis
Like, do I put pebbles in my mouth, Michael? Isn’t that a choking hazard?

Michael Hoeppner
Hey, look at you, knowing the historical reference.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes, pebbles in the cheeks. Oh, shucks, exactly. No, it is not a choking hazard if you do it correctly. We’re not putting pebbles in the cheeks. You’re using one impediment that you put in between your teeth. A good thing is a slice of wine cork, that’s what I learned from Andrew Wade, but you have to hang on to the wine cork on the side to make sure you don’t inhale it. Easier is the end of a toothbrush, or even your pinky finger, neither of which are choking hazards, obviously.

And all you do, as I’m doing right now, is you put the impediment in between your teeth, and then the task is you have to make every single word totally clear even with the impediment in between your teeth. Now it looks silly. But you know what else looks silly? Basketball players dribbling with ski gloves on. Competitive swimmers swimming with extra baggy, two or three pairs of swim shorts. Sprinters running with a parachute, dragging behind them. Those people look silly, too.

It’s not silly. You’re doing the exact same thing. You’re building stronger muscles by making the physical activity more difficult. And by doing this, all of a sudden, all the muscles of enunciation, because they are muscles, get stronger because they have to fight past an impediment. Then you remove the impediment and, voila, your enunciation is better.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Michael, this is so much good stuff. Tell me, anything else that’s really good and juicy and powerful you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Hoeppner
I just want to make sure that people get this really clear sense, “Wow, there’s almost a tool for each of these things,” and there is. And the point is, you can treat yourself like the communication athlete that you are and use some of these innovative approaches to build some new muscles.

And with that, I want to just quickly mention the first two that we didn’t get to for posture, in the book, but also in real life, if you don’t have the book, make a paper crown, and imagine you’re walking around with a crown on your head and you’re a regal monarch. And for grounding your feet, in the book, I actually have a page where there’s two silhouettes of footprints. You can stand on the book and keep the pages adhered to the floor.

So, for each of these places, you might feel like you have challenges in your communication life, there are ways to approach it, and physical, innovative ways that can create change very quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Now with the crown on your head, I’m thinking about a recent trip to Burger King with my kids and the Burger King crown, and those things stay on pretty good even when we’re bobbing it all over the place. So, is there some nuance to how I do the crown exercise?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. Well, the nuance there is there’s a bit of imagination that has to happen. Put it on and then challenge your kids, or whoever you’re with, walk around, allowing the crown to give you the regal bearing of some legendary monarch.

If you’re with kids, make it a game. See who can stand as tall and walk as elegantly and regally as a monarch. And you’re going to notice very quickly what that unlocks is the exact kind of posture we were talking about earlier. Not posture from muscle effort, but posture from ease, grace, height, and balance.

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

Michael Hoeppner
There’s two quotes, and I’m going to mangle them a little bit, but it’s more important people remember the idea than even the quote. One is Buckminster Fuller, “If you’re trying to change something, don’t try to fix the old model. Invent a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

And the other quote is from Teddy Roosevelt, which is something like, “The best reward in life by far is doing work worth doing.”

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

Michael Hoeppner
We use that system of five P’s I mentioned to look at politicians’ speeches, and it turns out, pretty straightforward, politicians who use vocal variety are evaluated by their audience as more authentic. Politicians who never use vocal variety are evaluated as inauthentic. And in politics, being labeled inauthentic is like the kiss of death these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Michael Hoeppner
I’ll tell you what I’m reading currently that I like the best. I don’t know about favorite book ever, but currently it’s Moby Dick, and part of the reason is it has the most dazzling piece of brevity. The first sentence is three words long, and two of the three words are monosyllabic, “Call me Ishmael.”

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

Michael Hoeppner
My favorite tool, in terms of software, is Otter it’s an app that does a bunch of transcription. And part of the reason I love it so much is it’s really good at notating what you’re saying, and I love to explore the dynamic of how humans speak versus how they write, and how our language is different in those two different sorts of processes. And so, very often, I like to actually write some stuff by first talking it out, and Otter lets me do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, I want to get your hot take on this, there is a real difference between how we speak and how we write. And where I find it most pronounced in my life, hundreds of times over, is in bios because bios are written, and then I speak parts of them. And so, when there is a – what is it called? – a dependent clause, like, “A graduate of Harvard Business School, John does blah blah blah.”

And so, I feel like that was made for writing and not for speaking, so I feel silly speaking it, even though we understand when I’m doing a bio, I’m going to be reading something that’s been kind of provided and edited, but I feel off and I change it. So, it is. Yeah, what’s going on here?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. First of all, you’re doing your guests a real favor by changing it real time, because if you notice when you just said that, you even took on kind of a game show host voice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Michael Hoeppner
You said, “A graduate of Harvard Business School.” So, it’s very difficult to read overwrought flowery language that really is made for writing, it’s very difficult to read that without any degree of mockery, because it sounds ridiculous when we say it out loud. So, you’re doing your guests a favor by translating that for them real-time, it sounds like, perhaps, sometimes even.

What is going on here is, of course, they’ve looked at this, is that our brains are even stimulated differently based on how we’re using language, and the activity of writing is fundamentally different than the activity of speaking. And yet we think they’re identical. I’ll give you a quick tool for this. This is, in fact, in the book. It’s called out loud drafting. If you want to get better at writing speeches, things that you’re going to say, come up with content that’s then eventually going to be spoken out loud and make it better, use this tool, out loud draft.

As opposed to picking up a keyboard and tap, tap, tapping away to start. Nope. Stand up, walk around, record yourself so you have the transcript, in case you say something genius, and then talk it out, real time, on the fly. First time might be bad. That’s okay. Do it again. Second time it’s still bad. Do it again. By the third time, it’s going to be better, and then you can go to the keyboard and write some stuff down. But only once you’ve done that, because then the writing is going to sound much more like how people talk anyway.

This is a tool I use in politics all the time so that speeches sound like direct first-person address as opposed to “Recited talking points that cover every single bit of policy that I need to in order to get elected.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that’s dead on. I guess you said politics, I’m also thinking about sales copy. I’ve heard a great phrase I liked, which was, “Join the conversation occurring inside your prospect’s head.” Yeah, that is what I find persuasive, at least when I’m thinking about buying something, is that. And if it does sound flowery, elevated, like a grand essay, I’m less persuaded in terms of thinking, “Oh, this is awesome, and I want it, and I need it.”

And then I find, like I was looking at a top strategy consulting firm’s website writing about their experience with different cases, and I was like, “The purpose of this website is to get a C-suite executive to hand over millions of dollars for a consulting project. I don’t think you’re doing it right.” And I feel a little bit arrogant saying that, like, “I mean, who am? I’m not in that business of selling super high-end corporate consulting services.”

But I don’t think even highfalutin executives speak to each other that way and read about your omnichannel solution enablement, and go, “Oh, yeah, that’s what we need. Call the guys at BCG ASAP because I’m fired up by what I’ve read here.”

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think this leveraging omni-channel stuff would just be so much more compelling in terms of, like, “Our clients have seen 30% increases in leads from their websites, apps, and direct mail.” I go, “Oh, those are three different channels and that’s a result I find very intriguing. Maybe I should talk to these consultants.”

Michael Hoeppner
That’s right, “Because I know what a website is, I know what an app is, I know what email is. Okay, great. Sounds brilliant.” Now this is a really important point for your audience, in particular, because this is not just about website copy. I see this all the time. Imagine this scenario. You’re in a board meeting. Someone’s going to present on something, okay? They’re sitting in a chair. They’re being introduced by someone else, or someone else finished up a presentation, and they’re going to hand the baton off to the person who’s going to go speak.

The person sitting in their chair is speaking like a human, chit-chatting with her neighbor, talking about something, diving into the discussion. They stand up. They walk to the front of the room. They even say something else casual and normal to the person who’s handing it off to them like, “Okay, thanks so much. Appreciate that.”

And then instantly they’re going, “We’re going to consider a leverage strategy, multi-part,” and they, all of a sudden, begin speaking like someone completely different as they’re reading off their slides, reading off this overwrought script that they’ve written, and, all of a sudden, the person we’ve seen two seconds before is replaced by a robot.

Communication is communication is communication. Your job is to say words that are meaningful to your audience and to focus on your audience in all these different situations. And it’s why I think, partly, that idea of public speaking is so confusing because whenever you’re speaking, it’s probably in public, unless it’s a private conversation with like a lover or a spouse or something like this.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And so then, I’m thinking about what’s the ideal time and place for flowery language?

Michael Hoeppner
First rule is you have to know your audience. So, I consult and coach in politics a lot. Most of the time we’re trying to find the simplest language there is and speak in monosyllables and even better use vivid language. That means nouns that are images and action verbs. But that’s because the audience and also the channel they’re going to receive this in, very likely they’re going to see a 30-second soundbite and that’s it. So that’s the first rule, know your audience.

But the second is, and now I’ll use a big word to emphasize a point, the platonic ideal, going back to Plato, the platonic ideal would be that you actually do both things. Now I mentioned Moby Dick earlier as the book that I’m reading. I mentioned that first sentence, but if the entire book was three- to five-word sentences, and all the words were monosyllabic, no one would still read Moby Dick.

Two sentences later, after that “Call me Ishmael” deadly simple sentence, Melville writes an 87 word-long sentence that features big words like “methodically” and “hypo” and these sorts of things. So, the ideal is that you can actually do both. Use soaring, big, complex rhetoric that verges on poetry, and also deadly simple blunt messaging.

And, as usual, one of the best at this ever was Martin Luther King Jr. and you can see this all through his speeches. This back and forth and back and forth between complexity and simplicity. The complexity gives your audience the credit that you actually think they’re smart, which you should. Audiences are smart. And on the other side, those simple phrases show them that you are a visionary leader who can identify a simple goal and deliver on that.

Now, that’s a lot to achieve in like a boardroom presentation or something, but people get bad coaching a lot of times too, of like, “Dumb it down. Keep it simple, stupid,” that kind of stuff. The best you can get to is that you actually do both, and those are the speeches that stand the test of time.

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

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, well, first, the URL for the book is really simple, DontSayUm.com. If you want to reach out to me, LinkedIn is usually the best. That’s just Michael Chad Hoeppner at LinkedIn. And then the company that I lead is called GK Training, and again, that URL is very straightforward. GKTraining.com.

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

Michael Hoeppner
If you have the book, read one chapter, the chapter you need. If you don’t, there’s a free chapter at DontSayUm.com. I’m going to keep it free because people need this. It’s called Navigating Nerves. So, a challenge there is read that chapter and discover how actually your approach for navigating nerves might be totally counterproductive, and give yourself a new tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, this is fun. Thank you. I wish you many meaningful communications.

Michael Hoeppner
Thank you so much, and the same to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Janice, welcome.

Janice Omadeke
Thank you. Thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk mentorship, and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a particularly fond memory you have of a mentor of yours.

Janice Omadeke
Oh, gosh. Honestly, I mean, I have quite a few. I don’t think I could be in the business of mentorship without having some great stories. So, the first one that comes to mind is my very first mentor in corporate America, Amy. She was a creative director at PwC, which was my first big dream job over a decade ago. Her combination of grace, poise, and also intense program management, and a clear understanding of the value she brought in her role and to the organization was something that I was so thirsty to model, and something that I hadn’t seen coming from defense contracting at that time. And I just learned so much from her.

Working with her really showed that you can be both very intentional with the way you interact with people and also very passionate about the returns you deliver to either the company you work for or the company you build yourself. So, thank you, Amy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, she sounds lovely. Could you zoom into a particular moment that really touched you and left an impression?

Janice Omadeke
Sure. My first six months at PwC, so I had come from defense contracting, my entire career before then, very much the old boys club, as you can imagine. I’m from the D.C. metro area, and so, oftentimes, I never felt like I really belonged. I felt like I had to deeply alter my personality or practice a high level of self-abandonment in order to meet my career goals and support the organization. So, my first six months, she really helped me just return to myself.

I would ask her a lot of questions. So, there was one conversation where I just asked her point-blank, “Amy, what is it like being a woman partner at PwC? Like, what is that experience actually like? Because coming from defense contracting, I know where I want to go, but I am scared of reaching those heights if it’s just me as the only woman on a team or in that particular career level and there’s no one else.”

And she was very open about the fact that, one, that organization was very diverse, but how she has been able to quiet that noise, quiet the naysayers, and just focus on her job and what she needed to do. And she communicated that roadmap so clearly with such a concise vision that I was actually able to replicate and model that the four years that I was at the firm as well.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say quiet the noise and naysayers, was there an instance of some naysaying that she quieted, and how did she do so?

Janice Omadeke
I think it’s the internal naysaying that, especially when I was in my early 20s, I had just entered the workforce, like brand-new, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at that time. And I am Congolese American, first-generation American, I did not come from a background where networking, mentorship, the career landscape that I was entering into, those weren’t common dinner-table conversations in my family. Like, it was just a big deal to get a full-time job with benefits and then proceed.

And so, I really had to learn through trial and error, through a lot of reading, through seeing other examples out in the market to figure out sort of what my professional identity was. But within that, especially in the setting that I had entered into, as I mentioned before, there were a lot of behaviors and traits that didn’t feel like they were in alignment to me, but I felt I had to adopt in order to survive.

And so, that self-abandonment I’m referencing previously is just the noise that you quiet, rather, is just the cultural norms from a very toxic environment that should have never been norms to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you lay it on us? Give us the down, the dirty, dirty here. What was going down that was disgusting? And how did that enter your head such that you were saying some things that weren’t so helpful?

Janice Omadeke
Well, you know, I’m grateful for the experiences that I had because it’s made me a better manager overall, because I never want to replicate those. But what I will say is that it feels wildly inappropriate to have VP-level leadership throwing an eagle paperweight at employees…

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there it is. That’s real, whoa.

Janice Omadeke
…or cursing at them, berating them, you know, the verbal interactions, we’re at a point where, not me personally, but, like, my direct manager would sleep at his desk and not go home because of the culture of first one in, last one out. So, if our boss was in the office until 11:00 p.m., even if we didn’t have anything to do, it was sort of required that we stayed because that’s how our performance reviews were evaluated, or that’s how promotions or raises were evaluated.

And when you’re, in my case, an entry-level graphic designer with four roommates, and you’re really going after these lofty goals that I had of making six figures and paying off my student loans in a five-year time period, yeah, it was a very interesting dynamic, one that I learned a lot from and one that I am grateful that I experienced. I think it built some experiential scar tissue and definitely taught me the type of leader that I want to be and not be.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah. Wow. Well, I’m sorry you went through that and it’s good to hear that you were strengthened as opposed to torn down from those experiences. But it also sounded like there may have been an interlude in between being torn down and strengthened, in which you had some residual mental stuff going on.

Janice Omadeke
Yeah, I think everybody does.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, what were some of the things that you were telling yourself or the beliefs that you adopted temporarily that you were able to chuck off?

Janice Omadeke
I don’t think I ever let them fully absorb, but I don’t think that was an intentional decision on my end. I think there was a part of me that understood my worth, a part of me that understood everything I experienced in that timeframe was actually not okay, and so I just started putting the wheels in motion to explore other opportunities outside of that.

I think that was really the big lesson of, if you are undervalued, if you are being treated in a certain way, yes, you do have these lofty goals; yes, rent must be paid, yes; you have to survive in Washington DC, but it’s up to me to decide what that actually looks like, like, “What am I willing to forego in order to do those things?”

And once I knew sort of my internal bargaining range of what I was willing to accept and had those boundaries, I knew to prioritize myself and find employers and teams that shared those values, and I did. You know, later on in my career, pre-PwC, and I was still in defense contracting, I had great employers. I had great teams that I really enjoyed working with.

There are some people that I still communicate with over social media to this day, over a decade later, because of those relationships that were built inside those employers. But I think, for me, I’m very grateful to have had parents that established the need to prioritize boundaries in order to reach future goals.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s great that you were able to identify that, “This is not normal. This is not acceptable,” as opposed to, it can happen in early career experiences, like, “Oh, shoot, is this what work is? Uh-oh. Well, that’s a bummer. I guess this is what my life is now.” But you were free from that.

Janice Omadeke
Right. Or where we throw a paperweight at somebody, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“I guess things get thrown in the workplace, or a helmet.”

Janice Omadeke
Exactly. No, I think it’s a matter of I just really understood my values, I understood my morals, and I knew what I wasn’t willing to give up and what parts of my soul I wasn’t willing to sell in order to reach that, especially, in a corporate setting, it just wasn’t necessary. And thinking about it now, I’m so glad I did and I’m thrilled. Like, it makes me so happy knowing that that type of culture is just broadly unacceptable.

In 2009, it was just a different case, that kind of was a bit of the norm, those sorts of cultures. But now that would never fly, and I’m thrilled that people no longer have to experience that, and that they can really focus on accomplishing their goals, getting acclimated to a supportive culture, that they can really find their footing inside an organization, make it their own, while also contributing to the success of their team, their employer, and the organization overall. It’s really great to see that.

Pete Mockaitis
Very much. It’s good to see some improvements. And, unfortunately, though, toxic workplaces and bullying does appear in spots, but hopefully less so and people are more aware that that’s not cool. So, tell me, when you said that Amy helped you quiet some of the internal naysaying, what did the naysaying sound like in your head? And what was the contribution Amy made to that?

Janice Omadeke
I’ve always believed in myself and my ability to advance in my career, but the negotiation piece was always a big one in terms of salary. You have your Salary.com, you have Glassdoor, you have all of this information, but sometimes, when early on, when employers would ask what your salary is, they’re not thinking, “Oh, okay. Well, this person is actually making $10,000 under market, so let’s give them $15,000, that way they’re above based on their skills and qualifications.”

If you tell them that you’re making a certain amount and then market, they give you maybe a 2% bump, that was just what it was at the time. And so, Amy taught me how to remove that scarcity mindset of pushing back and negotiating and advocating for yourself in a way that’s both logical, empathetic, and helps you reach that goal of finding middle ground between yourself and the other party in which you’re negotiating with.

And that’s something that I still use to this day, not necessarily on the salary front, but just how are both parties coming together to solve this issue, and how are you doing so in a way that everybody feels seen, heard, and respected at the end. And at that time, the naysayer in me was just saying, “Say yes to the salary, that way they don’t move on to the next graphic designer that is vying for this fully remote managerial job in 2014. Like, just say yes.” And she helped me in my next round of being promoted, and just the internal review process, actually, bump up my salary to where I need it to be and then some.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. And that is something that you can read it but it’s very different when you have a human being advocating for you, and you can sort of feel the support and see what’s up with the mindset. And this is just a freebie bonus nugget. So, Janice, what’s the proper way to answer the question when I say, “So, Janice, what’s your current salary?” If I’m asking you that as a potential employer, and you know the salary is below market, and too low, so it’s not relevant a question in a poor anchoring position, what do you say in that tricky position?

Janice Omadeke
I would say, “My salary is well within the range of the price point that you already set forth in the job description. Based on the market average of X and X, I am well within that bell curve and look forward to maintaining that in my next position.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure thing. Yeah, that sounds a lot better than, “None of your business. Back off! Shut up! Not relevant.”

Janice Omadeke
“You’re not supposed to ask me that anymore.” Yeah, no.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “Is that even legal? What state are we in? Let me review the law?”

Janice Omadeke
Exactly, that’s a much more diplomatic way of saying that, and also shows that you’ve done your research, and you also have a bit of a backbone to stand up for yourself, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. All right, so mentorship. I appreciate the roundabout pathway, but so mentors make a huge difference in areas of negotiation, making you stand up for yourself, quieting the internal chatter. So, so much good stuff. I’d love it if you could share with us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about mentorship over the course of your career and writing the book.

Janice Omadeke
So many people want a mentor but when you respond, saying, “A mentor in what?” or, “What would you like to work on with a mentor?” or, “What type of mentor do you feel would be most helpful to you?” crickets. I mean, that’s fair, right? Like, we talk a lot, and you see so much on, “Get a mentor. It helps,” because it does. You’re able to fast track your career five times faster as a mentee. As a mentor, you’re able to fast track six times faster, but there’s less information on what to actually work on with a mentor.

The fact that mentorship is not one size fits all. So, what type of mentor do you actually want to work with? What type of mentorship structure works for you? And who are the type of people that would be beneficial in this particular chapter of your career? And I think a lot of that is just left to assumptions versus actually educating people that are eager to find mentorship to understand that because they’ll be able to find their mentors much faster if they have that clarity.

Because, then, instead of just sort of a spray-and-pray approach, or just looking at everyone based on title or location or a high-level view of what that person could be, you’re now segmenting it the same way an entrepreneur would segment their customer market to know exactly where to spend their time, who to spend their time with, and how to communicate in a way that’s effective for the other party so that you’re both working together in that potential mentor-mentee dynamic.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Janice, I love that so much. A huge takeaway right there in terms of getting specific because I think when folks say, “I want to mentor,” if they haven’t really thought through the details then they might be embarrassed to say during the crickets, “Well, I guess what I wanted was a fairy godmother type figure who would just sprinkle career growth dust upon me and feel like a loving elder figure that can bestow wisdom and take me to places I want to go.”

As opposed to, “I don’t know how to navigate digital marketing with all of the different pathways and like what’s noise and what’s real, and all of the tools and opportunities and campaigns.” It’s like, “Okay.” Like, that’s something you can really work with, as opposed to just magical helper elder friend.

Janice Omadeke
Well, I think, too, yes, you do get some people that are saying, “I just want the magic wand fairy godparent that will take me from $30,000 annually to $600,000 annually in a month.” Like, that’s a great audacious goal. However, if we haven’t already started planting those seeds, that might be a steeper task than what’s in the realm of reality, right?

But with the right mentor, you can actually start breaking down those goals and saying, “Okay. Well, if the goal is that much, then how can you get there in a realistic timeframe?” whatever that timeframe is, right? And having mentors, plural, a series of mentors that could help you holistically look at your current career, look at your investments, let’s say, look at where else you could potentially build that wealth, if that was really the goal, to accomplish that.

And they might also have some come-to-Jesus conversations of, “That is possible, but if it’s not possible in a month, it might be possible in a couple of decades. It might be possible within the set timeframe, but the current one that you’re going after isn’t feasible. So, let’s take these pieces of the task list in order to accomplish that as the immediate next steps, and let’s get you to an exceptional level within those to continue moving forward.” Like, that’s a good mentor.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood. Thank you. And you mentioned a number, five to six times faster career growth with a mentor. Tell me, what is the source and the underlying data of this goodness?

Janice Omadeke
Yeah, I can send you the link to it, but, I mean, it’s everywhere, honestly. HBR has reported on that, Fast Company reported on that, Forbes has reported on that, other mentorship startups in the space, like MentorcliQ, I know has reported on that as well. It’s just a well-known statistic that those that are mentored are promoted five times faster, and those that do mentor have the likelihood of being promoted six times faster than those who are not mentored or mentoring.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. All right. So, we’ll totally link to the particular sources for that in the show notes for this episode. But tell me, in your own work, mentoring, being mentored, helping other people mentor and be mentored, has that been your experience, like, “Yeah, that sounds like it’s in the ballpark, five or six times the career growth rate with mentors or doing the mentoring” seems about right in your experience?

Janice Omadeke
Absolutely. I’m a living proof of that statistic actually, to have gone from a corporate graphic designer, to then expand within entrepreneurship, and to have climbed the summits that I’ve climbed with an entrepreneurship, like the 94th black woman to have raised over a million dollars for a seed-state startup, being Austin, Texas’ first black woman to have a venture-backed tech exit. I would not have accomplished that without the help of my mentors, 100%. It just fast-tracks your knowledge, it fast-tracks your self-understanding, your access to resources, the broadening of your network. Like, if you work the process, it actually can work.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic. All right. The size of the prize is large, so lay it on us, Janice, it sounds like the first step is to get specific associated with, “I want a mentor.” It’s like, “No, no, let’s get real clear.” What are the kinds of questions we should be asking and answering for ourself before we go on the hunt?

Janice Omadeke
Take some time to understand who you are and how you’re wired so that you’ll know if someone is a fit for you. The same way you would understand just meeting somebody out at a barbecue, let’s say, if they may be a potential fit for friendship or not. Based on your early conversations, you’ve done the work to know who’s a compatible fit for you in that space, and the same logic applies in mentorship.

So, look at how you operate within your career. Are you a morning person? Are you a night owl? What do you actually value at work? Are you the type of person that’s first one in, last one out? Or do you prefer working remote so that you can travel while also still working? Do you value family time? Is that really important? Or are you the type that wants to kind of work 24 hours a day? There’s no wrong answer, but being very clear in who you are in your professional identity so that you can find people that will complement it when needed, push back against it when needed, but ultimately will be a fit for you based on that is really important.

Understanding how you like to communicate, how you like to be communicated with, what type of feedback and feedback structure works best for you so that if you’re engaging with a potential mentor, and maybe their approach is more indirect that it’s preventing you from learning, you can circle back with that person and say, “Hey, actually, I prefer directness in my feedback communications. So, if you do have feedback, it drains my battery when I now have to spend time kind of sifting in between your words to figure out what you meant versus what you said. Is it possible for us to be more direct in our communications?”

If you want to have that conversation, great, but in this day and age when people are so busy, knowing that that’s your preference and finding people that will communicate with you in that way, or be willing to modify their communication to support that is great, and that’s what helps you end up expediting your mentor relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, that sounds delightful to find multiple mentors who can match us on all of these dimensions. I mean, is that possible? Is that realistic? Are we asking for too much? Can beggars be choosers if the mentor is bestowing generously their time and wisdom and expertise upon us? Can we get this level of fit?

Janice Omadeke
I think so because I don’t think it’s asking a lot to have a general understanding of how you and your mentor will communicate with each other. It is not mandating that every single mentor must communicate with you in this particular way. Just like you would with any other meaningful relationship, you understand where that other person is coming from. You understand their lived experience, you understand as much as they’re willing to share who they are, you’re presenting who you are, and then you both are working together to build a relationship that’s sustainable for both of you, and then figuring out what works within that.

So, another great example is if you are the type of person that likes to send one-off texts questions and appreciates that type of communication but your mentor prefers maybe meeting for coffee, a good workaround could be a virtual meeting, meeting once a month for an hour virtually. Ideally, if they are your mentor, you’ll do what it takes. But at the same time, I think finding some middle ground, if there is some sort of outstanding circumstance that prevents that from being realistic, it’s you’re well within your rights to figure out what works for both people.

I’ve seen relationships where the mentee just says yes to everything so that they have a mentor and they can say that they have a mentor without really thinking about how much they’re learning and how deep the relationship is actually being built. And when one party, as we’ve seen in most other relationship dynamics, if one party is consistently the accommodator and the other party is not aware of that, the relationship can only go but so far in comparison to actually just being vocal about additional preferences or wanting to work together.

So, the goal isn’t to strongarm in any direction, but really to build something that’s fruitful for both parties where you’re building that muscle memory of real communication and making sure that both parties feel as though they’re equally contributing to the growth and development of that relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. All right. So, if we’ve got great clarity on what we’re after, our goals, ourselves, and who would be a swell fit for us, where do I find such fine folks?

Janice Omadeke
Well, start finding their watering holes. Think about where you’re also interested in spending time. The great thing is that now, the virtual world is so vast. So, a good starting point, LinkedIn community groups are really great. They’re based on interest, industry, affinity groups, there are so many, so finding one that actually resonates with you is great. Social media is another great spot to find someone. I would not go based on followers. I would not go based on title. Actually, hear what these people are discussing. Join a virtual community there if you can.

Also, look at very niche and specific groups based on your interests. So, for example, when I was starting my first company, The Mentor Method, I was a graphic designer, I already understood the tech space, but I wanted to learn more about the intersection of tech and entrepreneurship. So, I found groups that I also felt very included and welcomed in. So, that included like DC Web Women, which consisted of a lot of entrepreneurial web development women, and it was great.

So, it hit a lot of those boxes where naturally I wouldn’t have felt comfortable going into that environment. But there was also that professional alignment, and because of the group and the culture that was established within that, there was a community that was very eager and excited to help advance and amplify other voices, especially people that were new to the group. There were a lot of opportunities to collaborate and there were a lot of opportunities to meet potential mentors, and I ended up meeting quite a few from those sorts of groups. But that’s also a very niche community based on the title, but I do find a lot of success within those.

So, yesterday I did a speaking engagement with an organization, and this woman is in politics, working on economic development and affordable housing. And so, depending on your thoughts on that topic and sort of who she’s reporting to, that could change things, but the advice was to start spending time within those spaces to find additional mentors that are within her vertical of mentor of marketing within that to then start expanding because that’s just such a niche focus.

And then by the end of the event, she had already found like three groups in Austin, Texas that she was going to join and try to find people within that niche environment. And I think getting very clear on the watering holes that make you feel good and make you feel comfortable that way, energetically, you’re giving off a sense of wanting to collaborate and being open to meeting new people while also knowing that just, in general, that could be a good target mentor audience is extremely helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. So, let’s say we’ve been hanging out in such places, we’ve found a couple folks we think seem fantastic, how do we proceed with approaching and asking?

Janice Omadeke
Do an internal gut check. Just confirm one more time. It can’t hurt. Like, why are you actually interested in getting mentorship from this person? Just again, what is it about them? What are you hoping to learn? Start having the informational coffees. I’m a slow burn person. Having at least three conversations with them before presenting the opportunity for mentorship because that gives you time to get to know them, get to see them in different environments, see if there’s actually a fit, if they’re interested in mentorship, if you communicate well together, all of the things that are really important in building a mentor relationship.

So, if all of that is checked off, then perhaps you make the ask. This is always a dicey part of the process because 61% of mentor-mentee relationships happen organically. But for 39% of the population, which typically ends up being the population that really needs that mentorship, and for whatever reason they just don’t have access to it, making the ask just provides, and having a structured program just provides that stability in those bounding boxes to really help them flourish.

So, if you’re going to ask someone to be your mentor, set the stage via email, or your next conversation, just saying, “Hey, I’d love to meet with you again to talk about the opportunity of having you as a mentor.” And then in that meeting, saying that you’ve really enjoyed getting to know them, obviously, based on their strengths in one, two, and three, and your goals of A, B, and C, they could be an impactful mentor to help you accomplish those goals. You would love to meet with them for an hour a month. You’ll set up every agenda. You want their feedback. This is what you’re hoping to learn from them. What are their thoughts?

This could easily be like a five-minute conversation just setting the stage and sort of creating that ask, hear what they have to say back, like, “Yeah, I’d be interested in learning more,” or, potentially, like, “Hey, I’m sorry, I don’t have the bandwidth,” which can happen, and that is totally okay. You want a mentor that has the bandwidth versus saying yes, and then falling off the grid for seven months. And so, that’s how I would structure it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. And so, I don’t know if you happen to know, since there’s a lot of feelings here in terms of, I don’t know, risk, rejection, vulnerability, all that stuff. Do you have a sense for roughly what proportion of the time folks say yes versus no?

Janice Omadeke
No, because it’s a case-by-case basis. Depending on the person you’re speaking with, they might have availability, a life situation happens and now they don’t, or maybe somebody wasn’t available, but then six months later they do have the bandwidth. It’s really a case-by-case basis. I don’t have a percentage of the number of people that say yes or no, but I will say, in those early conversations, a key component is kind of vetting their interest in mentorship.

Overall, I will say, though, that people generally want to help other people, even if it’s an informal mentorship of just grabbing coffee once and being able to learn from them in that capacity, people are typically open to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, how about for funsies, if you think about your own batting average, what does it look like?

Janice Omadeke
Oh, wow. Well, because I followed the process that I laid out in the book since early in my career, I’d say my average is like 85%.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, I guess what I was driving at is for those who might hear a no and feel sad, disappointed, and have their own level of internal naysaying responses, we can know the mentorship queen herself doesn’t get them all, so this is to be expected, it’s normal.

Janice Omadeke
Exactly. You can’t get them all.

Pete Mockaitis
And just kind of move on.

Janice Omadeke
It’s just part of the process. I mean, it’s like any other meaningful relationship, right? Sometimes they last, they last the test of time. Other times, people have to part ways. It’s just part of the process. I mean, there are different circumstances within that 15% rate of mine for them not working out. But, overall, I will say that if you receive a “no,” if the relationship doesn’t pan out the way you had hoped, there is always a reason for that. Trust the timing, trust the process, and the right mentors will reveal themselves in time. There is no rush. You will figure it out and you will be fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s say you do get a “yes” and you’re off to the races, how do you have conversations that are productive? And how do you think about it being a two-way street?

Janice Omadeke
Mentorship is a two-way street. Like, I don’t even think about it at this point because that’s the foundational component of mentorship. You want to make sure that it’s a conversation where both parties are gaining something from it. Now, thankfully, on the mentor side, being able to share your lived experiences to help improve the quality of life, the quality of your mentee’s career, is deeply rewarding. I mean, it’s one of the best feelings. You’ve mentored before, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, yeah.

Janice Omadeke
Yes, like you know that warm and fuzzy feeling when your mentee comes back and it’s like, “I took your advice and this happened,” or, you see them come up with these new concepts, and just watching their career flourish, it’s a lovely feeling. And I think there is that two-way street in that and just wanting to help the world be a better place through sharing your own bumps and scrapes and experiential scar tissue.

But, on the mentee side, you are the one driving the relationship. You’re setting the agendas, you’re requesting the feedback, you’re making sure that your mentor is available at certain times and just pushing that relationship forward. So, within that, the way that I like to structure it is sending the agenda maybe 48 hours ahead of time, if not sooner than that, broken down into, “Here’s the latest, like, here’s what I’ve been working on recently, just some great updates, some challenges. And this is what I’d love to discuss in our call.”

I like to touch base with my mentors in between my monthly meetings. So, let’s say they gave me advice on a proposal for a new initiative, and I just heard back and we’re moving to the next steps in that process. It takes 30 seconds to send a quick thank you email and say, “Thank you so much for your advice. Based on that, I was able to update slides two, three, and five per your feedback, and I think that really helped us in getting to the next steps. I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.”

“Oh, and by the way, I saw this article on gluten-free baking. I know that you were considering going gluten-free for a month, just given how you’ve been feeling a little more tired lately from our last conversation. So, here’s a quick article on that in case it’s helpful.” You’re delivering value. You’re being a person. You’re building a relationship. You’re showing that you heard them, and that you saw them as a real human being, and you’re providing your update in a non-transactional way. Like, bing, bing, bing, bing, like all of the stars, all of the boxes checked. It’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when you said updated slides two, three, and five, that shows that we’re getting pretty darn specific. This is not just sort of like, “Oh, hey, so I got a presentation coming up, and hope it’s good,” but rather it’s like, “Hey, yo, I got some materials I’m showing you. I’ve got some specific question about a specific situation that is brewing in the near future.”

Janice Omadeke
Yes, do the legwork ahead of time. You’re going to have to. And, in the example of the presentation, let’s say, you’re going to have to build that presentation anyway, and your mentor is so busy, and you’re eager to work with them because of their expertise. Do the legwork ahead of time of at least putting together a shell of that presentation. It takes this.

You’re going to have to do it anyway, so why not do it a little bit earlier and have them react to it in the same way you’re hoping that potential customer, potential partner, whatever the situation is here, will react too, so that you’re getting that feedback in real time, and you’re just quickening your ability to get to a yes in that goal that you’re seeking to accomplish through the help of that mentor?

So, in the example of that presentation, maybe it’s a 10-slide pitch deck, just having quick bullets, like, “This is the title. This is what this slide will cover. Maybe there’s a graphic or something. Does that make sense? Is this the story arch that I should be using? Are there details that are missing? What are your thoughts here?” And just getting that so that you can actually respond to it is extremely helpful and very efficient, and your mentor will love that.

Like, give your mentor something that they can actually respond to versus staying in this space of sort of high-level theories. The more concrete you can get and the more you’re actually working on something together, the more fruitful those relationships will be. Also, the world is very small. It’s impossible to know everyone that your mentor might know.

So, let’s say you’re working on this, this actually happened to me, let’s say you’re working on this presentation or a pitch deck, right, and you’re going through it. That person might know a potential investor that would be a good fit. And if you stayed in that high-level sort of theoretical discussion of what your deck will be versus walking them through it, it would be a lot harder for them to start facilitating introductions.

It would be a lot harder for you to show that you are actually doing the legwork of building out your business or whatever it is, versus just showing them in that presentation. And I ended up getting introductions to multiple investors that ended up investing in my first company that way. So, just doing that legwork and giving them something to react to, and even outside of that, just an activity or something that you’re doing together that’s actually educational and helping you accomplish that goal tends to help build that sustainability in the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, totally. And that five or six X really seems all the more resonant in terms of like, “Oh, yeah, so you’re acquiring skills superfast because you’re getting feedback that may not be possible to get from folks inside your own organization.” And what you said about the specifics really resonates. I was thinking, just yesterday, I was chatting with a buddy who had some ideas, like, “Hey, I’m thinking I might want to become…take my experience as a doctor and an expert witness to do some keynotes and workshops associated with how to reduce the odds of a doctor getting sued for medical malpractice.”

It’s like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And so, we were having all these back-and- forth ideas of, “I’ll try this and research this,” all of these things. And it was really rich and fun for me, I guess I was playing the mentor role there, as opposed to, it was like, “Hey, so do you have any tips for if I’m thinking about maybe getting into speaking?” I was like, “Well, I mean, make a video.” Like, I’m pretty limited in what I could say, “I mean, you should get a video, research the competition, maybe write a book.” It’s, like, I don’t have a lot. I don’t know.

Janice Omadeke
Exactly. Yes. One of my friends did the same thing. I would say we’re peer mentors to each other in different spaces, but having written Mentorship Unlocked, they’re actually writing a children’s book, a different space. But we met up for lunch to discuss being an author, and he brought everything to the table. I mean, he had an outline, he had little sketches, he had the whole story built out bullet by bullet. He had the morale of the story, just first and foremost, like, “This is what I want children from the ages of 4 to 6 to get from this 30-page book.”

I have kids within that range. Like, he understood the problem he was seeking to solve for both the child and the parent. He had market comms. Like, he had really thought through it. So, in our hour and a half coffee lunch conversation, we were able to really dig into the nuances of it, and thinking about what the next steps would actually be, versus sort of the theoretical, like, “Should I write a book? Should I not? Do I need to make an outline? Like, what’s in the outline?” Like, he had already done the research.

And even if he was, let’s say, moving in a direction that wasn’t as fruitful for his book, like, let’s say his outline maybe wasn’t ideal. It was, but in this case, let’s say it wasn’t, right? At least I have something to react to, versus some theory around what he might hypothetically include in his book outline to hypothetically talk to publishers. Instead, we could focus our time on, “Here are some potential publishers that you could talk to after you accomplish these three things, because they will not take a meeting with you without these,” and then he’s off to the races so much faster.

So, to your point, it’s really helpful to do that legwork because you’re going to have to do it anyway. So, even if you’re moving in the wrong direction, at least you know now to make a left turn instead of right, and you can edit accordingly.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And as I’m thinking about my own recent conversation, I felt fantastic and excited afterwards, and not at all like, I don’t know, taken advantage of, or like, he’s a taker. It was like, “I’m being drained.” It was like, “No, that was fun,” and that was, like, I feel like I just shared some gold with him, as opposed to if all I said was, “Hey, make a video, research a competition, maybe write a book,” I’d be like, “I mean, I think Google or ChatGPT could’ve told you the same thing in about four minutes, so I don’t know what we’re doing here,” as opposed to, oh, yeah, we got into some stuff, and it was a lot of fun and I’m excited to see what happens with it for him.

Janice Omadeke
Hundred percent. See, you’re a great mentor. Look at that.

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

Janice Omadeke
Be kind to yourself. You are doing your best, and the right mentors and the right community around you will see that and help you amplify your efforts.

Mentorship is not a paid opportunity. If someone is saying that they’ll mentor you if you pay them a monthly retainer, they’re not a mentor, maybe they’re a coach or a consultant, but do your diligence there, and don’t be afraid to ask for introductions. It takes, I mean, it actually takes a while. I think for me, when I wrote my first LinkedIn post, “Hey, do you know someone?” or like starting to ask for introductions to potential mentors, I would rewrite my emails at least a thousand times before sending.

But getting into the practice of asking for possible connections, showing the vulnerability of saying, “You know, I really don’t feel like I’m that strong in whatever the skill might be, but I feel like you might know someone who is. Does anyone come to mind?” Even if they don’t have someone then, that seed will always be planted. They will be thinking about that at their next networking event, or somebody will enter that individual sphere where they will be able to make that introduction to you. Just don’t give up. It is a process. It takes time.

But for me in my own career, I didn’t have impactful mentors until six years in for my corporate career, so it can take time. And then in entrepreneurship, it was a lot faster because I’d already built up that process but it still takes a while to find the right people, and it’s just trial and error. So, all of that to say you’re capable. You can do it. Don’t give up. And Pete and I both believe in you.

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

Janice Omadeke
I think a good one here, I say this aloud, “I am no longer going to stand in my own way.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Janice Omadeke
Yeah, that’s been a recent one for me. Another one is, “Your mind is yours. Take it back. Your time is yours. Take it back. Your peace is yours. Take it back. Your freedom is yours. Take it back.”

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

Janice Omadeke
Recently, I have been looking at the intersection of AI and HR and what’s going to happen in that market, and where AI is the most applicable within the HR space. A lot of people are thinking about it in terms of recruiting and how they’re able to filter resumes. I’m looking at it through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion to see how the technology is actually helping because we already had, you touched on a nerve, Pete, but you know we already had a lot of bias in the way in which people were even given opportunities to interview for jobs.

And depending on who’s building that technology, it’s just amplifying what the machine is being fed, which is by a human, which naturally has bias. So, I’ve been looking through studies. I’m not ready to cite one yet because I’m still doing my diligence on which ones are credible and not, so I don’t want to cite one and give them that shine yet. But I have been very excited and very intrigued, and spending a lot of time in researching who’s building the technology and looking at the differences in recruitment rates along different affinity groups, let’s say, and whether or not those stats are actually changing.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.

Janice Omadeke
I know it’s a little different, but I enjoyed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, different is good. You might just come up with some unique killer insights that are powerful, so that’s fun. Good luck. Enjoy. Hope it takes you some cool places.

Janice Omadeke
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book.

Janice Omadeke
The Power of Positive Thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Janice Omadeke
Always a good one. Got that one early. I still refer back to it when I need a little bit of humbling and to just settle my nervous system. I think that’s always an oldie but a goodie. I think Masters of Scale, of course, I mean, just a classic. Lost and Founder is an exceptional book. I read that during, in 2018, during the early stages of my first company, The Mentor Method, and it’s beautiful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Janice Omadeke
My timer. The timer on my phone. I set it for meetings ahead of time. I set it to end meetings. I live by it. That’s when I know to get ready to go somewhere to meet my friends. I need my timer because I can get in productivity loops, especially with my work in AI and product development and everything else. And then with the book, Mentorship Unlocked, and my conversations with people, I can just get in a loop where I’m actively working on something, and that sort of reminds me to get up. I’ll set timers to get water. I’ll set timers to do a lap around my building or what-have-you, but without my timer I think I could easily lose track of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Janice Omadeke
Getting 85 ounces of water in every single day.

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

Janice Omadeke
Yeah, let’s connect on LinkedIn. You can find me, Janice Omadeke, on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Instagram @janiceomadeke. And you can also visit my website, JaniceOmadeke.com.

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

Janice Omadeke
Think about your goals for the next 6 to 12 months. Actually, I want you to take a sheet of paper, write down your goals for the next 6 to 12 months. Next to that, write down what your naysayer or inner saboteur is telling you, why those aren’t accomplishable. Then next to that, remind yourself what skills and strengths you have that will help you get there, and then what types of mentors and resources you’ll need to actually accomplish them if you left that column on why you think you can do it right now blank.

Get clear on what you want to work on over the next 6 to 12 months, and then do everything you can to tell that saboteur and that naysayer that it is possible, and start building community and resources around that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Janice, this has been beautiful. I wish you many rich mentorship conversations.

Janice Omadeke
Thanks, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Valerie, welcome.

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, okay.

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

Bingo!

Pete Mockaitis

“Yes, she was like that noise.”

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

Right, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

Well, obviously it is.

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

Oh, yes.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

I think that’s good. I feel complete.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

Nails.

Valerie Fridland

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool?

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

They can go to my website, ValerieFridland.com.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

Valerie, thank you. This has been awesome.

Valerie Fridland

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

Pete Mockaitis

Monica, welcome.

Monica Parker

Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monica Parker

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

But our brain thinks it’s life or death.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

Correct.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Monica Parker

Sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Always sleep.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Monica Parker

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.