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Extreme opinion seems to be the norm.  How many times have you consciously avoided a conversation about social or political views? “Remaking the Space Between Us” author Dr. Diana McLain Smith shares her insights with Andrea about how to start the conversation in an environment when toxic polarization is standard.

TRANSCRIPT

Meet Dr. Diana McLain Smith. I’ve interviewed a lot of high IQ folks here at the talk about talk podcast. But I have to say, Diana is off the charts. I met Diana when Amy Edmondson recommended that I read Diana’s book, entitled “Re-Making the Space Between Us.” This book is chalk full of relevant history, more current stories, and incredible insight. 

In the next 45 minutes, you’re going to hear my conversation with Diana Smith, and my summary of what we can do to help us re-make the space between us. 

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #176

My interview with Diana Smith was recorded just before the US presidential election. We decided to wait until after the election to share these insights with you. As November 5 came and went, Diana Smith’s insights, and our conversation were top of mine for me. The next day on November 6, I flew from my home in Toronto to attend a women’s leadership conference in Boston, Massachusetts. Yes, many of my friends said that I was crazy to go to the US. Anyway, when I was at the airport waiting for my flight to board, I started a conversation with a complete stranger. Interesting how this often happens when we’re traveling, doesn’t it? Of course, the election came up, and we explicitly decided not to mention which side of this political divide we support. But over the course of our conversation, it became very evident …

Have you had any conversations like this lately? This episode will help you navigate these conversations.

OK – I better introduce myself. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and I’m an executive communication coach. Please just call me Andrea. At Talk about Talk, I coach ambitious executives to elevate their communication skills so they can communicate with confidence and credibility. To learn more about what I do, head over to talkabouttalk.com where you can read about the coaching and the workshops that I run. Plus there are lots of free resources for you on the TAT website, including all sorts of quizzes, tips sheets, and other resources. The one that I’m most excited about is the brand new TAT archetypes quiz. It’s kind of like a personality test, but instead of evaluating you on personality traits, you can learn which of 12 professional identity archetypes resonates with you. You can find all of these resources, including the archetypes quiz, on the talk abouttalk.com website.

Alright Let’s get into this. “Talking Extremes and Remaking the space between us.”

Let me introduce Diana, then we’ll get right into the interview.

Anyway, as I’ve often said you don’t need to take notes because I do that for you. So sit back and listen and I’ll provide a helpful summary for you at the end.

Now, Diana.

Dr. Diana McLain Smith earned her masters and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. Prior to graduate school, Diana was trained as a family therapist. Today, Diana is a renowned thought leader who has led change efforts in some of America’s most iconic businesses and cutting-edge non-profits. A former partner at the Monitor Group and a former chief executive partner at New Profit, Smith developed an approach to conflict and change called Leading Through Relationships (LTR)™. Diana’s frameworks and tools are captured in dozens of articles and in her books, entitled, “The Elephant in the Room” and “Divide Or Conquer .“ Her insights and expertise have been used around the world to turn intergroup conflict into a powerful force for change.

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Thank you so much, Diana, for being here today to talk to us about “Remaking the Space Between Us.”

Diana Smith: I am delighted to be here, Andrea. I really am excited. I love the questions you sent me, and I think we’re going to have a great conversation.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Me, too. So let’s get right into it. I know from, you know, the outset of reading your book, and then it’s definitely confirmed in the epilogue which I just reread. I know that you feel optimistic about the future, despite all of the, if you want to say it, horrible things that are happening out there.

What is your hope for this book?

Diana Smith: Well, the hope for the book is actually that it gets in the hands of everybody, because I’m trying to correct for a bias on the part of the media. The media leads with what bleeds. And there was once a wonderful conversation that Judy Woodruff had with Roger Ailes, political operative, and he told her, “Here’s the thing about the media: you get two guys on the stage running for office. One gives you the Middle East peace plan, and the other one falls in the orchestra pit. Who do you think the media is going to cover? The orchestra.”

So I’m trying to correct for a profound bias that I think is discouraging everybody and exhausting everybody. It’s— you talk about it in your research— it’s this tendency to focus on the extremes. My hope is that I can help correct for that, so that people have enough energy to get reengaged as citizens and to start to heal the divides that have emerged over the past 50 years.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh, beautiful. I mean, that sounds like Utopia, right? It sounds—it’s so—it’s utopic. Perhaps it’s also really, really challenging. I mean, every essay that you wrote in your book, I was like, “Oh, and there’s that!” Oh, and there’s our implicit bias, right? Oh! And you referenced my research. So my doctoral research, which I don’t talk about a lot in my business with Talk About Talk, but my research was on word of mouth, and particularly what motivates people to share their consumption experiences—the services and the products that they’ve consumed. And not surprisingly, there’s an asymmetrical U-shaped relationship between the valence of your experience, or the story for our purposes here, right? And whether or not you’re going to talk about it. In other words, people talk about extremely satisfying or dissatisfying consumption experiences, not the mediocre ones, because there’s nothing novel about them. There’s nothing interesting about a mediocre experience. It’s those experiences on the extremes that we talk about, that we remember. And as I was reading your book, I was thinking, this is exactly the same phenomenon—like we’re being pulled to extremes, which makes it very difficult to remake the space between us, right?

Diana Smith: So I’m not looking for Utopia. But let’s come back to that.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Fair enough, yes.

Diana Smith: Just to come back to the question you just asked. I don’t much like mediocrity myself. Mediocre experiences. I’m sympathetic to that.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Good job.

Diana Smith: With the media, they subscribe to what I call an outrage model of news. Okay? So they’re only focused on the people who go to the restaurant and get served a crappy meal and go, “God! This was awful.” Okay.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: That’s right.

Diana Smith: But think about the people who go and they say, “Man, this is the best meal I’ve had forever.” They report on it. Right. Well, there are news outlets out there that are reporting on those “Wow! That’s great news” stories, but you don’t hear about them. It’s not part of the dominant news model, of an emergent news model. And that emergent news model is showing up in places like the Solutions Journalism Network, which I highly recommend your readers check out.

You can go there and look at their story tracker and find lots of stories that are the equivalent of a 5-star restaurant meal. Okay? And people will talk about them and exude happiness about them, and so on. The difficulty we have is that we’ve been so cultivated in the outrage model that we carry around in our heads an outrage mindset, which fits like a hand in a glove. Okay, so one of the things I’m hoping to do, partly through the book, why I wanted to get it in everybody’s hands, is I’m trying to cultivate—not only in the news, which I care about, but in people—an engaged mindset.

Which looks not just at the problem but at what people are currently doing to solve those problems by working together across divides, because, even though we differ dramatically, we do share common problems. And we actually have a lot of common goals, and more in common. A research organization has demonstrated through endless studies, and I highly recommend people check out More in Common, that suggests that we agree on more things than we disagree on. 67% of us are not in ideological extreme groups, and so those people are absolutely prepared and primed to get great stories that will motivate them to get involved.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh, my goodness! I don’t know where to begin with the questions here. I think one of the stories in your book that I think—I told you this before—the interview that really resonated with me was the story about the young boy whose bedroom window was broken.

Can you share that story? I think this is really kind of setting the table here.

Diana Smith: I mean, there were 3 hate crimes in a row in Billings, Montana, in the 1990s, and this was the beginning of a movement called Not in Our Town. And I found the most poignant one of those crimes to be the 6-year-old boy who put a Menorah in his window at Hanukkah, and somebody threw a rock through it.

Prior to that, African Americans attending a church were terrorized by self-proclaimed skinheads, and before that, a Native American home was vandalized—the outside of their home was painted with a Nazi insignia and the word “die.” And the first thing that happened is the Painters Union went and painted that house for free.

And when asked why, he said, “Don’t other places come to the help of their neighbors when they’re not doing well? I mean, that’s what we do in Billings.” And then white neighbors escorted the African American congregants to their church. And then perhaps most notable, the local newspaper printed a copy of the Menorah and hundreds of homes put the Menorahs in their windows.

There was a woman who I have great respect for, and she did another film recently called Repairing the World about Pittsburgh, after the Tree of Life incident, where 11 people’s lives were taken by a white nationalist. Patrice O’Neal and her colleague, Riam Miller, went to Billings, Montana, back in the 1990s after these hate crimes had occurred to see what the neighborhoods did to respond. And she did a documentary called Not in Our Town, which you can find on PBS. Even though it’s quite old, the film quality isn’t great, it’s still an incredible film.

And she showed the film when she got back to Oakland, California, where she’s from, to communities in the Bay Area. And after people came from all over—by the way, it was like law enforcement and faith leaders and educators and regular citizens, and you know, the big auditorium with lots of people there—she showed the film, and then she turned to them and she said, “So, what do you think of Billings, Montana?” And they said, “I don’t want to talk about Billings, Montana. I want to talk about our town.”

“Are we creating a sense of belonging sufficient to reduce hatred?” Because they understood that one of the reasons hatred takes root is because people are isolated and are alienated, and people don’t have a role, and they don’t have a place to belong to.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: And so…

Diana Smith: Not in Our Town is both about saying we won’t put up with this, but also about educating people about how hate takes root and helping people to become included.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right. We all want to become part of… we have a need to join a collective or a tribe. Right? I know that was a theme in the book as well.

I’m sure this has occurred to you a million times, but it just occurred to me right now how sort of meta this is, right? We’re talking about how the media is focused on extreme messages, because that’s the news that sells.

But there may be an opportunity for us, for you—starting with you now being on this podcast and other podcasts, and with your book and everything—to use that idea of an extreme message. The downfall, if we don’t do what you’re hoping, what you’re prescribing here—is that it’s an extremely negative outcome. Is that not enough to get people’s attention? Do you know?

Diana Smith: I think it has gotten people’s attention. I think Kamala Harris’s campaign—whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican—just from an empirical point of view, I don’t think she could have sparked the enthusiasm she sparked, if it weren’t for how fed up people are with the… It’s not just extremism. This is… it’s negative. Hateful extremism.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right? You can get…

Diana Smith: Dream, joy, love, and people solving problems. But what you’re getting here is extreme hatred, and people are tired of it. I read some article that talked about… I think it was Jumping the Shark, which was from an old TV show. The Fonz jumps the shark, and it was a metaphor for when a TV show has gone too far, and people just get fed up with it and sick of it. And so they start doing stupid things like having the Fonz jump the shark. Well, that’s what’s happening to the far right right now. Okay, it’s almost becoming a parody of itself, because people are tired of it.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Hmm, yeah, I love that. That they become a parody of themselves. That’s amazing. So back to the asymmetrical U-shaped relationship I was talking about—the extremes—but it is asymmetrical, right? Where, to your whole point, it’s the negative news that gets attention, that gets published, and then gets the attention, and then is recalled.

You know, I remember when I was studying word of mouth, there’s this sort of myth—this kind of common-sense myth—that we’ve all heard, that you know, negative word of mouth travels faster than positive word of mouth. And it was like, actually, no, it’s just that it’s recalled more. So we even recall negative messages more so than positive messages, and definitely more so than neutral messages.

Diana Smith: This is really important. And I think the people listening to you are probably saying, “Yeah, that’s right. You know, you’ve got this negative news, and we’re up against so much, what are we gonna do?”

And all it does is disempower people.

Okay? And there’s no question that for evolutionary reasons, for cognitive reasons, for social reasons, we’re all primed probably to be more responsive to negative messages as a way of defending ourselves from threat. True.

So, that’s a given. We really understand that. There are also lots of things that we, as human beings, have learned to self-discipline ourselves, because we know if we follow our instincts… I pick up the guy on the street who looks really cute… people are gonna say that’s inappropriate behavior. I know not to do that. I mean, there’s a whole lot of things that we have learned to socialize out of our responses because it’s detrimental to ourselves and detrimental to others.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Can I just say, at a social level, and also at an individual level? Right.

Diana Smith: Exactly. I mean, I’d get arrested. I mean, so yeah, right? And so…

This is the kind of thing where I think if people start to reflect on their own internal responses, and there’s been lots of research on this, we… you know, the negative messages target our “hot” systems in our brain, and Michelle, a psychologist, and his colleague, whose name I’m blocking right now, did research on self-control.

And they discovered that, you know, we have a hot system which reacts quickly, is emotional, overcomes our rational… it’s reactive. But they’ve learned that people can shift to their “cool” system with practice, and the more they practice it, the quicker they can shift to their cool system, which is reflective, is thoughtful, is mindful… all those kinds of things. So I think what I want to do is put control in the hands of people.

And I believe, by the way, if you look at the beginning of my book, I cite 15 citizen movements that have led nations out of darkness. I’m not believing this as a matter of faith. History tells us that we have more power than we are aware of. So I want to focus on what can we control…

And we control? We can control how we react to those messages. We can find better news sources, which I’d be glad to recommend later. Okay?

We can do lots of things to counter this. So I don’t want to suggest—and I think it’s problematic to suggest—that these forces are so powerful, we are helpless. We are not. We are vulnerable to those forces, but we are not helpless.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So let’s get into what some of your top suggestions are for ways that we can get traction in this quest. As I was, after we had secured or booked this interview, Diana, I was listening to a podcast with Scott Galloway, and he was talking about… he and his new co-host Jessica Tarlov just started a new podcast called Raging Moderates.

I just love the title. And he even smiled and joked about the title. So there are big things like you writing this book, like Scott and Jessica hosting this podcast, but what maybe… start with some of the little things that we as individuals can do. I guess proactively—not in the moment when we see a transgression—but I mean, like proactively, what can we do?

Diana Smith: Yes. Well, you know, I think the first thing is that we extend to ourselves the grace we wish others would extend to us, and we hope to extend to others. Okay, because…

We are going to get triggered. I get triggered all the time. I know you had Amy Edmondson on your show recently. And she’s obviously the thought leader behind psychological safety.

But, you know, we can’t always create psychological safety for other people, or be perfect, or react perfectly. I think it’s a natural instinct for us to distance from people who make us uncomfortable.

So I think one thing we can do is start to think about… What do we have to gain from interrupting that immediate response to get angry, distant, to run away?

And I think one thing is to help ourselves see, and to coach ourselves to see, that as a leader and as a colleague, for us to succeed, we have to have the biggest bandwidth possible for collaborating with people. That is in our interest as a leader and as a colleague. If you can’t deal with a lot of people, you tend not to be successful. So you have to increase your bandwidth anytime you find yourself getting angry, threatened, frustrated, upset.

Okay, essentially, what that person is telling you is that you’ve reached the limits of your competence. You’ve reached the limits of your bandwidth. You don’t know how to deal with this person, and therefore, you’re upset because it’s threatening to you.

If, instead of seeing it as a threat, you see it as an opportunity to expand your bandwidth, to expand your capabilities, to learn how to reach across divides. So that would mean doing things like reaching out to the person, finding out things you have in common…

Getting behind their eyes to see what they see, getting inside their heads to see what they experience. It’s not having a political conversation with them. It’s like, if somebody in a meeting says something inappropriate, you don’t have to call them out in the meeting. Afterwards, you can say, “I was surprised you said that. What’s going on?”

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right.

Diana Smith: What’s going on? What are you… what are you going through? Right? What are you experiencing? And then try to help the person see things that you see that they might not. And a great book out now by Jeff Wetzer, I’d recommend him for your podcast, called Ask…

And he talks about how the most caring thing you can do for somebody is to get curious.

And so, you know, getting curious is really important. And then…

You know, the one thing Lincoln said, many brilliant things. But the one thing he said that I think tops them all…

Is, “I don’t like that man. I have to get to know him better.”

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh, yes, I remember that. I love that.

Diana Smith: Okay? And I think if… I think it’s possible to remind ourselves of that. And then…

You know, I think in addition to what we can do when we’re face to face with people as leaders and colleagues, I think we can start to educate ourselves on what people are already doing to remake the space between us. There are organizations, and I can name a few, and you might put them in the show notes. There’s an organization called Starts With Us, and they’ll send you an exercise every day to get you to reflect on how you navigate the space between us.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh, amazing. Yeah, I’d love to.

Diana Smith: It’s amazing. And this is like, you know, a few minutes a day. And then there’s the Listen 1st project, which lists about 150 organizations across the country, literally millions of people working at the local level in nationally connected groups, remaking the space between us by working on common problems together over time.

Another internet site that I highly recommend is Sharon says. So it’s on Instagram, and it’s Sharon McMahon’s site. Okay? And it has workshops, it has seminars, and then get in touch with organizations like Not In Our Town. They’re all across the country.

So, you know, what you can do… And then there’s another one called One Small Step, which will hook you up with somebody who’s completely different from you for 30 minutes so you can just talk about your life experience.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh, yeah.

Diana Smith: And then you can make a friend across a demographic or ideological divide. But no matter what…

Do not give up.

Do not withdraw.

Our democracy cannot survive if the people in that 67% give up. We have to keep our heads and our hearts in the game.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, we’re at a majority. And we need to use our numbers.

Diana Smith: Exactly.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So in a business context… At the very beginning, when you were answering that question, Diana, you were talking about, to paraphrase, diverse…

Groups… You know, the research shows, and I want to really reinforce this: diverse groups are proven to be more effective. So diversity in, particularly senior executives in an organization, organizations that have more diverse boards of directors…

You know, are more successful in terms of the metrics, the profit and bottom line that they’re tracking and other key metrics. So another way to think about this, if you want to be really sort of performance-oriented or rational from a business perspective, is…

Listening to diverse perspectives and internalizing them, and then maybe even acting on them or collaborating can be a competitive advantage.

Diana Smith: Oh, it is a competitive advantage. That’s why I go crazy when people talk about this as woke, or ideological, or, you know, soft or Kumbaya. I’m an extremely practical person, and I’m the most competitive person most of my friends know.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay. Good to know. Good to know.

Diana Smith: So I care about doing well. And in order to do well, I need to see things I can’t see.

And I can’t do that unless I tap the wisdom and the knowledge and the perspective of others. So it’s a very self-interested point of view, and in some ways, I consider myself a bit of an Imperialist, because I’ll grab any idea that I think is going to help advance something I really care about and get me to a goal, and you’re going to do that best with a diverse group of people.

So it’s too bad that that has become an ideological football, because no one’s going to win the game with that attitude.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. Yeah, it’s like, it’s like the term diversity has become weaponized, which I know is a term you use. Right? It’s become weaponized when, in fact, what you’re talking about is…

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: …just the fact that we’re not all the same, you’re not prescribing a certain way of thinking, you’re actually…encouraging… I’m trying to not use the word diversity. You’re encouraging different perspectives.

Diana Smith: Yes, I’m encouraging learning.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So…

Diana Smith: …has been my life’s work is organizational learning. You know, we live in a competitive, fast-paced world, and organizations that can’t adapt can’t keep up, and you can’t adapt without learning.

And you know, if you’re drinking your own bathwater to use a disgusting image, you’re not going to get very far. So you need to be able to learn, and you need to be able to learn from people who think and experience differently than you, the world differently than you do, and have access to different information. And, by the way, I’ve spent my life and some of it with Amy, and you know, over 30 years looking at groups and organizations, do what we’re watching our nation do. Which is why I wrote the book.

Groups discounting each other rather than learning from each other.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right.

Diana Smith: And yet the nature of the groups, and how they get divided in organizations is such that they have access to not only different information, but different kinds of information. They have different experiences, they have different competencies. So putting that all together is critical for the organization to survive, same goes for our nation.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, yeah, okay, so I have to… I have to confess, Diana…

When we first started this conversation, I did not share your optimism. I’m hopeful, but I was feeling a little bit more pessimistic, I’m just gonna admit, than I am now.

With your conviction of being ambitious. So I need… I need to just share this. I know for a fact that the people that listen to this podcast, my clients, and the podcast listeners…Almost a hundred percent of them have two attributes that I admire so much. One is their ambition and the other one is their growth mindset, right? And you were just talking about how you also have those traits and the combination of those two things has got to more of us to do all of the things that you’re talking about, right, to remake the space between us. So…

If you could also, just to get really practical here, maybe share some new sources. I know that there’s the one that you mentioned…

Diana Smith: Solutions, journalism, network. Better than most of them by far.

I think If you want a more balanced news, I think Reuters is probably the most balanced. but in terms of a solutions, orientation solutions. Journalism network is by far the best. But I want to come back to something that it’s a distinction that James Stockdale makes between being an optimist and having hope.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, because words are important.

Diana Smith: Yeah, I don’t self-identify as an optimist. So I want to read to you something that he said.

First of all, Vice Admiral James Stockdale survived 8 torturous years in a Vietnamese prison camp. Yeah. And so Jim Collins, business writer, Jim Collins, Good to Great, interviewed him, and he said, “How the heck did you survive?”

And he said, “You know, I never lost faith in the end of the story.”

“I never doubted, not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end, and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect I would not trade.”

He then went on to say that faith was very different from the optimists.

The optimists would say, “We’re going to be out by Christmas.” Then Christmas would come, and then Thanksgiving, and then, you know, Easter, and then Christmas would come again, and they’d set their sights on a date, and the date would pass, and they died of a broken heart.

Yeah, this distinction led to what’s called the Stockdale Paradox, which he put this way:

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

And you saw in the book I confront some brutal facts in that book.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

Diana Smith: Yet I never lose faith in the ability of humans to overcome those adversities because we have done so throughout history. The only question in my mind now is because of climate change, we have a time horizon that is imposed on us, and so our ability to climb the learning curve fast is absolutely critical, and the more people who despair and think it’s not possible, the slower we will go up that learning curve.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Hmm. That is a beautiful point. Yeah.

Diana Smith: Hope is a political act.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay.

So speaking of time constraints…

You and I are talking today less than a month away from the U.S. elections. And I know that this episode is going to be released after…

But I want to ask you your top-line thinking about where we are and what might happen between now and election day, and maybe to go back to the hope and optimism point, what your hope is.

Diana Smith: Yeah. Well, my hope is that no matter what the outcome of this election is, that the millions of people already at work across the country, working to bridge the divides that created this dysfunction we are experiencing…

That people will join their ranks, and make sure that this democracy that our founders sacrificed their lives to create, did not… and people in the Civil War died to save, that they did not die in vain.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Whoo.

Diana Smith: People join that movement. We’re going to need to do it, regardless of how the election turns out. I think the bigger election, so to speak, is, are we going to vote on ourselves as citizens, and believe in ourselves and do what we need to do to save our democracy and to save our planet and to make this multigroup democracy of ours functional?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, yeah. So it’s about taking our lens and pulling back, like, what is our ultimate objective here? It’s not just, “I voted for the party” or the “candidate that won” or “that lost.” It’s much bigger picture than that. And really focusing on that. Okay.

Diana Smith: It’s about our ability as a multigroup democracy to solve urgent problems as quickly as we can before they trump us. That’s going to require us to work across groups. We have failed at doing that the last… not completely, but we’ve not done well the last 50 years. We’ve done worse and worse. We have to turn that trajectory around. Our elected officials are not going to do it until we, the people, do it because they’re going to cater and pander to the extreme.

So we in the 67% have got to stop ceding ground to the extremists, take back our power and our control, join these groups across the country that are working to do that, and turn around what has been a bad trajectory and turn it into a good one.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay. So I am gonna sneak another question in before I get to the four rapid-fire questions, because, you know, before I pressed record again, you and I… I said I want to ask the questions that I know the listeners want to hear. I know what I would want to hear is: what exactly do I say in, you know, it’s the end of November, and I’m in a meeting at work, and I’m in the 66-67%. Someone who’s got an extreme view says something in the moment. Right? So, I mean, the meta-level or the strategic level of advice that you’re giving is to join these movements, to practice media hygiene, to do all of these kind of proactive things. What about when you’re in the moment?

Diana Smith: Yeah. Well, we talked a little bit about it earlier, but let me get into it. I came across an article in Dear Eric, which is in the Washington Post in the Life section.

Someone wrote to him and said, “I’m in this group of guys that get together on Zoom, and we’ve been together for many years, and sometimes this one guy says things that make me uncomfortable. I sort of don’t say anything and let it pass, but recently, he said he really has a problem with all the brown people coming to the country.”

And this fellow thought that was a very— as I would, too— a very problematic statement. And just to be clear, I find it problematic because I think people don’t understand the positive role that immigrants play in coming to our country. But anyway, Eric’s response, I thought, was really good. He said, rather than call him out, call him in.

Calling someone in is an invitation to discussion and repair. It’s a way of saying, “It concerns me that you hold this opinion. Would you be open to talking it through?”

Now, I would ask a different question than that, but I certainly think that’s perfectly reasonable. I would tend to say, “I’m surprised to hear you say that. What are you worried about?”

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right? Okay.

Diana Smith: I want to understand. What is it behind that statement? And then I can imagine saying things like, “Well, you know, I’ve had a different experience. And some of the research I’ve done, because I know immigration is a big issue, I’ve done some inquiry into it. And I’ve discovered that immigration has been actually vital to turning around dying towns, that they’ve added money to coffers, that they play a vital role in industries across the United States.”

So what is it that you’re seeing or hearing that leads you to worry? And then just start a conversation, not a fight. We need to build relationships, not cases.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So we’re building relationships, not cases. That said, we can focus on the issue as opposed to pointing fingers at a person and being accusational, right? So there’s a…

Diana Smith: Good morning!

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

Diana Smith: Yeah, but…

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I never thought of that before, because I know some of the most common advice that communication coaches give, you know, on this topic of communicating with difficult people— I’m saying “difficult people” in air quotes— is to focus on the issue, not on the person.

Diana Smith: Yeah, yes, exactly. And if you focus on the issue, understanding that people can disagree, but they don’t need to be disagreeable.

And through talking about the issues, if you’re genuinely interested in learning what’s going on, not just condemning the person, then through that, you build a relationship of greater trust and openness.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

Diana Smith: And it’s possible. I mean, in the book, I talk about the transformation of a white nationalist whose experience in college led him to disavow white nationalism. And he did that because of the conversations he had with friends.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, do you wanna share a little bit more about that?

Diana Smith: This is an extraordinary story, and it’s… I’m sorry, yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: It is.

Diana Smith: It’s one that falsifies the idea that, you know, someone is so far gone that there’s nothing you can do. Okay? So first of all, the story—which I write about in the book—is called Befriending Your Ideological Enemy. It’s based on a book by Eli Saslow called Rising Out of Hatred, and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. It tells the story about a young guy named Derek Black, 18 years old, and he was the heir apparent to the white nationalist movement in the U.S. He was the son of Don Black, who founded Stormfront, one of the first hate sites on the internet, and godson to the ultra-right-wing politician, David Duke, who’s a neo-Nazi and a conspiracy theorist and a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

So this guy came from a very small, insular white nationalist group. After being homeschooled, he goes off to New College in Florida, and New College is a liberal arts college that has a far-left-leaning student body.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So…

Diana Smith: And there, he meets and makes friends with people far outside of the circle that he’d ever encountered. Okay, so you can imagine the cognitive dissonance this guy’s going through. He’s there for about a year, and nobody knows he’s a white nationalist. He meets people, he makes friends, acquaintances, and so on, but after a year, somebody finds out and outs him.

And the message board at the college just goes wild. They start saying things like, “You know, Derek’s an idiot, a hatemonger, a Hitler, a fraud. You simply cannot reason with someone like that.” And they said he ought to be expelled or ostracized.

There was a very small, diverse group of students that made a different choice.

And it was one of Derek’s acquaintances, an Orthodox Jew by the name of Matthew Stevenson, who decided to invite Derek to his weekly Shabbat dinners. A bunch of people dropped out because they didn’t want to be there, but a small group came, and beforehand, Matthew turned to them and said, “Just don’t be assholes. We want him to come back.”

And his view was: “This guy has been raised by white nationalists. We’re not going to change his view in one night. Let’s not talk about white nationalism. Let’s just get to know each other.”

Also at the table was a Peruvian immigrant by the name of Juan, another Orthodox Jew, Mosh Ashe, whose grandfather had been in a concentration camp in Germany, and then Alison Gornick, who was a leftist feminist. Okay? And over the next 18 months, this small group of friends created a context in which Derek’s very narrow mental space, which had been cultivated in this white nationalist community, started to expand.

And he started to reach across this chasmic distance between a white nationalist group and these ultra-liberal students. Okay, imagine how hard that must have been for the guy. And so, after 18 months, he eventually came around. He reexamined his beliefs, mostly with Alison. They’d get on the internet, they’d look up studies to examine the intelligence of different races, to look at the consequences of immigration— they did the whole thing. And so, afterward, he reflected on the process, and he told a reporter:

“It was people who disagreed with me who were critical to the process, especially those who were my friends regardless, but who let me know, when we talked about it, that they thought my beliefs were wrong, and took the time to provide evidence and civil arguments. I didn’t always agree with their ideas, but I listened to them, and they listened to me.”

It’s amazing to think of the distance this young kid traveled in two years. Okay?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: It is.

Diana Smith: So it shows it is possible.

And that’s the point I wanted to make.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So it’s impressive that he went from what many of us would say, like a kid that didn’t have a chance, I mean, given his upbringing, right? Didn’t have a chance.

Yeah, he somehow had an open mind.

But also the other people who didn’t just reject him. That’s also very impressive.

Okay, are you ready for the 3 rapid fire questions.

Diana Smith: And.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Question number one: are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Diana Smith: I’m an introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh!

Diana Smith: Meaning, I push myself to be an extrovert, as I am today. Okay.

But I recover alone.

And the definition of an introvert is usually, where do you recharge? And I recharge alone. Yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Diana, do you know that almost a hundred percent of the people that I interview have an answer, something like what you just said.

Diana Smith: Yeah, I can believe it. Because if you’re a leader, you have no choice but to be an extrovert. And it’s exhausting because you’re basically alone.

You’re taking on the weight of the organization on your own. I’ve been executives for 40 years. It’s a tough, tough job.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. Okay. Question number two.

This, I’m very curious to hear from you. What are your communication pet peeves?

Diana Smith: Well, I’m, you know. I always hate to call them pet peeves, because I’m empathetic with why people do these things, but they can be irritating, and they’re problematic, and they’re not in the interest of the person who uses them. But the incessant use of qualifiers, especially the worst one would be: Let me be honest.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay, so.

Diana Smith: Because, like, okay, cause all the other times I haven’t been honest. So watch out.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I say that way more, but I catch myself saying it. Recently, I’ve been—when I’m in the middle of a coaching session or workshop, I’ll say, Well, to be honest, and then I go: Stop.

o be clear, I am always honest. What I meant was actually… or I want to emphasize this point exactly.

Diana Smith: I think a lot of qualifiers are what an old mentor of mine, Roger Brown, at Harvard called politeness strategies. Okay, we want to mitigate any tension. And so we say, you know, I know this is a sensitive topic. So I want to make sure, you know… And so you’re packing these sentences up with all this superfluous stuff, it’s inefficient.

And it—the point gets lost in all the padding, and I think it sends a signal that you’re uncomfortable, that makes other people uncomfortable. It reduces honesty. It reduces learning.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: You and I could do a whole podcast episode, conversation about that topic. I love it. Okay, last question.

Is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending a lot lately?

Diana Smith: Can I give a podcast, a book, and a documentary?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Please.

Diana Smith: Okay. Podcast: The Focus Group, Sarah Longwell’s podcast on The Bulwark. It’s extraordinary. She gets together with voters, and she asks them what they think about all sorts of things. So you get to hear, unmediated by the press, what people are really thinking, and we need more of that.

Excellent book: John Meacham’s And There Was Light: Abe Lincoln and the American Struggle. If you want to see a reality in the United States which is identical to today, read that book.

It’s incredible. Documentary: I Am Not Your Negro, which is basically a documentary on James Baldwin.

And it’s an extraordinary documentary, and especially for people who are white. It will be an eye-opener, and it’s an important one for people to understand.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay, I will put links to the three of those in the show notes.

I’m good.

Ask if there’s anything else you want to share with the listeners about Remaking the Space Between Us.

Diana Smith: I think it’s the single biggest challenge we face. We have become very insular within our own groups.

Recycling the same news, the same beliefs, the same values. And we’ve gotten very distant from groups that are demographically and ideologically different.

And so we need to start to…

Close those divides. Open up. We have to open up the space within our own group before we can close the distance. So we have to start opening the space within our own group. And then we need to close the distance across groups.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Thank you so much, Diana, for sharing your insights, your suggestions, and your hope for how we can remake the space between us. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.

Diana Smith: Thank you, Andrea. This has been a lot of fun.

Thank you so much, Diana!

Diana’s knowledge of history, combined with her storytelling, and of course, her strategic acumen provide such a compelling case for us to focus on remaking the space between us.

Diana shared many many recommendations of resources that we can explore to help make this a reality. I combed through the transcript and included links to all of these resources. You can find the list at the top of the show notes in whatever podcast app you’re using.

Now, let me summarize. As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m going to briefly review Diana’s insights focusing on three categories that I found in a paper she co-authored with Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson. The paper is called “Too Hot to Handle: How to Manage Relationship Conflict”. In this paper, Diana and Amy outline three practises for discuss discussing hot topics: one is managing yourself. Two is managing the conversation. And three is managing the relationship. 

Let’s start with managing yourself.

An easy place to start here is to explore the resources that Diana mentioned. If you’ve taken the time to fill your brain with neutral information or perhaps information from across the spectrum, you’re better equipped in so many ways.

Remember that diversity of thought and opinion can be a competitive adntage – for yourself and for your team. Did you catch Diana’s comment about bathwater? 

“if you’re drinking your own bath water, you’re not going to get very far.”

That’s pretty visceral.  Hopefully this idea of diversity of thought inspires you to check out a different website or news source from the one you’ve been reading.  Maybe starting with a few that Diana suggests.

So that’s tactical. In terms of a mindset, Diana mentioned many times that are focus on learning and curiosity can help. This is what I focussed on in that heated conversation that I had in the airport the day after the election. I remember thinking Diana would encourage me to be curious. So I started asking questions. It works beautifully. Thank you, Diana.

That’s managing yourself.

The second category of insights is about 

Managing the conversation. 

Diana aptly said “start a conversation, not a fight. We need to build relationships, not cases.” Let’s start with conversations, then we’ll get into relationships.

Imagine you’re in a meeting. It could be one on one where you need to have a conversation with someone about something to build your business or it could be with a large group. Someone might say something inappropriate or perhaps something that you believe is not true. They may be expressing their social and political views.

Assuming they’re not Kai bashing the whole meeting, Diana suggests that you address it privately, after the meeting ends.

Diana shares a few prompts to get us started the first one is:

“ it concerns me that you hold this opinion. Would you be open to talking it through?”

The second is: “I’m surprised to hear you say that. What are you worried about?”

With both of these prompts, she starts with a non-threatening she starts by stating her opinion, but in a non-threatening way. In the first, she said it concerns me that you hold this opinion and then the second she said I’m surprised you hear to hear you say that. Then she followed that statement up with a question, would you be open to talking it through? Or what are you worried about?

This is a great framework for all of us. Start by sharing our concern in a non-threatening way then ask a question.

In practice, these prompts are a great idea,. However, in practice, sometimes things get very heated. We get triggered. Diana reminds us to use our self control. To pause. To overcome our hot system, which is reactive and emotional and shift to a cool system, which is more rational. Then we can follow up after pausing with one of these prompts.

So that’s managing the conversation.  We’ve covered managing yourself and managing the conversation.  Now , the third and last category is . 

Three is managing the relationship

I think that’s a great place to close. the most caring thing you can do for somebody is to get curious.

The next time you’re in a heated conversation with someone, whether it’s a coworker, a family member, a friend or a complete stranger in an airport. I hope you remember these words. The most caring thing you can do is to get curious. Thanks again to Diana.

As I said, you can find links to all of Diana’s recommendations and more in the show notes for this episode.

My coordinates are there too. Please connect with me anytime. Check out the Talkabouttalk.com website or send me a DM on LinkedIn.

Talk soon!

The post Talk EXTREMES – Remaking the Space Between Us with Dr. Diana McLain Smith (ep.176) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson talks with Andrea about the significance of accountability in a psychologically safe workplace. Learn about the important difference between disappointment vs regret and between mistakes vs failures. Amy shares insights from her new book, “The Right Kind of Wrong,” including the three types of failure, and the one we should be striving for!

TRANSCRIPT

Yes, we all have work to do. In the next 45 minutes, you’re going to learn directly from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, a pioneer in psychological safety and failing well.

Wait – isn’t that an oxymoron? “Failing Well”?

I cant wait for you to hear my conversation with Amy

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #175

My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and I’m an executive communication coach. Please just call me Andrea. Through my work at Talk about Talk, I coach ambitious executives to elevate their communication skills so they can communicate with confidence and credibility. To learn more about what I do, head over to talkabouttalk.com where you can read about the coaching and the workshops that I run. Plus there are lots of free resources for you, including the brand new archetypes quiz, where you can learn which archetype resonates with you and your professional identity. You can also free coaching from me by signing up for my free email newsletter.

OK,Let’s get into this.

Recently, Amy published a new book called “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing well”. After reading the book, I emailed Amy and asked her if I could interview her for this podcast. I was thrilled that she immediately agreed. To say Amy’s work is impactful and prolific would be an understatement. So my goal with this interview is to ask Amy the Qs that I know YOU would ask – Qs focused on communication skills, and possibly Qs that differ from the Qs she typically gets in many of the other interviews she’s done. Here, we focus on our communication and our mindset as leaders and as communicators.

We have a LOT to talk about here!

Let me introduce Amy, then we’ll get right into the interview.

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. Amy is so perfect for this chair, I have to say.

Amy studies teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning, and she’s authored 7 books and over 75 cases and articles. She’s been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #1 in 2021 and 2023; She also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017.

In 2019, Amy’s published her seminal book, “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth.” Her more recent book “Right Kind of Wrong – The Science of Failing Well,” is due to be translated into 24 additional languages, and was selected for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award.

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Thank you so much, Amy, for being here today to talk to us about psychological safety and the concept of failing well.

Amy Edmondson: Thrilled to be here.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I’ve already shared the definition of psychological safety, but I have a question. When I’m discussing this with my clients, especially when it comes up in coaching sessions, I often describe it as a culture where it’s safe to take risks. Is that a solid, short definition?

Amy Edmondson: It absolutely is.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Perfect!

Amy Edmondson: This topic has come up frequently in my work and research within organizations, largely due to the growing popularity of the concept. However, this also leads to many misunderstandings and misconceptions. There are two key points that people often raise that can be frustrating, both for them and for me. One is…

Amy Edmondson: People often say, “We love this psychological safety concept, but we have to care about performance.” The reality is that without a climate where risk-taking feels safe, it’s challenging to perform well.

In our world of uncertainty and interdependence, there’s another concerning trend: people are starting to misuse the concept as a weapon. They might say, “You can’t give me feedback, or you’ll undermine my psychological safety.” That’s completely incorrect.

Psychological safety actually encourages an environment where we provide feedback to one another. We should aim to give it respectfully and accurately, even though it won’t always be perfect. We need to accept that we might get it wrong sometimes, but we’re doing our best and will work through it together.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I love how your two seminal books are not mutually exclusive; there’s so much overlap. You mentioned getting it wrong, which leads me to a question I was planning to ask later. Recently, I conducted workshops for physicians in Australia, despite the 14-hour time difference! I shared that I would be interviewing you, and they had some questions for you.

One physician mentioned that, in Australia—especially in medicine—while it’s not illegal to not create a culture of psychological safety, it’s increasingly coming up in courts of law. I see you nodding; this isn’t news to you.

Amy Edmondson: Yes, I’ve heard similar concerns. While the intentions are good, this situation can be deeply problematic.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: yeah. So is it against the law to not create a culture of psychological safety? Or is it that it comes up.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: One of the physicians mentioned that it seems to come up when people are accused of bullying.

Amy Edmondson: Yes, and that’s a complex issue. Bullying can sometimes be perceived very differently—what one person sees as bullying, another might view as directive management. Before labeling behaviors as bullying or linking the lack of psychological safety to legal issues, we need to be clear about what constitutes illegal behavior, rather than focusing solely on subjective outcomes.

It’s tricky because someone might say, “I don’t like you; therefore, you’re a bully,” leading to reports that might not reflect the true situation.

What worries me about these well-intentioned efforts to eliminate bad behaviors is that making it a legal matter can create a serious atmosphere. If the consequence of speaking up is something as severe as going to jail, people may feel compelled to hide issues rather than learn from them.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Unfortunately, and ironically, this could lead to negative outcomes. Yet, there’s a wealth of research—much of which you’ve contributed to—that shows psychological safety is critical for team performance.

Amy Edmondson: Absolutely. My own empirical research is just a small part of the broader literature. I developed a measure of psychological safety long ago, and many researchers have since built upon that work. If we include the healthcare literature, there are over a thousand peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that psychological safety is linked to higher-performing teams.

This connection exists because most teams require a level of risk-taking for success—not reckless risks, but behaviors like asking for help, admitting mistakes, or expressing dissenting views. Those actions are essential for performance but can be difficult for many people to engage in.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Returning to our earlier discussion about the challenges you’ve mentioned regarding the true spirit of psychological safety, it often comes up that we have business objectives to meet. I often use a 2×2 matrix that shows psychological safety on one axis and accountability on the other. I see you nodding your head.

Amy Edmondson: I remember I drew that. I I conceptualize that in like in the middle of a class one day 20 years ago because because I I realized that so many people have this kind of false dichotomy that either you know, care about or uphold high standards of performance and accountability, or we can have, you know.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

Amy Edmondson: Psychological safety and accountability are two different dimensions. Once you plot them, you realize there are four quadrants. There’s a zone where both are low, which I call the “apathy zone.” In this state, there’s no accountability and no psychological safety, leading to a lack of motivation.

Then there’s the “comfort zone,” where psychological safety is high but accountability is low. It might feel good for a short time, but it doesn’t foster growth or high performance.

The quadrant I see more often is the “anxiety zone.” Here, accountability is high, and there’s pressure to perform, but psychological safety is lacking. People want to do well, but they don’t feel safe enough to engage in the behaviors that would actually help them succeed.

This zone can lead to burnout, as it’s exhausting to operate under those conditions.

The ideal environment is the “learning zone,” or the “high-performance zone.” In this space, there’s a sense of ownership and commitment to high standards, paired with the freedom to speak up, ask for help, and share differing opinions. In an uncertain world, that’s the only culture that truly thrives.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Absolutely, and this applies beyond work. Think about family dynamics—when teenagers communicate with their parents, for instance.

Amy Edmondson: Exactly. I discuss this in my book Right Kind of Wrong, emphasizing that in family situations, you don’t want kids to be afraid to tell the truth. If they are, it can lead to dangerous situations—like not calling for help because they fear a negative reaction.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yes, the communication skills we talk about in coaching can be valuable in personal life as well.

Before we continue, I want to share a question from Dr. Janette Wright, an anesthetist in Australia. She’s familiar with psychological safety and her colleagues are as well. Here’s her question:

In an operating theater during a critical incident, psychological safety can diminish due to harsh words or urgent tasks that are ordered rather than requested. Even in a team with a great culture under normal conditions, what’s the best way to maintain or renew psychological safety during these circumstances?

Amy Edmondson: This is such an important question. These situations can occur not just in operating rooms but in families and relationships as well. If we expect perfection in our responses, that’s unrealistic.

Fortunately, there’s a path to recovery. The first step is to acknowledge what happened. If something was said or done that might have harmed psychological safety, it’s crucial to name it. Apologizing is also important; it shows that you recognize the impact of your actions and are committed to doing better next time.

The key is that these moments must be discussable. We will all make mistakes, but when we do, we shouldn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed. Instead, we should create an environment where these issues can be openly addressed.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: You know.

Amy Edmondson: Logical safety, or we find some optimal place in the middle. It’s like, No, no, no, it’s two different dimensions. And so.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, they’re orthogonal.

Amy Edmondson: They’re orthogonal and once drawn, then you realize, oh, there really are four quadrants here. There really is a zone where both are low, and you know that’s a pretty sad state of affairs. Nobody wants to work there. I call it the apathy zone.

Amy Edmondson: You know, no accountability, no psychological safety, and it’s you know you try to take care of yourself. But you’re not terribly motivated.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right.

Amy Edmondson: And then, of course, the one that people are worrying about is the comfort zone, where it’s like high psychological safety, but no accountability, no commitment to high standards, and you know I always think that might be fun for a day or a week or so. But that’s not really what it means to be a thriving, you know, adult human being or child, for that matter, you know. So the one, of course, that I see far more often, and I want to come back to this in a moment is the anxiety zone where.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

Amy Edmondson: You know, the accountability is apparently high around here. The need to perform well is high around here, but psychological safety feels low.

Amy Edmondson: And so that’s you know. That’s the anxiety zone. That’s where I’d like to do a good job. But I really don’t feel safe engaging in the behaviors I need to do a good job.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right.

Amy Edmondson: And and then.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: That’s like the burnout zone, too.

Amy Edmondson: That’s a burnout zone. Absolutely. It’s exhausting.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. And then the.

Amy Edmondson: You know, the place we all want our teams to be is the learning zone, or the which I also think is the high performance zone. And that’s where we feel a sense of accountability or ownership and a commitment to high standards, and we feel able to speak up to get help to, you know, offer a different point of view, and so forth. And in an uncertain world that’s like that’s the only kind of climate or or culture that’s going to work.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, I’m even thinking about, even in families, right? When children like teenagers are talking to their parents, or what? Like, yeah, it’s even beyond work.

Amy Edmondson: Oh, yes, in fact, I didn’t think you know I write about that in Right Kind of Wrong, because it’s the last thing you want is in a family situation is to have kids be afraid to tell you the truth, because then they might first of all, you don’t know what’s going on, and that’s dangerous. Second of all, they might literally, you know, get into the car of a drunk friend rather than call you, because they’re afraid you’re going to yell at them.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right? Right? So we can extrapolate. I find that with most of the things that I coach, it’s communication skills. It’s that people are like. Oh, this would work in my personal life, too. I said, yes, it will.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So before we go any further, I want to read this question from this this woman, Dr. Janette Wright. She is an anesthetist in Australia, and this is her question. She’s very familiar with psychological safety, and most of her colleagues are as well. So here’s her question.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: In an operating theater environment. During a critical incident there can be a loss of psychological safety, for example.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Harsh words or time-critical tasks that are ordered rather than requested.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Even in a team who, under normal conditions, have a great culture of speaking up and collegiality. What is the best way to maintain or renew psychological safety during these circumstances I read that word for word from what she sent me.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. So you can imagine her in this high stakes, or right.

Amy Edmondson: It’s such an important question. And you know, I think it happens in the OR but it also, we were just talking about families, and it happens in families, it happens in couples and relationships. Right? We will. We if we, if you and I had a theory that depended, or a practice that depended on being perfect and delivering the perfect response every time. That would be a lousy theory. Because no, we’re fallible human beings. So this situation will happen. Fortunately, I believe it is. There is a path to recovery, the sooner the better. But the most important steps on this path are, first name it acknowledge it.

Amy Edmondson: Oops, you know. That was not how I really wanted that to come out. Now you may not be enough presence to do that immediately, but do it as soon as you realize that something happened that is potentially harmful for the future, and then apologize and apology just means my in. I was scared, and you know my my I reacted too quickly, and I’ll I don’t think that had a positive effect, and I’ll do better next time, and then and then keep working at doing better next time.

Amy Edmondson: So the most important thing is that it’s discussable. We’re all going to fall off the balance beam, but when we fall off we shouldn’t be ashamed, embarrassed. We shouldn’t make it undiscussable, which it often is. It’s like, did you see that, you know? Behind closed doors.

Amy Edmondson: Remember. Oh, that was awful! Well, I’ll never feel safe again. There! It’s like, just get out, you know. Get get on top of it as quickly as possible, and speak truthfully about it. And the very act of doing that is demonstrating the kind of candor that, after all, is what we’re looking for.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right? Right? So when I’m coaching my clients and they’re looking for almost like a prescription. So I understand what it is. I’ve seen the seven question survey. I understand the definitions the mistakes people make, and so on, and so on.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: What do I do? And so I say, think about your mindset. Think about your words and think about your actions, and you’re talk. You’re actually talking about and taking an action and and the words combination. Right? So you’re.

Amy Edmondson: Yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay later on to admit fallibility. That’s one thing and the other one that I that I often mention that I’ve heard you say many times is when someone comes to you with an issue, or even a mistake, that they made you say thank you for telling me. Tell me more.

Amy Edmondson: Yeah, thank you for telling me.

Amy Edmondson: Maybe even depending on the situation. How can I help what ideas do you have? You know. So it’s all it’s it’s at least first and foremost about the what next I mean. Our instincts as humans, I think, is to look back like, well, how did that happen? Yeah. And you know, why were you so stupid? But no, we don’t say that. We, you know it’s it’s because you can’t do anything about the past, but you sure can do something about the future, and that’s your God. That’s your that’s your job, that’s your goal. So I I would say, you know it is. It’s, you know. Thanks for telling me. How can I help, or what? Now? What ideas do you have.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. So being future oriented is actually.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I think I probably implicitly was coaching people to do that. But but I’m not explicitly so. I I love that be future, not past oriented, right. There’ll be enough.

Amy Edmondson: And I’m a big fan of after action review. Right? I I believe we can learn a great deal, and we must learn from the past, especially from failures.

Amy Edmondson: But it’s just that. It’s that. What we’re talking about here is, how do you react in that moment? Because in a sense. If someone’s coming to you with a mistake or any kind of bad news. This is already a difficult moment for them. Job is simply to not make it worse. Right? It’s to make it better. Demonstrate that you welcome it, to demonstrate that this is what we do. This is what good looks like around here.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, and back to the example from the question from the physician in Australia. If later on you go back and apologize, you’re demonstrating that you know fallibility firsthand, and if, especially if you’re a leader, you have a huge impact on the culture. So you’re reinforcing it in real time and your course correcting right.

Amy Edmondson: Yes, yes, and if you I mean, if you’re expecting others to admit mistakes, and you’re expecting others to ask for help and admit their human fallibility. I promise you it won’t work if you’re unwilling to do the same.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So we keep saying the word mistake. And I wanna shift into failing. Well, and I wanna start by asking you what you think about this and it’s about vocabulary.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: And I think maybe because I’ve I’ve evolved my career into becoming a communication coach. I’m more conscious of and hopefully careful with the language and vocabulary that I use.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: And one thing that I talk about with my clients, and and especially if they’re in career transition, or they’re making plans for the future right, and talking about the difference between disappointment and regret. So I say, this is this is my take on this, which is, you make the best decision that you have with the information you have at the time. You may or may not be disappointed, but if you truly did make the best decision with the information you had then you really can’t have regrets.

Amy Edmondson: I love that. Yeah, I think that’s great. First of all, I love the word disappointment. I use it a lot because it’s a. It’s part of a self training practice to to not say, Oh, this is awful! This is, you know, this is the end of the world when it isn’t and to say instead, This is disappointing, right? I’d really I’d wanted that to work right. I’d want to, whatever. And so disappointment is a very powerful world word, because it’s clean and clear and not exaggerated. Right? And and regret. Yeah, regret is quite interesting. I hadn’t thought about it that way because it really it does imply that you would love to rewind the videotape and do it differently. I mean, that’s not always appropriate. It’s appropriate for some things like that that operating room story again, you’d you’d love to if you were that surgeon you would love to rewind the videotape and not lose your cool. But you didn’t. So that’s okay. Do your best. You go forward. But but for the things that we do and try in life that we think might work or will work. But they don’t. You must not feel regret, because if you do, you will then hold yourself back, and you’ll do what I call playing, not to lose rather than you know going for it, rather than do your best. It’s sort of I’ll just take the safe, you know. I’ll I’ll try the same things.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. So so both of your books and I. And I think maybe all of your research is really grounded in this kind of growth mindset. Right?

Amy Edmondson: Yes.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Really is.

Amy Edmondson: And I love the growth mindset work.

Amy Edmondson: You know, Carol Dwecks, and you know others, her students, and others as well, because it’s I think it’s so.

Amy Edmondson: It’s so consistent with what is needed in a world that keeps changing. And for people who want to keep achieving or doing better, you know.

Amy Edmondson: Learning and growing and improving, and it’s so tempting. And I think the world is constantly sending us messages that we’re supposed to be perfect, or we’re supposed to get it right, or hit our targets or win awards. And it’s it’s so tempting to get caught up in those rather than in this idea, which is true, that we can keep learning and growing.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right learning. I say, learning, as opposed to performing.

Amy Edmondson: Yeah, yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So can you share with us the three archetypes of failure? I I first of all, I also archetypes. So you’re speaking my language so categorizing and defining. I think this also really helps people think about leveraging their growth mindset. By the way, I’m sure you notice this, too, in what you do. There’s like a self selection. People who are listening to this podcast probably have a growth mindset. Otherwise they wouldn’t select themselves.

Amy Edmondson: Probably true. It’s probably true, although I bet there are people who are, you know, growth, mindset. Curious, right?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I know.

Amy Edmondson: Because they know they know and want to learn and grow, but they also are like so many of us. Not immune to the pressures in their organizations, or the pressures in society that can re that can reinforce more of a performance mindset.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, I want to talk about that self awareness. But but first, can you share the definitions of.

Amy Edmondson: So. I’ll I’ll rewind for just a moment and say, Mistake, I’ll start with mistake. Then I’ll describe the three kinds of failure. So a mistake is an unintended deviation from a known practice or process.

Amy Edmondson: Right? And and and so I think that’s important, because a mistake is a kind of a particular category where it it’s a nonsensical word, unless there already is existing knowledge or process. Yeah, that gets the result. We want. Okay, mistake. And it’s got to be unintended, right? And an intended mistake is an oxymoron that doesn’t exist. It’s that’s just sabotage or carelessness, or whatever. Okay, so and forget careless. Let’s wipe that one out. So because that’s a different thing, anyway.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: You can.

Amy Edmondson: You can be careless and make a mistake. So, okay, so a but so so.

Amy Edmondson: I started with mistake because in ordinary talk people use the words mistake and failure interchangeably, and they’re not. A failure is an undesired outcome. There are three kinds. One is what I call a basic failure, which has a single cause, usually a mistake. It’s in familiar territory. If I text and drive and get into an accident, that’s a basic failure. I did something I shouldn’t have done, and I got a bad outcome.

A complex failure has a handful of factors contributing to it, any one of which wouldn’t create a failure on its own. But the unfortunate combination of factors gives rise to an undesired outcome. You know, supply chain breakdown, multi-causal—some workers are sick, weather patterns over there, and boom, it comes together.

Both of those kinds of failures are undesired and largely preventable. At our best, with incredible vigilance and communication skills, we can prevent most of those kinds of failures in familiar territory.

The third kind, intelligent failures, are the undesired outcomes of a thoughtful foray into new territory. These are the undesired results of experiments. You can’t have regrets about these because you could not have known in advance that it wouldn’t work. You had good reason to believe it could work. You’re a scientist in a lab running an experiment. You think, “This makes sense. Let’s get the data. Let’s see if it’s true.” Lo and behold, you’re wrong. Disappointing, to be sure—a failure, to be sure—but an intelligent one, and one that we need to learn to welcome and celebrate because they bring us new information.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: This categorization of the types of failures helps us reconcile the societal obsession with avoiding failure and performing at a high level, on the one hand, and what we keep hearing about failing fast and failing hard, on the other hand.

Amy Edmondson: There’s no bad idea in the operating room, right? Not something you’d want to do in passenger air travel. There are contexts in which we need to do everything in our power to ensure a successful outcome, particularly in high-stakes, high-risk situations. Part of the reason I articulate this typology and these archetypes is primarily to help us make the important distinctions we need to truly welcome the new knowledge that comes from intelligent failures. If failure is all lumped into our minds as one idea or one category, it’s not going to work psychologically to make us feel okay about failure. We can only feel okay about failure when we have cognitive distinctions around the types of failure, and then it frees us up to engage in more smart risks.

I point out in the book that, in fact, name a field—the people who are most successful are not successful because they’re failure-free. They’ve become most successful because they’ve failed more often than the rest of us. They’ve been willing to try hard things and stomach the disappointment of failure, getting better and better at their craft.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: When I hear you describing these archetypes, it occurred to me that there are kinds of wrong that we want to avoid and kinds of wrong that we are totally okay with.

Amy Edmondson: Exactly. They’re all wrong in a sense, in that they are all undesired outcomes. But only one type of undesired outcome is the right kind, or at least the productive kind.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: In part two of the book, you talk about self-awareness, situation awareness, and system awareness. I just gobbled up chapter five because I’m all about self-awareness—internal and external. I was going back and forth between feeling optimistic about the message and then feeling pessimistic.

Amy Edmondson: That’s exactly the experience I have. I toggle back and forth between feeling very hopeful about what we know and what we’re capable of doing, and also feeling very depressed about it because we do, we? I will repeatedly and consistently fall into the same traps. Even Danny Kahneman, of course, who wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” falls into the same traps.

I think part of the solution is recognizing that it’s okay to have system one fast thinking. If you stop to pause—like which way should I brush my teeth every time you do it? You’d never get through the day. Many of our instincts are necessary for survival. You stop yourself from running out into traffic without even thinking about it, and that’s good. So we need all of these skilled routines to get through our days. We need to get continually better, and none of us will ever be perfect. But we need to get continually better at learning when to pause and slow down our thinking.

To me, the hopefulness comes in once we become aware that self-awareness is a thing and that thinking about your thinking is not a bad idea. For things where there’s uncertainty and reasonably high stakes, we really do want to challenge ourselves. I borrow from some of the great thinkers and those who spend time thinking about how to have healthy thinking.

I try to borrow some of the simple wisdom and say: how should we do that in business or in organizations? The simplest rubric I borrow from a former mentor, Larry Wilson, is stop, challenge, choose. Just pause. Learn to breathe, learn to say, “Okay, I’m feeling a little anxious. What’s going on?” Pause and take a look at your thinking.

Ask yourself, “How tethered to reality is this, or am I spiraling out?” What other ways might there be to think about this situation? Now pick the one that is in my best interests and health, and maybe happiness. If I can realize that, “Oh, that’s disappointing, but not fatal, and I’m going to try harder next time,” then that’s a healthy habit.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So you’re shifting me a little bit over into the optimistic.

Amy Edmondson: Right with it.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: As you were talking, I was thinking it still relates to a growth mindset.

Amy Edmondson: Oh yes!

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: After coaching executives for a couple of years, I had an epiphany. At the end of the calendar year, I looked back and realized what really differentiates the most successful people is a growth mindset. A few years later, I recognized self-awareness as another key factor. These aren’t necessarily orthogonal; I think they’re correlated in some ways.

Amy Edmondson: Yeah. yes, I mean, I think, yeah, in order to have a growth mindset. I think you you have to be a little bit more thoughtful about  what you’re doing, and why and why? The disappointment isn’t really so awful, because the spontaneous reaction to a failure or being wrong about something. And this is just well, you know. Well, well demonstrated in research, our spontaneous reactions are not are. It’s a negative emotion that’s just automatic. Right if I didn’t do as well as I thought. Whatever that’s I’m going to have a negative reaction. So the growth mindset is that superpower that comes back in and says, No, it’s it’s a learning experience, and not in a cliche way. But like, what what did I do that led to the outcome that I’m not happy about, and what might I do differently next time.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I love that you use the word superpower. There, Amy. I love it. Okay, I’m I’m gonna ask you the 3 rapid fire questions. Now, are you ready.

Amy Edmondson: Okay. Yep.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: 1st question, are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Amy Edmondson: Introvert hands down!

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Hands down. Yeah. Have you taken.

Amy Edmondson: I have taken. I’ve taken the you know the the Briggs.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Briggs.

Amy Edmondson: Briggs. I was. Gonna say, Briggs, Myers, that’s wrong.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: And the Big 5. It’s also in the Big 5 of social psychology, right? Both of us.

Amy Edmondson: Yes, it’s 1 of the Big 5, and and I was. I was gratified to learn, though in as part of being trained as a psychologist like you that you know, that doesn’t mean you’re inept in social situations. It just means it takes more energy than. and that then I, as an introvert. It means I have to recharge, and I’m happy to recharge. I have lots of opportunities to recharge a lot of the work I do is solo at a keyboard.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. Yeah. And and also, you may have a superpower of being a fantastic listener, which probably helps you in your research. Right?

Amy Edmondson: That is true, I mean, I’m not sure I got that as good as I want it to be. But I but it is true that as an introvert you are a good listener, and and prone to listen.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, okay, that wasn’t so rapid. But I love hearing your thoughts on that. second one. I I’m curious about this one. What are your communication.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: pet Peeves?

Amy Edmondson: The up lilt. So that is let me tell you about my work. And I was just finishing this chapter. and I know it’s it’s gotten to be so common now that it almost is disallowed as a pet peeve, because it’s practically everybody and I find it so so much less compelling than than stating it as a sentence rather than asking, or, you know, implying it’s a question plus. I think it really requires. It takes it drains the listener because the listener is is sort of feeling, because it’s implied by the tone that they have to say something, or respond, or agree or disagree, and it’s it’s exhausting.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. So I’ve noticed, I labeled this Phenomenon, or the kind of increasing prevalence of it, the uptick and up speak.

Amy Edmondson: Okay.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, and it also.

Amy Edmondson: I like that.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So Adam Grant had an article a couple of years ago in the New York Times, where he talks about women purposely using weak language. So with some of my senior female leaders, I assign them to read the article, and then I say, I want to talk to you about this, because, depending on who you’re talking to, it might be in your best interest to use up. Speak, but I hope you’re conscious of it. I hope that when you are, when you have conviction about something, you’re not asking them. Instead, you’re telling them

Amy Edmondson: Exactly, exactly.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay question number 3, is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending the most lately?

Amy Edmondson: Yes, the book. Maybe it’s old fashioned to say a book, and it’s not a brand new book, but it is a brilliant book, and it is called, get rid of the Performance review.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh!

Amy Edmondson: Sam Culbert, Ucla emeritus. And it is not a book about why we shouldn’t have performance reviews. It’s it’s really a book about how the way most of them unfold is not learning oriented, not helpful, not forward looking. and does. And it’s a sham. Or it’s theater that isn’t working. So it needs to be replaced by what he calls the performance preview where we. Together and my job. If I’m your manager, my job is to help you think about growth mindset again. My job is to is to help you do well. so I need to know what you need from me. You need to know what I expect or what we’re trying to do, and I need to know how to most enable you. And so it’s a mute. There’s mutual learning, and it’s forward looking and it’s so. you know, it’s so profound and so rare, but but really a powerful way of of managing performance.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, sound like, it sounds like this book made a real

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: real impression on you. That’s very. I can see how it’s very kind of interrelated with with your topics of failure, the right kind of wrong and psychological safety. I will put a link to that book in the show notes, and I just want to close by asking, is there anything else you want to share about the right kind of wrong failure, psychological safety, anything else.

Amy Edmondson: One thing, so I’ll go full circle back to psychological safety, which, as you said, it’s all interrelated. and say.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right. Okay, that is beautiful. Thank you so much, Amy. I really appreciate your insights and your time. And it was wonderful to chat with you again after so many years. Thank you.

Amy Edmondson: Likewise. Thank you.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. Oh, Amy, thank you so much.  I just want to say also congratulations on having such a significant impact and influencing institutions and individuals at such a massive scale to be better people.

Amy Edmondson: Thank you. That makes my day.

The feeling is mutual, Amy!

OK – let me now highlight and reinforce

The 3 points are:

Focus on PERFORMANCE

Which brings me to the second point I want to reinforce:

FOCUSing ON OUR VOCABULARY

Amy started by distinguishing between mistakes and failures.

A mistake is an unintended deviation from a known practice or process.

A failure is an undesired outcome. There are 3 kinds of failures: basic, complex, and intelligent. I bet you can guess which one of those three is good!

A complex failure has a handful of factors contributing to it.

Intelligent failure is the undesired results of experiments. Think of a scientific experiment:

SO we encourage you to be careful of your vocabulary. Knowing that as humans we all fail at times and we all make mistakes. And we all experience disappointment and even regret. But if we consciously focus on taking smart risks, we can label our failures as intelligent failure and move on to learning.

Which brings me to the last point I want to reinforce – the Focus on LEARNING & THE FUTURE

Ultimately when you focus on learning and the future, you are cultivating a growth mindset.

This notion of cultivating a growth mindset, of focusing on the future and learning, is a key theme running through Amy’s work in psychological safety and in failing well.

That reminds me, I loved how when I mentioned that I think most of the Talk About Talk podcast listeners have a strog growth mindset – there’s self-selection there – Amy added that there are probably many who are growth-minded curious. Probably true. If that might be you, know this. Inasmuch as the research on team performance consistently shows that psychological safety contributes to team performance, the research by Carol Dweck and other consistently shows that whenou culativate a growth mindset – when you focus on learning and the future, this also can also improve your chance of success.

Thanks again to Amy.

Your work really is contributing to a more productive – high performing society. And a more enjoyable one too. .

As I said, you can find links to aAMy’s books aswell as the other books and articles we mentioned in our conversation, right in the shownotes for this episode.

My coordinates are there too. Please connect with me anytime. Check out the Talkabouttalk.com website or send me a DM on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you.

Talk soon!

The post PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY & FAILING WELL with Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson (ep.175) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

How to boost your self-awareness with Dr. Tasha Eurich.  Tasha and Andrea talk about how self-awareness can improve your communication, relationships, confidence, promotability, influence, empathy, leadership, and more.

TRANSCRIPT

Are YOU a self-awareness unicorn? That RARE person with exceptionally high internal and external self awareness? Probably not. But according to self-awareness expert Dr.Tasha Eurich, just by learning some of the tools and approaches you’ll hear in the next 45 minutes, you’re way ahead of the pack. One step closer to unicorn status.

Let’s do this!

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #174 “Boost your Self-awareness with Dr.Tasha Eurich.”

I’m so excited for you to meet Tasha. I read her book called INSIGHT a few years ago after it was recommended by Adam Grant. The full title is Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think. It immediately became one of my favorites, a book with research that I reference all the time, and a book that I often recommend to my coaching clients.

So I was very excited to book this interview. When the time finally came and we logged into the interview, we both stopped and stared at the screen. I’m sure my jaw dropped. Tasha was sitting in front of her beautiful horizontal bookcase, all sorted by color. Like a beautiful rainbow of books, including the turquoise book jacket cover of her book INSIGHT. Some of you might know that I am also obsessed with color, particularly turquoise. So there I was, in front of my vertical bookshelf, each shelf coded by colour – black then red then turquoise, then yellow, and so on.

WOW. Even if you’re not obsessed with colour, our screens were a sight to be seen. You could say we had an instant connection.

Speaking of connection – In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and I’m your executive communication coach. Please just call me Andrea. I coach executives like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence, establish credibility, and ultimately achieve your career goals. To learn more about what I do, head over to talkabouttalk.com and you can read about the coaching and workshops I run. Plus there are lots of free resources for you at the bottom of the talkabouttalk.com homepage. You can also sign up for my email newsletter, where you’ll get free coaching from me in your inbox. Head over to talkabouttalk.com to sign up now.

Alright, let’s shift gears.

In this episode, you’re going to learn a helpful definition of self-awareness, why it’s important, and Tasha’s strategies that you can start immediately to help you become more self-aware.

Let me introduce Tasha, then we’ll get right into the interview. At the end, as always, I’m going to summarize with three learnings that I want to reinforce for you. Sound good?

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author who helps people thrive in a changing world.

With a PhD in Organizational Psychology, she’s the principal of The Eurich Group, working with clients like Google, Walmart, and the NBA. She’s been recognized as the world’s top self-awareness coach and featured by Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and more.

Her 2017 TEDx talk has been viewed more than 8 million times! Tasha’s first book, Bankable Leadership, debuted as a New York Times bestseller. Her latest, Insight, explores the link between self-awareness and success. That’s where we’re focusing here today. She also has another book coming out in 2025 focused on resilience called SHATTERPROOF. I’ll leave links to all these books in the show notes.

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Thank you so much, Tasha, for being here today on Talk About Talk to talk about our self -awareness.

Thank you. It’s great to be here, Andrea. 

So I guess we better start with definitions. When you are writing and researching and talking about self -awareness, what exactly do you mean? 

So it’s a great place to start, I think, and you’re very smart to do that. It took our research team actually almost a year to scientifically and empirically.

So it’s the will and the skill to understand who we are and how you’re seen.

So I am familiar enough with your work that I know exactly what you mean by each of those very precise words.

But I want to say I applaud and appreciate how precise you’re being with that. So maybe break it down. What do you mean by will and what do you mean by skill, first of all. So both of those are equally important, right? If you’re missing one, you can’t become self -aware. The will has to do with not even necessarily a daily commitment because life, right? Life is crazy. Most days, if you are committed to seeing yourself clearly, that really kind of satisfies that piece of it. And then the skill is not just sort of using the myths and assumptions that we have about what it takes to become self -aware, but actually looking at scientifically supported actions that will improve our self -awareness. One of the things, you know, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this that we discovered in our research was that a lot of really well -intentioned people are sort of approaching self -awareness in a way that’s not giving them increased insight.

And so that’s where the skill component comes in. So it’s not just, you know, kind of throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks. It’s saying this is my self -awareness strategy. This is how I’m going to break this down for myself.

When I was listening to and then reading your book, that’s where I felt like I personally got a lot of traction as well, providing me with the skill, the frameworks, right, for how to think about or how to get input to your identity and, well, and so that you can become more self -aware based on other people’s input and other frameworks that we’ll talk about.

So let’s go back to the definition, though. The second part was about, I’m going to paraphrase here, but it’s really about knowing yourself and also knowing how others perceive you.

Is that’s another way of saying it. It is. And I think a lot of times when we think about self -awareness, we only consider that inner piece, right? Knowing who we are internally.

What do we value? What are our passions? What are our personality patterns over time? Things like that. But we often neglect an equally important piece of the puzzle, which is to understand how other people see us. And what I always say to people is, you know, everybody has these shirts of like, what other people, other people’s opinion of me is none of my business, right? And I, while that’s very empowering, and I’m sure it sells a lot of T -shirts, unless you work in a cardboard box and live in a cardboard box and never speak to another person again, it kind of matters how other people see you.

And the angle that I’ve gotten to with, you know, I’ve been coaching CEOs for more than 20 years now is they’re already having these perceptions, right? They’re already talking to other people about these perceptions.

Wouldn’t you rather know? Because when you know, you can decide what you want to do about it, it doesn’t mean necessarily you have to change. But if we’re not actively soliciting other people’s perceptions of us, we are missing literally, you know, one of the two camera angles of that skill. What’s interesting in our research is that we found that very often, you know, highly self -aware people discover that those two data points don’t always match up, right? I might see myself one way. There might be a perception of me that’s very different. And I always go back there to the F.Scott Fitzgerald quote, which I really love. He says the definition of true intelligence is being able to hold two opposing ideas in your mind and still retain the ability to function, right?

And so to become self -aware and to be on this journey, it’s a dance, really, of soliciting both, navigating both, making sense of both, and sometimes believing and understanding that they won’t square up, but you still have to have both of those data points. Oh, my goodness, Tasha, there’s so, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, oh, I need to ask her this, I need to ask her this, I need to ask her this, I need to to ask, there’s so many directions we could go. Let me start with a quick anecdote that when I was reading your book the first time,

I was also, I happened to be coaching a gentleman who I now realize was not self -aware, but I asked him whether he thought he was self -aware. And he said, I think I’m extremely self -aware.

Of course. And when I was reading your book and thinking about it after, I thought, I know based on your research and others, there’s what you call, or we call internal self -awareness and external self -aware. And I thought instantly, he’s high internally self -aware, but not externally self -aware. And in your book, you talk about how most of us think we are more self -aware than the average, right? Including me, by the way. Fun discovery. Well, everybody is everybody, right yeah um so losers and the introspectors, if you had to put the population, you know, maybe of working professionals into this two by two matrix, the introspectors would get more than its fair share of folks. I’m not,

I’m not sure. 

It’s interesting because I actually have the data. I could look at that. We have our insight quiz. Maybe we can put a link in your show notes for your listeners. But we’ve been doing this insight quiz and making it available to people for free for like more than five years now.

So we could run those stats. I just don’t want to speak out of the wrong side of my mouth, right? It’s been a while. But the last time we did it, I want to say three or four years ago maybe, we were seeing very few people are high in both, right? That internal self -awareness, the first part of the definition, knowing who we are, and then the second part of it, understanding how other people see us, that’s hard to achieve, right? But it is possible and very learnable. It’s just that, again, most people are approaching it with good intentions, but bad tools, right? The Seeker category is people who are just starting their journey in both of those categories, right? They’re just starting to learn kind of who they are, what they want, what matters to them, and maybe they haven’t gotten a lot of feedback in their life. And they’re really trying to start that journey. What I always tell seekers, if you feel like you might be in that category for anyone, is pick one to start with.

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Say, do I want to kind of get in touch with myself more? Do I want to understand how other people see me more? And then you can always add things after that. But to your question, where it gets really interesting is when people are high on one and then low on the other. And this happens because those two types of self -knowledge are totally independent. Just because it’s like the executive you were coaching, just because he saw himself clearly doesn’t automatically translate to other people, to him understanding how other people saw him. And then the reverse is true. The category I fall in,

I call pleasers. And these are people who are so focused on knowing how other people see them, that sometimes they forget their own, they forget or they aren’t even in touch with the choices that they can make in their own best interest.

Like the example that I give about this, it’s kind of a silly one, but a couple of years ago, I couldn’t decide what color car to get. I was renewing my lease. I was traveling. I was super busy.

So I texted like my five best friends. And I said, here are the choices. Which one should I pick? Right? It’s like this, this completely other focused view, which can have its advantages, but it can also have really big disadvantages.

You know, in that case, what car did I want? You know, what would make me happy? But going back to your – You’re the one that’s going to be driving it every day, Tasha. Exactly. They’re probably not going to be in it very often. But to your point, there is a pretty wide variety across those three categories. So I think it’s interesting, you know, I would argue that even somebody who says they’re self -aware may not be internally self -aware at all, right? If they say they’re self -aware and you look at them and you’re like, well, buddy, I’m not sure you understand. That probably means they’re low in external self -awareness. But what our research has shown is that regardless of where you fall on that spectrum,

95 % of us believe that we are self -aware. And the real number, according to several different studies that we’ve done, is about 10 to 15 % of us, right? So if 10 to 15 % of us meet those criteria, 95 % of us think we’re self -aware. What that means is that on a good day, 80 % of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves.

So that’s the question I ask about your client, right? It’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. It’s like our default should be to believe that we probably are not self -aware or at least not as self -aware as we could be.

Bingo. I always say, I put the word gently in front of that. Gently stop assuming that you’re self -aware. I wouldn’t want any of your listeners to get the wrong idea about this.

I am not here as like a poster child of self -loathing or, you know, self -consciousness or neuroses. That isn’t what self -awareness is at all. But there is, I think you’re exactly right, there’s this paradox that as soon as we stop assuming that we are self -aware, we can actually become that. And, you know, another way to look at it is as long as you’re making forward progress, that’s all that matters at the end of the day. That’s very inspiring. So I want to get into some of the tactics that you recommend. I know there’s the what versus why recommendation. But before we get into that, I just want to touch on something that you said that also is related to something in your book about folks that are like the senior leaders and the most powerful people. So when you’re talking about the pleasers,

It reminds me of some of the conversations that I have in workshops and coaching with my clients when we’re talking about their personal brand. And one of the most important strategic principles,

I believe, of establishing a strong personal brand is to focus on what makes you unique. Because if you’re thinking and focused on your unique strengths and passions, you’re going to end up being as happy or satisfied as you can be and as successful as you can be.

And so when I’m thinking about this two by two matrix, I feel like it might be okay to be a pleaser early in your career, but then at some point, you have to focus on what you want to be and what you are so that you can evolve. And this is what I say. Like it’s early, it’s fine early in your career to look around and copy people because you’re trying different identities, right? But as soon as your mid -career, and definitely when you’re a senior executive, you need to double down on what makes you unique, right? So maybe that’s when being a pleaser can really backfire on you, right? But it happens because we’re social learners. We look around at other people that are successful and we copy them. I guess the question is, do you think there might be kind of a similar insight here about self -awareness as there is about personal branding, where to, let me tell you a little bit about the sample of people that we really studied most exhaustively. And you know this. We called them our self -awareness unicorns. And these are people, yeah, that didn’t start out as self -aware, but through some, like, mysterious process that we wanted to uncover, were able to become dramatically more self -aware and, in fact, highly self -aware. And what was so interesting to me is that there weren’t any patterns in that sample based on any demographic, including age. So I’m thinking about, you know, one person, Kelsey, who is a middle school science teacher, who was very, very early in his career. But even earlier in his career, he had been an engineer and was absolutely miserable. And so he went on this journey of self awareness and said, you know what I really want to do is I really want to be a public school teacher and I want to teach science to kids.

And so from my perspective, I think we miss something really for every year we’re not on this journey. We could be, you know, depending on whether it’s internal or external self -awareness, if we’re missing internal self -awareness, you know, we’ll be like somebody who, you know, is maybe not choosing a career that makes them happy. And for every year that goes by without having external self -awareness, we could be alienating everyone, right? Who knows what impact we’re having if we don’t know and can’t control it? So I see what you’re saying, and I think you’re right. I think in some sense, self -awareness becomes more important the higher up you rise because it’s more rare. But I would also just encourage anybody, like, wherever you are on this journey, wherever you are in your career, it will put you above the pack. If you use some of these tools and really use what’s scientifically supported, it’s a superpower. There’s no better way I can say it.

I absolutely agree. I’ve been telling people lately, I used to say a growth mindset was the superpower that would build your success in your communication skills and then in your career. But I actually think it’s a combination, a growth mindset and self -awareness. In your definition of self -awareness, though, there is the growth mindset because it’s the will, right? We just put everything in there just to make sure.

So my next question is related to what you were just saying about as you get more senior in your career, it becomes more important. So in many things that I’ve read that you’ve written and interviews that I’ve listened to, you list the many, many benefits of self -awareness. Why don’t you just list some of them right now? I love this question. So we could be here forever, but I’ll kind of focus it to your audience specifically.

So people who are self -aware are more successful at work. They get more promotions. They’re better communicators. They’re better influencers. I know, right? Pick your favorite. They’re more confident. They’re more empathetic. They’re more effective and respected leaders. And there’s even some evidence that’s been starting to emerge over the past 10 or so years that in companies with high numbers of self -aware, you know, employees and leaders, those companies are actually more profitable. So a lot of executives might think like, oh, I’m a very busy person and, you know,

I don’t have time to work on my self -awareness. But what I would say is, you know, you are modeling this behavior for the entire organization. And an organization can only be as self -aware as the person at the top or the team at the top or the senior team, right? But wait, there’s more. This is where I’m like the knife salesman person or the infomercial, but wait, there’s more. So self -awareness also benefits us in our personal lives. There are a ton of examples, but I think kind of most universal is that people who are self -aware have better romantic relationships. They have stronger and deeper friendships. And this might be especially interesting for some of your listeners.

They tend to raise more mature and less narcissistic children. Oh, wow. Right? So like pick your poison. The beauty of this, and this is why I call self -awareness the meta -skill of the 21st century is that it is literally the foundation of everything else that you’re accomplishing in your life.

You can only be as influential as you are self -aware. You can only be as good of a communicator as you are self -aware, right? You can only be as authentic as you are self -aware. And so that’s where, you know, I think if, again, if you choose to work on the skill, the ripple effects are are astonishing. Okay. Well, you’ve got me convinced, Tasha, easily. Easily, when you say communication skills, I light up, as you could see. So before we move on to the tactics for how people can work on developing their self -awareness, I just want to ask you this question that occurred to me a couple of days ago.

So on the one hand, there’s this research that one of the things you said was more effective, and it was effective and something leadership, more effective and respected.

Respected leadership, leaders. But there, I think you said there’s also an inverse correlation between power and self -awareness. So how do you reconcile that?

Because presumably these leaders have power. Right. So the way I would reconcile that is that some leaders figure it out and benefit, right? So just because it’s rare at the top ranks of a company doesn’t mean it’s not immensely powerful. And in fact, I would argue that makes it more powerful.

If, you know, we all, I would argue that, like, we all probably start at a similar level of self -awareness, but what happens is when you’re the boss, suddenly you walk in and like nobody’s giving you bad news, everybody’s laughing at all of your jokes, right? Nobody’s bringing you problems before the problem becomes a big problem. And that’s just the nature of, you know, hierarchy and power.

There’s a lot of other examples too of, you know, many leaders, especially senior leaders that I’m sure we both worked with make assumptions. And the assumption is something like, well, I must be doing something right.

I’m the CFO. Right. I must be doing something right. I’m an SVP. And, you know, that is often true. But the success criteria change, we change, the environment changes.

So we can’t ever say, I’m good, right? I’ve arrived. And I think, you know, again, with each successive level of leadership, fewer and fewer people are comfortable telling us the truth. So that’s how I would square that is it is actually, it’s empirically important at high levels, but it’s even more important because it’s so rare. Right. B, not necessarily because of something that you did differently. It’s because of other people treating you differently.

And then you just, but if you have similar beliefs about what feedback is, yeah, I get it. Okay, that makes sense. Please share with us a couple of your favorite frameworks, if you want to call them that, or tactics for helping us improve our self -awareness? Sure. So let me give you two. And I think these are, in some ways, these are the, like, simplest and most practical.

And I use these a lot with my coaching clients. So one is for internal self -awareness and the other is for external self -awareness. So internal self -awareness, we found that those self -awareness unicorns, almost to a person. Each had some kind of daily practice. It was very quick. And again, if they didn’t do it every day, they didn’t beat themselves up, they just tried to do it most days, where they were reflecting on their day, but not in a way that kicked them down something I call the rabbit hole of rumination, right? And the danger of sort of over -analyzing ourselves and our experiences is that we actually lose insight, and it makes us worse off. It makes us more stressed, more anxious, more depressed. And that’s probably a whole other podcast that we can do. But for the purposes of this, the daily check -in process,

I would offer three questions. So think about this, like, the next time you’re brushing your teeth at night, or the next time you’re driving home from work, ask yourself some variation of, number one, what went well today, number two, what didn’t go so well, and then three, how can I be smarter tomorrow? And by the way, if you’re working on something different, if you’re working on something specific, you could even say, how can I be more empathetic tomorrow? How can I be more influential tomorrow. How can I be a better coach tomorrow, right? But I think smarter is a nice catch -all of how can I use what I learn today to be 0 .1 % more self -aware tomorrow.

And what’s really interesting about the journey of self -awareness that we’ve discovered is most of the time improvement doesn’t happen in really dramatic leaps and bounds.

It happens slowly, incrementally, every day. which is maybe what I’ll give you for the second tool.

This is actually not something that I identified. It was something that I named. I call it the Dinner of Truth, but it was developed by a communications professor named Josh Meisner. And Dr. Meisner has been doing this exercise with all of his students for many, many years. I would guess he’s probably in, I mean, at least the thousands, if not the 10 ,000s. And here’s what it entails.

So First, you identify someone. It could be a work colleague. It could be someone in your personal life with whom you want to improve your relationship, right? Then you take them out to coffee, lunch. I like dinner because you can have cocktails and one cocktail can make this a little bit easier if that’s something that you’re into. And then you sit them down and you kind of explain, trying to improve myself awareness. you’re someone that’s very important to me. I have a question I’d like to ask you to answer as honestly as you can. And the question is, what do I do that is most annoying to you?

Everybody’s stomachs collectively dropped upon hearing that question. That is a hardwired human response. We’re very scared of possibly discovering that people don’t think, actionable that I can focus on. So instead of an indictment of who I am, you know, I always worry that my friends would be like, you know, Tasha, I’m really glad you asked because everything you do annoys me.

And I don’t really like that much. And I don’t want to be, but that’s the fear, right? And I know it was, you know, at the time, I even knew it was irrational, but you’re afraid of it. But like, one of my friends, you know, said, I love you in person, but you really annoy me on social media. And I was like, thank you. That’s so actionable, right? And I actually complete, this was like 10 years ago, I completely changed how I was showing up in, in that sort of virtual space. And so I would encourage people as scared as, as scary as it sounds or as scared as you might be.

Give it a try. Just try it once and see what happens. So I guess the criteria, who would you ask? It would be someone who probably Thank you. ask and then you just say, that’s okay. Thank you very much. Let’s have a nice dinner now. But yes, but I think if you’re a little more strategic about it than that, if you say, you know, has this person, you know, maybe been the brave soul who says the thing that nobody wants to say, like in at least one context that I can remember, that’s a pretty good sign. Yeah.

I’ve gotten in the habit. I’m thinking now as I’m speaking with you, Sasha, probably based on my reading of your book and listening to you, I’ve gotten in the habit after I’m done with coaching sessions and with workshops of immediately asking for feedback and make me really clear to people that I truly believe feedback is a gift, right? Because I’m in this environment where I’m coaching people. And if I don’t ask for feedback, unless I did a really bad job, which doesn’t happen, but if I did a really bad job, I’m sure they would let me know, but they’re always like, oh, it was great.

You got nine out of 10, la, la, la, whatever. I’m like, tell me something I can do to improve next time. And most of the time, they don’t share anything. They’re like, no, everything was great.

Is there something you can say to people that encourages them to share feedback with you that you’ve come across? Yeah. I mean, let’s take that situation specifically, because I think it’s something very generalizable, right? We all can ask for immediate feedback. And so how can we get that feedback and have the best chance it’ll be helpful? I might even, so two ideas there.

One would be to share with them past feedback you’ve gotten. You could say, you know, gosh, I remember you know, five years ago I was giving this workshop And a gentleman, you know, came up to me during lunch and said, you know, we don’t have enough breaks and we just don’t have the mental space to think about everything we’re learning. And it was so incredibly helpful. And here’s how I changed the class.

Like, maybe you can give a couple of examples of that. If it’s the first time you’ve asked for feedback on something and you don’t have, you know, a past track record, I would just make some stuff up, like, or even say the things that you’re worried aren’t working, right? Like, you know, I felt like my energy was down a little bit this afternoon. And, you know, maybe that’s in my head, but maybe you can verify that for me. That’s a hypothesis I have that I can’t test without you telling me what you think.

So to kind of give them, like, I’m not just saying this, I’m actually going to give you examples and show you how excited I am about hearing feedback on those examples.

I think that might do a lot. It’s obviously just one thing you can do, but I think that’s worth trying. Definitely worth trying. I’m going to try it and I’ll let you know how it works. I can’t imagine it wouldn’t work, right? It’s like you’re setting the table for the feedback. Yeah. I love it. Okay. So I can imagine some people are hesitant, is a nice way of it to ask for feedback, to gain insight into particularly their external self -awareness, right, and what their identity is in the eyes of other people.

So this leads me to your upcoming book called Shatterproof. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re going to be talking about in that book? So I have to preface this by saying that the book just went to copy editing,

And I am not yet as smart and talking about it as I know that I need to be. But I’m just going to give you like some headlines. I started writing this book.

I worked on Shatterproof for five years. And it started out as an exploration of, you know, when bad things happen to us, what are the best ways that we can respond?

So that we’re not just sort of getting back to where we were before, but we’re getting, you know, smarter, more confident, stronger, more ready for, you know, whatever challenges lie ahead.

But during this research, COVID happened, as we all remember, and I experienced something that I had never experienced in my life. So I’m a person, you know, I just recently learned I’m not a fourth generation entrepreneur. I’m a fifth generation entrepreneur. and I have been raised, you know, I was raised by a single mother, taught that when you fall down, you get back up again, right? You’re resilient, you’re tough, you persevere. And I’ve, you know, I’ve had lots of challenges in my life like we all have, you know, for me, the biggest one has been a lot of, like, pretty significant health challenges. But I, you know, up until COVID happened, I had always found a way to kind of push through them to endure quiet endurance, right, where I wasn’t complaining.

I was getting up every day. And, you know, for the longest time, I assumed that everyone else was in 10 out of 10 pain every day and they just didn’t complain about it as much as I did. So then I was like,

I have to complain less. But what happened during COVID was literally, and I can trace the day that this happened. I woke up one day And my resilience ran out.

I hit my resilience ceiling where I was, my coping tools that I had relied on for my whole life were not only not working, but they were feeling like extra stress. You know, things like exercising or meditating or my gratitude journal, right? All the things were taught will help us be resilient.

My tank was completely empty. And so that actually kind of kicked me down into this hole of looking at what does the research on resilience actually tell us?

And what’s the alternative? Right. And so the best way to think about becoming shatterproof is a second skill set in addition to resilience.

It’s not that resilience isn’t helpful. It’s that it has its limits, right? So becoming shatterproof is about instead of bouncing back, which is what resilience is, when we become shatterproof, we are proactively growing forward through our toughest challenges. So instead of, you know, waiting for something to be over and just trying to keep persevering, we’re actually saying this is an opportunity for a profound personal transformation. In order to do that, I need to understand what my pain is telling me.

I need to kind of understand the self -limiting patterns and behaviors and beliefs that I’m bringing to the table. I need to pick new ones. And so the book is really about this four -step framework to become shatterproof that we can use, you know, all the time, first of all, but specifically when our resilience is starting to run out so that we’re not, I never want anyone to experience what I experienced and it was about, you know, March or April of 2021. And so the book is really to help people, my publisher didn’t like this title, but the goal is to help people build a more beautiful life in a world of constant chaos.

Instead of just bouncing back, like, and people, you know, they’re falling off equipment or whatever. And some of them, it was like not the first time that day where they had just like something’s happening, right? And I was watching with my mom and I said, well, they’ve got a TED talk. They now hit rock bottom in front of billions of people. Billions, I think, right? Isn’t that? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, I’m going to move on to the three rapid fire questions are you ready i’m ready okay first question are you an introvert or an extrovert big time introvert really okay i’m what’s called yeah i’m a gregarious introvert that’s the qualifier okay what are your communication pet peeves there’s only one at the top of the list and it’s lying dishonesty Dishonesty.

Okay. Question number three, is there a book or a podcast that you find yourself recommending a lot lately? By the way, I recommend your book all the time. Well,

I and Penguin Random House, thank you, Andrea, for that. That’s very nice of you. So to your question, yeah, the book that I have been, I find I’m recommending most often lately is by my really dear friend Laura Gassner Otting.

She has written two books, but her most recent one is called Wonder Hell. And it’s about what happens when we start to achieve our greatest potential and how it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

It gets into things like imposter syndrome and all the things that come along with success when we thought success would be easy and we actually discover that it’s hard and it’s it’s a it’s very clever she is um she’s like the best friend that’s going to kick your ass and tell you exactly what you need to do um but in a way that is so kind and warm and she’s also very very funny it’s it’s a delightful book oh I can’t wait to read it i can’t i can’t wait you know based on the fact that we’re both interested in in i guess self -identity and self -awareness And based on the fact that we arrange our bookshelves similarly,

I’m going to maybe make the hypothesis that we might also enjoy reading the same books. So I can’t want to read that book. Is there anything else you want to say, do you want to share with the talk about top listeners about self -awareness?

I mean, I would just say, sort of let me give them two things. Number one, I would encourage everybody listening to this to go take the five minute insight quiz. You can get it at https://www.insight-book.com/quiz.It again takes five minutes. It’s free. You fill out 14 questions. You send it to someone else who knows you well. They fill out 14 questions. Very important. And then when both results are in, you get a nice report that shows you high level, which of those four boxes are you in right now? And then it gives you, you know, usually two or three very practical things you can do if you decide you want to improve.

So I think that’s the first thing. But the second thing, I’ll go back to, you know, kind of a theme that I think we’ve touched on multiple times, which is

Amazing. Thank you so much, Tasha.

I really appreciate your time and your expertise, and it’s really nice to get to know you. You too. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, two self -identity, self -development, bookshelf nerds. We had to come together at some point, so it was a pleasure. I love it. Thank you.

Thanks again to Tasha for sharing her insights about self-awareness.

Yah I got that.

Her book is called Insight and she’s insightful.

OK – let me now highlight three of the INSIGHTS from our conversation that I want to reinforce:

First – The significance of self-awareness.

They get more promotions.

They’re better influencers.

They’re more empathetic.

They have better romantic relationships.

And.

As Tasha says, self -awareness the meta -skill of the 21st century.

That’s the first point.

The second point I was going to reinforce is the definition of self-awareness. This is about thinking but self-awareness in a more disciplined way, beyond self-awareness as “thinking about thinking”. Tasha’s definition is the will and the skill to understand who we are and how you’re seen.

There are 4 components of this definition:

As Tasha mentioned, it might be helpful to think about these last two dimensions – internal and external self-awareness, in terms of a twox2. There’s low and high interval self awareness on one axis and low and high external self-awareness on the other axis. The rare folks who are high on both are what she calls the unicorns.

Many of us are on the diagonal – There are the Introspectors (those with high internal and low external self-awareness) – I’ve worked with some clients who are Introspectors. They’re clear on who they are but don’t challenge their own views or search for blind spots by getting feedback from others. They end up in big trouble. Then there’s the Pleasers (those with low internal and high external self-awareness) – Tasha admitted she might be a pleaser, and I think I might be too. We’re so focused on appearing a certain way to others that we could be overlooking what matters to us.

The last point I want to reinforce is Tasha’s suggestion for how to become a unicorn. She has two suggestions:

The idea here is that is that improvement in your self-awareness doesn’t happen quickly, Rather, it happens slowly, incrementally, a little bit every day.

The second suggestion from Tasha is

You know what? I’m going to start doing this. I‘m not going to wait for some fancy dinner reservation. I’m just going to ask my co-workers, friends and family what I do that annoys them. Actually, I already know what annoys my family. They tell me all the time. But I’m not sure about my friends and co-workers. Hmm.

Well that’s it!

The three things I wanted to reinforce for you are the significance of self-awareness, which includes the long list of different ways it can benefit you; the definition of self-awareness, along with the helpful 2×2 framework that distinguishes between low and high internal and external self-awareness; and two ways to boost your self-awareness. To boost your self-awareness, ask yourself the three questions: What went well today? What didn’t go so well? How can I be better tomorrow? And, of course, there’s the Dinner of Truth.

Thanks again to Tasha. Tasha, I can’t wait to read your next book, SHATTERPROOF, and interview you again. You can connect with Tasha through her coordinates in the show notes. My coordinates are there too, so please connect with me anytime. Check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website or send me a DM on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you.

Talk soon!

The post Boost Your SELF-AWARENESS with Dr. Tasha Eurich (ep.174) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

How to become an epic storyteller with “Under the Influence” podcast host Terry O’Reilly. Terry and Andrea talk storytelling, elevator pitches, and peeling the onion to identify what business you’re really in.

That fabulous voice belongs to Terry O’Reilly host of the popular “Under The Influence” podcast. I’ve been listening to “Under The Influence” for years, and I’ve always enjoyed Terry‘s sense of humor, and his skill as an exceptional storyteller. I knew we were both Canadian and we’re both podcasters.  I had no idea he’s also a huge fan of the power of three.  Did you hear what he said?  Bingo, Bango Bongo. Let’s do this!

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #173 “Under the Influence with storyteller Terry O’Reilly”. In this episode, you’re gonna learn the ingredients necessary to create compelling stories, how and why to “peel back the onion” and think hard about what business you’re really in, and so much more.

In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and I’m your executive communication coach. Please just call me Andrea. I coach executives like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence and clarity, establish credibility, and ultimately achieve your career goals. Sound good? To learn more about me and what I do, head over to talkabouttalk.com and you can read about the coaching and workshops that I run.  Plus there are a bunch of free resources for you at the bottom of the takaboutalk.com homepage. You can also sign up for the Talk About Talk email newsletter, where you’ll get free coaching from me in your inbox. Head over to talkabouttalk,com to sign up now. 

Alright, Let’s shift gears. I can’t wait for you to hear my conversation with Terry O’Reilly. If you’ve ever heard his Under the Influence podcast, you know he is like an encyclopedia of stories and insights.  As you’re about to hear, he’s the same in real-time, without a script.  He’s also very gracious.

Let me introduce Terry, then we’ll get right into the interview. At the end, as always, I’m going to summarize with three learnings that I want to reinforce for you. Sound good?

Ok.

Long before he had a radio show, Terry was an award-winning writer at Canada’s top advertising agencies. Creating campaigns for top brands such as Labatt, Bell, Nissan, and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

In 1990, Terry co-founded Pirate Radio & Television with eight recording studios in Toronto and New York.

In 2005, he became the host of the CBC Radio One and WBEZ Chicago radio show, Under The Influence, with over one million listeners a week. His podcast has been downloaded over 75 million times.

Terry was awarded with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Advertising & Design Club of Canada, and has been granted Honorary Degrees from three Canadian universities.

Ah – the power of three again.

Terry has also written three books, the latest being “My Best Mistake” about people who made catastrophic career decisions – but it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them.

He has a wonderful wife and yes, three lovely daughters, Terry he says like some of this work.

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Thank you so much, Terry, for being here today to talk to me and the talk about talk listeners.

O’Reilly: Well, it’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: There are so many directions that we could go in this conversation advertising, branding, personal branding. But I thought something that really stands out about you that I appreciate very, very much is your fantastic ability to tell stories. So I thought we would start there. And I’m curious as a master’s storyteller. What do you think makes for a great story? Is there an ingredient list that’s necessary.

O’Reilly: That’s a very good question. when I think about that, I I think 2 things, I think structure. I think that’s always been one of my strengths. For whatever reason, who knows? Is story structure that may have come from almost 40 years in the advertising business, where you have to? You know, structure Mini stories inside 30 and 60 seconds, which is, you know, in a a Herculane feat at best. So I think. And even you see, a lot of movie directors start out in the advertising business, and they learn storytelling because you have to. You have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end inside 30 or 60 seconds. And I think that’s a real discipline that you have to develop. So structure is the key for me cause as a director, so I directed commercials for 3 quarters of my career. I think I directed my staff, told me at one time something like 14,000 commercials in my career.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Wow!

O’Reilly: So I got to see a lot of really great storytelling and a lot of really bad storytelling and where most stories fell down, Andrea was in the end. There was great beginnings, wonderful middles, and terrible ends. It just never wrapped up. They never had a they never had a destination in mind. It didn’t come to this wonderful satisfying. It’s like seeing a great move, and you think I loved everything but the way it ended. You know that because the ending is the toughest thing for a writer to write so structure to me is critical that you have a beautiful teasing opening, and then you have this really sumptuous middle. And then you have this inevitable end. That’s just so satisfying. I think the other little thing beyond story structure is the element of surprise. Where you don’t really know where a story is going, or you think you know where it’s going. And then the writer just yanks you to the left or to or to the right, and I think those unexpected moments add impact.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: My brain is immediately going to personal branding when you say that. But I’m going to stick with advertising for.

O’Reilly: There you go!

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Couple minutes here. So beginning, middle, and end. consistent with my love of the power of 3, I’m thinking about my my self-introduction framework where I encourage people to Start with who you are, what you do, what your passion is, what your expertise is. Ground yourself in the present, then go past to establish credibility. And most people end there. Right? They’re like, and that’s me. Right going around the table or around the screen step 3 is the icing on the cake. And you you said similarly that many people or many stories, are missing. Kind of that last? Yeah, that part 3 or the ending of the story.

O’Reilly: Act. 3. Yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, act 3. So that’s that’s interesting. That that analysis.

O’Reilly: You know, even in sound, Andy, it’s interesting. You say that the power of threes I was known to be a I was a humor director. So if you had humorous scripts you would bring them to me. I I could do drama, but there were directors that were better at that than me, but humor was always my thing and I used to call them Bingo bango bongo moments that when things happen in threes like, you know, 2 knocks at a door is one thing, but 3 knocks is funny. and it’s hard to articulate. Why, that is, or if something falls off, let’s say a glass falls off a table. If it falls in a sequence of 3 sounds, it’s funny, and if it’s falls in 2, it isn’t so that even the power of 3 is a is a powerful rule within our audio.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I had no idea. But I’m not surprised. Yeah.

O’Reilly: Fact. Yeah. that’s the power of 3 a 3. Is this this amazing number in our lives? Although they say the world’s favorite number is 7, and the world’s favorite color is blue. But I’d say 3 is really it is that key secret ingredient.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, I I think 7 is like the maximum. There’s something like, that’s why phone numbers are 4. Right? Yeah, I I’m a fan of threes. You have 3 daughters right.

O’Reilly: I have 3 daughters. That’s right.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I did my, I did my reading. Terry.

O’Reilly: You did, you did.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So back to the storytelling. I’m I would love to hear what your take is on what brands are the best storytellers, maybe past and present.

O’Reilly: My favorite brand for storytelling of all time is Volkswagen in the in the sixties. So Doral Dane burn back, which I think was the greatest advertising agency of all time, led by Bill Burnback, probably the greatest creative director of all time. What they did with that brand to me is amazing, because if you put it in context, the early sixties automobile advertising was all the same. It was, you know, see, the USA in your Chevrolet and the Vw. Brought humor to advertising for the 1st time, and then they brought incredible honesty. They would talk about how ugly the car was. and they talk about how underpowered the car was, and they’d make they would make all its faults strong points. And you know that even though it’s under powered it, doesn’t it. It doesn’t take much gas, and just because it’s ugly doesn’t mean you can’t love it. And it became the most beloved car North America, I think. And it was all due to the storytelling. You know, they, the one of the 1st ads. The headline was Lemon. and I don’t think I could sell that ad today. There’s no way a car manufacturer is going to allow me to say lemon as a headline. But if you read the story underneath that headline. It was basically saying that the car you were looking at in that ad had a blemish on the chrome of the glove compartment, so it can’t go out yet. So it really was a story about incredible quality.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right.

O’Reilly: Under a headline that was is the most toxic word in automobile advertising. So the storytelling made that car a an icon, and I think they were the best storytellers in advertising for all time. A little more recently, I would say. Nike is a great storyteller, you know. Just do it, and every Nike ad, you see, is a story about a team or a person achieving something in amazing yet no, Nike ad looks like the other Nike ad like they. They almost feel like they have nothing in common. But it’s a storytelling that makes campaignable.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right.

O’Reilly: Apple’s the same thing. I think Apple does incredible advertising. It’s always they harken back to Steve Jobs, which is so interesting to me. They’ve really been so consistent that virtually every apple ad is is about one person achieving something. It’s not a business, it’s not a company. It’s always one person achieving something with the power of a computer which was Steve Jobs vision of taking the computing power out of Ibm and giving it to the individual. So they’ve run to that strategy for all these years, and I love their storytelling.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

O’Reilly: You asked me who the best storyteller is today. Right now. At this moment I would say, Heinz.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay, Heinz.

O’Reilly: Hines is doing this. This catch up is doing the best work I’ve seen in years. They and most of it’s done out of Canada. It’s got done out of rethink in Vancouver. They are winning every award. They are being written up in ad age and add news every week. They are doing things like I wrote them things down. They do. They did a big puzzle with 5,700 pieces or something is all red, you know, one of those crazy puzzles they did they asked kids to draw just ketchup. They just said, draw ketchup and kids. All the kids drew Heinz labels.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Wow!

O’Reilly: They asked AI to do to. They said they asked AI draw ketchup, bottle, and AI drew Heinz great ways. They did a tweet, which was the slowest tweet in the world. 57 letters. The message was 57 letters, Andrew, but it took 57 h to complete. So, just sitting there watching this tweet slowly appear. All of that is storytelling right? Because the richer a ketchup is, the slower it pours, which has always been Heinz raison d’etra right? And all these fun ways of getting across. How unique and how love the brand is in that category is just incredible storytelling.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: It’s almost like they’ve gone, Meta. They’re reinforcing their equity and creating new equity with it. Right? Like, yeah, wow, especially.

O’Reilly: In an in that old sleepy brand like it’s not a.com like it’s it’s been around forever.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So where are you seeing these ads? I mean, I know you’re you’re I shouldn’t ask you personally. But where cause.

O’Reilly: And we’ll see them.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Where can people see them?

So we used to, you know, tune in when we got home from work, and we’d watch the Evening News and everything so. And and now the media landscape has become so fragmented. And I’m I’m I see, as many ads as the average person.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: But I have not seen that. So I’m wondering if they’re on certain meat that you know. Maybe they are on television or streaming platforms that I’m not.

O’Reilly: I would say, most of it’s probably online in the form of videos, Youtube videos, or whatever just. They’re great at creating press. All those Heinz ideas create press, and I always say the best advertising creates press, because suddenly your budget feels like it’s quadrupled. If the press gets hold of it right, and rethink, or masters at that.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So my next question I was gonna ask you is is related to the point that you just made there. So over time other than becoming more fragmented and going into new media. Obviously with the Internet especially, and video. What else has changed in terms of advertising and storytelling.

O’Reilly: I think this, I think you sort of touched on it. I think storytelling is spilled out of traditional media for sure. But even online. It’s spilled out. So, for example, sticking with Heinz, they put out on at New York’s fashion week, which just happened. They put out a line of clothes. Heinz, a ketchup, put out a line of clothes that had just a little ketchup drip. and it became the talk of fashion. Week.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I did. I did read about that. So.

O’Reilly: Here’s the catch up finding a way to worm their way into New York’s fashion week. With this, with just the ongoingness of their strategy and and their storytelling ability.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, you know what I would say. There, the medium is the message right? that’s absolutely brilliant. I love that.

O’Reilly: And everything they do is is tailored to that but specific medium which is so great, which I think is the sign of a great marketer. It’s not the same thing in every medium. It’s the same tone. It’s the same overall strategy. But but Instagram looks different than Facebook and Facebook looks different than Youtube. Video, like everything’s tailored to that medium.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right brilliant. So I’d love to switch over into personal branding. And you you were talking about the Volkswagen lemon ad, and how they turned that into a pot. So it: drew the reader in. You know. What? What do you mean? You’re calling yourself a lemon. I better read what they’re talking about here, right? And they basically turned. I’ve heard this term a lot recently. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Yeah, right? Right? And that also relates to humans. So when I’m coaching executives on their personal brand or their professional identity

They’ll admit to me that there’s some part of their identity that they try to hide right it could be, for example, their sense of humor like. I don’t want people to think I’m unprofessional, so I hide my sense of humor, or I hide my you know my upbringing where I was brought up, or my accent, or they tried to somehow hide their identity. And then and then I talk to them about how we can create a narrative where what they’re perceiving as a bug may actually be a feature. So that’s my segue into asking you, Terry, whether you consciously and or strategically develop your personal brand.

O’Reilly: You know I did an episode on personal branding a couple of years back.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay. And it was the most popular episode of that season which surprised me because I thought I just never would have guessed that. Yeah.

O’Reilly: And that’s why, in the book that’s sitting behind you there, there is a chapter on personal branding.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I read it that even.

O’Reilly: That book is for marketers. I I really thought, you know, there’s everybody, even within marketing, has a brand. So I think, like any great brand a a personal brand has to share so many things in common with. If you look to Nike, or Apple, or Heinz, or whatever is that? 1st of all. they figure out what their uniqueness is in the category. and then everything they do kind of centers around that uniqueness. And there’s a consistency. Then there’s a tone there’s a kind of language that a great brand uses. There are guardrails, too, I think, but I don’t think they can be super super narrow. Because, as you were saying, you know, if someone’s really funny, or you know, if someone had a really tough upbringing, but achieved a lot of success. That’s a great story like that can really be. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature like it can be a really great part of your of your personal brand about how you overcame obstacles or overcame speed bumps to achieve success. So for me, a great brand is what makes you different.

And then how can I express that in creative ways? And that means you have to look around the category. See what your competitors are doing because you don’t want to strike a similar tone to somebody else. You want to find your own piece of real estate that you can own. Even my radio show on CBC is different in one big way, because I looked when when I pitched the show to Cbc. Never thinking for a moment that they would ever buy it, Andrea? You know the advertising free Cbc, taking on a show about advertising.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

O’Reilly: Shockley.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Irony. Love it.

O’Reilly: No, it is yeah. I looked at all the shows on on Cbc. And I thought, Okay, I’m going to Zig. Everybody’s saying I’m going to Zig, and what that was is I didn’t do interviews like I may be the only narrative show on Cbc. Maybe there’s 1 more out there, but I chose to go narrative storytelling instead of interviewed.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that’s the only thing that distinguish. I mean, it is.

O’Reilly: So it’s 1 of them. Yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So you also have a beautiful voice. You also have incredible knowledge. You’re also a beautiful storyteller, right? I could go on

O’Reilly: So that was the starting point, though Andrea was that beyond all of that lovely stuff the starting point was, how can I stand out on the air just sonically.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Right.

O’Reilly: I thought, Okay, I’m not going to do interviews. That was a big decision. Because there’s a lot of great advertising people. I could interview.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I’m sure, and it’s fun.

O’Reilly: And it’s fun. Yeah, it’s fun, right?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So I was. Maybe you’ve answered this next question with what you just said. But so what’s your product? Category, or your cat or personal category. I guess I mean, you’re saying other radio shows.

O’Reilly: Well, you know, the 1st chapter of that book is, what business are you really in.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

O’Reilly: And that’s that’s you think that’s so easy to answer. And it’s and I give some examples in there that Molson’s not in the beer business or in the party business, and Michelin’s not in the tire business. They’re in the safety business. I mean, you really have to know what people are buying from you in order to be relevant. Yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: You see, I’m just showing I’m opening the book to show you. As I was reading that chapter in particular, I took my marker out. I started writing. Talk. Talk about talk is in the business of right. Yes.

O’Reilly: Right, but that I mean that that gets to the heart of your question. You know you have to know what it is people want from you. because, as I say in the book, if you’re if someone’s shopping for tires because they wanna have make sure their family’s safe if you’re selling speed as a tire feature, and the and the place across the street selling safety. They’re gonna cross the street, even though you’re both selling tires right.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

O’Reilly: I think you have to, really. And it’s so hard to. you know. Peel, the onion, to figure out what it is that you offer even my show it. It started out as a show about creativity. and then it very quickly morphed into a show about strategy. And that has been my ongoingness, and I’m a creative guy. I was really always dealt with strategy. But I wasn’t a strategic account director. I was a writer. But here I am evolving into strategy. So so my show is really a look. I take people on a a look behind the closed doors of advertise, like everybody’s got should have an elevator pitch. That’s how you get to the nub of who you are and what you offer is, try coming up with a 1 sentence elevator pitch.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Of what you do, whether you’re a brand or a person. Yeah.

O’Reilly: And what you do, and what makes you unusual? You know I have a chapter in that in that book which I find such a great exercise. It’s really hard to do well that exercise. But you know, I always say, you know, Dirty Harry, that great Clint Eastwood film series of phones that made him famous. Really, you know, what was it about about Dirty Harry that made him so compelling? And it was that it wasn’t that he was a rogue cop. It wasn’t that he was tough. it it wasn’t that he broke the rules, which is what everybody answers. The the true answer to that is, he was more violent than the criminals he chased.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: That’s right. I just read that. I just read that.

O’Reilly: When you, when it’s articulated, you go. Yes, that’s exactly why he was so mesmerizing and and and why he created so much that character created so much controversy, and and ticket buying was never really seen before. and even I wired magazine, which is my favorite elevator pitch of all time. They, you know, it’s about entertainment technology at at trends and their elevator pitch when they were looking for funding from investors was. we want to feel like we’ve been mailed back from the future.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I, yeah, I love that too.

O’Reilly: Maybe the best elevator pitch of all time.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: My favorite elevator pitch of all time is, you know, the Sigourney Weaver aliens movie. Do you know what the elevator pitch was for? It.

O’Reilly: Jaws in space.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yes, I probably learned that from you, Terry.

O’Reilly: Yeah, you may have. Yeah, I’ve mean that once you can articulate  a really great elevator pitch. And that means, I mean, look at the language in the 3 we’ve talked about there. It isn’t like, I am a marketing communications expert like that’s not an elevator pitch. That’s a that’s just a statement that’s not an elevator pitch. An elevator pitch should make people lean right in. So when when wired magazine said to their investors, We want our magazine to feel like it’s been mailed back from the future. All the investors around the table instantly were interested in that magazine. You know what.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: That that unexpected element that you said.

O’Reilly: Who is it so?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Important, and it.

O’Reilly: Business.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Is one sentence right? If it has something unexpected in it, then.

O’Reilly: Yeah, a little surprise or or an incredibly interesting collection of words that sums up. What is the essence of you that makes you so different.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: okay, so I want to have time for the rapid fire questions at the end. But I, before we do that, I want to shift to your most recent book my best mistake.

O’Reilly: Yep.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Can you share with the listeners what the basic premise of the book is, and then also share with us maybe one or 2 of your best mistakes.

O’Reilly: The premise of that book was people who more, that I have a couple of other of additional little stories in there. But the overall arc of that book is people who made catastrophic career decisions where they lost their jobs, the credibility, their livelihood. They lost everything. and it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them. So I thought that as an exploration was interesting, because when that happens to most people they usually disappear, they disappear into the ether, or they just completely change careers or vocations, and just like wipe the slate clean. But I thought, it’s yeah. And I thought people who actually muscle through that are more interesting. So the 1st chapter of that book is about Jaws Steven Spielberg. It’s such a well told story, except for one detail, right? So everybody knows he was out on location in Martha’s Vineyard. He’s got 3 mechanical sharks that he’s had built to scale. which ate up most of his budget. By the way, he’s a 1st time film director really done some television. This is his 1st time with the Big Leagues. You think he’s only 28 or something? He gets out to Martha’s Vineyard. They put the sharks in the water. He’s got his cast, his crew, everything out there and the sharks immediately. Malfunction. And he’s paralyzed because the main beast of this film doesn’t work. And he goes into his hotel room one night thinking he’s gonna lose at all. He’s gonna lose his his chances. Being a director. He’s gonna he’s gonna be pulled back to Hollywood. He’s gonna be fired. He’s sitting in the dark panicking. and then he asks himself the most interesting question. He says. what would Hitchcock do.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh, wow!

O’Reilly: In that moment he knew the answer, and the answer was, What you can’t see is is the most terrifying thing of all. So then he, you know, he figures out a way to imply the shark, the fin through the water, or the pulling the big yellow. What it barrels through the water to show it’s or the music the great score. Right? Don’t, don’t. But the mistake he made, which is really why I decided to retell that well-told story, because everybody knows those details, is he? When he tried these sharks out in Hollywood he tried them in freshwater tanks. Mistake was he didn’t try them in salt water. The saltwater corroded all the mechanics. I thought there, I never knew that detail, and that’s why I love the story, and that’s why I loved how he let me. That that huge mistake he made in the filmmaking led to the best part of that film and lost him on his career like be ended up being the best thing that ever happened to him.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. And the so it’s really interesting that that story is your lead in this book, Terry, because as an audio storyteller, you’re leaving just in the same way that he left the the moviegoers image of the of the shark up up to the moviegoers. Right? When you’re telling your stories on your podcast and your radio show. You’re leaving it up to us to kind of fill in the blanks in our minds about what everything looked like.

O’Reilly: That’s the joy of audio. Your your listener becomes your art director. and I always thought that was so incredibly powerful. I mean a lot of writers and advertising don’t like audio don’t like raid. Let’s call it radio don’t like radio. They’re afraid of it. They much rather do television or print or film because at 1st glance. It looks like audio doesn’t have all the the same toolbox. You don’t have casts like you don’t have faces. You don’t have wardrobe. You don’t have locations.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

O’Reilly: I always thought that was way more freeing because I could be on the moon in a radio commercial. If I have done it correctly. You’re with me as a listener. I could be at the bottom of the ocean, and all of that would. I couldn’t do on television because it was too expensive.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Right? And and this, yeah, it’s the power of audio. I wonder if these art directors or creatives are also thinking that it’s just less tangible, right? Like it’s a it’s an audio file. I can’t actually open something,

O’Reilly: That’s why it’s also the hardest to present, Andrea, because you can show a print layout. You can show a TV storyboard. But with radio. You have to actually get up in a boardroom and perform it for your client, which gets to your great question, are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Bye.

O’Reilly: Yeah. I love this question. I was so glad that it’s on your list.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay, let’s do it. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Terry?

O’Reilly: Complete Introvert.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Of really.

O’Reilly: Oh, complete introvert, so they say the definition of an of a introvert versus an extrovert is, do you get recharged by being alone or recharged by being around a lot of people. So I recharge not by being alone. I’m not a hermit, I mean, but away from the crowd is where I recharge. Right? So that was, that was a big hindrance to me when I started my career. because I learned quite quickly that you had to learn how to present in a board room you had to get up. You had to be able to perform. You had to be able to feel questions. You had to be able to to really own the room. And there’s a lot of money riding on those meetings right? You could spend, you know, a million dollars on it. You’re trying to convince someone to spend a million dollars on your idea. It’s there’s a lot of pressure going on. And I hated it. It was my white knuckle fear. I would beg people to present my work for me, because I just it was just the it was the the thing I feared most. And then I realized that by letting other people present my work, most of it wasn’t getting sold. So I thought, Okay.I have to learn how to do this. so I was very fortunate because I had a great mentor. a creative director. I had early in my career was a magnificent presenter he was just. Oh, my goodness! He could just thrill you with the work. He just it was something about him, and I just watched him constantly at work. and I, slowly, by osmosis, learned how to do it. and then I actually got over the hump of fearing it. So by I would volunteer a lot. So you know, Craig, director, say, okay, who’s gonna present the work tomorrow, when I go put up my hand and go. Okay, O’reilly’s gonna present the work. Who’s gonna present the strategy? Jill’s gonna and I would go home and just rock in the dark, because I’ve now put myself in a situation where I have to do it, but I did it so many times that I actually got over the hump of fearing it to actually looking forward to it.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Amazing.

O’Reilly: Introvert like me.That is a big journey. Situationally, specific extrovert.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. Oh, wow, wow! You just came in with the Zinger. So the most common answer that I get is like, I’m a recovered introvert. That’s some version of that, right like I was an introvert. But I overcame it, and I’m like introverts are the best listeners.

O’Reilly: Yeah, right. World needs, introverts. World needs. Yes. But your story, I’m sure, will inspire a lot of people, whether they’re an introvert or an extrovert or not

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Ok, so that wasn’t so rapid fire. But it was a very valuable story for everyone to hear. The second rapid fire question is. what are your communication, pet peeves?

O’Reilly: 1st of all, I think you touched on it, too. I think people don’t listen. I think listening is a big part of communicating like 2 monologues don’t make a dialog. Right? Yeah.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Very well put. You are going to be quoted on that, Terry.

O’Reilly: Yeah, I’ve seen, you know I I’ve been in so many meetings where somebody will ask a client a question and then answer it. Before the clients had a chance to add like again, it’s just a monologue, then. I think listening is a very underrated huge part of a great communicator is listening and know thy audience. The the Golden rule, you know. putting yourself in the shoes of who you’re talking to or imagining. It’s a funny thing, you know. If I’ll write an episode of our show. and I’ll send, you know. I’ll record my part, and the engineer puts it together, and we’ll talk about it. I’ll make a a list of revisions, sometimes 20 or 30 revisions long. because I’m I mean the weeds on it. and then I’ll listen to it, you know, over the course of that process like 6 times. and then I’ll then it’ll air on Cbc. And it feels completely different to me because I know a million people are listening to it. I’ll pick out little mistakes in it. Where I thought, how could I have missed that when I listened to it 6 times in a row.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Wow! So I just wanted to share with you that over the past several years people ask me all the time, what do you think communication superpowers are, what are the things we need to work on? And I would come up with a list of 3 depending on the person. The 3 most important things probably are confidence, listening and storytelling. Yeah, right? If you if you don’t have confidence, actually, you have nothing because you’re paralyzed to your point. And then, being a good listener, is a great next step, and then kind of the icing on the cake is becoming an eloquent or effective storytelling.

O’Reilly: It has to be. You know Theodore Levitt has that great line that I’ve stolen for decades, which is, people don’t buy 3 quarter inch drill bits. They buy 3 quarter inch holes, and you have to understand even not just brand advertising, but as a personal brand, or in a meeting or an exchange. You have to understand what it is. People are buying right. You have to listen to them and know what they want, and not just make it myopic in one way.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah. So this is what I handwrote in the front of the book. When when you you did that, you shared what the story in in the 1st chapter that you just shared here. And so I you know, I put the book down and I thought, what is talk about talk selling. is it communication skills, coaching? No. it’s actually selling confidence.

O’Reilly: That’s what it is. Exactly right. Takes a long time to get to that, though, doesn’t it? To peel that onion to get to that that word.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I love the metaphor peeling the onion. I’ve been dancing around that idea of confidence for years. So okay, the final rapid fire question, rapid fire question is there a podcast or a book that you’ve been recommending lately? Not not your books, not your podcast not my podcast something. Else out. There.

O’Reilly: I read so much. Oh, my goodness.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Do you? Oh, yeah, you have a book club. Yeah.

O’Reilly: Oh, yeah, and you can see. I don’t know if you can see behind me. I can’t see myself on the thing, but I mean, that’s just marketing books back there right.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

O’Reilly: Yeah. let me think about that for one second one podcast. It’s got nothing to do with marketing per se, that I love is the plot thickens from classic movies. So Ben make. That’s who I love. I just love his intro. If you ever watch that channel, he always does these really wonderful interviews? And or he’ll do great introductions to movies, old movies telling you what happened behind the scenes, etc. He has this great podcast called the Plot Thickens, where every season is about a different filmmaker or actor or actress, and it is absolutely rivetingly fascinating.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh. excellent! I will check it out, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.

O’Reilly: It’s really good. There’s 1 more, I’ll say, I’ll talk to you about just very quickly. here’s a a podcast. Series called, I think it’s called the bank robber diaries. I may have that name wrong, but they enter this whole series. They interview a, a a real-life, modern-day bank robber.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Oh!

O’Reilly: Robbed. I wanna say I may have my numbers wrong because I listened to the series a year or 2 ago. He may have robbed like 20 banks in California now, not some like now, and he tell he talks about how he does it. about how we. It was just a fascinating look into a, into a criminal mind that you would never normally get like. Here’s how I case a bank. Here’s how I make my getaway. Here’s where I parked my car because I had to run out with all the money, and I had to like. It was like just mind blowing to get inside the mind of someone like that, and then he’s he’s now, you know, re Beyond that he’s eventually an FBI guy caught him. He went to jail. Now he’s on the other side of that and he’s just. It’s a fascinating story.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: I was curious whether they were interviewing him in jail.

O’Reilly: Already done his time.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Done this time So. Is there anything else you want to leave with me? And the talk about talk listeners in terms of storytelling or personal branding or advertising.

O’Reilly: I think I think, above all, it’s it’s to be a wonderful storyteller. In my humble opinion. I just I think it’s you have to have an enormous sense of curiosity. I think you have to be curious about people and things, and why people do the things they do and and influences in the culture. And you know again, that’s about listening or asking the right questions. And I think really wonderful writers have this ability, Andrea, to be in a situation, then hover above it at the same time. So you know you’re having an exchange with your car mechanic, but you’re also watching it from above in the ceiling, because you’re watching the dynamics.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

O’Reilly: That I remember I I was getting my car fixed. am I? And I looked at the bill, and I had a heart attack. and my mechanic said to me, You know what it was really difficult, but you know I I didn’t even bill you for all our hours. It’s you lose, I lose. and I thought what a great way to sell a high, a high bill was to use the term you lose. I lose, and and then I as a writer, I hovered above that moment, you know, and I grabbed that moment to use elsewhere him and and I am always making notes by the way of things people tell me, or I make copious notes on every book I read. And I collect them all, and the great thing about being digitized is you can search anything, but I may not. I may find a wonderful story that someone’s told me, Andrea and I. I may not use that story for 5 years. but when I use that story it is the perfect story. For that moment.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Gosh!

O’Reilly: So, writer. I collect stories.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: So where do you put them?

O’Reilly: So on my computer, it’s on a hard drive in case my computer. you know, dies. But yeah, but even just book notes. I have probably 1,600 pages of book notes. So far.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Wow, incredible.

O’Reilly: Just pulling out little moments, little stories, little turns of phrase that I can attribute back to somebody. But, like, you know, you don’t buy through quarter and drill bits you buy through quarter inch holes, like all those little nuggets that just clarify.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Okay, I’m going to sneak one last question in, because, like, you’re basically serving this one to me. have you created a language model for AI based on all of your books and all of your podcast episodes. Because I feel like people would pay money to ask Terry. I have.

O’Reilly: Haven’t done anything like that.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Well, there’s an opportunity for you.

O’Reilly: AI is is kind of I’ve I’ve been stepping back from that just to see it unfold, because it’s so new to all of us.

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: Yeah.

O’Reilly: Yeah. Well. who knows?

Andrea Wojnicki – TalkAboutTalk: all right. Well, I want to thank you so much, Terry, for sharing your stories and your advice very much. I learned a lot, and I have learned so much over the years. And now I’m thrilled to share that with the talk about talk listeners. So thank you.

O’Reilly: Well, this has been a terrific conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Isn’t Terry great?  If you want to hear more of his voice, check out his “Under the Influence“ podcast. 

Thank you, Terry, for so graciously sharing your insights with us.  As you can probably tell, I had a lot of fun.  

Did you catch where I realized I was telling Terry a story that I learned from him?

Pretty funny. Probably the best implicit compliment ever, right?  Repeating a story back to someone that first shared the story with you. Hmm.

Anyway, now, as promised, I’d like to summarize three main points from our conversation:

1-Storytelling

Terry says that two things make for a great story:

And to be a wonderful storyteller Terry says you have to have an enormous sense of curiosity.

Curious about people and things. Listening and asking questions.

2-The power of overcoming obstacles or speedbumps to achieve success 

This is the main point of his latest book: “My best mistake”?

Terry talked about the example of how Steven Spielberg’s Jaws mishap (i.e. the mechanical shark rusting in the salt water) turned the movie into a long-lasting cultural icon.

Terry also specifically mentioned how that weakness, or obstacle ,or BUG of yours can become andintegral and compelling part of your of your personal brand. It’s what makes you unique.

3- peeling back the onion 

This idea of peeling back the onion – it could be for a product brand or for your personal brand. It’s about thinking deeply, peeling back the onion, regarding what business you’re really in. 

For example, Molson’s not in the beer business, rather it’s in the party business, 

and Michelin’s not in the tire business, rather they’re in the safety business. 

And Talk about Talk is not in the communication coaching business, rather it’s in the business of elevating your confidence.

Now ask yourself, what business are you REALLY in? 

OK – There were so many more rich points, but if I limit myself to three, its:

And  that’s it.  I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did,.

I put links to Terry’s podcast and his books in the shownotes. Please check them out.

Thank you again, Terry, it was wonderful to meet you and I loved our conversation.

Thank YOU so much for listening. Please let me know what you thought of this episode. Connect with me on LinkedIn and DM me there.  And talk soon!

The post Under the Influence with Storyteller Terry O’Reilly ep.173 appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Building your personal brand is about identifying and communicating your points of difference.  Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery joins Andrea to talk about why personal branding is so important and why many people hesitate or reject this whole premise of personal branding.

TAKE THE PERSONAL BRAND SELF-ASSESSMENT

RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

Particularly in today’s world. Avoiding personal branding is just really not an option.

That was Jill Avery, marketing professor at Harvard Business School and personal branding expert. Last year Jill co-authored a paper in Harvard Business Review called “A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand.”

Jill is not only a personal branding expert, she’s also a friend and a wonderful human. I can’t wait for you to her what she has to say share with us about personal branding. Let’s do this!

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #171 “Building Your Personal Brand with Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery”. In this episode, you’re going to learn why personal branding is so important – mandatory really, and also a few reasons why many people hesitate or even reject this whole premise of personal branding.

In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki please just call me Andrea. I’m your executive communication coach. I coach executives like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence and achieve your career goals. To learn more about me and what I do, check out my website, talkabouttalk.com where you can read about the coaching and workshops that I run. Plus there are a bunch of free resources for you there.

Ok, let’s get into this. I’m sure you want to hear from Jill. Here’s how this episode is going to go. After I introduce Jill, we’ll get right into the interview. Then at the end I’m going to summarize with the three learnings that I want to reinforce based on our conversation.

I met Jill over 20 yrs ago, when I was in my first year of the doctorate program at HBS. She was considering joining to program. We met and instantly hit it off. We quickly learned that we had similar backgrounds – we both worked in Consumer Packaged Goods (or CPG) marketing, she at Gilette and me at Kraft. We also both earned our MBAs, but we loved school and we both ultimately earned our doctorate.

Today, Jill Avery serves as a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. She’s a prolific and award-winning author of 100+ publications on branding, CRM (that’s cust relationship mktg), and digital marketing.

In addition to her role as a faculty member at HBS, Jill remains close to practice by serving as a board member, consultant, educator, and advisor to companies and their executives.

Yep, she’s qualified!

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Thank you so much, Jill, for being here today to talk with us about personal branding.

Jill: I’m thrilled to be here, Andrea. Thank you so much for having me, and it’s delightful to be working with you again.

Okay, let’s get right into this. My 1st question for you is with regards to the benefits of developing your personal brand you mentioned to me when we met that it seems to be a hot topic. It’s in demand with your Mba students and your Exec Ed students. why do you think that is what are the benefits of developing your brand.

Jill: I think there’s so many benefits for developing and managing your personal brand over time. And I I think this is why people are so excited about this topic right now, and a little anxious about it. As well. I to me the greatest benefit of personal branding is empowering yourself empowering yourself to to tell your own story. But you know, think about personal branding as giving you the opportunity to tell the story that you want to present to the world about who you are and what value you have to offer, and what difference you’d like to make in the world. and how you can create value for those around you. So to me, that’s that’s kind of the central reason to to do a personal branding effort. There’s lots of secondary effects. Things like enhancing your visibility in your field and and establishing yourself as an expert making yourself more memorable to the people that you meet, enabling you to fit in by communicating something about your legitimacy, to to be in a space, and enabling you to stand out by communicating what makes you different. What makes you unique in a certain group of of people? It’s about communicating your competitive edge. So you can expand your social network, open up new opportunities for yourself.  but I think not to be forgotten in all of this, because all of those sound, very professionally enriching, and and, you know, helpful for my career I personally believe that a personal branding journey is really about helping you uncover and celebrate and share the unique value that you offer to the world. It’s about self reflection, and and having the luxury of time for self reflection, and then being able to uncover and celebrate what makes you you. and effectively communicate that to people around you.

AW: Right? Right? So when I coach folks on their personal brand, I identify a bunch of strategic principles that we follow. and I have a feeling that these are going to align based on your Hbr article I know that they align with with what you think. If I had to choose one, though it’s about focusing on what makes you unique. And I’m wondering what you think about that. I have this saying that people seem to love. It’s unique is better than better.

Jill: Yeah, I think personal branding is about discovering what makes you unique. It’s about discovering what we’ll call in marketing your points of difference. What makes you stand out from others around you? I think, unfortunately, we’ve been socialized for so much of our life to try to fit in with others, to try to to assimilate or or blend, or make ourselves more like the people that that we surround ourselves with. When our real value as a person is about being different, being unique, seeing the world differently, approaching the world differently and creating value in a way that nobody else can. And for me, that’s what personal branding is all about. It’s about uncovering those differences. finding ways to make them valuable in helping us achieve our goals and finding ways to communicate those to people, so that they recognize those differences as valuable and as something that that can help them in their journey, as well.

AW: Right. So it’s what I’m hearing you say is, it’s about 1st identifying them and then creating a narrative around them right? And then consistently reinforcing them with your audience or your target market, you might want to say, Yeah.

Jill: Yeah, absolutely. And and you know, sometimes we think of our differences as deficits. I’m different than everybody else. But in personal branding. Those things are often the things that make you the most memorable or or the most willing to to stand out in a crowd. And so it’s finding how to turn differences into a positive story about how they have shaped you and how they help you contribute in a differential way.

AW:  So you’re making me think about Dei right? And and you know, over the last, let’s say 10 years. It’s it’s become a bigger part like it’s more often, for example, a topic in Hbr, and there are courses being taught on it. There’s all sorts of projects going on. Do you think that Dei might be fueling the interest in personal branding, or vice versa? Or are they just? Are they somehow related.

Jill: I think there’s been so much talk and conversation about diversity, equity, inclusion belonging. How do we bring our authentic selves to the office, and and what precludes us from from doing so. And I think it’s a really healthy conversation. What I find when I present my work on personal branding to diverse audiences. The people who are perhaps the most intrigued and the most agitated about what I have to say are often underrepresented minorities, whether that be women or people of color, or Lgbtq plus individuals. They come up to me after the presentation, and they say I’m fascinated.

But personal branding is really hard for me, because I don’t bring my authentic self to the office, or I often hide aspects of myself. And and how do I stop doing that. How do I present myself in a more authentic way that feels safe for me, and that helps me communicate my values. So I think, particularly for for people who feel underrepresented in a setting. Personal branding is even more important because you want to be the one to tell your story. You don’t want other people.

Jill: Narrating your story for you if you will. So so I think it’s more important. One of my top episodes of the over 160 episodes to date is called controlling your narrative.

AW: And it’s really about that. And people tell me that they find it really empowering. And it’s for that reason, right? Sometimes there’s this other saying that I’m hearing a lot lately these days. It’s it’s not a bug. It’s a feature. right? So you can take what you may have thought was a bug. It could be a personality trait it could be. It could be something you were born with, or something that developed over time, or whatever it is. It’s a you think it’s a bug, or people tell you it’s a bug, and you can you know, turn it within reason. You can turn it into a feature by controlling the narrative around it and establishing it and reinforcing it as part of your personal brand.

Jill: Absolutely. I think a big part of personal branding is what I’ll call embracing your blemishes, finding those things that are different about you, and that you may have hidden in the past because you might have been anxious about them, and finding ways to turn those blemishes into something more memorable about you.

AW: Beautiful. I love that embellishing your blemishes. Love it so. You said that it may be an even more powerful exercise. I’m paraphrasing, but it may be an even more powerful exercise for folks who do already have unique characteristics about them, and and they may have been hesitant to do so. Let’s shift that now to what about junior folks who are more early in their career versus the senior leaders. for whom is personal branding more important? Or is it the same.

Jill: I I don’t ever like to answer a question with both. But I’m gonna say, both here, Andrea, I think early in your career. You need to think about your personal brand as a somewhat blank slate. Right? You. You haven’t started to fill up the narratives or communicate the narratives about who you are and what you have to offer your resume, if you will, is a little sparse, your Linkedin profile a little empty so early in your career. You’re looking for opportunities to begin to tell your story, to begin to establish your credibility, to build connections. Think about early in your career as making a 1st impression, and we know in communication the importance of 1st impressions and managing them strategically. So as a a new employee. Everything you do is being watched and observed and assessed and evaluated. And so everything matters when, when you’re early in your career. but later in your career, personal branding and the need for it doesn’t end, I think, of personal branding as an ongoing journey, of negotiating and renegotiating our personal brand with others around us and that renegotiation needs to happen over your lifetime. Because you’re not the you that you were yesterday. You’re changing, you’re growing, you’re developing. So there’s new narratives. There’s new attributes. There’s new value to be communicating to the world.

I think the other thing for senior leaders is to remember that while you’re focused on promoting your personal brand in doing so, especially if you do so authentically, genuinely, with humility, with vulnerability. You’re creating the conditions and the culture at work to allow others on your team to bring their authentic selves to work. The more vulnerable you can be in your personal branding effort as a senior leader, the more it makes it okay for everyone on the team to express who they are and their individuality and the value that they’d like to to bring.

AW: That is such a good point. That’s such a good point. I also share your opinion that it’s important throughout your career. You know you and I both have kids in their twenties, and 1st impressions are really important. You need to nail yourself introduction and then follow up by reinforcing that said, it is a lovely time when you can experiment right. And I sometimes say, and when I’m doing workshops in particular, I say the most common mistake people make with their brand copying others. But it’s kind of okay to do that early in your career, because you’re experimenting with different. If you want to call them personas or points of difference. And and we’re social learners. Right? We look around. We see other people who are successful. Oh, I’m going to try what she tried, or I’m going to try what he tried. and see if that works for me, and how it feels when you get to be a middle manager and definitely a senior manager. You’re never going to reach your potential. I don’t think, unless again, you’re really celebrating what makes you unique. Right?

Jill: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said, though, in personal branding for modeling after others. Right? If I if I think about my personal brand. It’s definitely influenced by many of the mentors that I’ve had in both my professional and and personal life. Not that I’m embodying or trying to be someone else. But I’ve picked up tips and tricks and strategies along the way that I’ve incorporated, and that I enact authentically in my brand that help me be the person that I am today. So so I think that practicing modeling is is an important part of of exploring your personal brand.

AW: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. While we’re celebrating our uniqueness. we are social learners. and we should be unapologetic about taking advice that we or or modeling other successful folks. Again, the the word, though, is that you used is authentic, right? It needs to feel true to you. You’re not trying to act a certain way you’re like, Oh, that’s interesting. I’m going to try that right? Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting balance. So a couple of times. You’ve said the word points of difference, and it just reminds me, back in the day you and I both worked in consumer packaged goods. and then we shifted to Academia. And now you’re you’re teaching in the Mba program in the Exec Ed program, and I’m coaching folks. And but we still have this Cpg background.

Jill: We do?

AW: The advertising brief. Do you remember writing that document like this is the brand name? The brand personality is this, the brand values are this. Here’s the benefit. Here’s the differentiator. Here’s all these, all these things. So do perfect analogy like, can we take product, brand strategy document and use it to fill in what our personal brand is.

Jill: So I think there’s a lot of points of overlap between marketing products and brands and marketing people. And when I started approaching this area of research. I relied upon the the big body of research that we have in the product and brand area for branding versus the people branding area which was more underdeveloped.

So I think there are concepts that transfer incredibly well, I’ll talk about one step in the personal branding process as creating a personal value proposition. And that’s a 4 part strategic statement that looks just like a customer value proposition. So if you take my Mba marketing course, you’d be like, I recognize that. And I think it translates really well, it it encourages us to focus on who is our audience? Who are we branding for and to to focus on the people on the other side of the table. It enables us to think about that point of difference or that unique value claim that we’d like to make and it helps us understand that we do that in the context of competition. And it allows us to imagine the evidence or the proof points that we need to put forward. So there’s a nice parallel between the world of products and people. But there, I think there’s 1 really important difference between marketing, a product and marketing a person.

Jill: And that is that we are human and we act human. And that means we make mistakes, and we sometimes act off brand and we do things that aren’t always accretive to our brand or creating brand equity in a more positive way. And so when we’re managing a personal brand, we have to get good at managing inconsistencies or multiple identities. I think there’s you know, there’s there’s other things that get in the way of personal branding that we just don’t have to worry about on the product branding side things like we’re personally and psychologically invested in ourselves to the point where we’re biased. We can’t easily see our weaknesses. So when we do a personal brand audit on us.

We we can’t really interpret the data well by ourselves. We might need other people to come in and and help us interpret that so so because it’s us, and because we’re human. We, you know, it is a little bit different from marketing products and and regular.

AW: I can see that it would be so. I was thinking as humans, no matter what, every day that goes by. We’re also aging. But but so is a brand right like you. You could, if you were forced to. You could even say what what you were just talking about is is similar to like a brand transgression, right?

Jill: It is, it is. We have brand crises in both personal branding and in product branding, that that we need to manage and and negotiate our ways our way through.

AW: Yeah, yeah, so it’s like, it’s a force fit. But I love. I love your point. It’s actually the difference is that we’re human. And the box of tide on the shelf is not.

Jill: Yes, and so it’s much easier to manage the brand of a box of tide, because tide doesn’t act up over time.

AW: Much easier, but not nearly as satisfying.

Jill: Exactly.

AW: Again, we’re self-interested. So okay, I love it. I love it. When you and I met Jill we were talking about how, in both of our experiences. We found it really interesting that some people are hesitant to develop their brand right? It’s like they they put up a bit of a wall. Can you share with us? What? What your experience of what you’ve heard from people who are, who have this hesitation.

Jill: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of anxiety. There’s a lot of frustration out there about the need for personal branding. Even myself every semester my Mba students would come to me and say, Professor Avery, you know this course was really interesting, but do you have anything on personal branding. And I would be like. Yeah, we well, I don’t do that. I you know, I market products and and brands. I don’t market people. And I had this like sense of uncomfortableness about it, that that it was fundamentally different. And as I present this work to audiences, I often have people who sit in the audience with arms crossed, you know, shaking their head, disagreeing with me, and they come up afterwards, and and they start to argue that they don’t want to be a personal brand. They don’t want to feel commercialized by this, that they just want to act authentically. They just want to present themselves without having to be strategic or intentional about this. So so it feels to some people false. It feels like they’re an actor on a stage rather than just being themselves in in life. I think the other point of uncomfortableness comes from the fact that we’ve grown up in a world where we’ve been socialized to not toot our own horns. We’ve been socialized to be humble or demure or not not really tell people what we have to offer. And so there’s a social reticence to personal branding. As well.

And then there’s other people who have seen people’s efforts at personal branding that have gone awry, and you know some people do this in a very inauthentic way, or smarmy way, or they’re too sales mini, and it feels uncomfortable, and and people don’t want to be perceived as as that themselves. And then I think, there’s there’s some people who don’t like caring about what others think of them. They don’t like that concept that other people are always judging them. And so they say, I I don’t care about managing my personal brand. I am who I am, and I don’t care how you perceive me. And with those people I often say, great you be you. But remember that a lot of your professional and personal goals rely upon other people. And so you must think about how you’re communicating your value to those people if you need them, in achievement of of your your professional or personal goals. So so I find that one interesting. It is. I I think that the getting us through this getting us through the anxiety and the uncomfortableness really important, Andrea, it’s it’s about finding a way to do personal branding in a way that feels true and authentic and not smartmy.

Jill: It’s a way to, you know. Put your story out there, but in a way that allows you to do that naturally, so that you can enact it in every touch, point in every day of your life, without like effortful thinking and strategy for it.

Jill: So the the effort and personal branding, I think, has to come at the beginning of the process where you’re uncovering and refining your stories. The enactment of those stories should feel natural and authentic. Otherwise my opinion you’re doing it wrong.

AW:  Yeah, I owe Jill. This is music to my ears. So so much of what you’re saying, I say in just in different words. It’s 2 steps. The 1st is articulating or creating, and the second step is communicating, and then there’s the updating. If if there was a 3rd step, it’s of course it’s constantly evolving most coaches and probably even faculty that are focused on personal branding don’t spend enough time on Step One. They they shift right to, you know, finding social media followers, or whatever step one is really like you, said the self-discovery where you identify what makes you unique. And so I say, garbage in garbage, out quality in quality out, let’s spend 75% of our time focused on the articulation and and creating the narrative that is authentic to you, and then step 2 is so much easier. It’s so easy.

Jill: I know. Matt, I told you that I actually have had this experience a couple times when people have hired me to coach them over the course of, say, 6 months. And so we we create a plan. Of course, the the plan changes over time. But we create a plan of the topics that we’re going to cover. And it’s all the usual things that you would think about from a communication coach. Right? It’s confidence and listening and storytelling and formal presentations, and so on.

AW: And then personal branding, so creating your personal brand, and then communicating your personal brand, and a couple times when these folks have then gone to their managers to get approval. The man it has happened where the managers have said all the topics look great except personal branding. Take that off. So then I said, Okay, well, let’s call it something different. Let’s call it professional identity.

Jill: Yeah. About, you know, identifying your unique and authentic strength so that you can focus your career in those areas and your value to the organization. And then suddenly, it’s approved. Right? So.

Jill: Fascinating.

AW: Has baggage.

Jill: It has the word brand has baggage, and I and I think it goes back to that. I don’t want to be a commercial product. I want to be a human. I want to be a person. And so sometimes I’ll I’ll talk about this. If people are uncomfortable with the word branding. I’ll talk about this as discovering and communicating your personal narratives. This is about storytelling and and getting people comfortable with uncovering. composing, and and creating the stories that that make them them, and then communicating those.

AW: Beautiful, beautiful. So I call them themes. I like calling them stories. That’s that’s wonderful. So some people have different. It’s not to say, other people’s definition is wrong. It’s just that’s not what what you and I are talking about. We’re not talking about monetizing people. We’re not talking about creating different people right? Or changing a person. It’s it’s discovering their stories. I really like that. So so separate from that misconception. Are there any mistakes, or maybe other misconceptions that you have witnessed that people make when they’re developing and managing their personal brand.

Jill: There’s a few common mistakes that that people make in personal branding, I I think. The one, and it stems from the anxiety and the hesitation that we’ve been talking about. Andrea is having an underdeveloped or insufficient personal brand and you know, this might be characterized by a person who says, Oh, I I just I don’t have a Linkedin profile.

And in today’s world, not having a Linkedin profile, says something about your personal brand. You know you can’t avoid having a personal brand like it or not. In professional and personal settings. We all have a personal brand, and everything we do or don’t do, contributes to the building of of that brand. So if we make a conscious choice to really disengage from personal branding that builds our personal brand, but not in a way that’s that’s very advantageous for us. So so be careful about opting out of, you know personal branding activities that most people are are engaged in.

AW: A long time ago, years ago, I wrote an blog and an email newsletter about you know this, this main point, that we all have a brand whether we choose to strategically manage it or not, and you might be surprised at how easy and even enjoyable or satisfying it is to do some of that discovery work and then develop your brand. And I said, the analogy is your credit rating. so you have a brand whether you choose to manage it or not. You also have a credit rating, and you can ignore your credit rating, but your credit rating doesn’t go away, and it it can, and probably will affect you when you’re, you know, making a major purchase, or even getting a job right?

Jill: Yeah, that’s a great analogy.

AW: An hour.

Jill: It’s, you know, particularly in today’s world. Avoiding personal branding is just really not an option. And I’m not sure it ever has been. You know, people point to the rise of social media as building up the hype of personal branding. But we’ve always had a need for personal branding. We’ve always had a need to communicate the value that we bring to the world. So our medium is different in the way that we communicate it. We use, you know, online and and social media and other digital technologies to help us. But we’ve always done this work. And there’s always been a need for this work.

AW: We’ve always had a reputation or an identity. Right? So when I’m working with my clients on defining first, st what personal brand is it is, if you, I say to them, if you’re thinking reputation and identity, you’re bang on. That’s really what we’re talking about.

Jill: Exactly, exactly.

AW: On that I hope so.

Jill: Yeah, I. I explain it to my students as the image that other people hold about you in their head. And that image is very impactful because it it affects the way people perceive. You understand, you value, you experience you. It’s it really molds a lot of the way people interact with you. And so it’s important for us to care about. That brand that exists. you know. It’s it’s funny to think about our personal brand as something that we can curate and try to manage and shepherd. But it actually doesn’t belong to us. It exists in the minds of other people.

AW: Oh, very well, put Jill. You are going to be quoted on that that is, I would say, a lovely I need to think of the word a lovely. not interpretation. Actually, that is, I think, a very eloquent interpretation of Jeff Bezos. Quote where he says, your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room. So that used to be my definition that I used with my clients. And and I said, it’s now it’s more like a mental exercise. Right? What is your boss and your boss’s boss saying about you when they’re meeting to talk about promotions. and your name comes up in conversation. What do they think? And what do they say? That’s your brand? And then I see the looks on people’s faces like -oh! And I say, this is all good. There are things that you aspire to. There are things that you’re working on, and there’s things that you are that they don’t know yet, and we can. We can work with all of that. So.

Jill: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that points to one of the other mistakes that people make often in personal branding where they think it’s all about me. It’s all about what I want to say, and you know who I am and how I project that to the world.

Yes, it is about you, but it’s about you in relation to other people, and the value that you want to deliver to other people. And so the best personal branders are the ones who really get into the heads of their audience, who understand the person on the other side of the table, and all of the misconceptions or stereotypes, or existing brand associations, that they might already hold about you. and then using your personal branding efforts to change their minds, to adjust that story and renegotiate your personal brand with those people over time. Now, is it all people do. I need to care about what everybody thinks about me? No, I just need to care about the people who are important to my goals, and that might be people at work, people in at home. But if someone’s important to me and and important to the achievement of my goals. Then I do need to care about what, how they perceive me and and what my personal brand is in their mind.

AW: This morning I had a coaching call with a client. and we were kicking off the personal branding stuff, and he started making some comments about his response to things that were going on in some meetings. and I said to him, You sound like you’re very self-aware, but externally self-aware. So you are consciously thinking about what other people are saying and doing, what your response is to them, and how your response is interpreted by them. You have this high external self-awareness, I said, most of us have pretty high if we’re successful anyway, high internal self-awareness, and we call that self-awareness right? But we may be less conscious of our external self-awareness. And I think what you’re describing is shifting the lens from. I know who I am to. What do other people think about me. It’s almost like it’s less selfish. right? It’s less myopic.

Jill: It’s almost like you’re having a meta understanding of the social interaction. Right? You’re you’re understanding how you’re acting, how that’s being perceived by the other person, and how that perception is going to affect the opportunities that you have to create value in the world. And so it’s it’s having other awareness. But it’s also having a more sophisticated social awareness of how your actions insight, response in someone else and how that’s going to cause their actions to be different towards you.

AW: Over time consistently reinforcing those things. So it just becomes like they don’t think about it. You walk in the room. They know exactly what they’re getting right.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AW: Okay, are you ready for the 3 rapid fire questions.

Jill: Yes, I am.

AW: Okay, I love it. They don’t need to be that rapid fire.

Jill: I know rapid fire questions always scare me. I don’t know why.

AW: The 1st question is, are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Jill: Oh, I think I’m an extroverted introvert. You know, as a professor I I speak in public every day, but I still get nervous before every class. And you know I I it’s it’s amazing to my students to see that and to hear that. And and they say, But you seem so calm, and I’m like no inside. I am shaking every time I have to do public speaking.

AW: So that’s why you do so well, Jill, because you have positive energy. That’s that’s what I tell my clients. When you feel that adrenaline in your. I feel it in my chest, too.

AW: Don’t think oh, no, I’m nervous. Think? Yes, now I’ve got the positive energy to go out there and knock it out of the park, and that’s what you do.

Jill: Yes, definitely. 1 1 of my colleagues at Harvard Business School, Allison Wood, Brooks, has a fascinating piece of research that teaches managers to reframe nervousness to excitement, to enhance their performance. And so I’m not nervous. I’m excited, says Alison.

AW: Being excited. It makes you smile when you say it right. I mean.

Jill: Exactly exactly, and I think you know I don’t think the anxiety will ever go away for me, but I think I’ve learned how to manage that anxiety in my communication practices, and so I’m an over preparer for any public speaking engagement that I have, and I write down notes, and I bring those notes into the classroom, and I lay them out on the table.

But once I start speaking I never look at the notes. It’s just a security blanket for me that I know, no matter what happens, whatever contingency happens, I’m prepared. And so that’s just one of my practices that I put in place to help me manage that anxiety.

AW: Sounds familiar. Jill.

Jill: Okay.

AW: Question number 2, what are your communication, pet peeves?

Jill: Oh, definitely, when my students start a comment with quote, this may be wrong, but. And I hate that you’ve just undermined your credibility. When you start a statement with that I want my students to speak with confidence. I want them to defend their ideas and and stand behind them when you lead off with. This might be wrong, or what I might be wrong. You’re sandbagging yourself. You’re you’re you’re making your audience, not listen as intently or not. Take your recommendation as seriously. So start strong. Finish, strong. Don’t sandbag.

AW: I love it. It’s the whole apologetic language thing right? And they, you know, the research shows that women use more apologetic language, and they preface their recommendation or their comment with. Can I just say a question, can I just say something? Or this might be wrong, but, like, just stop.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, no. Buts. Just make your recommendation confidently.

AW: Not just the recommendation that suffers the person. Actually, because you’re everything you say, you’re reinforcing something. You’re signaling something to other people about your brand about your credibility. Right?

Jill: Yup, it’s a it’s a weak posturing rather than a strong posturing.

AW: Beautiful okay. Last question is there a podcast or a book that you’ve find yourself recommending lately.

Jill: I am super excited about a book and it’s called Breaking Glass Tales from the Witch of Wall Street, and it’s authored by Patricia Walsh Chadwick, who actually is a colleague of mine from one of the corporate boards that I sit on. It’s a fascinating memoir. It’s a hero’s journey about a woman who grew up in a religious cult, who was expelled from the cult at age 17, with no education, no money, no place to live. and who worked herself up from that beginning as a receptionist in a brokerage firm to become a senior partner on Wall Street, breaking all kinds of glass ceilings having lots of trials and tribulations and adventures along the way. And I I love this book. It’s a story about perseverance. Patricia’s a fantastic storyteller. And this is a book that is also also a great social history of the 19 seventies, eighties, and nineties on Wall Street so highly recommend it.

I cannot wait to listen to it or read it. I’ve been listening to books lately, so oh, I can’t wait. I’m going to download it right now. Thank you so much.

Jill: I guess I would just leave you with. I know personal branding is a little scary. It might feel a little uncomfortable at first, st but I actually believe it’s the greatest gift you can give to yourself that time for self reflection that time to uncover and celebrate the real you, and that time to start owning the narratives that you’re putting out there in the world. Jill: All of that is going to help you make the difference that you’d like to make in the world. so just do it.

Thank you so much, Jill.

Jill: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

I could have gone on and on in that conversation, but I have to respect your time and Jill’s. So now, I’m going to quickly summarize with three of the themes or learnings here that I want to reinforce for you.

The first point is what I refer to as the most important strategic principles of personal branding – focusing on what makes you unique. Jill refers to it as your POINT OF DIFFERENVCE. She said, QUOTE:

Personal Branding is about discovering what we’ll call in marketing your points of difference. What makes you stand out from others around you? I think, unfortunately, we’ve been socialized to fit in with others, to make ourselves more like other people. Our real value as a person is about being different, being unique, seeing the world differently, approaching the world differently and creating value in a way that nobody else can.

And I loved her point about how we often think of our differences as deficits. Instead, she encourages us to… Embrace your blemishes. Maybe even embellish your blemishes. That’s what makes you memorable. It might even be how you add value.

The second point I want to reinforce from our conversation is that yes, we can take most of the tenets of product branding and apply them to ourselves as personal brands. We have points of different, and target markets and competition. But there is one critically important difference. Managing a person brand is more complicated because we’re human, We are complicated. Managing a product brand (like Tide laundry detergent) is much easier than managing a personal brand, but not nearly as satisfying. If you take the time and effort to focus on developing your brand, you’ll be amazed at the traction you get.

The 3rd and last point that I want reinforce is Jill’s reminder for leaders. She highlited how senior leaders should remember that while theyre focused on promoting their personal brand, they’re creating the conditions and the culture that allows others on their team to bring their authentic selves to work. She said QUOTE

“ The more vulnerable you can be in your personal branding effort as a senior leader, the more it makes it okay for everyone on the team to express who they are and their individuality and the value that they’d like to to bring.”

OK – that’s it for this episode!

.Thanks again to Jill for sharing her thoughts and expertise on personal branding. I loved every minute of our conversation, as I’m sure you could tell. I hope you too enjoyed listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will refer it to one of your friends, and I also hope you’ll leave a review on Apple, Spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening. Talk soon!

The post Building Your Personal Brand with Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery (ep.172) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Seth Godin, famed author, blogger, and podcaster shares his wisdom on what communication skill we should work on, the issue with authenticity for professionals, and a new definition of personal branding. Let’s make a ruckus!

BOOKS BY SETH GODIN

RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

That, as you can probably guess, from the title of this episode, is Seth Godin. And he’s on a mission, encouraging us all to make a ruckus.  To make a generous contribution to the world.  To change the world for the better. 

Whether it’s in one of his books, in his blog, or in this conversation you’re about to hear, Seth Godin always makes me think about things in new ways. Take, for example, Seth’s answer to the first rapid fire question that I ask every guest: “Are you an introvert or an extrovert?”  Seth had the most unique answer to this Q that I’ve ever heard :

I never thought of it that way before, did you? You know, most of the smart guests I interview tell me they’re an introvert. So maybe he’s right. We’re evolving to all be introverts. I guess I really am an anomaly. And now I know why cocktail parties without alcohol don’t work very well.

Are you keen to learn more from Seth? Let’s do this!

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #171 “Making a ruckus with Seth Godin”. In this episode, you’re gonna learn what communication skill Seth thinks we should work on, a new definition of personal branding, and why we all need to choose our genre – amongst other things.

In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki please just call me Andrea. I’m your executive communication coach. I coach executives like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence and clarity, establish credibility, and ultimately achieve your career goals. Sound good? To learn more about me and what I do, head over to talkabouttalk.com and you can read about the coaching and workshops that I run. Plus there are a bunch of free resources for you at the bottom of the takaboutalk.com homepage.

Ok, let’s get into this. I’m sure you want to hear from Seth. Here’s how this episode is going to go. After I introduce Seth, we’ll get right into the interview. Then at the end I’m going to summarize with the three learnings that I want to reinforce based on our conversation. Three things that I hope you’ll take away and that I hope will help you in your quest to make a ruckus.

Seth has been on my radar since I was a brand manager early in my career, and I read his book called “Purple Cow.” That book is just one of the 21 books that have been bestsellers around the world and that have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and of course Purple Cow. His book, “This Is Marketing,” was an instant bestseller around the world. Recently, he organized the all-volunteer community project called The Carbon Almanac. In 2023, he wrote, The Song of Significance, which is already a bestseller, and I strongly recommend it if you are a leader of any kind, or if you seek to become one. I’ll leave links to all of these books in the shownotes. Yes, Seth is prolific.

Seth also creates impact. His blog (which you can find by typing “seth” into Google) is one of the most popular in the world.

But back to Seth. In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. More than 40,000 people have taken the powerful Akimbo workshops he founded, including the altMBA The Marketing Seminar, and yes, “The Podcasting Fellowship.”

I have to tell you, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Just ask my family. Anyway, one of my favourite episodes of all time is a relatively recent episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast where he interviews Seth. Seth is irreverent, wise, and inspiring. It was when I was listening to Seth provide advice to Tim Ferriss, that I decided to finally ask Seth if I could interview him.

My goal here is to ask Seth new and different questions that I haven’t heard him answer on other podcasts. Things like, “do you think about your personal brand?” and “What do you think is the most important communication skill?”

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

AW: you ready.

Seth:Born, ready.

AW: Nice.  Thank you so much, Seth, for joining us here today to talk about making a ruckus.

Seth:Well, thank you for having me and for showing up hundreds of times. This podcasting thing takes a lot, and I appreciate you beating.

AW: Well, as I said, I know that your podcasting fellowship was a catalyst for me in making this happen. So I am very grateful for that. And even before the podcasting fellowship, Seth, I always thought that I had read most of your books in the last couple weeks since you agreed to do this interview. I did a little bit of research, and I found a list of well over 80 books that you have written. and that list did not even include the Carbon Almanac, or this is strategy.

Seth:Well, I didn’t write the Carbon Almanac, but many of the books you’re talking about are from my early career as a book packager. and if you’re doing your job right as a book packager, you’re not writing every word. every book beginning with permission, marketing. I wrote every word. There are also books. Before that I wrote every word. But I don’t have a team anymore. I used to have a team.

AW: Okay, I know. I looked back at your bio, and I saw that you were in the publishing space, and I thought that explains some of it, but still.

Seth:Yeah. It’s a lot.

AW: Seth, you are absolutely prolific. And I have a question for you about this body of work that you’ve created. The question is, how would you characterize or summarize or label what your body of work represents? And let let’s say, your recent body of work. Maybe, since purple cal.

Seth: Well

AW: I hope I’m making a ruckus. That’s very aspirational. A couple of months ago I listened to one of my favorite interviews of you, which was, I think, a walk and talk that you did with Tim Ferris, and I took some notes from that that I wanted to follow up with you on. One of the questions that I wanted to ask you is about again defining something, but you use the term genre. And I was wondering if you could share your take on genre.

Seth:Well, genre gets a bad rap because of generic but they’re not really related. Genre is essential at a bookstore, because the mysteries have to be next to the mysteries and not mix in with the cookbooks. Because if you’re going to buy a mystery, you want a book that’s in the mystery genre. Now, that doesn’t mean all mysteries are the same, but it means they rhyme with each other, and they allow us to make predictions and to sort without wasting all of our time. So we can agree, I hope, that books have a genre but so do charities, so do political causes, so do people we go on dates with, so do restaurants. If you go to an Ethian or Opian restaurant and they serve you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It might be a very good peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But you’re not happy because you went to an Ethiopian restaurant and so with lots of people who I work with, who are creatives. They seem to think it’s a badge of honor to have no genre. And to say, this is for everyone. It’s really important. and what I say to them is, if you don’t have a genre you will be ignored.

AW: Beautiful. a lot of my work has evolved from focusing on improving communication skills to helping people identify their unique passions and expertise and superpowers, and I call it their personal brand, or in the context of executives, their professional identity. And one thing that really gets a lot of traction is helping people identify what their archetype is

Seth:Hmm.

AW: People love being diagnosed, and then it’s not that there’s a better or a worse archetype. I think the power is  seeing yourself, and then understanding yourself and focusing, and then being the best version of that that you can be. I’m curious if you think about your personal brand, Seth.

Seth:Well, because I’ve been in the marketing business for a long time. I take the word, brand very seriously. Tom Peters wrote the very 1st breakthrough article about personal branding, in FastCompany. Exactly the same day that I wrote the 1st book on personal branding called, Get what you deserve. and.

AW: 1,997.

Seth:Something like that. It’s a long time ago.

AW: And it would. 84

Seth: What’s a brand? A brand is a promise. It’s what we expect from you. So a logo is not a brand. All the stuff you think is important is not a brand, brand is what other people think you’re going to do next. And so the story that I tell is Hyatt and Nike both have Logos. But if Hyatt hotels announced the line of sneakers, we have no idea what it would be like. But if Nike announced that they were going to open a hotel. We all know what it would be like because Nike has a brand and high, it doesn’t. So most people have worked very hard to have a brand of They do what you ask them to most of the time, and you have to pay them. Yeah, that’s it. right that you know you go to see a podiatrist. The podiatrist is going to fix your foot, but that’s it. That’s their brand. It’s not the clothes you wear. It’s how do you act in a way that changes what people expect from you? Right? And a very personal, simple example is, if you were coming to my house for dinner tonight? Would I expect that you would be bringing about online. or would I expect that you would be ridiculously over the top and bring me this and this and this, and this, and I’d be like, wait, wait! What’s going on here? This is too much that could be your brand, then that’d be a good thing. It could just be a thing. And so when we want to not be a commodity, an easily replaceable cog. we have to stand for something. and once you choose to stand for it, it helps to stand for it all the time

AW: Right in all ways. You, you said. It’s not how you dress. Actually, I would say how you dress is one of the ways that you reinforce that brand. Right? Do you agree.

Seth:It depends on whether you’re fashion designer or not. Let’s say I need somebody to build a deck on my back porch. I don’t care what they wear, and they may have a ridiculous article of clothing on. It probably won’t affect what I was looking for when I was hiring someone to build the deck. So what you wear only matters to the extent like these glasses I’m wearing. They’re my logo. They’re not my brand that when someone is reading one of my blog posts or books, they’re not saying, Oh, I can hear the yellow glasses. No, that’s not the case. The logo is just a signifier to, you know. So you know it’s me.

AW: Interesting. I think a logo could be inconsistent with your brand, though right. Of course you can have a logo, you know. this is a great experiment. Think really hard about 2 really? Well done. Logos. Okay, you got them in mind. Gay. Yeah.

Seth: Are they for terrible, terrible products.

AW: No, they’re for excellent products.

Seth:Right. Everyone always picks Logos that they associate with excellent products. The fact is, the Starbucks logo is terrible. Terrible. There’s nothing good. It’s hard to reproduce. People think she’s naked, but maybe she’s not, and her hair is a mess, and what is that, and the Starbucks name is terrible. It has the word bucks in the title for an expensive place. None of it makes sense, but people love the experience. So they’ve now decided they like the logo.And yes, it is possible to slap an average logo on a great brand. But if you think about it. like Patagonia, is one of my favorite brands, the logo. It’s memorable, but it’s not. It doesn’t match their brand. 140

AW: True. true. So your previous comment reminded me of the famous quote from Jeff Bezos, where he says your brand is what other people say and think about, say about you when you’re not in the room. right? It’s really about your identity which may or may not have something to do with the yellow glasses that you’re wearing right like when I think about Seth, I picture you in yellow or orange glasses right? And sharing expertise about how to make a ruckus.

Seth:Well, I would argue that my brand is different than my logo. because most of the time. if people have me show up in the room. They expect me to do 2 things one say something that is both true and surprising at the same time and 2 be pretty kind and there are plenty of people in my line of work who are not kind. and there are plenty of people in my line of work who say things that are not surprising. So I am distinguished from those people by those 2 things.

AW: I love that I love that that’s like the intersection I was just listening to. This is marketing for at least the second time. Maybe the 3rd time. And you talk about what’s what’s on the X axis? What’s on the y axis right? And plotting. And and I even do this actually with my clients when we’re talking about their archetypes, and I used to say, identify the one archetype that represents you. And now it’s like the intersection of 2 can often be at least as powerful. I think that’s a huge insight, I mean, the consultants would be laughing at us right like. Of course it’s a 2 by 2. It’s always a 2 by 2, but.

Seth:And consultants are up, and consultants are always laughing at it.

AW: Yeah, yeah, I guess I guess. So I want to shift into communication a little bit. So my, this podcast talk about talk is really targeted to growth-minded executives who are trying to grow their career. And they have this idea, this epiphany that communication skills, are going to help them get there, right? Based on your observations and conversations? What communication skills do you think are the most important? Maybe it could be that they’re the most lacking. But the most important communication skills that we should be focusing on.

Seth:I think the biggest problem most people have is they don’t actually want to communicate that they so semiotics is the science of flags and signals. If you can watch a movie with the sound turned off and understand what’s going on. It’s a pretty well made movie. I guess the symbols and the signs are expressing themselves. If you get on an airplane and someone who works there is pointing with that 2 finger point in each direction, you know in whatever language they’re talking exactly what they’re doing. You know it by heart. but lots of times we’re hiding. We are talking, talking, talking, talking, but we are hiding because we don’t actually want to be seen, because it’s scary to be seen. We don’t actually want to make a point, because then we’d have to be responsible for it. So that’s why, when you call a big company, and they have all this gobbled ego gobbledygook gobbledy book that they just said to you on the phone instead of just saying, Yeah, it’s broken. right? Because they don’t want to say, Yeah, it’s broken. And so the hardest part for me when I see people who have trouble communicating, I think the hardest part is, people don’t actually want to be heard, so they’re afraid to directly say what they mean.

AW: Wow! Okay, that blows me away. Let me tell you. The typical answer that I hear is Oh, it’s confidence, or Oh, it’s precision. Or Oh, it’s storytelling. One answer to the question that gets a lot of traction also is listening. And I thought, that’s where you were headed at first, st right? We think we’re communicating. But we’re not really communicating because we’re not listening. And you’re saying, no, it is actually about amplifying what you’re saying. But people are. It’s almost like they’re afraid to put their stake in the ground. Yeah. okay, I’m going to do some thinking about that. I was just listening to. A new book called Executive Presence 2.0. Where the author talks about Sylvia Ann Hewitt. She talks about how the 3 ingredients to executive presence are communication skills, gravitas, and showing up. and people that have these things and have exceptional executive presence, are the people who put their stake in the ground and say what they mean, and back it up. They make the tough decisions.

Seth: Yeah, I think it’s very important to realize that there are 8 billion people on Earth. Nobody is for everything. No one is for everyone you need to find your people. So I don’t go to Paul Weber’s anymore. Because Weber sells hamburgers. I haven’t had meat in 40 years. I can’t even smell the place right. And if I said Paul Webber, you gotta stop doing that. Start serving kale milkshakes instead made with oat milk. They should appropriately say, there’s a place 5 miles up Highway 11. You can go, you know. We don’t do that here and a key part of communicating is, I’m speaking to people who speak this language, who wanna go in that direction, who believe this sort of thing? And if you’re not one of those people, you might be in the wrong room

AW: So that relates to another topic that I wanted to ask you about this. I don’t know if it’s tension or integration, maybe between authenticity and consistency. I love how you, Seth, define these terms, and then talk about how they’re the same and different from each other, and how people may confound them. Yeah, I have a whole rant about authenticity, as you know.

Seth: you and I do not know each other well, so I have no idea if you’re having a good day or not. because you’re a professional. If you were showing up authentically, and your cat had just thrown up behind the refrigerator, and there, you know, crank collar just bothered you, and you had athletes, foot, and you were cranky about all those things. I wouldn’t like you more. Because I wanted, I came to the podcast to talk to a professional professionals are consistent. They’re not authentic. We want a consistent doctor. We want a consistent customs and border patrol agent. We want a consistent gas station attendant. We don’t want to have to guess every time we see, because we’re not their friend. we are engaging with them on a transaction. So yeah, I’d like my friends to be authentic with me. I can call my friend Lisa in Italy, and she will tell me her truth But if you’re not my friend, please just be consistent.

AW: So during Covid and after Covid there was this this phrase going around, should we bring our whole selves to work.

Seth:- 228

AW: And I replied to some of these articles and said, I hope we don’t bring our whole selves anywhere. Right? Sounds consistent with what you’re saying so. But back to this authentic, so consistent professionals need to be consistent and authenticity. You’re equating with full transparency. And so we don’t want that is that right?

Seth:Well, even partial transparency, you know we were. We started by talking about brands. Is Nike consistent? Right? That Nike isn’t going to sell you a 3 inch heel. and they’re not gonna sell you something that breaks in a week, because if they did that their brand would fall apart. Maybe they authentically feel like doing that, because they would make some money.

AW: That.

Seth: What what we want is to build something that even if the logo wasn’t on it, people could tell we did it well. The only chance of that is, if it’s consistent. Now, the exception which social media has amplified are divas, rock stars, and people get paid for throwing a tantrum. Those people are supposed to be authentic. But guess what they’re faking it? They’re consistently being fake authentic, right? They’re having tantrums all the time, because, like maybe, Bob Dylan feels like being eloquent and singing in a way that we can understand, but he can’t. because he has to be consistently authentic as a mumbler.

AW: Yeah, I love this. I interviewed an academic from the Us. On the archetypes of female pop stars. And she was talking about this, you know, you go from like the innocent girl, and then you rebel, and you go through these stages. And oh, oh, my goodness! That’s but you need to consistently conform or show up consistently, as that you know, hot mess, or as that diva right.

Seth: Yeah, and that’s what killed Amy Winehouse. right like. And there’s a lot of misogyny. There’s a lot of family trauma. But the fact is that if you make a reputation as a diva who’s living right on the edge, you might not make it to

AW: Yeah. Oh, gosh! It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wow! So be careful what you’re conforming to. What archetype, if you want to use the term archetype, or what persona, or what brand. or what genre.

Seth: Right. And this this rubs people the wrong way because they think it’s fake. But is it fake that a surgeon’s wearing a mask and the rubber gloves, and standing like this in front of you before they do surgery right? The fact is that when you put on the uniform you become the professional, and the word uniform is the word uniform. For our reason.

AW: Yeah. So I’m curious about your take about transparency at work like so I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the work of Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School, right? And she talks. She talks about psychological safety and creating an environment where it’s safe to take risks, and she encouraged. Leaders are the folks that create the culture so they they can’t. They can’t allocate the adoption of psychological safety. They need to create it themselves. And one way they do that is, by being vulnerable, admitting mistakes, and so on. And the the term authenticity shows up a lot here in in this body of work. So  how do you.

Seth:Okay.

AW: And so.

Seth:Let’s let’s break this into pieces a little bit. If you are consistently creating culture in an organization by doing things like admitting mistakes, acknowledging that you’re not infallible. You’re not being authentic doing that. You are being consistent, doing that. You are showing up to do it even when you don’t feel like it. even when you’re like. Oh, I can’t believe they need me to tell that story again. It embarrasses me every but you tell it anyway, right? That is consistent. So if Amy is writing down steps. she’s encouraging people to be consistent. She’s not encouraging, encouraging them to say, whatever the hell pops into their head.

AW: That’s right.

Seth:The key for me about transparency at work is let’s get real or let’s not play which is a simple sentence. That means we’re going to agree on what things are like around here, and we’re going to agree on where we are going. If you don’t want to buy into that, I get it. Here’s a severance package you are welcome to leave. but we’re going to agree that that’s what things are like around here, and then we can be honest with each other about whether we’re accomplishing that. So my friend Danny Meyer owns a bunch of restaurants. He started. Shake shack. If you work for Danny Meyer at one of these restaurants. We don’t have to revisit on a regular basis. Why, people are coming to spend a hundred dollars for dinner. and we don’t have to regulate regularly. Revisit. Why, we fold napkins. I know you don’t fold napkins at home, but we fold napkins here cause we’re putting on a show. And if you’re grumbling about that, if you’re grumbling about the, you know, systemic income inequality that leads it so that people can come by a $200 bottle of wine I get that. That’s totally legit. But the show we put on here that’s at the center of it. So let’s get real. This is what we do. This is a game, and I get to say to you that napkin wasn’t folded properly, and I’m not attacking you, and I’m not making a personal statement. I’m talking about the napkin. and if we can’t agree on what the napkin’s supposed to be, then we can’t work together.

AW: Love it. Okay. I have a boot camp that I’m running after this interview, and I’m going to be talking to folks a lot about consistency. I love this. Okay, I want to shift to a different element of communication, and that is brevity. conciseness.precision. I know you have a very famous short blog, the shortest blog. What was the shortest blog you ever wrote.

Seth:You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.

AW: Yeah, I love that. I love that. In fact, you’ve already made the decision. So just do it right back to Nike. Just do it. So I recently read, brevity.  Is that what it’s called? The book by the axios founders? Smart brevity. It’s called.

Seth: Okay.

AW: Yeah, highly highly recommend that. But

Seth: I hope it’s not too long, and I probably will just

AW: It’s they.

Seth: I probably would have just in the book brevity. I’m not sure they needed the word smart. So right there, I cut it in half. But okay, go ahead.

AW: They could have cut it. No, they it’s very meta. They use all the principles that they’re teaching in the book, in the, in the communication of the book itself. So I have this theory that a lot of people think they’re being generous with the volume of information that they’re sharing. I know that I did early on when, 6 years ago, when I started blogging and podcasting, I thought, the more I shared the better. And so I have this new theory that if you really want to be generous, you do the work to sharpen the message, to make it more concise, more brief, so that it’s easier for other people to understand. Does that sit well with you?

Seth: I’m always in favor of people doing the work. But let me challenge the concept of brevity the way many people understand Nordstrom’s founders and employees frequently tell a story A guy who was working at the tie counter at Nordstrom’s men’s ties. and a 75 year old man comes in with 2 snow tires.

AW: I knew you’re gonna say that.

Seth: And he puts the snow tires down on the desk, and he says, I bought these here. I don’t need them. I need a refund. and the person who’s working at the counter reaches into the cash register hands the guy $300 and says, Thank you. And he leaves and part of the punchline is nordstroms doesn’t sell. Snow tires this story, which I’m happy to explain it. But I don’t need to. This story is told because it is way longer than always give people a refund but it works better than saying, always give people a refund. True, because stories stick with people. So brevity actually means as short as possible, but not shorter. I mean, I used to know a kid who’s really young, he said. It’s simple the boy! Cried Wolf, and the villagers didn’t come. that’s it. You can’t tell that story more briefly than that.

AW: Yeah. Okay, okay. okay, I want to ask you about your upcoming book. This is strategy. very cleverly and simply titled consistently with your previous book which I told you I’m rereading right now. This is marketing can you share with? I know it’s coming out in October. I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Can you share a little bit about that book?

Seth: There aren’t any books on strategy I’ve ever been able to recommend. because they’re not really about strategy. There are big, thick books for Mbas. There are books for generals. but mostly there are books of tactics. and strategy is a philosophy of becoming. Strategy is deciding what work to do today to get the results we seek tomorrow. Strategy is about systems and games and time and empathy and an elegant strategy is a path that gets better as we go. And most people, small companies, big companies, nonprofits, political campaigns. embassies. do not have an elegant strategy. They’re constantly pushing uphill. They’re constantly insisting that the world align the way they want it to align. and the thing is good. Waves make good surfers. So 1st we got to look for the right wave 1st we’ve got to understand how the world is structured, and then the change we seek to make in that context, not insisting that the whole world rearrange itself because it’s unjust.

AW: So that’s the systems thinking that you were talking about. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I read a summary. And I thought, it’s if I had to choose the 2 things. The 2 things that this book is about in terms of strategic thinking is systems thinking and longer thinking longer term. I think you? You just said it, you said it’s it’s about, what are we doing today to plan to succeed tomorrow? Something like that.

Seth:So longer term might just be one day. And it might be 100 years okay, that people who listen to podcasts like this, love curves and graphs, the long tail, the crossing, the chasm, the Gartner Hype cycle, and all of them go like this right? But we forget that the axis on the bottom is time. Right? Time is Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once. And so we do something today. And we have 3 customers. But we get traction. That gets us to 9, and then we get traction. That gets us to 81. But if we start today and don’t get 81. That doesn’t mean we failed. And if we start today and hustle. trying to skip 3 and 9, 81 that we are planting seeds. We are watering, fertilizing. We’re gardeners, and if you go to the wrong soil, or you use the wrong seeds, it’s not going to grow.

AW: So recently, I interviewed Roger Martin, who was. Boss. He was the Dean at Rothman when I was on the faculty there. and he is also a prolific thought leader, and he has the most downloaded video at Harvard Business Review called A Plan is not a strategy, and I was listening carefully when you were talking about your book. You did not use the word plan. but it sounded an awful lot like a plan.

Seth: This is fascinating. I’m gonna have to go find that video. I’ve never seen it. Rogers, a big Rogers, a big brain. So I can’t wait to see it. Yesterday I changed the subtitle of my book. the subtitle used to be creating the conditions for change and that’s what the book’s about, but I don’t think I don’t think that’s and brand for me consistently because it’s a little too hard to understand. So I changed it to make better plans.

AW: Oh. Oh, wow! Oh, I can’t wait to hear what you what you say about this video.

Seth: Well, I need to watch it right away, cause it’s not too late for me to change it back, so we’ll see what.

AW: Amazing. I’m I’m going to send it to you right when we’re done here. I’m also going to put it in the show notes. Okay. So one last thing before we get to the the 3 rapid fire questions that I can’t wait to also ask you is. did you happened to read. Arthur Brooks, one of his recent books, called from strength to strength.

Seth: I did not.

AW: Okay. So let me tell you the one graph in this book that to me is basically the thesis of the book on the X-axis. You have time, and on the Y-axis you have some sort of output that humans have over their lifetime. Right.

Seth: Right and.

AW: And so he talks about how, as ambitious, smart, well-intended folks, we jump on this curve in our career, and it’s about productivity and output and status and getting promoted. And all these things And at some point we hit cognitive decline. And it’s earlier than we all think. It’s in our 40 s. So I’m well past that. And then many of us, especially the ambitious folks. keep fighting for, you know, dominance for productivity, for.  These things, and it gets harder and harder, and often to the detriment of our physical health, our relationships, and our life in general right, and what he advocates is that we jump to a second curve. Instead of being productive, the output is sharing our wisdom.

Seth: Interesting.

AW: This. I was like this perfectly described. It was very validating for me, right? Because I used to be a brand manager at Kraft, and I was working really hard. And then I went, and I earned my degrees, and I was on a faculty member, and then I jumped off. I started. Talk about talk, and I’m sharing wisdom, and and I find it incredibly fulfilling all the things that he talked about. And then I thought. I think Seth has been doing this from the beginning

Seth: Well I am not a role model for anything except maybe not eating hamburgers. The sharing wisdom is a broad statement right that I happen to be in a line of work where my words are on a piece of paper, and sometimes people pay money for them. But you know, if I think about the A/C heating contractor down the street, who’s my age? He has apprentices and people coming up in the business. He spends a good chunk of his time teaching those people how to install air conditioning. That’s wisdom as well. So I don’t think that what Arthur is saying is that everybody should become a pundit. No, I don’t think he is, either. I’m not saying you were saying that I’m clarifying for me right that what we have is the chance. You know I spend almost all my time helping nonprofits and people I care about for free figure out what they ought to be doing. and I don’t do that in public cause. That’s not my brand. I do that because that’s my my craft, my work, and I’ve been doing that for a while I couldn’t do it when I was 35, because no one would trust me to do it. And so what’s really happening is it’s not the internal thing of physical or cognitive decline. It’s the asset value of the benefit of the doubt. And as we gain the benefit of the doubt. I think we have leverage to amplify our insight. and even if we lived to 200, it feels to me like it’s a good use of your time long before you have to worry about whatever’s gonna have to do next.

AW: I love that I love that so it’s not just that you’re shifting your idea of what the what’s on the y-axis right? It’s that over time you accumulate more wisdom to share and back to branding. Maybe a reputation for credible wisdom.

Seth: Exactly.

AW: Beautiful. Oh, my goodness! I love that you are going to be so quoted on that, Seth. Are you ready for the 3 rapid fire questions?

Seth: They’re all rapid fire the way my brain works. What do you got.

AW: Yeah. So I just want to. I want to share with the listeners that, like all of the people that I interview for my podcast once I said to Seth, once we book the interview, I’m going to share some of the ideas that I have for questions. We’re definitely going to go off script, and you replied to me and said, I don’t want the questions I love that I love, that you don’t want the questions so1st rapid fire question, official, 1st official rapid fire question is.

Seth: because people get there, and they don’t know what or why to engage right? So when I’m doing my work, I am eagerly showing up for other people the same way. A swimmer is swimming as fast as they can. But that doesn’t mean that in their spare time the swimmers swimming as fast as they can, just for fun. So I regularly. you know I have no one in my office. I have no employees. I can go 12 h without seeing another person quite happily. Huh!

AW: Not me. But that’s okay. That’s okay. All right. Next question. what are your communication, pet peeves, or a pet peeve that you have when other people are communicating, and you wish they would change the way they’re communicating.

Seth: Well, peeves make lousy pets because they’re just. They’re hard to keep but with that said it hurts me when I see someone who is on a useful, righteous path undermining their work by falling into common traps. It could be something as simple as regularly. I will hear people on an interview use ums, and us to stop person from taking the mic back. That’s not a hard problem to fix. It’s 4 days of work. and that’s a trivial one on a bigger scale, much bigger, much more important, much more common scale marketers, particularly people with a personal brand in quotation marks hustle too much. They interrupt too much, they hassle too much. They try to get the word out, I think getting the word out is a ridiculous mantra. It’s not effective, and it it undermines everything you’re trying to do.

AW: I know you talk about that a lot. And this is marketing. Yeah. okay. The last rapid fire question I’m really curious. Given the bookshelf behind you? Is there a book or a podcast not one of yours, and not one of mine, a book or a podcast that you find yourself recommending a lot lately.

Seth: Okay. So the best podcast ever made was mystery show episode 3. She only made. Starley only made 6 episodes. Don’t start with episode, 3. Start with episode 4. Episode 2. But you should listen to mystery. Show episode 3. Mystery. Yeah.

AW: Joe

Seth: Mystery show. It’s in each. In each episode she solved the mystery.

AW: Okay.

Seth: She’s she was terrific. But the problem was, she tried to make one a week, and it needed to be one a year, and if it was one a year there’s no way she could have made it work anyway. I listen to history of rock and roll in 500 songs. I’m up to the current episode, which is 189.  And that’s a lifelong project for Andrew. It’s gonna outlive me for sure 99% invisible is nothing but wisdom, wisdom. Wisdom. Roman is a superstar. My friend Brian’s podcast, the moment highly recommend it. I used to listen to Dan Carlin’s history podcast. They’re a miracle. After a while. It’s too much Genghis Khan was too much Genghis Khan for me. So I took a break. Who else we got and then the best audio book ever recorded is just kids by Patty Smith.

AW: Okay. I am going to put links to all of those in the show notes, and I’m going to definitely listen to all of them myself. Is there anything else you want to share? Seth, with the talk about talk listeners, about how they can effectively make a ruckus.

Seth: Big problems, demand small solutions. find one person. find a tiny pocket of a system. find someone who is lonely and begin there. do not wait for the Pope to call you and put you in charge of solving something. Giant. Build things that are small. We gain traction, and then we do it again.

AW: Wow! All right. Thank you so much, Seth. I appreciate you sharing your time and all of your insights with us. I’m very grateful. Thank you so much.

Seth :Thank you for having me keep making this ruckus. It matters.

Did you get that? Don’t wait for the Pope to call you and put you in charge of something. Thank you, Seth. Personally, I’m inspired to take action and make a ruckus.

Now I’m going to quickly summarize with three of the themes or learnings here that I want to reinforce for you.

But first, I want to share a few things he said that I’m not sure I agree with. Im curious what YOU think. The truth is I’m still thinking about these things, which is what I love. As I said at the beginning, Seth always leaves me thinking.

The first thing I’m not sure I agree with is how Seth said that how you dress isn’t your brand, its your logo. Remember when I asked, “how you dress is one of the ways that you reinforce your brand. Do you agree?” His response?

Hmm. I think how you show up, including how you dress, is a significant part of your brand.

The second point where I’m not sure whether I agree was when Seth said “Professionals are consistent, they’re not authentic.” I understand his point about being professional and consistent, but I think things are changing in terms of authenticity. More and more, respected leaders with strong personal brands are sharing parts of their personal life, their humanity, their vulnerabilities, with others at work. They’re encouraging others to also “be themselves” and not conform. Of course, you also must be dependable, accountable, and trustworthy.

Again, I’m curious what YOU think. Is it true that Professionals are consistent, theyre not authentic.”?

So as you can see, like I said, Seth makes me think.

Now, the three themes that I want to reinforce with you from this episode. Here they are.

The third and last theme I want to reinforce is Seth’s definition of personal branding. I’m definitely going to be using this definition in my coaching. Remember Jeff Bezos’ definition: Your brand is what people say about you when youre not in the room. Seth’s got a slightly different take that I think is at least as compelling. “Your Brand is what other people think you’re going to do next.” Aks yourself, what do people think YOURE going to do next? That’s your brand. LOVE IT!

Phew ok – that’s it. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, I just cant wait to read Seth’s upcoming book THIS IS STRATEGY. I’m sure he’ll have a new take on strategy that I haven’t considered before.

I leave you with this.

Let’s all make a ruckus.

Alright. That’s it. That’s everything for this episode. Thanks again to Seth for sharing his thoughts and for encouraging us all to make a ruckus

If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will refer it to one of your friends, and I also hope you’ll leave a review on Apple, Spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening. Now go make a ruckus. And talk soon!

The post Making a Ruckus with Seth Godin (ep.171) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Introducing yourself shouldn’t be something you dread. Learn a 3-point self-introduction framework (not a script!) plus 4 general tips for introducing yourself effectively. Introducing yourself is a rare opportunity to highlight your personal brand!   (Re-release of ep. 86)

TAKE THE FREE PERSONAL BRAND ASSESSMENT

The post INTRODUCTIONS – How to Introduce Yourself (ep. 170) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Communicate with confidence: There’s the mental preparation, then there’s confidence in the moment.  In this first of a two-part series, we focus on the 4P’s of mentally preparing to communicate with confidence: Practice, as in rehearsing; Proverb, as in adopting a mantra; Pep talk; and Pirate, as in copying that confident feeling.  (Re-release of ep.58)

The post COMMUNICATE WITH CONFIDENCE: Part 1 – Mental Preparation (ep 169) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Do you communicate with IMPACT? Deloitte Vice-Chair Jennifer Lee defines impact as the ability to get someone to take action. Learn 3 specific communication tactics to elevate your impact, plus insights about how respect, being curious, and establishing the value of each person in the room can increase your impact.   (Re-release of ep.112)

Jennifer T. Lee

Relevant episodes:

The post Communicating with IMPACT – with Jennifer Lee, Vice-Chairwoman at Deloitte (ep. 168) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

How self-aware are you? Andrea shares the definition of self-awareness, different types of self-awareness, and how we can improve our communication effectiveness by being more self-aware.  (Re-release of ep 121)

TAKE THE FREE PERSONAL BRAND ASSESSMENT

The 3 Point Body Language Scan

The post SELF-AWARENESS & Communication (ep. 167) appeared first on Talk About Talk.