Bryony hung up from the virtual meeting with her boss with a heavy heart and a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had just gotten the news she dreaded.
Bryony was a Senior Manager who’d requested a promotion to Director. Her boss said, “Well, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll recommend you because you’re doing good work” and had unenthusiastically taken Bryony’s request to her boss. The answer was not only “Not now,” the top boss dismissed Bryony’s future possibilities as well.
Her boss thought she was being helpful when she said,” You don’t really have a chance of getting promoted because you don’t have leadership communication skills.”
Bryony had no idea what she was talking about. She asked what skills were they? The boss had trouble defining them, just that Bryony wasn’t coming across as “a real leader”.
Bryony sat for five minutes trying to figure it out, wondering if she needed to be bossier. It was not her style and if that’s what was required, it was hopeless. She also didn’t see how being bossy was a good thing.
A large corporation had acquired 8 successful companies through their Mergers and Acquisitions. They paid a lot for them. Each one of them had a CEO. Now the CEOs were Senior Vice Presidents, high up in the large company, but no longer the men in charge of everything and everyone.
The CEO had gone through our special virtual Leadership Coaching Program based on Mastering Virtual Presentations. When he saw each one of these 8 new SVPs speak to internal audiences, he cringed. They had good content, but lots of sharp edges and missing key skills in their delivery that would make them great. So, he signed them up for the program.
The 8 men showed up skeptical and arrogant, but willing to give me a chance to see if there was anything good in what I presented. They didn’t think so, but they weren’t rude about it. They were quite pleasant. But arrogant. Especially with each other. Each one tremendously competent. Each one exceptionally accomplished, and the proof was the organizations they had built from nothing and then sold for hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars.
Everything begins with awareness. When you are not fully aware of them, you lose sight of the person in front of you. An invisible wall forms, you unknowingly start talking at them, and your words can’t quite reach them. But when you become fully aware of them, truly present with them, the wall dissolves. You don’t have to try. Connection happens on its own. You start talking to them. Your communication flows naturally, it becomes effortless, and you reach them.
Ben didn’t want to just “improve” his communication skills. He wanted to stand out.
When he gave a presentation at a conference, he didn’t only want applause. He wanted people talking about it in the hall afterwards and telling everyone when they got back home.
When he met with his boss, Ben didn’t just want “a good meeting”. He wanted his boss fully engaged and talking to his boss about it, and that boss telling it all to his boss.
When he met with his team, he didn’t just want to “go through the agenda.” He wanted a team spirit that lifted everyone higher.
He wanted peers who respected him and sought out his opinions. He wanted customers with long-term, enthusiastic loyalty.
He wanted people’s faces to light up when he walked into a room.
Ben was done with ordinary. He wanted extraordinary.
I love AI. I use it every day, I can’t believe how much time it saves me. Many of the people we’re coaching and training are not only using it, they’re creating it. They’re the ones designing it, making it all happen, and even shaping the future of AI for all of us. So, how do they feel about it?
This week I wrote about Human Connection in the World of AI. But I did something different. I recorded it as a podcast. Since I’m talking about human connection, it felt right that you should hear it in my voice.
“You have to be willing to fight for what you want.”
And Beatriz was only too willing.
However, no one she worked with, including her boss, was in the mood for a fight. They had started running the other way when they saw her coming.
Beatriz‘s response was, “If you’re not getting what you want, you need to fight harder.”
She came to me for coaching because this strategy was failing her. Beatriz had run out of ammunition, but didn’t want to surrender.
Yesterday, driving to the office, I saw a tall woman crossing the street. It was 8 am, sun was shining, 59° outside.
She was wearing short, light blue shorts, a large, purple puffy down ski jacket, a maroon woolen hat topped with a big pom-pom and long flaps that came over her ears, and bright, neon lime-green running shoes.
It made me think about listening.
And I was thinking that, if I really wanted to understand her, if I really wanted to be able to communicate with her, how fun it would be to suspend all judgment and simply listen and understand why from her point of view.
No thinking, “It’s too cold for shorts! And way too warm for a ski jacket! And never cold enough for a woolen hat here in California. And those fluorescent lime-green shoes, you can see them from two blocks away!”
It’s so important in listening that there’s no thinking.
“She gets very defensive whenever I ask her a question.”
Vincent was describing Vickie, the Executive Vice President who had just cast the deciding vote to veto Vincent’s promotion to Vice President.
Vincent was complaining about how difficult Vickie was just to talk to. And he was trying to get her to understand how qualified he was to be a VP.
From his perspective, the problem was …. Vickie.
And, it was true. She did get defensive with Vincent. He visibly irritated her.
But Vincent had identified the wrong root cause for why Vickie reacted this way to him. As you know, if you have the wrong root cause, you’ll get nowhere.
What was Vincent not seeing?
Alexander: “We’re trying not to like you.”
Me: “How’s that going for you?” (Laughing)
Alexander: “Not well. Why do we like you so much?” (Laughing)
Me: “Well, I like you!”
So, that sounds like the absolute silliest conversation you’ve ever heard, right? It gets even more absurd when I tell you that it was with three of the most highly trained, most highly skilled negotiators in a large global corporation that has over 100,000 people.
They put three top negotiators up against me. They heard that we don’t give discounts. Their Procurement Division found that utterly unacceptable because they always demand deep discounts. So they put three of their best people on the call to negotiate a discount with me.
They were serious, rough, tough, brutal, cold. I would describe them as even vicious. I didn’t know people could get so mean and demanding.
Then, 20 minutes into the call, the above conversation happened.
Valeria had a problem. She’s a passionate woman and it was a passionate problem. “People don’t listen to me. They tune me out. They don’t do what I’m asking them to do. They don’t even give me a response after a while.”
“It’s not my nature to talk slow.”
It has nothing to do with her nature. If it did, I wouldn’t have been able to help her.
With a little bit of coaching, I got Valeria to adjust her velocity (think of it as her “speed”, how many words she was jamming in) so people could really understand the individual words she was saying.
An amazing thing happened. And it happened very naturally. Valeria used fewer words.
Tim: “You’re not going to believe this. It feels weird to have everything suddenly going well.”
What is Tim talking about?
He’s talking about a change in strategy that initially seems subtle, but one that creates more power than most people have had in their lives.
To understand it you have to understand humanity and the better you understand that, the more successful you will be.
Daniel wasn’t supposed to say anything. He was the Corporate Attorney in the meeting between Sales and the customer they hoped to get. It was a big customer: the government of a major European country. If they signed a deal, it was going to be hundreds of millions of dollars.
He was only there because the prospective customer had initiated a strong dispute about his organization’s licensing terms.
His only charter in this meeting was to protect their intellectual property. He was there to tell this prospective customer, “No, we can’t do that”.
Daniel was fresh from a Causative Communication workshop and was watching it all go down. What he saw was painful. He could see every mistake being made, but it was his job to stay silent until the discussion about the license dispute made its way to the top of the agenda.
Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He thought to himself, “Well, I don’t think I can make it any worse than it already is.”
And so he jumped into the conversation. The sales team was shocked. What did the corporate licensing attorney think he was doing????????
“They don’t want to change.”
“They’ve been doing everything the same way a long time. They’re stuck in their ways and they just don’t want to hear about any new way of doing it.”
Adira spent 15 minutes detailing events and deeds that proved how stubborn “they” were and, with a flourish, she finished with, “Perhaps I should leave and go to a different organization where they value creative thought.”
So I asked, “What would be the most ideal outcome you can imagine? What would be really wonderful if it happened?”
She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “Wonderful?????” She spent another 5 minutes patiently explaining to me how “these people” were far from ideal, how they did not measure up to her standards, did not live up to her expectations, and how disappointing it all was.
Adira had no awareness of what she was doing. None.
She had no idea she was being critical. She thought she was being objective.
My job was to raise her awareness.
Ruth had her mother pressed up against the refrigerator and was pushing a large knife against her Mother’s throat. Strung out by vicious crystal meth withdrawal, Ruth was screaming, “Where is your money!?” The mother was screaming back, “No! I’m not giving you any money! I gave you money for the last time. You just spend it all on drugs. I would rather die than give you any more money for drugs.”
I was on a “ride-along” with an Oakland police officer because I had been asked to deliver communications classes to the Oakland Police Academy. Since all my experience had been in the corporate world, I was there to gain experience with the types of real communications challenges they would be dealing with in their world.
In one intense week, I joined officers in investigating a homicide, chasing drug dealers, interrogating a stolen credit card suspect who swore she didn’t do it, responding to sexual abuse, talking young prostitutes off the streets and the scene in this kitchen that I will never forget.
Rich, the officer I was with, was calm. So calm, he actually created a powerful calming presence.
He spoke to Ruth. His voice was calm and filled with understanding. Rich said, “I know how you feel. It’s a feeling so horrible ripping you up inside, it would make you kill your own mother.”
There was a moment of quiet. A change was happening.
Thomas was one of three experts on a cyber-security panel, a media interview with a live audience televised across the world.
Thomas was looking directly into the camera, eye contact strong, executive presence strong, confidence strong, competence undeniable.
I started coaching Thomas about two years ago. The presentations he was giving back then had much less visibility. As his competence increased, he was asked to present more frequently.
When you see him now, you would say he’s a natural.
That doesn’t mean he started out that way.
“No, I can’t do that for you.” “No, I can’t attend that meeting.” “No, I can’t give that presentation.” “No, I can’t be there.”
No one likes to say, “No”. It’s the same when you have to give bad news.
People are basically good. They don’t like saying, “No, you can’t have that.”
Imagine you’re in a job where you have to say, “No” 37 times a day.
Such was the life of Debbie Gross, Chief Executive Assistant for Cisco’s John Chambers, one of the top, most dynamic and cover-of-every-magazine CEOs in the world, leading a mega-organization of 70,000 employees, revenues of $48 billion.
Debbie had to say, “No” to heads of state, global CEOs and a multitude of impressively pushy individuals both inside and outside Cisco.
I remember well what happened the day Debbie changed her approach after one of our coaching sessions.
Results were instant.
Alisa had an important presentation before our second Mastering Virtual Presentation Skills coaching session. She decided to try what she learned instead of her normal routine which is to look at her notes or her slides.
Afterward, Alisa made a brilliant observation, “The results exceeded expectations. Looking into the camera made me tune into their voices, how their voices sounded.”
I asked her, “What did the voices tell you?”
Alisa said, “I could tell they were warm, receptive, interested and engaged. I didn’t need to see their faces.”
Alisa is right. Human voices, when you really tune in, tell you everything.
Teams from three companies, different time zones, were coming together to discuss supplier issues. All three anticipating an unpleasant, contentious, argumentative, blaming, confrontational series of disagreements, punctuated by complete resistance on three sides.
Valerie, the vice president I’m coaching, was one of 12 people attending.
Valerie arrived to the meeting early. And did something no one had ever done before in their previous meetings: She turned on her camera.
As each person joined one by one, Valerie greeted them warmly and used the new skills we practiced in her coaching.
One by one, they all turn their cameras on and the next thing you know they were all talking warmly with each other. Like friends, actually.
And the meeting transformed into a collaboration.
Linda was given work that was beneath her capability. When she spoke up, she was dismissed. They gave a project that belonged to her to someone less qualified. No one would talk with her and her boss kept canceling their one-on-one meetings.
Everything about her was dark. She came across like doom and gloom combined with fear, resentment and blame.
Linda decided to find out what she was doing wrong that was causing her to fail, and to discover what she could do about it.
She transformed during the coaching. Every video showed dramatic progress. New strategies. New abilities. Real personal growth. She learned how to handle not just that situation, but any conversation, any communication challenge.
After using what she learned in our one-on-one coaching program, she became radiant and compelling. The people she works with changed from cold and hostile to warm and greatly appreciative.
They pushed her into a leadership position because they wanted her there. This never happens, ever.
Manuela lives without restraint. She loves without restraint. She gives without restraint.
Manuela grew up in El Salvador and eventually had to flee with her family due to gang violence.
Now that she has found safety in the US the smallest things make Manuela happy. Rain makes her happy. When it stops raining, it makes her happy. Flowers blooming in the spring, the smell of pine trees. Every kind of weather. Life is beautiful.
She’s not waiting for any person or politician to do anything. She chooses to create the reality she wants to live in.
People can tell you about the state of the world, what is and isn’t possible, what’s going to happen in 2022. They can tell you these things. It doesn’t make them true. They only become true when you decide they are true.
The truth of others may spoil our dreams if we follow their truths too closely. It’s only ever your own truth that ignites the spark that makes the real goodness in your life begin.
Don’t look at what other people are doing to find out what you are capable of. Your standards may be much higher than theirs.
Solomon Asch was a pioneer in Social Psychology. He designed and conducted a series of many experiments trying to understand individual judgment, including moral and ethical judgment, and the powers that, for better or worse, influence it.
The number of participants in the experiments varied, but often there were eight. One of them was always told they would be part of an experiment on visual judgment. This person believed the other seven people were told the same thing and were participating in the experiment on the same terms. What they didn’t know was that the other seven were all actors following a script.
It is stunning to realize that there was no instruction to conform given, suggested, or even implied. Not from the experimenter. Not from the other participants. The pressure and demand to conform came entirely and completely from the pressure the person put on themselves. They were their own executioner.
There are many, many situations in life in which each of us is the seventh person.
This week right now is for dreaming your 2022 into being.
2021 was all about What do I need to do to survive?
2022 does not have to be more of 2021. 2022 can go way beyond a survival endurance contest.
2022 can be about dreams that come true. Don’t look to the world for permission. There is no “Dream-Come-True Licensing Entity” that’s ever been any good.
You are your own licensing entity. You are the one who gives yourself a license to dream and to paint those dreams into reality, to make them come true. Or not.
Don’t limit your dreams by what other people dream.
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