Word Count:  703

Reading Time:  2 minutes

If you think authenticity is saying one thing and thinking another, you might be interested in what the research says.

Remember that study about communication that says only 7% of communication comes from the words you use, 38% comes from tone of voice, and 55% comes from facial expression?

It’s an urban legend.  Sure, Dr. Mehrabian conducted communication research and published those percentages, but: they don’t apply to all kinds of communication.  Those percentages only apply when a speaker’s words did not match their tone or facial expression.

 When someone is being insincere, or lying outright, we discount their words in favor of the expression on their face or the tone of their voice.

You can prove this:  Go stand in front of the mirror and say “no” while shaking your head.  Then, say “no” while nodding your head yes.

When my actions match my words, I believe my words   When my actions and words contradict each other, I believe my actions.  In the battle for credibility, tone, and facial expression win every time.  Bluegrass music illustrates this well:  The words to so many bluegrass songs are about death, tragedy or love lost, so why is everybody grinning and tapping their toes to the tinkling banjo riff?

Because when the words and the music don’t match, the music wins.

Some work examples:

1. In an all-hands meeting, the CEO says he wants to hear from all of you, to address your concerns.  As he responds to questions, you hear his voice tighten, watch his face stay closed and tight, and his sentences get more clipped.  You’re disappointed at best, cynical at worst.   Score: Words: 0, Vocal Misbehavior: 100.  Result:  Future town all-hands meetings have more presentation time and less time for questions.

1. You say a firm no to a project, and the doubts flood your mind, your voice and your face:  Will I be supported?  Will my boss override me?  Your client chooses to “listen” to the hesitation in your voice rather than your “no.”  Words: 0, the look on your face: 100.  Result:  You feel victimized and blame your boss or client for your workload, which keeps increasing.

1. You encourage your direct report to come to you for help with their issues and problems, and as she’s laying out a situation, irritation flickers across your face and steals into your voice. A moment later, you interrupt her to paint a more positive picture of her situation.  Words:  0, Your kneejerk cheerleading:  100.  Result:  Your direct reports come to you less often and you become disconnected from them and their work.

Authenticity is when your words, tone and facial expression all line up. It’s more rare than mittens on a fish.

Take heart.  The first step is to break your denial:  You are a radio station broadcasting music 24/7, even when you are not saying a word.  Believing you are managing your face well enough or keeping your emotions out of your tone is a fantasy.

So you may as well speak up, and put your music into words, like this:

1. “I meant that I want to hear from all of you, and I find myself wanting to defend myself against what feels like negativity and complaints.  I don’t want to do that.

Then get yourself back on track:

“I’d like to change the process.   For every complaint or concern, please offer a suggestion – or two or three – that would address it.”

1. “I just said a firm ‘no’ and was flooded with doubts about whether my ‘no’ would be respected.  I guess I’m really worried that you’ll go around me on this one.  I want to reiterate that I think this project is a mistake.”

1. “I’m so sorry _____.  I’m having hard time listening.  I want to jump in and contradict the picture you’re painting with the more upbeat way I see it.  How about we each take a minute to summarize how we see this client, then compare notes.  I think we’ll do better if we get that out on the table.”

Putting your music into words is the authentic way to strengthen your voice.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

If you believe conflicts have to end badly, they probably will.  I see it differently.

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Word Count: 566

Reading Time: Well under 2 minutes

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I’m on my way to a quick breakfast between appointments when a neighbor stops to recruit me to the latest community crusade, “We’re going to put up ‘Private Property – Do not Enter’ signs to keep the kayakers out.”

“Uh-huh.” I nod noncommittally.  My stomach growls.

“There are so many more small craft coming into the marina than there used to be.  I hate it when I look up and some stranger is staring into my bedroom.  I don’t want them here.”

“I see it differently,” I say.

“You do?”  She looks surprised.

“Yes.”  She’s still looking at me, so I explain.

“I think the number of kayakers looking in my windows is the same as always.  I think posting rules we can’t enforce won’t help.  So I’m OK with the status quo.”

“Huh,” she says. “That’s interesting.”  A pause, and then she launches into her fears that the kayakers are casing the houseboats, citing conversations with other neighbors as “proof” that the situation is dangerous and action is needed.

I listen for a bit longer, then politely excuse myself.  I feel great.  I haven’t harmed our relationship by being disagreeable, I haven’t fled, I haven’t disagreed.  I just see it differently.  Plus, I’ve got just enough time to eat breakfast.

When I’m on my inner game, it’s effortless and fun to stand in my own space like this.  When I’m off my game, it can feel impossible.

We all have our moments of transcendence and grumpiness.  Skills work regardless of mood, backstory or the rank of the person in front of us.  That’s why there is no need to wait for personal enlightenment.  Instead, we can simply steal this sentence:  “I see it differently.”  I stole it from Harriet Lerner’s latest book Marriage Rules.  I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks now, looking for moments when I feel coerced or crowded by someone else’s opinion.  Before this helpful sentence, I’d argue, feign agreement, or run like hell.   These all left a sticky residue.

In the choice between fight, flight or join, I’m holding out for a better option, one that keeps me connected without erasing me.

These days my growing edge is the refusal to choose between being connected to my fellow humans and expressing myself.  I don’t want to persuade or be persuaded, coerce or be coerced.  I don’t want to argue or to agree.  Although I’m open to being touched, I don’t want to founder on the tsunami of your emotions.  I do want to be connected, my authentic self to your authentic self.  And I don’t want to visit – I want to live this way.  I want that even – especially – in highly coercive environments hostile to authentic connection and self-expression.   Of which there are many.

I’m getting real traction from “I see it differently.”  Not, “I disagree,” or “You are wrong” or even “I’m right.”  It’s more “I see it differently and that’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about reporting accurately from Planet Liz, which is the only ‘truth’ I have access to.  It may or may not be valuable to you, and I am offering it without knowing.”  I like how sparky this is, and how my boundaries become both gentle and firm.

What’s it like on your planet?

If you want excellence, choose struggle.

It looks so easy:  Jerry Douglas steps on stage with his resonator guitar and unleashes a cascade of notes so beautiful my jaw drops.  I want to do that.  When I play a resonator guitar for the first time, my head is full of Jerry’s playing.  The room is full of my playing, which is…different than the sound in my head.  Different as in much, much worse.  Painfully worse.

 I have a choice to make.

You hear great speakers all the time.  People who seem to have others in the palm of their hands.  You go to class, you learn some great techniques. When you try the techniques, they backfire.

You have a choice to make.

I can choose my past as a pretty good guitarist, or I can choose an uncertain future playing the resonator guitar.  You can choose your past as a bon vivant, a sensitive guy, a good listener, or you can choose an unknown future, possibly as a communication superhero.

The path to your new future is paved with new skills, not just new information.  New skills are grown using 3 very specific, very doable steps*

1.  Make it smaller.  Then make it tiny.

Being a communication superhero is a composite skill, made up of many smaller or component skills.  That’s why getting inspired by someone really good doesn’t translate to an increase in your skill:  You see the glorious whole, but the specific skills that make up that whole are invisible to you.

You’ve got to chunk it down.   Find the tiniest unit of performance, the one that’s easy to improve.   Find the moment you veer off course, and build in a course correction.   This is critical:  You’ve got to find something so tiny, so easy to improve that you can do it no matter what.

I got better at asking open-ended questions by writing down sentence stems on a 3 x 5 card and taking it with me everywhere.  (“What do you think about …?”  “How do you see…?”  “What if…?”  How might…?”) I found that my mind went blank because I was anxious, and the sentence stems got me over the hump.

2.  Stick with it.

Repetition is what builds myelin, and myelin is skill.  It’s not the flash of insight, or the new factoid that creates the excellence we love.  It’s attentive, patient repetition.  That means every time, everyday.   You want to practice the new skill, not the old one.  You’re either building myelin around the new pathway, or you’re building it around the old one.  There is no myelin-neutral path.

I carried around those sentence stems until they were inside me.  When I couldn’t speak the questions, I wrote it down for the practice.  I didn’t let anything get in the way of firing that neural pathway.   When the questions became  a part of me, they generated a flow of new and better questions.  That’s how I knew I’d made a quantum leap.

3. Struggle.

When you feel the gap between what you want to be and who you are, it’s frustrating.  That’s fantastic!  Taking up residence in the gap between how you want to be and how you are is what makes the circuit fire strongly enough to attract myelin. The more you feel it, the better.  Pick a target, go for it, fail, analyze your failure; rinse and repeat.

I didn’t want to ask good open-ended questions, I wanted to be the kind of consultant that changes lives.  Mastering open-ended questions is a component skill of changing lives.  It was painful to stay in the awkward phase of asking good questions, and that’s what made it so effective.

The brain responds to struggle.  Choose that.

Eliminating the word “but” is like throwing a party for your brain.

Word Count: 465
Reading Time: About 90 seconds

As I sit down to write this, we’ve just come through another election season in the United States.  The level of vitriol was unprecedented, our inability to remember all we have in common eroded by years of hateful, divisive language.

The time for communication superheroes was never more urgent.  If that seems like a tall order, I’ve got good news:  You don’t have to attain enlightenment or become a better, more peaceful person to make a difference.

You have to eliminate the word “but” from your vocabulary.

This one, tiny step has the power to transform your thinking.  Once you accomplish that, you’ll be on your way to shifting our national dialog.

When it comes to the brain, practice makes permanent.

Here’s how it works: We’ve spent years practicing the language of division, polarization, and war.  According to Daniel Coyle in “The Talent Code,”  repeating an action, causes the brain to wrap that neural pathway in myelin, the brain’s insulator, which turns that pathway into an ultra-fast neural superhighway.

Lay down enough myelin and you’ve got a habit.   Keep laying down myelin and you’ve got a fixation.  Lay down more and it gets harder to see the links between seemingly polarized points of view.  That’s how you know your mental rut has deepened into a foxhole.

Refusing to use the word “but” can reverse this trend by forcing us to hold two seemingly irreconcilable concepts in our mind.  This invites the brain to make new connections, which it loves – this is how the brain parties!

If you’re ready to start myelinating a more innovative neural pathway in your brain, eliminate the word “but” today.  Your brain will stutter, then gasp, and finally creak its way to new thoughts.  Before long, your brain will be party-central, where all the new, innovative thoughts want to hang out.

Here’s what to do instead of saying but:

1. Replace it with the word “and.”  This is the fastest path to the party.  In any sentence, the word “but” negates what came before it.  Compare “I want to come over tonight, but I’ve got to make cookies,” with “I want to come over tonight and I’ve got to bake cookies.”  The “but” version uses the cookies to negate the possibility of coming over.  The “and” version leaves all p0ssibilites on the table and keeps the brain engaged. Its next contribution might be “Hey, how about I mix up the batter and bring it over?”

 

2. Replace “but” with a period.  Instead of “I like to eat donuts for breakfast, but they’re really bad for you,” say “I like to eat donuts for breakfast.  They’re really bad for you,” and see what happens next.

 
If you’re ready to start your own “but”-less trend, let me know in the comments below.

If you want to be a communication superhero, s-h-h-h-h!

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Word Count: 520

Reading Time:  Under 2 minutes

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“Speech is silver, Silence is golden.” (Swiss proverb)

If you’ve been to even one communication seminar, you have enough tools to last you a lifetime.

Paraphrasing, open-ended questions, and probing questions on the listening side; saying what’s so without blame or judgment, using “I” statements, and stating feelings on the speaking side.  The more of these excellent skills you take in, the more difficult it can be to work them into your repertoire.

Wouldn’t it be great If doing just one thing could dramatically improve every conversation you’re in?

 
One of them can:  Silence.

Silence is how you give someone the gift of your attention.

 
And your attention is what everyone is vying for.  At the gym this morning, I claimed the exercise bike right in front of a TV playing CNN. I was astonished at the amount of visual stimulation competing for my attention.  There were closed captions, constantly changing headlines at the bottom of the screen,  a shifting video background behind the two anchors, the excruciatingly lovely color coordination of set, clothing, headlines and background, and the director’s shifting  camera angles.  It was an extravaganza of data points, so many I didn’t know which to pay attention to.

So, I ignored them all.

All that stimulation was designed to capture my attention, but I it didn’t work.  Nothing stood out.  Nothing cut through the clutter.  Worst of all, I can’t tell you what I thought about it.  And that’s what makes silence so powerful:  It connects us with ourselves, with what we really think.  It connects your client with themselves.  You with your self.  It’s rare anymore to build this kind of reflective time in.

As a consequence, we get more and more data, with less and less meaning.  I recommend bucking that trend.

 
When you’re moving really fast, trying to impress with your brilliance, your commitment, your credibility, stop.  Stop and let stillness reign: For a moment, be silent.  Give someone the gift of your attention and see where that leads.

Here’s what I think silence can do for you:

• Cut through the clutter
• Give you and your client time to listen to what they just said
• Give you and your client time to listen to what you just said
• Give you both time to think
• Open the door for the other listening skills you learned in those workshops.
• Calm an anxious situation.

Start small:

• Slightly increase the pause between listening to another and responding to them.  Then increase it some more.
• Speak more slowly than the person you’re talking to.  This increases the silence between words, sentences, paragraphs, thoughts.
• Take notes and verify you got it right with your partner
• Look thoughtful and interested

Start even smaller:

• Schedule the week you’ll commit to more silence, then for get about it until the appointed time.
• Put a blank card in your portfolio or notebook to remind you of silence.
• When you are ready, commit to 3 moments of conscious silence in a conversation you are already comfortable with. ( If you like what happens, you can expand your time.)

 
Let me know how it goes.  As always, comments are open on the blog.

Until next week,

Liz

If you think being authentic is saying whatever comes into your head, you might be giving people too much information.

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Do any of these sound like you?

• “You say to be authentic, but then I get in trouble for saying too much. “
• “I can’t lie to my clients.  If we can’t do something, I have to say so.”
• “Trust me.  No one wants me to be authentic. “

 
How can being yourself be so tricky?

An Authenticity Rule of Thumb
I like this three-fold test when I’m deciding whether or not to speak up.

• Is it true?
• Is it kind?
• Is it useful to the person hearing it?

 
If it’s true and kind, I’ve taken the blame and judgment out of what I’m about to say. Being kind while speaking the truth shows great compassion.  It’s also difficult, because sometimes we just want to let it rip.  But being authentic is not an excuse to dump on someone.  Keeping it useful is how we avoid that pitfall.

Is what I’m about to say likely to be of any use to the person to whom I am saying it?  Authentic speech, even when it is hard to hear, comes from a singular intention: To be of use to the person receiving it.  The examples below fall on the continuum from inauthentic speech to way too much information.

It may help to remember perfection isn’t the goal here, being real is.  That means there is room for our mistakes, for apologies, for learning and for laughter, however sheepish.  The best way to know how you’re doing is to watch the effect your words have on others and adjust accordingly.

Authenticity is a big topic.  The comments are open for your ideas, clarifications or questions.

“I’m not sure about what happened in that meeting. I asked if they were OK with what we agreed to and they each said yes. But I’m not convinced.”

Does this ever happen to you? I have this conversation with a coaching once a week, on average.

My response never varies: “Say to them what you just said to me. Say, ‘I know you say you agree with this, but I’m not convinced.'”

Often, I hear this: “I wanted to tell them that this can’t work. I wanted to say that the what they asked me to do is not only impossible, it will get them a result exactly opposite the one they want.”

“What stopped you?”
“I could never say that.

And then, you do say that, but not to the person who needs to hear it and not at the time it could do some good.

A participant once came up with a ground rule I love:  This is the cab ride home.  This meeting, this conversation, this moment.

If you think you should be doing “it” better, you’re suffering needlessly.

A Director-level client told me about a recent conversation she’d had with a colleague, a department head. The department head was working herself into a fury, reiterating that my client should be doing a better job of “it.” Each time my client skillfully asked for more clarity, she got more cranky intensity. Running out of cleverly worded repartee, my client said:

“What is ‘it?’”
“I beg your pardon?” said the department head.
“This ‘it’ you keep referring to, the thing I should be doing. What exactly is ‘it?’”
“You should know what ‘it’ is.”
“I don’t.”
“But you are the Director – you should know.”
“I don’t know. Will you tell me?”

And she did. “It” was a simple list of 4 things the department head needed from the director. The director wrote them down, and made sure they got done.

What I love about this conversation is:

• The director stayed grounded, calm and helpful.
• She did not take the crankiness personally.
• She did not get defensive and fire back her own “should.”
• She did not shy away from the crankiness.
• By interrogating the crankiness directly, she broke through a years-old stalemate between departments.

You can have similar, struggle-free results.  Most conversations are built on assumptions. The tricky thing about assumptions is they exist just out of our awareness, much like the foundation of a house. If, like a foundation, they were made of steel-reinforced concrete, there would be no problem. But our assumptions are made of the merest gossamer, wispy and hard to pin down. It’s easy to exceed their load-bearing limits. Basing your working agreements on assumptions leads to disappointment, which leads to unfortunate conclusions, which leads to judgments, which will get you horribly stuck, sometimes for years. Best to ferret out those assumptions as quick as you can.

There are three signs that assumptions are at work in the above conversation:

• The level of intensity/crankiness escalates as the conversation goes on.

• The use of the word “should” (Scratch crankiness hard enough and a “should” always leaps out).

• The use of the word “it.”

Like the three horsemen of the apocalypse, these signal big conversational trouble. I hope you like horses, because you’ve got to move toward these to get back on track.

How to interrogate an assumption (and not the person making it)

1. Calmly comment on the level of intensity/crankiness. “I’m getting a bit bowled over by your energy on this. Tell me what that’s about.” Or “You’ve raised your voice and leaned forward in your chair each time you talk about my campaign for bunnies in the workplace. Which makes me wonder: Do you think I’m crazy?”
2. Comment on the word “should.” “I’m getting distracted by the word “should” which you’ve used 3 times in the last few seconds. What is it I should know or be doing?”
3. Comment on the word “it. ”I’m sure I should know what “it” means, but I’m not at all clear. Could you give me the specifics again?”

In horror movies, there is always the terrifying knocking in the closet that no one wants to explore. It has to be investigated before the plot can continue, and we hang on the edge of our seats as the door swings open to reveal.. a truth we hadn’t imagined.  Assumptions are like that. You won’t know what the conversation is about until you look in the closet.