No matter what field you’re in, technical skills will only take you so far. Eventually, you’ll need to leverage interpersonal skills to stand out and effect change. Problem is, society has misrepresented what it takes to train these skills, making them seem like intangible or innate qualities that can’t be measured or managed.
In reality, there’s more research on human interaction than any exercise or programming methodology (by far) and it’s quite simple to evaluate said “soft skills”. That’s why on today’s episode we’re doing a deep dive into our proprietary social skill evaluation, how you can use it, and how it’s evolved over time.
Hint: it’s not just a matter of assessing “verbal and non-verbals”…
We’ll cover:
- How to measure something subjective and contextual like communication
- Why you need a comprehensive interpersonal evaluation and how it can help
- The major components most other social skill evaluations miss
- A breakdown of the AoC evaluation and how to use it situationally
If you want more on this subject and a copy of your own, you’ll have to join us in person at one of our Apprenticeship communication workshops. All upcoming locations and dates are listed here: artofcoaching.com/apprenticeship!
Now, for some fun announcements:
We have a new partner! LMNT is our go-to hydration product. With no sugar and no additives, LMNT is how I manage to maintain my voice when speaking for 16 hours and traveling every other weekend of the year.
Right now, LMNT is offering you a free pack at DrinkLMNT.com/AOC – give them a try and let us know what you think! (Watermelon salt is my favorite)
Also, on today’s episode you heard us talk about our new SPEAKING SCHOOL. If you’re interested in learning how to grow your speaking career, become more confident speaking publicly, or just need help refining a talk you’re giving go to: artofcoaching.com/mentoring for information on personalized, tailored sessions!
TRANSCRIPT
Brett Bartholomew 0:09
No true leader would ever turn down the opportunity to improve as a communicator. I mean, that’s just the facts, no matter what job you’re in, eventually, you’re going to realize that there’s only so far you can take the technical aspect before it becomes limited through your relationships and your ability to connect, build buy in, and the like. Why does so many people however, stay away from doing these things? Well, part of it is because communication and interpersonal skills training in general has been misrepresented. We’re gonna knock the dust off that today, we’re going to talk about why it’s actually really easy to evaluate, quote, unquote, soft skills, or as many are starting to call them power skills, because they realize that ultimately, if you want to affect change, and you want to get things done at the highest level, you better know how to interact. So tune in, we’re gonna go over our proprietary evaluation here at art of coaching, how it’s evolved, how you can use it, why it’s needed. On today’s show, let’s hit it.
Welcome to the Art of coaching podcast, a show aimed at getting to the core of what it takes to change attitudes, behaviors and outcomes in the weight room, boardroom classroom, and everywhere in between. I’m your host, Brett Bartholomew, I’m a performance coach, keynote speaker, and the author of the book conscious coaching. But most importantly, I’m a lifelong student interested in all aspects of human behavior and communication. I want to thank you for joining me. And now let’s dive into today’s episode.
Alright, guys, here we go. Let’s lock and load on this. Now I know time is precious. And this is not the episode. By the way. If you’re new to art of coaching, and you’re just diving in, and you’re wondering, why is this guy who used to train athletes, and still does talking about communication? Why is communication important? convinced me, that’s not the episode that we’re gonna go over today. This one is for those of you who are in a wide variety of fields. That’s what this podcast is about, in general, who already know communication, interpersonal skills, power dynamics, that these things influence you daily, who already have, I don’t want to use the term victim, but fallen victim to them over the years, maybe you didn’t know how to play the game, maybe you didn’t get an interview because somebody else had an in with a relationship. Maybe despite all of your advanced degrees or education, people still don’t listen to you. And you’ve just realized, Hey, I’ve got to figure this out. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. How do you do that? How can we actually train interpersonal skills in a way that is not like we’ve seen it depicted in the media, where people go to seminars that are hosted by and no offense to anybody in this profession? We’ve had plenty of them at our workshops, but FBI negotiator or somebody else that’s telling us, hey, it’s just about body language, or hey, it’s just about the verbal and nonverbal aspects collectively, there’s so much more than that. This is also for those of you that are in the performance industry that for a long time, I’ve just been told that this stuff is not quantifiable. Guys, this stuff, interpersonal skills, human behavior, absolutely, is quantifiable. And it has been for decades, there is much more research on human behavior and human interaction, than there is anything to do with a deadlift and a squat. Now, you have to understand this, and most people that are more senior in their field, not in terms of age, but experience, understand, eventually, you’re going to be in a room where a lot of different folks like you are really technically skilled, they’re all going to be good, or good enough, whatever that means, in the context of that moment, at the technical aspects.
So as we’ve talked about before, we’ve never said that the technical aspects of what you do is not important. That’s not our argument, hey, communication at the expense of that, but what we are saying is eventually what’s gonna help you differentiate yourself is how you interact, how you form relationships, and how you do it in a non cheesy salesy weird woowoo, Guru type of way, how you get into it to the point where if you are working with a team, and you’re trying to set your culture you are trying to be hands on, you’re trying to be interactive, you’re really trying to build people’s understanding of power dynamics and communication and how we can navigate these obstacles. So ultimately, you’re not wasting time. You’re not losing trust. That’s what we’re about. So we’re gonna dive into that.
Now. I do want to thank today’s sponsors these first. The first folks I don’t know that I would be able to speak on the road without an LMNT. And you gotta love this swanky spelling LMNT. Bottom line, guys LMNT is the electrolyte drink that I take on the road, I take a bunch of packets of it. I throw it in my water bottle because when I’m speaking, these clinics that we run are 16 hours over the course of a weekend. And even if I’m traveling to give a 60 minute keynote, you know you’re in the airport, you’re in the airplane. It’s all just recycled air, the altitude will dehydrate you, and you’ll just lose your voice. So it’s amazing. I coach for a long time in Phoenix, Arizona, 120 Fahrenheit, and I’d be fine for the most part and you sweat a lot. I sweat a lot. But when I speak, nothing dehydrates me like presenting or even this podcast. So we are super honored for them to be a part of our podcast family. Now, you can get your free sample pack today by going to drinklmnt.com. And then just hit slash AOC for art of coaching. One more time that is drinklmnt.com/aoc give them a chance. Give them a try zero sugar all natural ingredients. For those of you that are paleo keto, all the O’s it is very friendly for you.
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Alright, another thing, we have our AOC speaking school heating up, a lot of you have reached out to us by email saying, Hey, we’ve done your online courses, we’ve done this, I want to grow a speaking career. How did you navigate, just coaching and then breaking into a speaking career. Some of you have just said you want to be more confident speakers, we do that as well. And we have no interest in turning you into some robotic person who speaks like everybody else that is a core tenant of what we do is, hey, we want to help you find your voice your style. So if you go to artofcoaching.com/mentoring, again, artofcoaching.com/mentoring Fill out the form, we only accept about five per quarter. And again, these are personalized, tailored sessions that help you become a more competent speaker, or even learn how to build a speaking business of your own. So artofcoaching.com/mentoring.
Other housekeeping we love to give small shout outs to small businesses, people that they do not sponsor the podcasts we are not partnered with, and we do not get anything from them. But they’re just a small company and they’re doing the best they can like us at art of coaching. So we want to give them some love. When I was in the UK recently, I was there for about two weeks give or take. And it’s called the scrubba S C R U B B A bag, the scrubba bag and allows you to do laundry on the road. It saves me because again all travel and it’s hard to pack light. I have to pack clothes, I’m gonna speak in clothes and I’m gonna wear around town or if we have to go to a dinner. And then I stay active on the road. I’ve always looked at people that can just take like the smallest suitcase imaginable. And I’m like alright, you either don’t do anything active on the road or you know you’re fine just re wearing the same sweaty nasty clothes, I am not. So reach out to them. If you want to learn more. I’ve loved it. I got it off Amazon again, we get no kickbacks here. info@thescrubba.com again, scrub be a.com Tell him breaded Arctic coaching sent to you check them out. If you’re somebody that travels or likes to travel or camps, you will find a lot of use for them.
Also, guys, don’t forget, until the end of this month, all of our online courses are 30% off. Don’t do the usual thing every year. We do this around this time and people wait until December or until this is ran out. And then they say hey, why didn’t I get the 30% off? Guys just go to artofcoaching.com/courses. Now, these are masterclass style, filmed courses, downloadable notes, lifelong access, I’ve heard all the excuses. I don’t have the time you have lifetime access. Oh, what about CEUs? Yep, got those, oh, I don’t have the money. Great. Now it’s 30% off. And we also have a firm. So if you just go to artofcoaching.com/courses, you will find the code you will be able to lock and load and get that going. Alright, let’s dive into it today.
Like I said, this is not going to be an overview of all the science of communication, this is not going to be some pitch to you guys about why you should focus on communication. We’ve been there, we’ve done that we continue to do it. This is for those of you that are bought in, you’re ready to become a better communicator. cheesy stuff isn’t for you, rah rah seminars are for you. How do we get going? How do we evaluate it? Right? Pretty straightforward. Now a big part of my doctorate was seeing what the state of the industry was already. What do people believe makes a great leader or in our parlance coaching, we use leadership and coaching synonymously. What is a coach? What separates great coaches from average coaches? What are the effective component, the key components to effective coaching, what makes coaching uniquely challenging, these are things you had to consider? And so when I dive into the research of this, you would get a lot of different descriptions and definitions empirically of coaching and leadership and this and that, but one thing that was all universal is that it is an interpersonal based profession. Coaching and leadership is a social act amongst social beings. Therefore, it’s pretty universally agreed upon that communication should be the thing that we’re evaluating. I mean, it is the one piece
So As part of our research, I reached out to a lot of coaches and people in different fields, people that have done what they have done for 34 years, some that have done it for two male female folks from eastern part of the world Western culture. And I would ask them some simple questions. I’m not going to go over them all here. But I would say, what role, if any, do you believe communication plays in the coaching process? By and large? All of them would say, Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a critical part of it, it’s what we do every day, then we would say, Well, do you believe it’s a skill? If so how do you believe it can be improved? All but I think one person said, Yeah, you know, of course, it’s a skill, this is something we have to do. So then I would ask them, What do you train? How do you hone this skill? And the vast majority of replies would say, Well, every day, I’m practicing it when I interact. And I said, Okay, well, then how would you rank yourself as a communicator? How are you evaluating that? Let’s say we had to do it one to 10, with one being not effective at all, and 10 being very effective. And you’d get a range of answers, you’d get the typical, humble answer, oh, well, there’s always room to improve. So I’d get myself a four, even if they thought they were really good, then some would say around six to eight, you never really got to 10. But regardless of the answer they gave, I’d say great, what objective or subjective tool in any formal sense did you use to obtain that score? And then you’d get a chuckle, because they realize, well, no tool, I just kind of asked my colleagues or no tool I just asked the athletes or the people that I work with, no tool was the common thing. Now there were some respondents who said, I’ve got undergone teaching evaluation. And we’ll talk about that in a moment. And I’ve undergone coaching evaluation. Now, these usually were not centrally focused on communication. And I had undergone these as well, when I was a part of an organization, we did stuff where we’d shadow each other, you’d get graded on how well you use the time that you had, how resourceful were you with equipment? How did you position yourself in the room, but a lot of it was about session design, session setup, logistical management, not centered solely on the social interaction piece. And we found this more and more.
As we went through the literature, we found that although there are coaching evaluations that existed, they were either not easy to use, they were not easy to understand. Or they were not focused on the one thing that all these researchers kept saying that it was all about, which was social interaction. And it just seemed odd, because they said, Well, how are we going to evaluate this? And so I asked friends in the research community, Hey, have you heard of this? Have you heard of that, and I tried downloading some of these evaluations, and some you could get access to some you couldn’t, a lot of them, you couldn’t because they were behind research based, you know, paywalls, and there was no access. So you sit there and you think, okay, if it’s hard for the average person, or even the above average person, to even know that communication and interpersonal skills, how to define them, where to find something to evaluate them, then if they do, try to navigate what some of these terms mean, I mean, autocratic behavior, democratic behavior. Granted, we understand this, or the vast majority, but not everybody’s going to, and we know, guys, from a human behavior standpoint, if you want something to be used, it’s got to be simple. That’s the reason iPhones are always so popular. That’s a reason why a lot of things are popular. If it’s simple to use, and there’s no real learning curve, chances are, it’s going to be more highly adopted. Bottom line, because people are resistant to change. So there was an opportunity here, we’re finding more and more coaches saying that yeah, this is ironic, I never thought about this. I know that this is important, but I don’t evaluate it. And then I don’t even know where I’d find something to evaluate it while my daughter was born.
So we dive into this and we say, All right, we know that we need to create an evaluation, we know that we need this thing to be easily utilized. And you know, we mess around with the name, the conscious coaching, evaluation, the art of coaching, social agility, evaluation, whatever it is, right. It’s still a work in progress, as we name it. But we decided if we’re going to create this, we’re going to make sure it’s validated. We’re going to go through and we’re going to make sure everything that’s evaluated over 24 different points, that it’s valid, and we’re also going to make sure that bias is accounted for. And we do that in a couple of different ways. Now, let me explain the value of the evaluation first, and then I’ll talk about how we utilize it at our apprenticeship workshops, and all these pieces and no, I love you guys. This is not something where you’re gonna be able to download it online. This is something that is proprietary to us at our apprenticeships, not a sales pitch, just telling you how it is we give tons of free resources away. But even if we put this available out for the public, if you don’t come and understand how to use it, that tool is more dangerous than it is helpful and And there’s also just the fact that when you look at coach development workshops,
a 2016 meta analysis shows that 285 of them focus on technical skills, almost none of them focus on inter intrapersonal. And that’s the call to arms of, again, why we couldn’t put this online without getting trained, because the call and research is for more resources, it is for people to hate, we need more facilitated workshops to grow here we need if coaching is going to be considered a legitimately serious profession, we have got a lock and load with the interpersonal domain. And it also should just challenge you guys a little bit of saying, you know, why is it that more than $300 billion a year is often spent on leadership development, but we’re not happy with it? Well, one of the primary issues faced with that is people just want a script. So they go and get motivated, or they download something online, but they have no context how to use it, we don’t want that people are complex, the situations they find themselves are in complex, you need something that you can score that you can understand and you can utilize. So the purpose was to be able to provide coaches with a flexible, evaluative instrument that will ultimately give you more self awareness, facilitate more self reflection, deeper observation, discussion within context. And we knew that there had to be stakes here because I’ve done a couple of things in the past.
When I wrote conscious coaching, I said, Alright, let’s give people an easy field guide that they can utilize to practice because you get people that say, Hey, how do I put the book to use and so we created a website, get field guide.com. And some very simple, somewhat quixotic activities they could do, we did an online course Bought In one of the ones that’s on sale. And we had them try to fill out a coaching assessment themselves, but there’s just no accountability. And so we said, alright, this has got to be something we do live, we really got to get people live. And we’ve got to help them understand context, and really how to walk through this. And the other piece of this is that we knew we needed it to be used in a wide range of situations. So any other evaluation I had gone under, yeah, it can be used when coaching a group. But ours can be used when you’re shadowing, doing staff development, when you’re giving yourself video feedback. We’ve used it to evaluate ourselves on Zoom meetings, we use it as part of our art of coaching speaking school, it’s the only other place aside from our apprenticeship where you can get the evaluation. And you could even use this when I’ve used it, he would not be happy me telling you this. I’ve used it on my wife who she’s working on being more expressive with her body language. I’ve used it with myself, when I’ve done the podcast, it’s very painful to hear myself on the podcast, I have to remind myself of certain aspects of it. So you can use it in a wide range of situations. You can also use it whether you’re the protagonist or the antagonist in the scene. Now when I say scene, I mean training exercise, role playing scenario, however, you want to call that this, this podcast is not going to be about semantics for the sake of this episode. But say that you have somebody on staff that really doesn’t do well, from an assertiveness standpoint, or say that you have somebody that’s very analytical and just not able to get out of their own head. And maybe it’s you. And you’ve just got to figure out how to get more in tune with the other person. But we usually put you in a role playing scenario where somebody else is kind of serving as an obstacle for you. We figured out the traits that kind of, you know, push your buttons or make it a little bit more difficult. And we give them those constraints, because that’s really what role playing is, you know, if people are complex adaptive systems, which they absolutely are. And the context in which we operate is complex chaos ever changing. Volatile, you never know how people are going to behave, especially when in groups, you’ve got to be able to flex you’ve got to be able to adapt, you’ve got to be able to be put in situations that give you a hard time and force you to really adapt in real time. So we’ve used it to evaluate the sparring partner so to speak, as well as the person going through the exercise.
Now let me put this in a sporting context. When I box competitively, it was real simple. If you’re getting ready for a fight, that sparring partner needs to come at you. Of course, there’s days where you might do rehearse, or tone down sparring. But as you get closer and closer, that’s got to intensify. And they’re not doing you any favors by holding back. And we tell people the same thing at our apprenticeship communication workshops, don’t hold back. We’re giving you constraints because this needs to be harder on them in some instances than real life that’s overload. And I found how amazing is that that
it applies to the profession I started out in strength and conditioning. We would put 100 kilos plus on people’s backs and having to do back squats and a wide variety, a variety of exercises because those had both Direct and Indirect adaptations and benefits to people on the field to play the chord and play choose your surface. Of course, doing a squat and deadlift does not look like sprinting, but it can strengthen the muscles involved with that and stimulate the neuromuscular system. Thus, those things when performed well and properly programmed help people get faster or more explosive. Now not in the absence of sprinting, and plyometrics and other more specific type exercises. But the same thing holds true for us. We will use a variety of abstract improv games that are more akin to squatting effects on acceleration, right, these things don’t necessarily always look alike. And if you want an understanding of what that is go back to the episode where we talked about coaching as improv. And then we have increasingly specific scenarios. And then we have those specific scenarios that you’re going to deal with everyday life plus constraints. All of these are progressions and regressions, for social interaction that you can evaluate. And it has helped introverts and extroverts and ambiverts. And however Evert, you want to describe yourself alike, because you can turn them up, you can turn them down. And the nicest thing about the valuation is it’s not pass fail. It’s not win or lose, there’s no perfect score.
I went through movement evaluations, as a strength conditioning coach, all the perfect scores are 21, there were plenty of athletes that I trained, that didn’t get anything close to that, that were extremely high performing. And then there were people that scored at 21, that didn’t have a lick of skill in that domain. And it gives us false kind of idea that, Oh, if you just aced the test, you’re good to go. We weren’t interested in that. So not only did we want this thing to be flexible and easy to understand and diverse in its use cases. But it couldn’t be pass and fail if real life and being an effective communicator in real life is contextual, so must the evaluation. So what I mean by that is, people would get a score, and there is a zero to three. And they will score themselves after doing a role playing scenario. Their peers at the apprenticeship who range in ages, experience levels, professions will quietly evaluate them. So if I’m evaluating myself, after a role playing scene, I’m accounting for egocentric bias. You’re evaluating me as my peer, individual peer. And then we have people break up into groups, and they evaluate together. So we have group bias, individual bias, egocentric bias. And so instead of a perfect score, what we’re really looking for is the perceptual gap. If I gave myself a three, and a wide variety of the categories, some of which we’re going to talk about today, and everybody else gave me a one, okay, there’s a perceptual gap there, but it’s expected. And people don’t get defensive about it, unlike so many of the other assessments out there that say, good, bad, pass, fail, black and white. What this derives is conversation of why did you see it that way? And then we can go back, and we always review it on the tape. We always record these things, and we go back and re review it on the tape. And what do you think happens the minute, somebody that scored themselves very highly, and maybe even did get a bit defensive? What do you think happens with a score, the minute they go back and watch the tape? Usually, they kind of smile. And they think, Oh, my gosh, and they give themselves a more realistic score. But those of you that are just doing staff education in house, those of you who feel like you’re just practicing communication, because you asked your athletes are, like those of you that are not getting out and diversifying your perspective around people that see it different ways, you’re going to lose out on that because people will give you frankly, just flawed feedback. And even if you’re like No, no, no, no, they won’t. Our staff is brutally honest. Well, not every staff is multicultural. And that’s another aspect. We had people at our last apprenticeship in the UK, the English wasn’t even their first language. So there were some things that somebody thought they got a three on or a two on and then somebody from Spain or another that would say no, in our culture, this is how you would do this. And that feeds into as you guys know, why leadership and coaching at the highest level is never one size fits all because what makes a great coach or leader in one culture is not going to and another so a lot of time went into this to make this thing useful, memorable, flexible, and ultimately adaptable so people don’t feel like if they get guys there’s some situations where you should get one. And I’ll if we have time, I’ll talk about a couple of them.
So overall how this was created as we have seven key, what we call meta categories, all of which are social skills oriented. And within those meta categories, we then have subcategories. So let me break down the jargon. One category is the category of communication. Now remember I said this evaluation is on interpersonal skills, and interpersonal skills and communication are not synonymous. They’re involved with one another, but they’re not synonymous. They’re not communication for the sake of how we’re going to describe it here. Communication point blank, and like anything, there’s so many definitions is the process by which people share ideas, thoughts, and feelings in commonly comprehensible ways. And that’s from Hamilton 2014. And we’ve done previous episodes on the components of the communication process, which come from Adler, and Proctor and hardy 2018. And there’s so much other research, including when we look at Albert Mehrabian, who talked about how when we communicate, there’s so much of a lag between perceived meaning. So what I say, and what you hear well, 7% of how you interpret that or perceive that comes from the actual words, only seven. And of course, this is on average, right? You can look up, Albert, sorry, I think I said Alfred, Albert Moravian 38%, of how it’s perceived comes from the tone of voice and how that audience member conveyed it. And remember, there’s cultural factors. And then 55% comes from expression and looks, all those pieces. So communication itself is very, very, very nuanced. But for the sake of this category, the sub components are things like clarity conciseness, fluency, tonality, these are the ones you guys tend to be familiar with.
So clarity to get even deeper, that is, are you simple to understand, emphasis on a specific and consistent message use of appropriate and concrete words? So if I said communication, is the essence of effective leadership? How clear is that message versus me saying, communication is an incredibly important skill, if you hope to become and if I just keep going on and on and on, you may get it. But it’s not as sharp. Think of a newspaper headline, what does it say? How clear is it? Then there’s conciseness. That is, how brief is it? Now make no mistake, sometimes you might think that being concise is being clear. But remember, clarity is also about word choice. So it’s not just about being brief. It’s about how vivid, how I used to call it talking in color. How do those words conjure? What does it conjure in your mind’s eye is unmistakable? So clarity, and conciseness are not the same. And there’s also times where being concise, doesn’t always pay. I mean, imagine going up and somebody said, Hey, we’re gonna pay for a 60 minute talk. And you’re like, oh, I can do it in 30. That’s fine, if you can, but if they want to pay for 60 minutes, you still got to think about how can I make my points concise within this timeframe, but I also need to fill up this timeframe. Then there’s fluency gives smooth delivery, minimal fillers. Fillers, of course, are things like “uh” “like” “well” “uh uh” “you know”, sometimes I’m very guilty. And I appreciate somebody pointing this out to me respectfully, as a listener. I didn’t notice it. But I’ll say what have you a lot. So I apologize for that. But here’s the key thing. And why even at our art of coaching speaking school, we don’t worry too much about making people perfectly fluent. Because there’s research that shows while absolutely too many disfluencies can be disruptive and screw up the attention and people will tune out. No disfluencies whatsoever, really make you appear less likable, and less relatable. And there’s concrete evidence on that. It’s a big reason to be honest, why I don’t script out all these podcasts, there’ll be times where I’ll reference in note. Because I’m big on making sure I get terminology right with something or I want to honor the researcher. But the point being, I’m not really worried we don’t pay Lance, the guy that helps us kind of consolidate each episode, I don’t say, Hey, man, take out this cough. Or hey, take out this like we, there’s a balance, there’s a balance there. So and if you listen to it, you’ll notice some of these big, big, big podcasts that have 567 people working on them and they take weeks to produce the things you hear on NPR. Part of the reason you never hear disfluencies is those are mega edited. You know, they’re hyper produced, and there’s a place for that but so we’ll look at fluency
Tonality. Do you have appropriate alterations in tone and pitch and volume? Sometimes there’s a point to these things, some times they can distract you more. I don’t sit here with a sheet and say, okay, Brett, remember it, 38 minutes, speak up. And then make sure to get low part of the time depending on the medium. tonality can be a part of you or your brand, it can be what people expect of you. So if you came in hung out of my house, I don’t talk like this all the time. But for the podcast, listen, our company is about helping people navigate the messy realities of leadership and kind of be in a respectful kick in the butt. So I’m going to talk with an urgent tone at times. Let’s talk about tempo. Now remind you this is all just under verbal. We have seven meta categories, you guys are just learning subcategories of one aspect of it. Tempo, if you look at from research from Owen Hardy and colleagues, the average rate of speech is 125. Between 125 and 175 words per minute, the average thought rate is about 400, to 800 words per minute. So this tells you why there tends to be such a big gap. And why it’s so hard to listen and key in sometimes because our minds will wander, because we can generate thoughts far more quickly, then we tend to speak. Now, there’s a middle ground here. And of course, this is going to depend on cultural dialects. And we know that if you hear somebody speak Spanish and Puerto Rico, it’s very different than if you hear them speaking in different parts of Mexico. And in all different regions of any country. If they speak a foreign language or even in the United States, right, you hear some people from Boston talk and they may I packed the car and have it yard, they might talk at the upper end of that they may even exceed 300 words per minute. But that may not impact the other person if they’re used to it from a cultural standpoint. So this is why you have to love communication in a world that tells you this is bad, this is good. You must be this, you must be that. What we do have is concrete research on what is optimal in certain circumstances. But there’s flex space there, you don’t need to be a robot. You don’t need to worry if you speak at 200 words per minute, and the average rate of speech is 125 to 175. What you need to worry about is who’s your audience? And how are they interpreting it
When I went and spoke in Beijing, and we had to do non simultaneous translation, I had to speak far more slowly. I also had to have a lot more pauses in between each sentence. I remember stepping on stage and say and I’m so thankful to be here. Let’s get started. And the translator said fewer words. And you have to respect that. So that’s just verbal. That’s just the verbal part of it and guys are so many companies spending great high, massive amounts of money on this, Amazon has their Halo check in with tone. There’s a great company called cocido out there that does stuff with customer service. MIT has been on this for a very long time with sociometric badges, they look at conversational dynamics, turn taking these are things that we go into and and talk about at our apprenticeship. But essentially, you put on this badge, and it will measure and evaluate you. And you’re skill at navigating social interactions using social signals derived from different vocal features, including body motion as well and relative location to other people. Are you standing too close? Are you doing this to really fascinating stuff.
So now let’s look at the nonverbal piece remember nonverbal, just a subcategory of the larger communication category. Now within that we will evaluate on haptics, the use of touch. When is it appropriate? When is it not? Well, if this was a scene between two people negotiating, did they shake hands? If we are having people say hello and about five different ways, how creative Are you know, what are they doing? Oh, I bumped elbows. Okay, give you a quick hug. All right, maybe this one’s adapt what it like if we’re seeing a scene about confrontation. And I’m coaching Virginia and saying, Hey, Tom has an issue with confrontation, really get into his space, which is proxemics. And kind of think about what confrontational haptics would look like there. And so we can coach them on those things. What you guys have typically heard is nonverbal is what we call and the research alludes to as kinesics. But this is about your eye movement, your facial expressions, are they looking down into the right? Are they looking this way? Are they crossing their legs? That doesn’t account for touch that doesn’t account for spacing, that’s just your body language. There’s also aesthetics, believe it or not, what we wear and how we were it communicates things adornments, physical characteristics and strength and conditioning. A lot of people feel like gotta build by and I’ve got to look the part I’ve got to be jacked. It’s one of the only fields where they like wear their outfit or their uniform every day. There’s always this idea of what you need to look like, environmental decor, if you go into somebody’s house, my neighbor, Heidi, I mean, you could get dropped off in a time machine walk in her house and know what season it is. She’s very decorative. she loves celebrating, it’s okay, it’s false. You got 12 Christmas trees, it’s clearly Christmas. So even even tattoos. So there’s a lot of pieces here that you can look at. And you never want to create clones, because there’s so many different aspects to what makes somebody effective in those areas.
So another meta category that we utilize is negotiation. Negotiation is a critical interpersonal skill. Now, the negotiation category is all about learning how to not only gather information, but build relationships and learn how to ethically manipulate perceptions of common interests, so that we can achieve common or private goals. And that’s really for Morley 1981. And, and you guys know what negotiation means, right? Like in leadership and coaching, both are a highly interdependent process. We’re always trying to communicate with and influence the other side. So why would you not have a category and say, Hey, how well did you do this? Now, the evaluation has changed some aspects over time. But when it first started, the sub components of this category were empathy. Right? That was number one, if I’m watching, you try to negotiate a raise with somebody in a scene. And everybody at the apprenticeship is evaluating you. You think if you’re trying to get on the same page, or somebody that you might want to display some empathy, hey, I understand that the company was hit hard by COVID. And that you guys have to be, you know, you have to really evaluate where you’re going to spend the money. I understand that. And I empathize with that. Now, you don’t have to state it that way. It doesn’t need to be that empathy can be displayed so many different ways. Guys, I’m just giving you example, if my wife comes in right now and says, I’m stressed, I really need some help. And you’ve been watching succession for two hours. Now, can you help me? There’s two ways you can well, there’s many ways you can say, but I could say, back off, you know, I’m watching the show. Or one time, what I said is, hey, I understand you’re stressed and I’m, I’m sorry about that, I will help you. But I just got back from eight days straight on the road teaching, can you just give me 30 more minutes to unwind? Otherwise, I’m scared that I probably won’t be able to give you all my attention. Now, you could say both of those things are awful. Again, I’m just giving you an example. In a negotiation or conflict resolution type scenario, we should see empathy.
Now, you could say, and we had a great man I loved I loved having him because he brought up such a great point. His name’s Dan Forbes, came to our apprenticeship in the UK. And we were workshopping how he could be a more effective communicator with a client that was notoriously high strung, no BS fast talking. And we evaluated Dan, in this role playing scenario. And I said, Dan, there wasn’t a lot of empathy there, I probably would have given you a one, not because it was bad, but because it wasn’t present. He said, Yeah. Well, this particular person doesn’t want that. I’ve utilized that before. And they usually say, Don’t give me that BS, because they’re very adroit negotiators themselves. And they pick up on that. And he said, so it’s just gotten me farther. Oh, okay. Well, boom. So even though I evaluated him as a one, based on the context, then I would say, well, that’s that’s appropriate, that’s appropriate there. You have to look at guys, sometimes there’s something to be said for being? How do I want to phrase this? Well, I’ll go back to the example of the movement evaluation when I had certain athletes that would score poorly, but they’re great, and they performed well, and they didn’t get injured, and some that got a perfect 21. But they weren’t all that great. dysfunction can be an advantage, something that doesn’t look like it fits, or that it’s a good thing can actually be very advantageous. There are I think of a time when we were working with a major league baseball player from the New York Yankees, and there was somebody that really was like, Well, you know, he’s right handed, and he’s always thrown from this side. So we need to do so many more med balls, med ball throws from the other side. And really, we need to emphasize like four times as much work in this plane of motion to really correct that imbalance. Guys, all it did was screw him up. Because he depends on a certain amount of torque, he depends on a certain amount of functional asymmetry to be able to generate. And so when he went back to playing and throwing a lot, everything felt off. Well, of course it did. Of course, it did, because we had now messed with the very muscles and the very function of of how he was used to stabilize I mean, it screwed up motor control, plain and simple. And so there’s some times where you might get a low score, and it’s, Hey, that makes sense in the context of this scene, or the cultural dynamics.
Then there’s state management. State Management is how well do you keep your cool how well You keep your cool or if you’re somebody that’s very passive and you say, hey, I need to really, I need to assert myself, I need to be better. So I want to do this scene where somebody pushes me and I stand up all right? Well, then I should see an elevation and state management, I should see you be not to overuse the term again, but adroit at taking that up a notch. If they push you, I should see this. Now, I tend a lot before I got into a lot of this and was probably as self aware as I am now where I have such a healthy amount of self hate. Because some of you might think that because I have a following, or I don’t know, maybe it just might be the way you think I present myself that I really liked myself, or that I think I’m a great communicator, guys. I am reminded every day of how crap I am at all this. And that’s the wonderful thing and why it’s for higher level leaders. Because Hemingway always talked about, we’re all apprentices and a craft we’ll never master. That’s the beauty of it. People that are true, professionals, don’t try to be perfect, they don’t think they are, they’re actually going to spend most of the time in the areas that they think they suck at. Because they want that that’s why we named the workshop, the apprenticeship after that Hemingway quote, because you could come to 15 apprenticeships, and all of them are different. Because the people that evaluate you at all those apprenticeships are going to be different. And they have different biases. And that’s valuable for you. Because you’re going to interact with a lot of people in life. So I have a lot of self hate, because I’ll see myself. And I’m like, Man, I’m I’m awful at this. But I used to be very bad at state management, I’d get extremely fired up or anxious about something, and I’m better at it than I used to be, I still have a lot of work to do. But contextually I’m so much more effective than I used to be. Then there’s self disclosure. self disclosure, when you’re negotiating, you have to tell the other side what you’re looking for, to a degree you need to make them dig. if you’re gonna be empathetic, and you’re gonna relate to them, which is a huge part of what we talk about unconscious coaching, research, relate reframe. The last thing that’s going to help you in a negotiation is a parasocial relationship. So let’s say a woman named Becky is listening right now. And Becky calls in and we go through a role playing scenario. And I just asked Becky tons of information. And every time Becky asked me something, I don’t give her any back. After a while, what is Becky likely to do? She’s going to shut down or she’s going to start feeding me the wrong, as Arnold would say, and plumbing, I had the wrong advices. But you have to have some kind of self disclosure when you’re negotiating, you gotta give ground to gain ground. So I want to see that.
And we had seen it, we did another wonderful role playing scenario and a recent apprenticeship, where Ed, Ed, if you’re listening, God, it was so refreshing watching your videos again. And I won’t go into all of it to protect identity and all the pieces there, I’d respect any of your privacy as well. But long story short, she was trying to accomplish a goal, there was a power broker in her way. And Ed was very good at asking clarifying questions and motivational interviewing and showing politeness. But she wasn’t kind of getting to the point of here’s what I want, here’s why I want it and tying those things in. And that just prolonged the nature of the interaction and decrease the likelihood of her getting what she wanted.
Also, in negotiation, we have use of influence. So if you’ve taken bought in, we had a wide range of influence tactics we talked about in that online course. And I seem to have to beat this over the head because we get this emailed a lot. Yes, if you’re in a different field, you can still use these things. I know what throws some of you off when I say athlete or coach or strength and conditioning. But guys, just look at your bookshelf. I have a book written by a member of the military, he uses the term deployment, he uses the term soldier he used the term, right, I know that I don’t have to be in the military to learn from that individual. I have books written by surgeons, I’m not a doctor. Right. So Bought In is just for you as much as it is everybody else. But the reason I say that is some of you have said hey, can you do a podcast on all the influence tactics? No, I can’t I love you guys. That would be way too long of a podcast. And as much as I’d like to believe you think of me as Joe Rogan. Nobody’s listening to a two to three hour podcast. So all those things are in Bought In their chunked up and easy to digest videos, you get a free handout, and at the apprenticeship, you get that information as well.
But bottom line, and I owe a lot of credit to Gary UKL and his colleagues for these influence tactics, things that we’ve adapted, and that we’ve added to, but you use influence in leadership coaching and leadership in general is an influence based process, because influence is about helping somebody change their behavior. I mean, that’s what you do. You observe you change your behavior, you influence them. It’s not about being an Instagram influencer. Influence is the ability to utilize power to bring about change. And that happens every day in leadership. So think about that, like, share on time or think of a time when a negotiation with you went poorly. What types of constraints were present? What did you do wrong? Where were you tone deaf? did? Did you not disclose much? Did you not show empathy? Did he come in too hard? Did you not manage your state correctly? Were you a little bit too much of a pushover? I know I was when I tried negotiating raises at first. And then what kind of influence tactics are you using? Are you always coming with data? Are you always trying to rely on do you think that people are always just going to logic is going to win them over? I need to pull out my phone. Because myself and Ali Kershner were talking about man, it’s just a tremendous quote. And I don’t want to misquote it, so I am going to pull it up. But we were talking about how so many people just want to use logic all the time, all the time to try to influence people. And guys, this goes back to Aristotle more than 3000 years ago. ethos, pathos, logos, you can’t just rely on logic. You can’t you can’t rely on logic, there’s emotions, there’s so many other things that that people are going to utilize. But there was a great quote. And this quote came from The Little Book of Common Sense investing. And I believe it is also from Thomas Paine’s pamphlet of common sense. I’m going to read it. So it says, time makes more converts than reason. I’ll say that again, for you. Time, makes more converts than reason. And what that says essentially, is the same thing we talked about in our courses, things that determine human behavior, why people do some of the quirky things they do. They’re their own selfish drives. There’s environmental influences, there are social influences. And then there’s time. I mean, everybody’s coachable, but not on your time. And this is something I said all the way back in conscious coaching as well. It’s why drives everybody nuts, because everybody wants to fix everybody right now. And I also saw this in my life many different times. Pun intended.
There were times four years ago, when Oh, you’re writing a book on communication? What is it, it’s just going to be something that tells me that I need to love people up? No. for two to three years, there were some people that just like were vehemently it’s like, you almost thought that me talking about communication and interpersonal skills was offending them. And then, you know, unfortunately, one of them lost a job or one of them had trouble in their relationship. And we all have trouble in our relationships. And we all bounce around with jobs. And so that’s not nobody’s like throwing stones. But then they said, hey, yeah, it cost me this, and I wasn’t ready to hear it. Until now. I didn’t really know what you were doing. And then I kept seeing what you posted on social media, or, Hey, your social media wasn’t for me, but one time I bought your course. And holy crap, there’s a lot deeper. And you guys all have your own examples of that those of you that parents know that you’re teenagers, by and large that and I know N equals one aren’t gonna listen to you, they’re not always gonna have the closest relationship with you. But as your kids grow, you know, you might get closer, they’re gonna see things because why life experience has taught them a lot. Time has passed, time has passed. Time has passed. For me, I used to criticize. I remember when I first got in strength and conditioning, I would just the mentors that I had, or situational mentors, at least. It was such a shot in Freud a base scarcity mindset community and still is to a degree, they would just lambast other people doing this and that with their training methods, even if they didn’t have the context, and we do the same thing. And it wasn’t until, you know, I was put in situations where a film crew came in, and maybe they caught 1/10 of a session, then it was that 1/10 of a session that they put on ESPN. And I’m sitting there like what, that was not even part of what we did. That was that was a fun game at the end, or that was one piece. And he just realized, Hey, I Yeah, time has taught me and too many situations have taught me you can’t judge.
But you need to know that and a couple other tidbits before we go on to the next category and give you some insight as to what’s after this and how you can apply it is more from Thomas Paine. He said, I love this. There, can be a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong. And that gives it a superficial appearance of being right. And I think about this in the context of how people approach interpersonal skills training. It’s not that they think a thing wrong, but they think of it incorrectly, that it’s rah, rah woowoo, not measurable, not manageable. And so they think they’re right, because they only engage with information like that, and they never seek deeper information. I mean, we say it all the time that people that should come to our workshops, and the most or listen are the ones that are never going to listen to it. They’re never going to come. I’m not going to convince them you’re not going to convince somebody to do what you want them to. You’re not going to convince them the people that don’t even want to engage enough to have an open mind with it. Sometimes they come to you, because time converts them, time converts them. And that’s how you get somebody to enlarge their views beyond the present day time. We’ll do that
So another category, within this and, this will be the last one we’ll talk about here for today. And then we’ll kind of give a breakdown of some other pieces. And this one is something that people tend to struggle with as well. And rightfully so none of these things are easy, is what’s called orchestration. So we’ve talked about three main categories communication, and under that were subcategories of the verbal nonverbal and their components. There’s negotiation, and its components of empathy, state management, use of influence, self disclosure, orchestration. And yes, there is a reason these all end in Shan Shan Shan and part of that is with human behavior. If you want something to be adapted and adopted, you need to make it easy and memorable. Orchestration is all about how long do you keep the ball in play, for lack of a better term during a social interaction? Don’t worry, I’ll tease that out. But I want you to think of a time where you’ve gotten in a conversation with somebody. And it was obvious they weren’t listening. And they just their replies and other things were off topic. Or maybe even when you were working with somebody in your team or your organization, and you just weren’t in sync. You weren’t as in sync as you thought, well, a lot of that is orchestration, you can think of it as this Harmonic Convergence. Think of it as a conductor, leading an orchestra, because what you’re trying to do is arrange or direct elements of a situation or in this case, an interaction to produce a desired effect. You want a desired effect, if me and my colleague ally, are on a call with a potential podcast sponsor, or we’re training somebody in our speaker school. And we are kind of passing the baton back and forth, teaching or emphasizing a point or talking about a certain aspect of our service, or why we’re teaching a skill a certain way, we’ve got to be in tune, right? Every organization needs to be in tune. This is why most people reach out to us they say, our organization’s not in tune, we’re not on the same page. So think of orchestration as getting on the same page.
So one component of orchestration that we evaluate is point blank execution. What was the primary objective of the scenario or the situation? And did it get accomplished? Because that lays out the specificity of your approach? Did this get accomplished? That is a part of interpersonal skills, if I go to my neighbor to see how they’re feeling, because they’d been sick? Did it through proper clarity conciseness all the pieces of the earlier aspect of things, as well as how will I manage the conversation? If they said no, I’m still not feeling well? Or how well did I manage that? And was able to get the point across that, hey, I’m checking on you. I care. And here’s a resolution or some help I can offer did I execute that? Or I could think about on a previous podcast, when we did recently, what to charge for your time? Did I get all these things locked in, I was able to get this specifically laid out. And some of you right now might be like, wait a minute, I’m confused. This made sense up to this point. But now you’re saying that achieving something like being good at orchestrating a conversation being good at keeping things on flow? And being on the same page? also ties in the other components? Well, of course it does. Why wouldn’t it? Every category in here feeds off of another. self disclosure helps with empathy, right use of influence helps with execution. Good nutrition helps with losing weight, as does proper sleep, as does strength training. These pieces are huge. They’re huge. It’s a diverse portfolio, but they all have things in common. You think of a SEP IRA, a Roth IRA, you think of a traditional 401 K. These things are interactive, they’re interchangeable. So another aspect of it is
synchrony. So this occurs in verbal para verbal and nonverbal form, meaning were the words you chose and the actions in congruence or harmony with the other person or cultural norms. So for instance, and this ties in with the Kinesis, subcategory, if I go over to Norway, and I were just to start running around talking to random strangers, you know, being the stereotypical American and I’m just running around, you know, and I’m not respecting people’s kind of their space. I’m just kind of blabbing on and on and on. You know, they have something there and I always mispronounce this, and I always apologize to my friend Carl. I believe it’s Jana Milovan, or the law of jaunty right. And at its simplest, it describes the way that Norwegians and in fact other Scandinavians, too behave, they put society ahead of the individual. It’s not about boasting about individual accomplishments and being jealous of others. So if I don’t respect that, and I’m not in sync at, let’s say, I go to a dinner or anything similar, that is not going to be great synchrony. Or once again, if Ali and I are passing the mic back and forth, and I say, hey, what do you think about this and she all of a sudden starts on another topic. That’s poor synchrony. If I’m presenting as we do in speaker school, and somebody slides just jump a radically to some other point without some kind of tie in, they would get downgraded for synchrony that messageit wasn’t in sync, it didn’t flow, there was not a rhythm there.
And then relevance. So you know, did they stay on topic, if all of a sudden, we’re doing a role playing scene that is about a young know at all employee, and we’re confronting him or her and trying to give them some feedback. And we are speaking about them showing up on time, and I’m just making this up, or we are speaking about how they interact with clients, and they fire back and then all of a sudden, the subject becomes about something else entirely. And they got us off track. And the argument became about something that they wanted us to argue about, and we walk away feeling like Oh, my God, I just got pulled into another argument. That’s poor relevance. If my wife comes down, and let’s say we go back to that one situation that I mentioned, and says, hey, you’ve been watching succession for two hours now, can you help me? And I say, what’s for lunch? Not only is that rude and tone deaf, that’s poor relevance, that’s only going to lead to a bigger issue. So you always have to say like, it’s not just about what you say, and how you say it. And all these pieces, it’s about these other themes of how well are you surfing this? How well are you navigating all the other pieces, because communication really is even though it’s a two way street, about the other person. So you want to set people up for success, you want to make sure and lock these things in.
So when I was trying to give you guys some fun examples, one thing that we do at the apprenticeship just to get people’s guards down, because people can come in so tight, is we’ll do abstract games that can be simple or comedic and non threatening just to get people more comfortable. Because education for so long in any space is not that hands on. It’s not interactive. So this is called three lines sceen. It’s all about your establishing relevant information for added context. So I’d say Hey, good morning, Ali, can I get you some coffee? Now, if Ali says, Sure, and please get me a breakfast sandwich as well, since we’re not going to have time to eat at the airport. And then I say, Great, I’ll head down and meet you in the lobby. What do we know about the information presented? If nothing else, well, I said, Good morning, Ali, can I get you some coffee? Well, you don’t know much about the relationship between us. Right? There’s not a lot that you know, there. But you know, one person’s name’s Ali, and that it’s morning. And then based on Ali’s response, sure. And please get me a breakfast sandwich as well, since we won’t have time at the airport. Okay, now our bread and Ali business partners are they colleagues is this a couple, we still don’t know that. But we do know that they must be at a hotel. Because Brett asked if she wanted coffee. And she also said breakfast sandwich and we won’t have time to eat at the airport. And then I said, I’ll head down now and meet you in the lobby. All those things collectively give you some insight as to what’s going on here. They give you context, when people do role playing really poorly. They might just be like, what’s up? And somebody says, Well, I’m hungry. Why don’t you give me somebody so we can get to our flight. Cool. And there are people that do that in life, they’re not going to give you much. And you’ve got to be adept at getting that information out of them.
So we teach that as an abstract game, not to highlight amazing orchestration. But to help people that come to these apprenticeships, understand that part of great orchestration, and setting somebody up for success is by giving them detailed information so that they can stay in sync. And so what you’re talking about is irrelevant. It’s got to be relevant. If I get on a staff meeting, and I say, Hey, everyone. Today we are going to go over our q4 review specifically how well we did in our November courses. So we’re going to talk about these finances. And Liz, I want to set you up for success here. So could you just talk about how we did the last seven days in particular on convergence. Now even if you guys don’t know what that means? Liz, there’s execution, relevance, synchrony and also some clarity here. We’re talking about a certain topic. We’re getting it in line. And hopefully I’m minimizing Liz’s confusion about anything because I’m saying hey, it’s the next seven days, or the past seven days, and I just want to look at conversions. So we can tighten that up. Right I’m not a conductor asking people to play two songs at once. Now I respect that some of this can be confirmed Using because you guys don’t have the evaluation in front of you don’t know what to tell you, right? Because this is just something that you’ve got to come and train yourself. And even if I gave you the cause just be real for a moment, let’s say we did let you download the eval, you really think that with this podcast, and the eval, you’re going to be good, you’re not. And that is literally what the literature shows is wrong with coach and leadership development, please hear me if nothing else, people keep thinking if they go to a workshop and get a tool that tells them how to interact in every situation and how to do this. And I saw in strength and conditioning too, if you just give me a tool of the exact sets and reps and the exact exercises I should use and the exact equipment I should use, people keep going for a tool, and they don’t realize you’re the tool, you’re the skill that needs to get sharpened. Because that tool alone isn’t going to tell you how to adapt it. If I tell somebody, here’s the perfect program and the exact equipment you need to buy, and the exact set and rep scheme and they take that but that’s not what their environment allows for that’s not worth the paper it’s written on. If I tell you guys, here’s the archetypes, here’s the influence tactics. Here’s everything I’ve created the last however many years. And here’s our evaluation. How are you utilizing that because that’s, what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to build that. That’s why we utilize role playing. That’s why we utilize role playing. Very simple game we do. Again, before I wrap up for you guys, is a game called mind meld.
Now, hopefully you’re listening. I’m giving you fun, abstract theater, adapted games, go back to coaching his improv again, and you’ll hear why. But we do this with very real, very serious, high specificity type situations. So you’re not coming in just playing a bunch of games and leaving, you’re locking and loading. Ironically, the first two soft launches we did with the apprenticeship, some of those became that, because some of we got we had gotten so caught up in some of the things that the games highlighted. And it became addictive. But like anything, we’ve evolved so much that day, two of the apprenticeship is all situational role playing a little bit of review. And then it’s all video breakdowns, role playing group work, Team of Teams type stuff. But one of the fun things that you can do is called mind meld, very simple. And it’s just like Rock Paper, scissors, and that you’d say 123 Blank, right. And in this, that blank is filled with a word. So the overall goal of mind meld and how it plays into proper orchestration is to get two people to say the same word at the same time. And to do that, you’ve got to bridge the gap. So we may start. And I think there’s a video of us doing this on artofcoaching.com on the apprenticeship website. But let’s say you guys said all right, Brett, you and a co host, you’re on here, why don’t you I’m going to give you a topic 90s rock bands, and the broader, the better. Because that represents real life, in the sense that we’ve talked about communication isn’t a walk in the park, it’s a minefield, and it is a tool to help people address misunderstandings, if all of a sudden I go to Kroger right now and there’s somebody in front of me, if I just start talking to them, this guy doesn’t understand me, I don’t understand him. Right off the bat, we’re trying to sniff each other out. And so there’s a lot of times when you interact with strangers, it takes you a while to get to a point of common ground. So that’s really what this is about. And obviously, this ties into great negotiation and romantic relationships as well, because you need to get on the same page as somebody but you start from a very broad perspective, I don’t know you, you don’t know me, I don’t know what you want. You don’t know what I want, what baggage Are you gonna bring into this interaction? What baggage Am I gonna bring into it, so on and so forth. So 90s rock bands that just as easily could be sports, although that’s easy, because everybody just says baseball and football. And we have ways to make this harder and easier. Not going to get into that.
So let’s say we went 123. And then at the same time, I said Metallica, and Ali said Van Halen. Great. Well, now we’ve got to try to do it again, because we didn’t say the same thing. So I’m trying to think of Where’s Ali going with this? She’s trying to think of where I’m going, let’s say Ali screws up. And she doesn’t know many, you know, 90s rock bands or 80s rock bands. And the next one, I say Megadeth. And she says guitar, I could say why’d you say guitar? And she could say, well, I you know, I didn’t know where to go. Okay. Well, it’s clear to me now. I can’t just keep saying rock bands. She went with an instrument. So maybe it’s alright 123 And she says drums and I say bass. Okay, well guitar. I was I was thinking what’s similar to a guitar? I know bass guitar, but you have to say the same word. She said drums Okay, now does do I meet her there to she come there. And that’s the messiness of it. We don’t know how to talk to each other because we don’t listen. And because we don’t listen, we often don’t know where somebody’s going. And so on and on and on. But it’s amazing. Using because the best at this they get it done, they could You could literally say the word universe. And they may both end up saying at Astra, if they just get an idea of where they’re going with it and really good players as they get to know one another, they can get this done in four to five or less, it’s pretty incredible. And we’ve done things where it’s, it’s got to stay on the same topic or like any good evolving conversation it can evolve. So the topic could start places in Europe. And you know, because somebody could run out of places in Europe, but then they started thinking of European food and they say pasta, eventually it could turn into a type of wine. Just like if I could go talk to somebody on the street right now we might talk about the weather. And then we actually find out we know a common person, now we’re talking about them. And then we’re talking about the job they’re in and how cool it is. And you never know where that goes. So you got to be able to listen and play off the other person.
Alright, that’s it for today. I wanted to give you guys a little bit of a sampling. I know, you might be bummed out by that. Because again, there’s seven main categories and many, many, many different subcategories. But hopefully you get the gist. And guys, this is being used by organizations around the world right now. Yeah, we have no reason to lie. I mean, this is stuff that is being baked into AI. AI is not just looking at, companies want AI to be more human. And if Amazon is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into learning just about tone, just tone and how that comes across. And other forms of AI are doing biometric scanning. And there’s technology that’s literally using facial recognition software and kinesics, to say, hey, is this person more or less likely to be guilty? At one point in time guys, people are being held in detention centers, or in some instances being thrown in jail, because they looked nervous, or because they look like they’re stressed out, and that makes people perceive them as more guilty.
So this is very critical. This is critical. And if you’re not convinced, that’s all good, but do your research, because you will find in the medical realm, more and more doctors and people in that they’re coding, literally for patient, client interactions. People are about to avoid lawsuits. They’re saying, hey, how strong were the questions, you were asking? How personal did you get, but they’re not giving names to these things. So what you have is evaluations that are messy, and they’re not locked in by theme. And they bounce around. And they quit being about the thing that matters most, the interpersonal connection, because I promise you, I promise you more successful interventions of any kind, are the result of more successful interactions. You can go over on time, you can score poorly on logistical management, you could not have resources at your disposal. But if you can connect at an interpersonal level, through mastery in these 20 plus some categories, you’re going to be farther ahead than anybody else. It’s bottom line. I would love to have you guys learn more about these things. We’re always looking for fellow nerds, people that aren’t worried about diving into the messy stuff. They’re past the point in their life, where they’re worried about being evaluated guys, everything we do is in love.
With one of the hardest questions I got asked was what type of people come to your apprenticeship communication workshops? I mean, these are the most inclusive things. We’ve had people of every gender, every race, at least 20 some odd professions. nobody’s laughing at each other. This is not just skilled communicators. This is way more often people that are supremely aware of hey, I know I don’t know, at all. And I need to have feedback. And it’s a safe place to talk about that. This is a place where respectful disagreement and failure is encouraged. Because there’s not many places, if any at all in coaching and leadership development where that’s the case? How do we create authentic leaders and people can’t be their authentic selves, and work in real situations. We once had a young strength coach that came and said, Hey, one thing that really scares me about role playing is if I look silly, Somebody here might be hiring someday and not want to hire me. And another coach stood up and said, that’s wrong. I’m more likely to hire somebody that comes to do this, than I am somebody who just has 20 training certifications, and that’s the gist. And so if you’re also an organization that’s looking to refine your hiring practices, we help a number of organizations with that. We want to help that right. That’s why we have our courses is we’ve had people say, hey, we want people or our staff to go through your courses, because we look at that as a critical part of continuing development. And we don’t have so just reach out to us. We’d love to help. We’d love to see you for those of you that can’t make an apprenticeship and I did it. Maybe you’re in a different country and there’s travel restrictions or budget. Like I said, we do do this virtually in our speaker school. It’s not the same as the apprenticeship but you do get the evaluation. You do get broken down kind of reviews, and we’d highly encourage you to check it out. Just go to artofcoaching.com/mentoring, fill it out we’d love to serve you. Alright guys, until next time, Brett Bartholomew the rest of the artic coaching team. I appreciate all of you talk to you soon.
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