Silence Is A Skill | Jenn Alex | The Sean Trace Show

Communication isn’t something you’re either naturally good or bad at, it’s a skill you can actually train. In this conversation with Jenn Alex, I wanted to understand why communication breaks down so easily, even when everyone involved thinks they’re being clear. We talk about why people say yes when they really mean no, how assumptions create unnecessary mistakes, and why trying to sound smart can actually make your message harder to understand.

Jenn also explains why difficult conversations get worse when we avoid them, why preparation matters when emotions are high, and how one simple habit like pausing can completely change the way we listen and respond. We also get into workplace communication, public speaking, leadership, body language, and why simplifying a complicated idea is often a sign of expertise, not a lack of it.

The biggest takeaway for me is that effective communication isn’t about talking more. It’s about making sure the other person actually understands what you meant.

What’s one communication habit you wish more people would stop doing?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I would rather have somebody on my team tell me, let me go back and check my workload to see if I can give 100% to this opportunity versus saying yes, but then only giving 40% to it. Because that's not going to create the outcome that you want. That's not necessarily going to get you another opportunity in the future because perhaps you delivered on this opportunity when it was done. It was late, it was riddled with errors, it had tons of mistakes. There were lots of points throughout where you needed a lot of external help to hit the deadline or get things finished. People are more impressed when somebody can be honest with how I manage my time. It's not that I don't want to participate, but I don't want to participate or I don't want to say yes and give you half work. So I would rather have people tell me no, I don't have the bandwidth or the capacity for it right now. I would love to be able to help in the future. And it will probably come around where there is a downtime in the future and opportunity arises, and you can give a hundred percent of your effort to it and you can deliver on something that actually ends up being a much more successful outcome than just saying yes to everything and not having the ability to focus and do it well.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Welcome to the Sean Trace Show. I am the host Sean Trace, and I have an awesome guest with me today. Can you tell people who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Yes, my name is Jen Alex. I am a communication coach. So I when people ask me very quickly what I do, I teach people to public speak. So any type of communication within the business platform, whether it's giving presentations, being a keynote speaker, could be focused on business writing, active listening, the art of influence, how to build a PowerPoint. But anything that falls underneath that communication umbrella, we have a session or a one-on-one opportunity for.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

That's awesome. How how did you get started down this path?

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Yeah, it's a unique way. So, one, it's a small family company. So my dad started the business back in 2004. My mom joined a couple years later. She ran the whole back side of the business. She actually just retired two weeks ago. My twin brother also coaches and sells. And then I joined about a year and a half after he did. So it's something prior to my dad starting the company in 2004, he had done this for basically the industry founder of the business communication skill space for another 25 years before that. So we grew up with all of these skills. I can remember having a presentation in like sixth grade about, you know, science fair or something like that. And my dad had us out in the family room. The PowerPoint was up on like our big, huge 500-pound flat screen, you know, floor TV. And he was having us run through and practice these skills. So it's something that I've been around for, I would say, most of my life that I can remember. And then after going through school, I actually went to school to be a high school teacher. And I was a high school teacher for about three and a half years and then transitioned over to our business as it started to grow and the guys needed more hands on board. So I've been in a position of teaching, coaching, speaking in front of people for essentially my whole adult life.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Which is awesome, by the way. And I also had a background in education. Now I do, I taught for many years. I taught children English and age, age, age, age, age, age. That I found was that it was like one of the best lessons I ever had in public speaking. Because you might think you know how to talk to people, and then you have a bunch of aggressive eight and nine-year-olds looking at you going, no, you don't. You don't know anything about anything. Quick reality check. But it's awesome because it made me a better speaker. It made me bring comedy into everything. It made me, you know, react faster and be able to kind of balance things more quickly. But hang on. So when I do my outreach, I sit there and I try to find cool people. And my assistant and I just we go to town. We try to find people that are just really interesting. And so I don't know if you know, but I introduced interviewed your twin brother like two days ago. Yeah. I heard. Did he tell you that?

SPEAKER_01 4:35

We so I actually mentioned to him that I was on uh I was blocking off time on my calendar, and I said I'm a guest on somebody's podcast on Friday, so not available from eight to nine. And he was like, Oh, I just did one earlier this week too. And then it came out that it was with you. So very cool. It's awesome. It's really awesome. The other side of the coin, if you will, on I'm sure you had a similar conversation within the communication skill state space, but to see where everyone's different, you know?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Yeah, you guys are different. And like you, you know, one person can glean this and another person can glean this. And like you didn't tell me about your father in these sessions with the TV. And that just sounds interesting. And it makes me as a father recognize that we can start teaching these skills so early, and it's so important. But I wanted to ask you this. Like, I think about this all the time. That, you know, two people can come down and be trying to have a conversation. And whether it be uh two people at work, two people in a family, two people in a relationship, two people in the same sports teams. This week, um, I'm a huge Boston Celtics fan. And uh our team just traded away one of the star players, and the fan base is rabid right now. Like they are not happy. And there was something that uh Jalen Brown said. He said that the communication was going okay, and then it went sideways. And it's like it's interesting that I want to ask you why do so many conversations go wrong even when both people have good intentions? People trying to get a work out a deal, trying to communicate, but then something happens and it just goes, and I don't know what happened in that situation, but I I tend to think maybe someone read the room wrong at some point in time, you know?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Yeah. I would say a lot of times it's that people are on the same page with the objective or the purpose of the meeting, the conversation, the interaction. So either both people are coming with two different thought processes in terms of what we're hoping to accomplish or what the conversation is even about at a baseline. And so those two things don't match up, or somebody comes and they're not exactly sure what they want or are hoping to get out of the conversation, it's really hard for the other person to know what the goal is if you, as the speaker or the person that started the conversation, don't have any idea where you're trying to go. And so I think whether it's something at work, you know, you set up a meeting or it's in a personal relationship, you and your partner are sitting down to go through finances, talk about budgeting, where you want to go for your next vacation, what your kids should be participating in after school, whatever the thing might be. If it's not laid out clearly up front that here's what I'd like to get out of this conversation, it probably isn't gonna be an effective conversation just because people aren't sure where we're going, what the purpose is, what we're hoping to accomplish.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Right? I was thinking about that. Cause one of the interesting things when I was teaching English, one of the most fascinating classes were business English classes. And I loved it for one reason because when you talk to someone, hey, go meet someone new and talk to them in a conversation. It's pretty fun, pretty straightforward. Yeah, but you don't always understand that there are stakes. Like any conversation that's a business conversation, there are very high stakes. You are either trying to get a sale, you are trying to network, and that networking is building a relationship that can help you in the future. But like there are there's always a goal. There is always a very clear goal. And one of the things that's fascinating to me is that if people don't recognize that, um, it can kind of, I wouldn't say hurt the conversation, but definitely not help the conversation, you know?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

It hijacks it, it just derails the time that we have together. And at a certain point, people run out of time. So an hour goes by, we had an hour of time worth of coffee, worth a meeting. By the end of 60 minutes, there could be half the conversation that still hasn't been had simply because we went off on tangents, we talked ourselves in circles. Again, we didn't really know what the purpose of the conversation was. So we started talking about things that don't even relate to this conversation. And then it's just a, I don't want to call it a waste of people's time, but we end up having to schedule another meeting or sit down and have a conversation again because we didn't accomplish what we hoped to the first time through.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

I notice in many places, especially with my my team, uh, my business, that there are certain people that communicate in ways that's not effective. And some people have certain habits that don't help the conversation. And I wanted to ask you, what's the biggest communication habit that's quietly hurting people's communication or careers?

SPEAKER_01 10:06

I would say pessimism. I would say it's this idea that some people are just good at naturally. And while there are, I would say, a very small percentage of people who might naturally have this skill set in them, more often than not, when you see somebody, whether you're watching somebody, you know, like a TED talk speaker, or you're listening to a sermon at church, or listening to a friend or a family member who you say is just like they're a great storyteller. They always have a good message, they're effective. Those people have put in a lot of work to get there. This is communicating effectively, it's a learnable skill set. Anybody can do it, but it doesn't happen by accident. It is purposeful practice. It's intentionally going through, preparing, saying it out loud, going back, refixing things here and there. It's just like an athlete. You know, you mentioned the Celtics. An NBA star didn't get there because they were just naturally good at it. They've done a ton of work and prep and countless hours behind the scenes of boring repetitions and drills that in and of themselves, they're not fancy. They're not, nobody wants to go and watch players do drills. But all of those things they do before they get on the court and play the game, that is what makes them look so seamless. And it's the same thing when it comes to good communicators. They just put in the time and the work. And if something isn't working or they're not getting the results that they're hoping for, they're okay either going to somebody else and saying, Hey, I need help identifying what's not working, what's getting in my way, where I have room to be better, and then being able to try something out, maybe fail. Yeah. Try it again, do something different. But it's this constantly reevaluating and working through bettering that skill set.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

I love that. Like one of the things that I've been noticing with my daughter is that she's a very smart kid, but sometimes she has a very hard time reading a room. And she'll come in there and just fumble the interaction. And I had to sit there and start talking to her about the other day, her teacher was in the elevator, and this teacher is wonderful and lovely and really positive role model. And my daughter loves her. But what was interesting is we had my nephew's birthday at the same time as her study class, and she was not happy. And so she came in and she was just modeling everything in her space, was unhappy about being there, unhappy about studying. And the teacher picked up on it right away. Yeah. And she's she looked at me in Vietnamese. And my daughter was talking to me in English, and teacher was like, Is everything okay? And I said, Yeah, totally everything's okay. You know, but my daughter's like body language was like, it's not okay. No, and you know, she's 10, going on 25, and you know, I'm doing the best I can, but you know, one of the things that that I think we are not always aware of is how we have these, the subconscious signaling that's going on with our communication. You know, we have we might be sitting there going, yes, everything's okay, but our body language is screaming, not okay, not happy right now, you know? And you know, and it it can have repercussions, you know, it can definitely derail your career if you are putting out the wrong energy, if you're putting out the wrong things, which leads to my question. You know, why do people say yes in meetings when they're really thinking no? Why do we have a hard time communicating what we need to be communicating?

SPEAKER_01 14:14

I think for a lot of people, they want to come across as that team player. They want to be able to get the next big opportunity. And if I don't say yes to things, they're not gonna, you know, management or the director or whoever it is isn't gonna come back and offer me an opportunity to do it again. But the thing that I try to encourage when I'm coaching clients is you need to be honest and realistic with yourself. I would rather have somebody on my team tell me, let me go back and check my workload to see if I can give 100% to this opportunity versus saying yes, but then only giving 40% to it. Because that's not going to create the outcome that you want. That's not necessarily going to get you another opportunity in the future because perhaps you delivered on this opportunity when it was done. It was late, it was riddled with errors, it had tons of mistakes. There were lots of points throughout where you needed a lot of external help to hit the deadline or get things finished. People are more impressed when somebody can be honest with how I manage my time. It's not that I don't want to participate, but I don't want to participate or I don't want to say yes and give you half work. So I would rather have people tell me no, I don't have the bandwidth or the capacity for it right now. I would love to be able to help in the future. And it will probably come around where there is a downtime in the future, an opportunity arises, and you can give a hundred percent of your effort to it and you can deliver on something that actually ends up being a much more successful outcome than just saying yes to everything and not having the ability to focus and do it well.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Right. I'd prefer someone say no than say yes and do a 5%, you know, job or a 10% job, you know? It's way easier because then I can then take the resources and put them into a different direction and then use that person at what they're good at, you know? Yep.

unknown 16:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

I I had this moment today where uh I was teaching my daughter about communication and it didn't go well. As it doesn't, did not go well. Um her, again, she is 10, going on 30. Um, she was downstairs and her piano teacher was coming, different teacher. And she knew the piano teacher was coming, and she wanted to have some time to just relax and do her thing. Yep. Uh, but I called her because the piano teacher called me and I was up making some dinner for everyone. My wife was tired, and I said, Let me help with this. So I went up and I was making dinner in the kitchen, and I called my daughter because the teacher had called me that said, I'm at the front door. Can someone come let me in? So I called my daughter and she answered, Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm I'm I'm going, I yeah, I know, I'm going. Click. And I was just like, first of all, she hung up on me and I was like, Oh, there will be a hell to pay in a second, you know. And but yet she assumed that her teacher was upstairs and that she just needed to go up to meet her teacher. I assumed that she was gonna go down and get her teacher. So five minutes later, I go down, I finished up the cooking, and I look at her and she's like, Where's my teacher? And I'm just like, oh my goodness. She's still standing at the front door. And I run downstairs and I said, First of all, don't ever hang up on me. We're gonna talk about that in a second. Yeah. But you didn't, you assumed that you knew what I was gonna say and you hung up. And I want to ask you, what's more dangerous, assuming people understand you or assuming you understand them?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

I think it's more dangerous to assume that people have understood you. Because when I'm listening to somebody else, I have control over asking those clarifying questions, looking back through notes, thinking about what was shared and saying, hey, you know what? I think this is what they meant, but I should double check on that. As a speaker, whether it's personal relationships, like you said, with your daughter, whether it's with your partner, whether it's in business, assuming that people have understood you can be really dangerous because you leave feeling like, I killed it, I crushed that. That was an awesome conversation. Only to a half an hour later find that somebody's still standing at the front door. Or that all of a sudden your team is sending you 10 follow-up emails saying, Hey, so can you tell me again X, Y, and Z? And then all of a sudden we're doing all of this rework. So, as the person speaking, I would rather have touch points. I would take pauses. I'd say, okay, what questions do we have based on what we just went through? Where do people want to spend a little bit more time or where should we go through more information? If it's in a personal relationship, it's simply just saying, can you tell me what you just heard from me? I want to make sure we're on the same page. And if we're not, I want to clear up any miscommunication right now so it doesn't turn into a bigger issue later. So I think it's just slowing down and taking the opportunity to make sure it's not making anybody feel like they're not smart enough to understand or follow along, but it's making sure that I don't want you to leave with 15 questions still in your back pocket that didn't get answered. Because otherwise, this was not a value add or good use of either of our times if we're not finishing the full conversation.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

I love that because it's like you might both sit there, everyone's assuming everything's right, and yet 20% of the communication is going. You think about that. You know, I work with video. And one of the things when you see people they transfer files, like there's almost always loss. There's loss in data. When you send something to someone, data is inherently lost. Now, that's the reason if you don't want to lose it, you have to send these massive file sizes so that there's less lost information, unless you have a really good compression that you know makes it easier. But one of the problems is that when you send over information and things are lost, maybe it's audio quality, maybe it's video quality, maybe there's something else. But what's really interesting is that um you can lose one word and it can change everything. And like, you know, um, let's meet at eight o'clock. Great. Our flight is at eight, yeah, and you stop there. And I said a.m, and actually it's PM. Right. And you know, you show up at night ready for your flight, but that loss of that little thing can be a massive problem, you know? Yeah. And that that's where I'm always running into those little things. Like one of the things that I think is so powerful when I talk to people about communication is learning to listen. And it's hard because we want to fill dead space. We want to fill that space with noise because we get nervous, you know, with that emptiness, the emptiness of our own thoughts, you know?

unknown 21:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

And I tend to think That's one of the reasons that people try to overcomplicate communication. I wanted to ask you why do so many people make simple things sound really complicated?

SPEAKER_01 22:11

A few reasons. I would say, number one, they some people have a lot of knowledge about that topic. This is the space they live in every single day. They are in the weeds all the time. So it's hard for them to figure out how to get on that higher level to be able to share something in more of a simplified way. Some people they do want to come across as if they are so smart. I'm the subject matter expert. I know everything there is to know about this. And then I would say at other times, people they just don't know how to communicate something complex. A lot of people worry that if I share something simply, it's going to come across as if it was easy. And I don't want people to think that this project that I just worked on or this interpersonal work that I've done has been an easy process. So if I simplify it down, people are going to be like, oh, well, everybody could do that. Anybody could do that. But simple doesn't necessarily mean easy. Just because I am able to talk about something in a simplified way does not mean that I haven't spent hours and hours of work and dedication to doing this thing. But a lot of people get worried that if I simplify it too much, people are going to be like, it wasn't that impressive. Good for you. You know, Joe Schmo could do it too. So I don't necessarily need to come back and ask you about it. And so we overcomplicate it so that we come across as that subject matter expert. My twin brother and I were actually working with a client last week, big group of interns. They have these projects, report outs coming for the end of their intern project to the whole leadership team at this organization. So an executive came in and spent a little bit of time answering some of their questions, talking through who that specific audience will be that they'll be talking to. And he had a really great analogy that I just loved. And he said, the audience you're speaking to, they don't want to know how the watch is made. They want to know what time it is.

SPEAKER_02 24:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

And I thought that was so impactful. Don't tell me every single detail about how we got there. Tell me what the issue is, what you think we should do about it, and why this is going to help us. Paint the picture for me. Don't tell me every single paint that you used and every single product that you needed in order to create the painting or the drawing. Tell me what the drawing is. And so I thought that was a really great way of thinking about it. People are more impressed with speakers when they can take a complex idea and make it sound so simple and easy to understand. Those are the people that more often than not, listeners want to go back and speak to again or listen to again.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

I have this thing that with my daughter, um, I have all of these paintings around the room that she did. She's a great little artist. But early on, her teachers were phenomenal because I gave them parameters. Okay. And I said, All right, these are, I want to go and find some of the greatest works of art. And I want to let her try to recreate them with your help. Yeah. And she made so much progress because it was doing. And then the teachers were like, Well, she just wants to have fun. I said, She's a seven, eight-year-old kid. Of course, she just wants to have fun. But I want you to be teaching her technique and such. And what ended up happening was people just kept sliding back into um, let's talk, let's do these things. And I said, let's what's practical about that? So I finally found she loves sketching, she loves making things, and she's been making some of her own clothes. So I found this lady who's gonna come over and is an actual fashion designer who teaches art and design. And she's my daughter will draw something and they will take it from drawing to finished dress or shirt or skirt or whatever it is that she wants to make, which is awesome.

SPEAKER_02 26:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

And my wife was like, Well, why are we doing this? I said, Because it's practical. Yeah, she gets something done. And at the end of the day, isn't it great to be able to create something, you know, instead of like just talking about creating it, talking, yeah, you know, we talk about communicating, we talk in circles, but are you getting the message across? That is the biggest question. And I wanted to ask you a question because you know, a lot of people start trying to sound smart. They want to use big words, they want to sound, and I don't, I'm not just talking. I see this with big companies, I see this with TED Talks and all this. Like there are some people that get up on that stage and they go, I am here to prove something to you. One of my favorite writers was Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway's writing is so simple that it's almost boring, but it's fantastically well done. And there is so much of this leftover space where you get to make up the details. Right. Yet he conveys the simplest of points that allow you to have this powerful grasp of the story. And I wanted to ask you have we become so focused on sounding smart that we've forgotten how to be clear and simple?

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Yes and no. This is nuanced because it's not as simple as just a simple answer. As we just talked about, some people they do want to sound smart. They do want to sound elevated, they do want to make it look like I've done so much work, this took me so much time, and I need to show you that. Other people, again, is that they have knowledge and understanding of something that they don't know how to get high level. So they don't know how to take a complex idea and share it with a wider audience. There are some audiences who want those details. They want the step by step. I want to know everything that you know about this topic. There are other audiences where I don't want that information. I don't want complicated or complex. I'm in a as a personal example, I am very much trying to understand finances, which is just a big topic. But investments, you know, how how can I have money grow without knowing that it's growing? I'm not doing anything with it. It's in a bucket somewhere, it's doing stuff. Every time I try to sit down to understand and learn about stocks and bonds and the financial market, I get into this place where an hour later, my heart is racing, I'm sweating. I'm I've basically read myself in circles where now it feels like I'm reading something in French instead of in English because I have no idea what it is I'm reading or how to understand it. And so some of those websites or, you know, call it an influencer or whoever, but some of the experts that are out there in finance who can take this really big, complex, stressful thing and simplify it into, you know, here's baseline what you need to know. And then here are a couple of steps of how you can start to get there or what you can start to do to make that happen. Those are the people I find myself continuously going back for for tips and tricks, recommendations, next steps. But the ones who go through and talk about every single detail and come across as the expert in the field, but they're making it so complicated. I avoid those at all costs because I end up leaving a webinar of theirs or, you know, a YouTube video and thinking to myself, I'm worse off than I was before. I understand less now than I did going into this because now I feel like there are all these things that I had no idea about. And so it's trying to find that balance, but I think it's really starting with understanding who your audience is and what do they want and what do they need. Same thing with personal relationships. Who is it that you're speaking to and what are you hoping to accomplish with them? Lay that out first, and then you can figure out how to organize the message or have the conversation that you want to put together.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

I am I you're speaking of the choir there. I don't know if you know this, but I have a personal finance podcast.

SPEAKER_02 30:48

Oh, okay. Um, my group.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

It's actually one of my biggest podcasts. I have a personal finance podcast because of the exact same thing you're describing. I was so overwhelmed with every single thing. I didn't know what all of these different accounts were. I didn't know how they work, I don't know what to do, I don't know how to contribute. And then I started my own business and I was like, I'm terrified right now that I'm gonna make mistakes and I need help. And every time I turned a different direction, it just felt overwhelming. And what I found was that I needed to start a podcast so I could talk to people in a very simple way about very complicated things. And I think that there is a place for that, but there's also a place for the people who that, you know, that understand that and they want to sound smart. So I really love what you're talking about context. But, you know, um one of the things that I think about talking about finances, you know, there's a lot of difficult conversations there. And there's things that will make people just start sweating, you know? Yeah. And and I it makes me wonder why do people avoid difficult conversations, even when they know avoiding them will make them worse. And sometimes, most of the time, having them will make things better, but we still, we still avoid them.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

This one's interesting. And I think it really comes down to it's uncomfortable and people hate being uncomfortable. So people don't want to sit in that emotional state of overanalyzing, overthinking, having an issue about something, or for some people, it's even just simply admitting to themselves that they don't know about this. And in a world where everybody feels like I need to know about what's going on and I need to be a subject matter expert in the space of the entire world. It's hard for people to say, I don't know anything about this and I want to learn more. Somebody else tell me what I should know. So it's the emotional side of it's uncomfortable. For a lot of people, they don't want to ruin quote unquote the relationship, even though more often than not, not having the conversation can ruin the relationship just as much or even more. And then sometimes people don't know what they want. I don't know how to verbalize what I either need help with or what I'm hoping to accomplish. So we get stuck in this space of I don't know how to share the difficult news or have the difficult conversation because I don't really know what I'm hoping to accomplish. I do think it's important for people to have these conversations because it does help create better relationships, build that trust, keep the connection with people, whether it's work-related, whether it's personal life related. But there has to be a level of preparation. For a lot of people, they get themselves to the point where they're like, okay, I know I need to have the conversation. I'm just gonna rip the band-aid off. I'm gonna do it right now. Not a good idea. Don't wing it. Because when we wing it, that's where typically I would argue that more times emotions can get higher, people can get fired up about something. We end up saying something we wish we hadn't. And it's hard to take things back. So while you can't wait six months and then go back and have a conversation about something uncomfortable that your partner did, we know that's not fair. I also don't recommend doing it 60 seconds after the thing has happened because you're probably gonna be pretty emotionally fired up. You're gonna be maybe overly stressed about something. In the finance example, you know, people come in saying, I need to understand this, I need to understand it right now so that I don't lose all my money. Yes, likelihood of you losing all your money in this instance right here is probably pretty slim. But when people are so emotionally charged, whether it's the person that's asking the question or the person you might be speaking to, there's a level of needing to have everybody take a second to breathe, calm down, but prepare. Think about what I want to say. Okay, here's the difficult thing I need to share or I need to ask about. Be clear on what that is, be able to verbalize it. And then also some of the next steps. Here are the other things that I want to talk about. Here are the other things I need answers to, here are the things I'm hoping that you, as the listener or the person I'm speaking with can either do for me or you can do as a next step. And then that way there's some movement. It's not just talking about the difficult thing and staying stuck in this emotional, uncomfortable state, but it's labeling it, but then having progress where we're actually looking to solve or do something about it.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

I love that because you know, if you're not solving it or doing something about it, you're just spinning your wheels. No.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

I wanted to ask you, because you know, for the people listening that are going, okay, you've got me. I want to be a better communicator. If everyone could add one communication habit, uh, what habit do you think would most improve almost every relationship and everyone's ability to communicate?

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Yeah, I love this question. And it's actually one you mentioned earlier that most people hate. It's pausing. Stop talking. Just give space for the listener. It gives you an opportunity to comprehend, think about, sit with whatever information was just shared. As the speaker, it gives you an opportunity to do the same thing. Think about what you've heard and then be able to put together a response. But it's not just responding for the sake of talking and hearing yourself talk. It's actually something worthwhile that adds to the conversation. So many people are worried about efficiency. Our world is so built on efficiency. How can I get things done faster? You know, the use of AI, how can we do things without me even having to really put time or effort into it? And while all those things are good and it's not a bad thing to be efficient, efficient doesn't always equal better. So just because we're marking things off the to-do list, just because the conversation we had was 10 minutes instead of 30 minutes, that doesn't necessarily mean it was a better conversation. So making sure that we take the time that's necessary so that ideally we only have to do it once. We don't have this conversation only to have to have the same conversation with your partner, your significant other, your coworkers five more times over the next week. Because in that case, doing it faster backfired on you. It actually ended up making things worse. And that's where people become frustrated, annoyed. You know, we why are we talking about the same thing over and over? And it's like because you're not getting anywhere with it, because we're not being clear. We're not giving people enough time to again comprehend, ask the questions, make sure we're all aligned on the same page with what it is we need to do and where we're going from here. So I think just simply slowing down, as inefficient as that sounds, it's gonna end up making us have less conversations and rework in the long run.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

I love that. And it's one of those things that's very easy to do. And you just have to remember that you know, I wanted to know too, if you could communicate, and it might be the same advice, but what's one lesson that you wish every child learned in school about communication?

SPEAKER_01 38:42

This one's hard because coming from education, there are a hundred things that I wish kids would learn indirectly and directly about communication. But I would say it really comes down to this idea of nervousness, helping kids understand that a bigger room and more people is just more an opportunity for more people to hear your ideas. Thinking of it as a conversation. We have a hundred conversations a day, every day, on and off throughout our lives. You might be having a conversation with one person, you might be having a conversation with five or five hundred. But it's still just a conversation. So it's taking this idea of trying not to be intimidated by a bigger audience or a larger room. You're still just having a conversation. You are sharing your ideas as if you were sitting down and talking with your best friend, your parent. And then it's the concept of those adult role models, whether it's a parent, teachers at school, encouraging kids to speak rather than speaking for them. Of course, there are some kids that are shy, more timid. There are some kids that are extremely outgoing, but you know, you're going to a family party or meeting up with friends and their parents and, you know, doing a big play date. Have your kids tell them what they just did this weekend or what they learned at school or the about the goal that they made in their soccer game over the weekend, rather than you sharing that with the parents while the kid is staying quiet. You're out to dinner. Encourage even, I mean, we have a two and a half year old right now. So he speaks, obviously, and has language capacity and he talks a lot, but only to a certain extent, of course, at two and a half years old. But it's even encouraging your five-year-old to order their meal when you guys go out to dinner with the waiter or waitress rather than you doing it for them. But the more times they can speak and the more opportunities they have to practice this skill set, it becomes far less stressful and intimidating in the long run.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

I love that. Where can people go to find out more about you and what you do and the services that you and your family offer?

SPEAKER_01 41:03

Yeah, multiple places. So you can always hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm very active on there. I usually open it when I start work for the day and I'm on it until I close down for the day. But we have links to our website on there. Our website does offer a ton of information about our training programs. We have two books that my dad and my brother co-wrote the first one. My brother and I co-wrote the second one about our experiences with communication, how our process works, where you can see different examples of good communicators, places where there's room for growth. We also have a podcast called the Speak as Well As You Think podcast, where our three coaches, John, Matt, and I, get on and talk about different communication topics. Personally, I would say more of them focus on the business world, but again, how can we implement those things on a personal level as well? So once a month, we have a podcast episode that comes out. And then we also have a newsletter that comes out every week. It's about a three to five minute read. And each week it's different tips falling within the communication skill space. It's like we talked about at the beginning, it could be around running meetings, writing, listening, storytelling, but anything, they're just quick little tips that you can read. You can take a story and save it in your back pocket for something you might have. But we try to create as many ways for people to engage with us, whether that's a paid program that they run for themselves or their team, or it's just the free tips, techniques, tricks, things to try out on a day-to-day basis, whether it's via LinkedIn or newsletters or podcasts.

SPEAKER_00 42:48

That's awesome. Well, you guys offer so many awesome services and things to people to help them make their lives better that I love it because that's one of the reasons I have so many podcasts and I try to create as much as I can, is because I feel like we can actively help make the world a little bit of a better place. But you have to be out and doing stuff. Otherwise, it's not gonna be, you're you're not gonna make that same impact, you know?

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Agree. Yeah, share your expertise. Let other people who this is not their space, like you at finance, you know, I am so overwhelmed by that. Somebody just help me make sense of this, make it a little bit easier. And if we can help people make their lives just a little bit easier, everybody walks around happier.