The reason I’m writing about this is because of the holidays. I’m the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants and we celebrate Lithuanian as well as American holidays. So we always get a double dose of celebrations throughout the year.
From my earliest memory, there was never a holiday dinner where someone did not get up from the table, possibly in tears or wounded silence, storm out of the room and slam the door loudly. Never. It was not always the same person, we would rotate.
We got offended easily, and the way we handled it only made it worse.
Even so, I challenge you to find a family that loves each other more than we do. If ever anyone said anything bad about any one of us, they were in trouble.
That’s how it used to be.
Gregor had made an overnight change, both at work and at home. The results were so powerful, it turned his world inside out.
It was during the Causative Communication workshop that Gregor came to realize he only “half listened to anyone”. His mind was always moving on to “what’s next”. He was mentally halfway out of this meeting and heading to the next one no matter where he was.
At the end of the 3rd day of the workshop, Gregor made a life-changing decision. He said, “I’m going to stay fully present in every conversation. I’m going to give 100% of my focus, really listen and really understand. No shortcuts.”
Thanksgiving has inspired this article because Thanksgiving always reminds me how wonderful, even magical, affinity is.
Affinity is a feeling. It’s what you’re feeling about the other person, your emotional response to them. And very specifically, it’s how much you like them in that moment.
Affinity can fluctuate, even within one conversation. You can start out with low affinity and end up with high affinity. Or start high and go low.
“I’m now walking into meetings and making what I want happen. The first thing I noticed was that everyone started listening to me differently. Even my boss. Now people go quiet when I speak and genuinely listen, even my superiors. I hadn’t realized there are different kinds of listening. This is REALLY different. After that, it’s not hard.”
This broke all the rules considering where Agoston was on the corporate ladder. He was young, early in career and had no authority. But he spoke up at meetings, in hallways and conversations. His influence was growing daily. It wasn’t long before he was promoted and began rapidly moving up the organization.
Before he did the Causative Communication workshop, no one listened to him.
What made the difference for Agoston was mastering the skill of…
The question, “What do I need to say to get the outcome I want?” is a good question. Knowing the answer to it is essential to being causative.
The reason people experience difficulties when they’re looking at a situation through this lens is because they don’t realize that they’re skipping steps.
We’re still delivering an abundance of virtual coaching, and we also recently opened up our office for in-person training for the first time in 2 ½ years. It’s been thrilling. It’s for small groups of no more than six, so it’s also very personal.
Having the whole person in front of us for the whole day, several days at a time, seeing them laugh and smile in all dimensions, has been rich.
Even more remarkable have been the incredible transformations in their presentation skills.
Walter is a very high-level engineer who works on new product development, critical products that generate billions in annual revenue for the corporation. He presents quarterly to the CEO and executive leadership team who rely heavily on Walter’s technical expertise.
Walter is a really nice guy with a great sense of humor. I liked him right away. But when he started the presentation that he wanted to practice during our Executive Coaching Session, all the life in him drained away.
I asked him, “Walter, you don’t look like you’re enjoying this very much. What’s happening?”
He said, “I really hate giving this presentation.”
Me: “Why?”
Walter: “Last quarter, without talking to me or my team, the CEO promised Wall Street we would have a new product release in January. A brand new product that’s really complicated to develop. The CEO was feeling pressured because our competition is ahead of us on it.
“In our last presentation I tried to tell him that we’re not ready, that it will take us at least a year and I tried to explain why.
“He cut me off and told me that he had already publicly promised Wall Street and we had to do it. He said that since the competition had done it, he didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t do it. He said it was my problem to figure out, and just to go solve it.
“I went back to my team and we’ve all been running around in complete confusion for the past quarter. We’ve gotten nothing done and now I have to present our quarterly results and we don’t have any. I have to make it look like we’re working on it and moving forward when we’re not, and you’re right - I’m most definitely NOT enjoying this at all.”
Walter was faced with the dilemma of: How do you present something that violates your integrity? (READ MORE…)
“I’m a techie guy. I’m not one of those dynamic, charismatic types. I don’t even like them.”
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Steve. He had just been promoted to Senior VP. His boss, the Executive VP, reached out to me within weeks of Steve’s starting in his new role:
“You’ve got to help him. He’s in a very visible position now. His presentations are dreadful. He’s dry, monotone, off-putting. The employees are not warming up to him. Frankly, I don’t think they like him.”
The problem was that, while Steve dislikes the dynamic, charismatic type, that’s exactly the words used to describe the previous Senior VP, the one Steve was replacing, the one everyone loved, the one who had just left the company, the one everyone missed, the one everyone wished would come back.
You see the problem.
“I was struggling to find words.”
Vince, one of our Executive Coaching clients wrote that in an email that he sent along with the video of an extremely difficult conversation he had with a group of very unhappy individuals who felt they had experienced a great injustice.
He wanted to show us how, in an hour, this extremely distrustful group transformed into a smiling, grateful, warm, and unbelievably appreciative group of individuals who beamed at him with great friendliness.
It was remarkable to see.
Vince’s journey has been a fascinating one. He is a deep man, a good man.
Like many who come to us for Executive Coaching, his goal was to have executive presence and polish.
Isn’t it funny that now, after his coaching, he is writing about struggling for words? It sounds like he’s not “polished”. You would think he didn’t achieve his goals.
Yet Vince achieved something that goes way beyond.
Don (VP of a major corporation here for coaching): “I want to extend my executive presence throughout the organization, beyond my immediate area.”
Me: “What does that mean?”
Don: “I want them to know I can add value to their activities.”
Me: “Is there a problem with that?”
Don: “Yes, they’re not seeing it. They think that I can only add value in my own area. Not outside of it, not for them cross-functionally in the organization. It’s frustrating.”
Me: “Have you ever told them that you can add value?”
Don: “No.”
Me: “Why not?”
Don: “They need to see it for themselves.”
I call this “Executive Charades”.
“I can feel it. People’s minds get very quiet when I start to talk. They’re totally quiet until I’m completely finished. They’re really listening to me.”
Mateo, a recent graduate of Mastering Virtual Presentations, wrote that to me last week.
Why are they quiet? Because they turned off all thinking.
When do audiences do that?
“Can I send you the feedback from my last presentation?”
Only a week earlier, Lukas had completed the Mastering Virtual Presentations workshop.
It was supposed to be “just another normal corporate presentation”.
When you see those two words together, corporate presentation, what do they conjure up for you. Something thrilling? Gripping?
Very few people find them exciting.
Lukas was asked to give a “quarterly update,” which is the same low level of thrilling as a “corporate presentation”.
Except that Lukas surprised them all. And he was amazed by the response. He’d never gotten feedback like this before. No one had.
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”
I was coaching Victor, a young man in his early 30’s who had already made millions. He came to me questioning everything. Early success in the venture-capital world led Victor on a hot pursuit of things he found did not matter to him once he had them.
The things that matter most are the ones you can’t see, like deep human connections. Like kindness, respect, real understanding, and emotional well-being.
Victor was missing all of the above and burst into tears when he found a safe haven with me to be able to say it out loud.
“My life feels like it’s been stripped of meaning.”
Victoria leads a high-level Engineering team. It’s vital to her team that Sales doesn’t promise the customer anything Engineering can’t deliver.
It wasn’t going well. Engineering was no longer being invited to meetings involving Sales. That’s putting it mildly. Engineering was told to “stay out.” The relationship with Sales had gotten extremely contentious, to the point where the door was completely shut.
Victoria showed up for the Causative Communication workshop wanting to know how to communicate effectively with these people. How do you talk to someone who doesn’t even want to talk to you?
Her big focus was on finding out, “What do I say?”
She honestly believed she understood the Sales position and needed to get them to listen to her. She also knew they weren’t open to hearing anything.
“I’m the one who held back your promotion because I don’t think you have sufficient executive presence to be promoted to VP.”
I was helping Fred prepare for an upcoming one-on-one with the Executive Vice President, Olga, who was going to say these very words to him. Fred was there to change her mind.
We were practicing acknowledging the difficult things Olga would be telling him. Fred had earned some tough feedback and now had to pay the price of hearing it.
Even in the best of circumstances, Olga made Fred defensive. His hot buttons were triggered quickly. In past conversations, Fred’s strategy for getting Olga to change her mind was to overwhelm her with reasons she was wrong. But that didn’t work. It made Olga like him even less.
As Fred practiced acknowledging the piercing statements Olga would be making, I pointed out to Fred that his acknowledgements came across very reluctantly … and Fred just about shouted:
“Absolutely! I AM reluctant! Absolutely! I don’t WANT to acknowledge her when she’s WRONG!”
Acknowledgements have nothing to do with right and wrong.
“What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”
Maxwell was quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the wonderful French writer, author of the lovely book The Little Prince.
Maxwell was a student in the early morning Causative Communication workshop I was delivering for European students last week. We were wrapping up the last 5 minutes of the 2-day training, talking about the class.
The golden sun was rising in California as he spoke.
Maxwell continued: “The Little Prince is required reading for every child in my country. I thought of this quote because ‘the invisible’ is what I believe you work on in this class, and this is what we have learned to do.”
He was right.
“What are you doing?”
I was asking Alessandro this at the beginning of the Mastering Virtual Presentations workshop. Alessandro was giving his first presentation and I was trying to make sense of his sudden stone-faced glare and forceful hand gestures.
“I was told I need executive presence so I’m trying to come across with gravitas.”
The problem was that he was trying to do it with his body.
“I know it’s bad, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Morgan was demonstrating how she delivers bad news. She looks like she hates you.
The truth was, Morgan hated the message she was delivering. Because of the supply shortage, she now couldn’t get the order that you need right now to you for a year. Who could possibly love that message?
The immediate response Morgan got was, “Well then, we’re going to your competitor.” Morgan was in customer service. It was her job to save the customer.
What was upsetting Morgan was how upset she was FOR her customer. She could FEEL their pain. She felt horrible because she CARED so MUCH for them and because she could do nothing to change the vicious material shortage for them.
I asked Morgan, “Why don’t you tell them? Let them know how you feel, how much you care, and how much you would love to help them?”
That had never occurred to her.
“You have to be willing to fight for what you want.”
And Beatriz was only too willing.
However, no one she worked with, including her boss, was in the mood for a fight. They had started running the other way when they saw her coming.
Beatriz‘s response was, “If you’re not getting what you want, you need to fight harder.”
She came to me for coaching because this strategy was failing her. Beatriz had run out of ammunition, but didn’t want to surrender.
Yesterday, driving to the office, I saw a tall woman crossing the street. It was 8 am, sun was shining, 59° outside.
She was wearing short, light blue shorts, a large, purple puffy down ski jacket, a maroon woolen hat topped with a big pom-pom and long flaps that came over her ears, and bright, neon lime-green running shoes.
It made me think about listening.
And I was thinking that, if I really wanted to understand her, if I really wanted to be able to communicate with her, how fun it would be to suspend all judgment and simply listen and understand why from her point of view.
No thinking, “It’s too cold for shorts! And way too warm for a ski jacket! And never cold enough for a woolen hat here in California. And those fluorescent lime-green shoes, you can see them from two blocks away!”
It’s so important in listening that there’s no thinking.
“Dominique is smart, people like her, she gets things done. But we can’t promote her to VP yet. She has no executive presence.”
Imagine Dominique‘s reaction when she heard those words spoken by her senior management.
“But, but, but … I’m qualified! I don’t get it!”
That one missing ingredient was stopping it all.
What is executive presence? It’s an aura.
“She gets very defensive whenever I ask her a question.”
Vincent was describing Vickie, the Executive Vice President who had just cast the deciding vote to veto Vincent’s promotion to Vice President.
Vincent was complaining about how difficult Vickie was just to talk to. And he was trying to get her to understand how qualified he was to be a VP.
From his perspective, the problem was …. Vickie.
And, it was true. She did get defensive with Vincent. He visibly irritated her.
But Vincent had identified the wrong root cause for why Vickie reacted this way to him. As you know, if you have the wrong root cause, you’ll get nowhere.
What was Vincent not seeing?
Alexander: “We’re trying not to like you.”
Me: “How’s that going for you?” (Laughing)
Alexander: “Not well. Why do we like you so much?” (Laughing)
Me: “Well, I like you!”
So, that sounds like the absolute silliest conversation you’ve ever heard, right? It gets even more absurd when I tell you that it was with three of the most highly trained, most highly skilled negotiators in a large global corporation that has over 100,000 people.
They put three top negotiators up against me. They heard that we don’t give discounts. Their Procurement Division found that utterly unacceptable because they always demand deep discounts. So they put three of their best people on the call to negotiate a discount with me.
They were serious, rough, tough, brutal, cold. I would describe them as even vicious. I didn’t know people could get so mean and demanding.
Then, 20 minutes into the call, the above conversation happened.
Valeria had a problem. She’s a passionate woman and it was a passionate problem. “People don’t listen to me. They tune me out. They don’t do what I’m asking them to do. They don’t even give me a response after a while.”
“It’s not my nature to talk slow.”
It has nothing to do with her nature. If it did, I wouldn’t have been able to help her.
With a little bit of coaching, I got Valeria to adjust her velocity (think of it as her “speed”, how many words she was jamming in) so people could really understand the individual words she was saying.
An amazing thing happened. And it happened very naturally. Valeria used fewer words.
Tim: “You’re not going to believe this. It feels weird to have everything suddenly going well.”
What is Tim talking about?
He’s talking about a change in strategy that initially seems subtle, but one that creates more power than most people have had in their lives.
To understand it you have to understand humanity and the better you understand that, the more successful you will be.
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