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.
Intention is an invisible wave that carries your communication across and causes you to be successful in being fully understood.
Learning how to create this carrier wave is a game-changer.
People often try a variety of different approaches before they land on the precision it takes to create pure intention.
If you would like a little more magic in your life, raising your affinity for the other person is a super effective and rapid way to create it.
It’s not something that needs to happen only once in a while. You can do it in every conversation you have. Even in horrible, terrible, hammered situations with “difficult” people. Especially in those.
Amy came to Causative Communication thinking she had to learn to “be more forceful”, but that made her feel defeated because it was so far from who she really is, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be. It meant sacrificing too important a part of herself.
I loved her immediately.
The problem wasn’t that Amy was soft-spoken. The problem was that she had absolutely no intention when she communicated.
Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”
But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!
Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!
There’s a love that happens at work that’s not a romantic love. It comes from sharing and working together to achieve a deeply-felt, and deeply personal, purpose. It comes from pure appreciation. It comes from real admiration. It comes from the joy of creating something incredible with someone or someones. Perhaps you are thinking of someone in your life that you feel this for as you read this. Then you know - it’s powerful and deep.
Large corporations give us an extremely limited vocabulary for expressing this deep love. And great restrictions on how we communicate it.
“The thing about working in a really large corporation is I’m not very powerful.”
Carla didn’t realize that what she was telling me wasn’t a fact. It was a decision.
Many people don’t get this. They confuse their decisions with “the facts of life”. These only become facts after the decisions that create them. Different decisions create different facts.
Here’s how it played out for Carla and how she did the impossible.
Jayne showed up for Causative Communication desperate for a solution.
Her arguments were logical, rational and she had no idea why it wasn’t working. This kind of situation didn’t just happen once in a while in Jayne’s life. It happened a lot.
Jayne thinks light years ahead of most people, she sees what they don’t see, she comes up with answers faster than they can perceive problems. And when she has to communicate from her world to their world, if they’re not already in her world, they don’t follow her.
If you are like Jayne, here’s what you can when logical arguments don’t work.
Latisha showed up for Transforming Your Presentation Skills in quite a state. She was very self-conscious. No matter what I said, she kept asking me to coach her on her hand gestures and her words.
“Do you think this hand gesture is better than this one? Do I have more presence if I put my hand on my hip like this?”
On and on. It took Latisha all morning to realize I wasn’t going to coach her on any of that.
It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.
Most people have a lot of attention on themselves, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they want, what they’re going to say, etc. etc. etc. etc. It’s a deeply trained-in self-consciousness that makes the most important question in their mind when they’re giving a presentation the absolutely wrong question and that is, “How am I coming across?”
It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.
John sat down in front of me with a sour look on his face.
We were filming his first video in the Causative Communication training session. I have the students role-play a real situation with me, a situation from their lives that’s challenging for them so I can see how they handle pushback. We hadn’t even started and he was already looking at me with resentment.
It didn’t help that the look on his face was overlaid with a thin veneer of artificial civility. The first words he said to me were the forced polite, “Hello, how are you?” with a small, tight, fake smile. The look in his eyes told me he didn’t care.
John had no idea he looked this way.
Then John told me what he wanted from me in a tone of suppressed exasperation. He was restraining his frustration, but it was unmistakable. His face and tone betrayed him.
This made his communication feeble, the outcome hopeless. It made him powerless.
When we were discussing it afterwards, I asked John what he was thinking when he first sat down with me.
He said, “The last two times I tried to talk to this person, it really didn’t go well. I got nothing but resistance. I was expecting the same resistance again.”
And this was exactly what I was seeing – his overwhelming anticipation of a person he couldn’t influence, anticipation of an unsurmountable problem. Which is the same as saying that he came into this situation dragging the past into the present and anticipating failure.
John had no idea he was doing this. And he had no idea the impact it was having on his outcome.
Why is this important?
Let’s begin our New Year by talking about Vision.
Vision is all about seeing. The kind of vision that I’m talking about isn’t seeing what’s on the surface. It’s about seeing PAST.
On Day #1 of Transforming Your Presentation Skills, we usually film our students.
As we watch the first video together, we see very different things, the students and I. They usually hate themselves. This has everything to do with vision. What I do differently is….
When I first started Effective Training Solutions in my 20’s, I was a staff of one. This made me the CEO, which made my mother laugh to no end. After she was finally done laughing, she looked at me, and with great pity and sadness, said, “Oh, honey, why don’t you get a real job?”
As confident as my parents had taught me to be, my parents were terrified that I was going to fail. But I had learned well from them.
Even if it was all I had, I had a dream, and I knew that nothing else was going to make me happy but living that dream. I knew that you can make any dream come true if you don’t give up on it. And now, I’ve been living my dream, every day, for over 30 years.
We all had tears in our eyes. Elizabeth is an exec in the C-suite of a successful organization. Their senior exec team did the Causative Communication course together, and now, a month later in our follow up session, they were talking about the successes they created in the preceding month.
For Elizabeth, who was a stunning success in her professional life, this was personal.
Elizabeth‘s 12-year-old son, Matthew, had hit a stage where he wouldn’t talk to or look at her anymore. He defiantly turned his head away from her whenever she was talking.
You can imagine the pain wrenching her heart. Physically he was still in the house, but she’d lost his eyes. She’d lost his heart. She’d lost his trust. She’d lost all connection.
What I love about Causative Communication is that you learn simple truths that require very light energy and produce powerful outcomes.
We spend a lot of time on the concept of affinity. This is one of the most misunderstood, undervalued, underutilized, and yet most INDISPENSIBLE elements of deep, rich, emotionally satisfying human relationships.
Affinity ISN’T what you’re thinking. Affinity is what you’re FEELING.
I was explaining to Emily why I was not able to attend a meeting where I was not essential. The acknowledgement she gave me was a very resentful, “Bummer”.
I then tried to tell her what I had already booked during that time, and also why the meeting would be fine without me. Emily’s face was sour as I talked and she gave me an even more resentful, “Bummer.” She clearly was not listening to me.
My first impulse was, “This is not fun. I don’t like talking to you. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
And Emily was about to walk away herself.
At first, I was happy it was over, and then I thought to myself, “What would I tell a student to do in this situation?”
They already know how to walk away. But what they don’t know is how to transform an impasse like this.
George helps sales people close big deals. His track record is impressive. On average, he saves them 30 to 40 hours per sales proposal. His advice also increases their win rate by a wide margin.
George can look at a proposal or presentation in advance and with 100% accuracy tell you whether it will close the deal.
He has a very simple method. He has a computer algorithm which simply counts the number of times they use the word “YOU”. He compares that to the number of times the sales person mentions their own company.
Proposals where the prospect name is mentioned 10 times for every one time the sales person’s company is named (a ratio of 10:1) are a slam dunk and the deal is going to be closed.
Why is that? Is it because people are egotistical and they want it to be all about themselves? No.
If you look at the list of skills that make a hero, the ability to be in the moment is at the top.
When Dillon Reeves was asked how he knew exactly what to do to stop the bus to avert a catastrophe, it turns out he’s been carefully watching his father drive for years. His father said, “He’s always been very attentive to his environment.”
This extraordinary boy stands out. In a distracted world, he is awake, alert, aware.
Awareness is king.
The problem people have, when they’re not aware, is they don’t know what they’re not aware of.
Sometimes humanity is lucky enough to have a single individual who is able to break through all the preconceived notions of despair, hopelessness, and impossibility that overwhelm the rest of the world. They release in humanity the most powerful of forces, the force of love and harmony.
At that moment we see with great clarity what being human really means.
At that moment, we find what we are seeking, what seemed impossible the moment before. We reach that distant shore that we as humanity long for.
The video below is one such a story.
Ahmet: “Are you hungry?
Would you like half my dinner? I’m happy to share it with you. My wife made it and it’s very good.”
It was the end of a long day. His homemade dinner was steaming on a hot plate, it looked good, and it smelled good. And I was smiling as I said, “It looks delicious! But no, thank you. I’ll have dinner when I get home.”
Ahmet is a parking attendant in the basement garage of a tall, stunningly gorgeous building with floor-to-ceiling windows and spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and the city’s financial district.
Everyone he serves has a lot more money than he does. But Ahmet has more heart than 100 people put together and he extends every bit of it as he invites me to share his dinner.
I can’t remember the last time someone made an offer like this to me.
We were meeting for the first time. Her face was hard, stern. She had her head tilted back and was looking down her nose at me. Her voice was uncompromising.
“I am the Chief of Staff here. We are responsible for billions of dollars of new product development and I report directly to the Chief Operating Officer. Everything to the COO goes through me. I make sure everything gets done. I have global responsibility.”
Her eyes challenged me, daring me to top that.
I looked into the heart of this woman and said, “Very nice to meet you. You must have done a lot to get there.”
I wasn’t flattering her. I was understanding her.
She looked into my eyes and changed into a different person. Her eyes softened and she smiled very slightly.
She thought for a moment and said, “Honestly, it’s a tough job, they don’t always listen to me.”
I thought about that for a moment and quietly said, “I can really understand that. That would be tough.”
I was in no rush. I wasn’t being sympathetic. I was understanding her.
She looked into my eyes to see if my understanding was true. Being understood was new to her. She saw it was.
Some people think you have to be “born with” the skills and charisma that make a really great public speaker. Not true. Let me tell you the story of Henry.
I was invited to give a two-hour talk on presentation skills at a technical conference for a highly specialized professional association.
At the banquet the night before my presentation, I told the President of the association, Steve, that I wanted to line up a volunteer to coach during my talk. He asked what qualities I was looking for and I said, “Someone who really needs to improve in their presentation skills.”
Steve enthusiastically told me Henry would be perfect and I said, “Let’s go meet him.” Well, meet him I did. Henry hardly took his eyes off the floor while we were talking, and for the brief moments they did come off the floor, they went straight to the ceiling or the wall on our right. Turns out, Steve interpreted my request as, “Who is the absolute worst communicator in this group?”
Henry didn’t look like someone who liked to be told what to do. I told Henry, “You know, I’m going to be coaching you in front of 300 people.” He glared at me for a brief moment and said, “What does THAT mean?” I said, “I’m going to be telling you what to do and you’re going to have to do it. Are you okay with that?” He mulled it over a little (looking at the ceiling) and then said, “I guess that’s okay.” Neither one of us was sure that it was, but with these words we locked in our next day’s destiny.
After Henry left, Steve said, “I hope you’re going to coach him on looking at people!” And then laughed for 2 minutes straight.
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