hi Matt here I know that as a listener of think fast talks smart you value unique perspectives on the things shaping our world if that sounds right you should check out the intelligence the free award-winning Daily News podcast from The Economist and its Global Network of correspondents plus you can now listen to a deep dive weekend edition of the intelligence with a subscription to Economist podcasts plus you'll get access to special limited series such as boss class and all of the economists in-depth weekly shows on business China American politics and Tech listen wherever you get your podcasts all for just a few dollars a month search online for Economist podcasts plus to sign up and start listening emotional awareness allows us to better connect and communicate I'm excited to share this best of episode with you where I speak with Seline too about the value of emotions in communication I really enjoy the part where we discuss how feelings serve as data and input for the communication choices we make now enjoy the episode to truly H and develop your communication you have to introspect reflect seek feedback and integrate all of that information to improve I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication a at Stanford Graduate School of Business welcome to think fast talk smart the podcast today I am super excited to chat with Seline too Seline is a facilitator of the gsb's famous inpersonal Dynamics course she's a CEO coach and a GSB graduate welcome Seline I so look forward to our conversation I'm looking forward to this as well Matt I'm excited excellent well let's go ahead and get started I'd like to start with the interpersonal Dynamics course that you help facilitate it's also known as touchy feely and you and others help run that course can you remind our listeners what the course is about how it works and and share maybe two key takeaways from it of course interpersonal Dynamics is the most popular elective at the Stanford GSB it's really about teaching people how to be effective interpersonal communicators and how to do so both at work as well as in their personal lives how it works well one example I can bring to you is when I was a student in MBA at the GSB one exercise that we ran in touy fi is notorious it's known as the influence line where other students have to rank you according to how influential you are to them and consistently I wound up in the bottom half of everyone's influence line and I was devastated here I was a new immigrant to the United States female Asian and I couldn't understand why I was at the bottom of the influence line so I felt sad I felt disappointed in myself I felt hardd by resentful and normally what I would do would be to disengage and say you know what you don't think I'm influential I'm stepping out but what's great about this course is it encourages you to re-engage and so I dug into the feedback got insights from other people as to why I was coming across that way and as a result changed the way I behave when I'm in American contexts and what's great about that is that I diversify the range of behaviors that I bring to bear so when I'm in the states I come across with a little bit more emotion and more animation and when I'm in Asia I can come across with like less amplitude and I have this range of behaviors now I can pick and choose from and I have agency so that's what interpersonal Dynamics does it's a phenomenal course and one of the strengths I think of the course is that it really helps people as you shared in your story to really learn about themselves and to learn about themselves in a very direct way not mean but to learn about themselves and then as you said to develop a sense of agency to make those changes that that are needed and thank you for sharing Shing that in all of our interactions you are certainly influential in my book you would be at the top of my line so thank you for that thank you Matt I'd love for you to share how all of us can be a little bit more touchy feely if you will when we work in organizations or corporate cultures that emphasize logic and action what can we do to be more empathetic and connected to those environments one of the things I will say is I'll repeat advice that David Bradford one of the key devel Vel opers of the Tachi Philly course told me when I was actually chair of the Stanford alumni Consulting team I asked him David how do you bring touchy Philly to organizations and he said stealth it in with a check-in hm and this is how you do it you go around the room in any meeting and everybody says one feeling word how you're feeling today and one sentence as to why M the reason why you do that is because it creates the space for someone to say here's what's going on with me outside work now what happens is you no longer have the sales team talking to the marketing team no you have a parent talking to another parent or you have a caregiver talking to another caregiver you have more hooks more chances for people to connect with each other when I do my work as a CEO coach with startups a lot of the CEOs tell me Seline that'll take too long but honestly 5 minutes I I guarantee you 5 minutes is all it takes and then on top of that many of them will tell me Seline I can't say the word feelings in my organization we're a bunch of coders that word is not okay and what I tell them is okay don't say feelings instead use a prompt like what was one good thing that happened to you today what was one bad thing that happened to you today what's keeping you up at night and then over time you can slowly slowly increase the vulnerability and the range of emotions that you're allowing people to bring in I I love the advice and thank you again for the specific examples about how we can start with something as simple as just Begin by by checking in with each other and in fact doing so can warm people up and and get the conversation going and it doesn't always have to be about an emotion and and I loved what you said about how it changes our relationship so I'm no longer my functional role talking to your functional role where two people communicating and that immediacy and connection I can see brings a lot of value are there other bits of advice that you have or experiences you have as a facilitator of of interpersonal Dynamics or in your own private practice that can really help connect people together are there things we can do or say that can help with that I think there are two things I would recommend one is to be very clear about what you're feeling because feelings are data and in the rest of our logical lives we would never make decisions on bad or highly abstract data but we'll do that with feelings we'll just say I'm feeling sad mad or glad but that's not detailed enough so what I like to recommend is for people to actually take a page from Carol Robin's book connect in the back of that appendix you'll actually see a feelings chart carry that feelings chart around and check in at the beginning of meetings at the end of meetings and say how am I feeling right now at a granular level as an example before our chat today I've listened to this podcast since the very beginning I love it and so as a result before I came in today I was excited I was glad I was anticipatory but I was also nervous and so what did I do with that I decided I would go for a walk get some of those nerves out I would practice my vocal exercises and then I decided to reframe you and I will have a wonderful conversation and I think it makes for just a much more fun interaction than if I were just I'm just nervous ah absolutely so certainly no need to be nervous here and I too was very much looking forward to this so again I hear the advice much like you give to our students is you really have to reflect on yourself where you're at and and take that as information input in data from which you can then act and I think you're exactly right a in thinking about my own life when I look at my emotional state I'll just label it I won't actually go much deeper and I think that's really important because then you can take action if I just say I'm nervous but if I think more about that nervousness and how I can address it then I can do something about it so I like how the reflection leads to data that can lead to action exactly very helpful very helpful I'm love to get your thought thoughts and advice on how do you manage challenges and issues and disagreement at work when you're confrontational rather than collaborative I would say it's all about empathy okay conflict is magnetic it draws attention and whenever we encounter conflict our attention tends to go to this narrow Focus point that is the conflict alone I like to encourage my clients to expand their perspective and think about the relationship as a whole as a container and then go to gutman's research that we also reference in interpersonal Dynamics godman found out that there's a 5:1 magic ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions in successful relationships so my advice is build your emotional piggy bank by depositing those five good interactions in before you have the conflict build that and then even in in the conflict continue depositing those positive interactions in as a way of making sure that your conflicts go well because you're demonstrating good intent you're demonstrating that the relationship is important to you and these positive interactions can be really small they could be a smile an ey meet they could be a pat on the shoulder they could be a knot of the head it's easy but we forget I forget yes I certainly am familiar with goatman's work in this notion of storing up positive interaction and and I see this in my interactions with my kids there's a lot that I try to actively acknowledge the successes as a parent it can be very easy to focus on the the things you'd like to change or advice you'd like to give so I consciously try when positive accolades or praise are are appropriate to give that knowing not only that that will help in the moment but it might help me in those times where I have to give negative feedback or have a conflictual situation that's huge Matt I love that you're doing this with uh your family and even at work we have slack channels called celebration where people are encouraged to drop in and just celebrate somebody else for something they did or at the end of meetings we'll actually have breakout rooms where we'll put two people in together and celebrate each other that's really fabulous how that can help people and I begin to think back to when you talked about ways to bring empathy and feeling into organizations with a check-in at the beginning some kind of gratitude or celebration at the ending might be a really nice way to to round out an interaction or meeting they're nice bookends that's right that's perfect for those of our listeners who are looking to enhance or hone their empathy feedback and communication skills what advice and guidance would you give them B based on your experience I would recommend asking so the reason why I say that is all of us here sitting in Silicon Valley business types we tend to have advice monsters we like to give advice and what I would encourage people to do instead is to ask do you need support or advice right now and you'd be surprised the number of times people say I actually know what I need to do I don't need your advice I just want someone to commiserate with meh so do that ask first we assume people need advice but that's not necessarily always the case and the support component gives us a chance to connect with the other person yeah totally get it my wife and I have a lot of conversations around this issue as a professor as somebody giving advice is something that I do as a reflex and and listening and and understanding if support is needed is really important I actually think and this is a little bit true for myself that giving advice is is a way to hide behind you hide behind the advice so you don't actually have to connect and engage and I'm wondering if you find that to be true and have any advice on how to have that confidence to be vulnerable to I'm here to support you but I don't quite know how to do that or what's needed in the moment it's much easier for me to say oh just go do this yes of course before I answer that question I'll actually agree with you on that and also say that advice giving is distancing because it puts us in a position of superiority it assumes that we know the answer and hey Matt I can fix you just do this you know it's distancing and so my recommendation is actually to tiptoe into it by sometimes even just knowing that phrase do you want support or advice right now just practicing that because once you can say that the response your response depends on what the other person says and they will guide you as to what they need so just ask I think putting yourself in a place where you can just be receptive is hard but very useful and have seen that play out very successfully many times in my life so thank you for that so Seline before we end I'd like to ask you the same three questions I ask everyone who joins me are you up for that yes all right excellent so question number one if you were to capture the best communication advice you have ever received as a five to seven-word presentation slide title what would it be it would be people will remember how you made them feel that's by Maya Angelo absolutely tell me more about why that's so important for you because it's not about the words it's about how people feel inside that's how you persuade that's how you connect that's that's who we are we're emotional beings I think that's exactly right and we need to think about how we we impact people on an emotional level I think we do a disservice when we think about our communication is only information transfer it is clearly emotion transfer as well and we need to bring those two into balance and that quote is is very helpful to remind us of that I love that phrase emotional transfer there you go question number two who is a communicator that you admire and why I think Steve Jobs comes to mind know he used passion Simplicity storytelling to be memorable a and so much emotion absolutely and the thing I like about Steve Jobs in terms of his communication is he worked really hard on it you know he was very good at it had lots of natural talent but he worked hard tirelessly to improve and hone and and he also made sure to focus the message in a very concise clear audience Centric way so I agree lots of good things to learn there so much hard work underpinning what looked effortless isn't that amazing how how and I think that's a great lesson for all of us to remember is that practice and preparation can make things easier and look easier question number three what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe I think listening to understand finding commonality and connecting through feelings so connecting through feelings I I see absolutely from what we've talked about talk to me about listening to understand I think that's bound up with empathy right you can't really communicate if you don't understand what it is your audience is looking for your counterpart is looking for what they care about we focus too much on ourselves yeah and I feel like people and myself included when I listen I'm listening for the hooks that give me what I want to say next or help me get to the next place and not necessarily reflecting on what this means for the other person and potentially for this relationship interaction Etc so I like that idea of listening to understand yeah it's all it's part it ties back to what you said about practice conceptually it's an easy concept but it's really hard to do because you have to let go so much of your own agenda mhm yeah you have to quiet your mind and and really be present and for a lot of us that's hard Seline thank you so much this was a true pleasure to chat with you this notion of really respecting our feelings and embracing them and looking at ways to really understand ourselves so that we can bring our more whole self and emotional self to our interactions our communication is absolutely important so thank you for the lessons thank you for your time and and thank you for sharing important information with all of us thank you Matt pleasure was all mine thanks for joining us for another episode of think fast talk smart the podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business this episode was produced by Jenny Luna Ryan Campos and me Matt Abrahams our music was provided by Floyd Wonder for more information and episodes find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts thank you and please make sure to subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn hi Matt here as you know I am very curious and I'd love to recommend a show that I enjoy learning from and I think you 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