I can’t help with fear of death, or apocalypse, or zombies. But the fear many of us experience when we have a high-stakes presentation or meeting coming up? I have a suggestion.

Most of us can describe an interpersonal situation we don’t want to be in. The three situations we hear about most often from clients are: 1) Giving a speech or presentation to a lot of people 2) Having to give tough feedback or fire someone, and 3) Needing to answer questions when we’re not sure what’s going to be asked. 

In all three circumstances, we tend to turn inwards. We feel discomfort or anxiety just thinking about the situation, and we start to imagine the worst case scenario. “I’ll forget what I want to say.” “They’ll be really upset.” “I’ll look like an idiot when I can’t answer their questions.”

Instead, think about the person or people you’ll be addressing. What outcome do you want to create for them? If you’re preparing a speech, what do you want the people thinking or talking about as they leave? Imagine them talking to each other when it’s over. 

If you have to have a hard conversation, think about how you want that person to feel. Supported? Informed? Ready for the next steps?

If you know you’ll have to speak impromptu or answer questions, focus on the impression you want to leave rather than what you might not know. Do you want the audience to experience you as thoughtful, confident, at ease, capable?

Taking the focus off of how you feel (nervous, anxious), and turning it towards how you want to make other people feel is like a magic wand. The simple act of thinking about others turns the coming ordeal into an achievable task.  

When in doubt, stop thinking about yourself. How can you prepare in a way that makes this time valuable for others?

The impulse to prove our rightness always backfires.

If your intention is “to show I was right,” what will the outcome be? How will the person you’ve “proven” this to feel as a result? Are they likely to say, “Oh, gosh, yes, I am amazed by your rightness and will never make the mistake of doubting you again”?

No.

If you want to say (or type!) something in order to prove yourself right and someone else wrong, try choosing silence instead.

As someone with a tricky last name, I’ve had a lot of experience with choosing when and how to correct mispronunciations. However, as a middle-class white person in the United States, I’ve never worried that someone saying my last name wrong meant that they were glossing over or ignoring my culture. 

The people in this NPR article, though, have spent lifetimes of time and effort just trying to get their names said properly by the people around them, rather than replaced by “easier” nicknames.

It’s remarkable and wonderful that we can meet people from many different backgrounds in the course of our lives. Taking the time to really learn how to say each other’s names shows respect.

And if you’re not sure what to do?

“If you’re not sure how to pronounce someone’s name, just ask, says Ruchika [Tulshyan], the founder of Candour, an inclusion strategy firm. And there’s no need for a dramatic apology or drawn-out explanation if you’ve made a mistake. Pronouncing names correctly is ‘one of those ways that you can really practice anti-racism and practice allyship in the moment,’ she says.”

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/02/989609197/what-listeners-told-us-about-the-importance-of-getting-names-right

The way we communicate is a collection of habits. 

We’ve constructed these habits over the course of our lifetimes, so, like other habits, they start to feel like they’re the only way that thing can be done. We don’t think at all about the pace of our speech, or whether we use long or short sentences, or how our vocal cadence sounds. We listen to ourselves all the time, so whatever we say sounds normal to us.

But as soon as you start comparing notes with someone else, it becomes clear that all of these things—pace, sentence-length, cadence, etc.— show up differently and can be combined in infinite ways in different people. Your vocal pace and cadence, your volume, the vocabulary you typically use…all of these elements of our communication style add up to a unique signature. You sound like you. And that’s great!

Let’s take this out of the area of communication for a moment. Think about posture. Just like speaking, people have various habits around the way they stand and move. Those habits make it possible for us to know at a glance whether the person walking towards us some distance away is the person we’re waiting for or not, even when we can’t see their face. 

Sometimes, though, it becomes important to identify and tweak a habit. Maybe you find out that the way you stand is putting too much pressure on your lower back, so a physical therapist teaches you how to adjust your posture. Or maybe you learn that the volume that is comfortable for you is difficult for people to hear clearly in meetings. In both cases, it can feel like changing this habit is changing something fundamental to our identity.

Your habit can reflect who you are, but don’t confuse it with being you. You’re not defined by how you walk down the street or the set-point of your vocal volume. So if you get some feedback that one of your habits is getting in the way of really connecting with other people, think of it as an opportunity to try on something new. You don’t have to throw the old way out altogether! Just add this variation on your existing habits. Expand the repertoire of what it means to be you. 

A client recently said this: “I just have to make sure I don’t take on anything else.” The way she phrased this clued me in to the fact that maybe, just maybe, she has a history of overcommitting. I asked if she had a tendency to take on a lot of projects, and she said yes, overcommitting is standard operating procedure for her.

She said that she wants to be able to say yes to new opportunities that come along that interest her, but also that she needs to be able to take the current projects across the finish line.

I suggested she create a “message in a bottle,” a little note from her current self to her future self. This message would be “activated” in the event that she found herself in a circumstance where she might say yes to one too many things.

The message is simple. It boils down to one question: “How will I feel in the future if I say yes to this now?” Excited? Resentful? Overwhelmed? Fulfilled?

If you can honestly answer the question posed by your message in a bottle, you can set the future version of yourself up for success.

Another timely link! More and more companies are heading into the brave new world of the hybrid workplace, with some people in person and some remote, not necessarily all at the same time.

This article explores some of the challenges that are going to face us in the hybrid world, and how we cant make some intentional choices about configuring our work teams, times, and spaces. 

Let me know if you can’t open this article, and I’ll figure out another way to get it to you! https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/business/dealbook/hybrid-workplace-guide.html

I have mentioned my patient husband Charlie in these posts before. He is thoughtful, methodical, and detail-oriented. This is frequently important, but it really came into play recently when we decided to paint two rooms in our house.


Charlie’s attention to detail means he’s great at lots of home repair and maintenance tasks. My strengths…well, let’s just say that my strengths lie in other areas.

We decided that each of us would be in charge of one room that needed painting. Charlie and our son would tackle the larger room, and I would do the smaller one by myself. This allowed for a fascinating side-by-side comparison of our styles, and let me be the first to say that the room Charlie painted looks MUCH better than the one I did. 

Charlie carefully prepped the room, laying down plastic, taking off the outlet covers, cleaning the blades of the ceiling fan. I piled everything in the room on the bed and threw a drop cloth over it. 

Charlie assembled every tool he would need before he started. I had to stop in the middle of what I was doing several times to go find the next thing I needed. 

Charlie knew exactly what he was taking on when he started the project. I nearly quit when I realized how much work painting the trim was going to be.

At this point you may be wondering, “Hey, so, what strengths do you bring to this, exactly?” And that’s a great question! My contribution to getting the rooms painted came earlier in the process.

What I’m good at is getting things going. I’m a starter. I have huge enthusiasm and energy for new ideas and projects, for getting the team together and planning how it’s going to happen. I’m decisive—the dates for painting, the paint colors, and the game plan all decided and in motion fast. 

Charlie is a finisher. He stays with a project until the end. He deals with the detail work and the irritating obstacles. 

Our strengths complement each other. I show up with paint cans and a plan, and he tells me the best way to sand the trim.  And in the end, the rooms are painted. 

A good friend, Stephen St. Amant, shares his thoughts and insight every day in his blog. Today marks his 1000th post (!!!) In celebration of this achievement and as a special treat, I wanted to spotlight a recent post of his. _______________________________________________________________________________________ There are different ways to speak about our challenges. I suffer from I struggle with I fight against I cope with I deal with I live with I live through I learn from I sit with I thrive despite How do you talk about conditions in your life? The language we use matters. _________________________________________________________________________________________ You can find Stephen’s blog here: https://www.savenwood.com/ I encourage you to poke around and read more of his posts! They are typically short, like this one, and packed with good thoughts. Subscribe to join his loyal readers!

A colleague of mine recently shared a terrific idea I wanted to pass along to you all. 
It involves the audio-only social site Clubhouse (read more here, if you don’t know what I’m talking about!) https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/what-is-clubhouse-app

Clubhouse is kind of like dropping in on a bunch of conversations that are taking place, and you can pop your (metaphorical) head in and listen, and chime in if you want. There are thousands of people talking about every topic you can imagine!

My colleague, a business coach and podcaster, shared that he has been using Clubhouse for several months now. In addition to using it to spread ideas and connect with other thought leaders, he takes to Clubhouse to try out his new content.

When he has a new presentation or workshop coming up, he logs into Clubhouse, starts a “room,” and shares the material he’ll be presenting with the folks who pop their heads in to listen. They share their ideas and responses, and he’s able to see gaps in his thinking, implement their suggestions, and get some active practice time under his belt.

If you’re on Clubhouse, let me know! I’d love to connect with you there.

I spend a lot of time thinking about talking. Why, how, and even when people talk takes up a lot of my mental bandwidth.

But in order to really create connection, we need to learn to be great listeners, not just talkers. We can learn how to be present, suspend our own agenda, ask relevant questions, and come from a place of quiet and invitation.

Coaching listening skills is the natural counterpoint to coaching speaking skills. I’ll start with the person I coach most often—myself.