It was Valerie’s first Executive Coaching session of the new year and she was spiritless. She found out the CEO had decided to bypass her for the promotion from VP to Senior VP that she had been counting on. They wanted to bring in someone “fresh and with more experience” from the outside to be her new boss. Ugh!
Valerie got the bad news and then went out on the end of year holiday. It didn’t improve her mood.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“It’s hard. It’s hard to come back. It’s hard to look forward to this new year with any optimism. I feel like I’m not being valued. My enthusiasm for what I’m doing is completely drained.”
What was really drained was her ability to communicate effectively. If you look at the above definition of causative, it’s the ability to make what you want happen. And the ONLY way to do that is through the way you communicate.
The only way to persuade is to communicate persuasively. The only way to convince is to communicate convincingly. The only way to shape reality with others is through your communication.
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.”
I’ve handled many difficult situations. Many difficult conversations. And I’ve spent my life helping others do the same.
I’ve seen people turn their losses around rapidly. I’ve also seen people who take a long time to recover.
The fastest, simplest and most effective way to turn around a bad situation, a bad conversation, or a bad relationship is this.
First, face the situation as it is. Don’t get drawn into “How it should have been”.
If someone is being difficult and you can walk away and not deal with them, I'm all for it. If you can go around them, or above them or go somewhere else, why waste your energy dealing with a difficult person if you don’t have to?
But there are times you can't choose to end that relationship, even though you may be able to walk away for a couple hours.
Sometimes you have a difficult boss, but no other job. Until you find another job, you can't afford to walk. Sometimes it’s immediate family that you can’t leave. What do you do then?
This article is about how to make other people’s faces light up when they see you.
At my farmer’s market on Sunday, the farmer where I buy broccoli every week, a man who is normally sullen and glum, lit up and started grinning when he saw me walking toward his vegetable stand.
Why did he do that? Because spectacular communication is rare in his life.
The staff of a senior executive in a major corporation complain he never makes time to meet with them. After my first meeting with him, he told me to always stop by his office to talk when I’m in the building. His face lights up when he sees me and he always makes time. He gives me his full attention. Our impromptu meetings often stretch to 30 or even 45 minutes.
Why does he do that? Because spectacular communication is rare in his life.
A Vice President known for never answering his emails always answers mine within hours.
Why does he do that? Because spectacular communication is rare in his life.
I haven’t even begun to tell you the results my clients get. Every day I get emails from our students about what happens when they apply the Communication Formula. They get equally spectacular results.
Real communication leaves you and the other person feeling really good.
I’ve worked with professionals and executives of large corporations for over 30 years. They are used to feeling tense. It’s become normal. Feeling completely comfortable is not normal. Being relaxed is not.
That’s how being slightly tense, or even very tense, becomes habitual. And they’re surrounded by others who are also slightly or very tense. So they’re swimming in a sea of uninspected “normal”.
One of the foundational, skills students gain in the Causative Communication course is the ability to BE THERE COMFORTABLY. This sounds insignificant to the untrained ear. Yet, without this ability as a base, no other communication skills function.
This is illustrated by an email I received from one of our students, Mariela. Mariela has a “Lioness” boss who crushes the spirit and destroys the self-esteem of all.
Mariela emailed me this after the course:
Sometimes my students write the best articles. I think you'll be inspired by this success story.
I've worked with MANY people who wanted to get promoted. They have tremendous technical expertise and many other abilities and fine qualities. The key differentiator that always ensures true recognition and significant success for them is gaining the ability to communicate at the high level of skilled communication that their lives require.
One gentleman, whose name is Krishna, perfectly illustrates this.
What happens between childhood and adulthood that makes adults so uncomfortable and tense about looking into each other’s eyes?
This is a question I ask myself often. In our Causative Communication Live! Workshop, I help the grown ups restore their lost ability to really LOOK at another person. And I always wonder how we let ourselves get so mixed up with so many confusing ideas about it.
Worrying about what others are going to think, fear of their reaction, being excessively careful not to ruffle feathers … All of these cripple communication.
I can't tell you how many times clients come to me and say, “I just have to put up with it for now because I don’t want to shake things up right now. I’m just going to let it go for now.” And they suppress their own communication and chance for success. “For now” turns into a very long time.
If you need everyone to agree before you stand up to speak, you’ll never make anything happen.
Most people don't know how to truly connect with others as themselves. There's always something holding them back, some self-consciousness, a feeling something is “missing”, or something they put between themselves and others to protect them.
Often this is manifested when you see presenters trying to connect with their audience through their PowerPoint slides. You can see the trouble they would have if you took the slides away from them. They’d feel exposed, vulnerable, unsure.
Whether it’s slides, a beautiful body, or some attitude a person assumes because they think it makes them impressive, it doesn’t make any difference. The REAL skill is connecting directly as yourself.
This result isn’t something you achieve by improving your “corporate presentation” skills. It’s only available when you’re willing to step beyond what you see everyone else doing and do something very different.
This isn’t a journey about hand gestures or tone or how you make your slides…this is a journey about connection.
Ayansh felt powerless. His promotion had put him in an extremely contentious engineering team. They didn’t discuss each other’s ideas, they shredded and destroyed them. No one listened. They were all sneering. Each one showing off how brilliant they could be, and the way to do that was to see the others go down in flames.
They were brilliant. But it was all being wasted.
What a group of successful execs will learn in Causative Communication, are the rules. Not the rules that I dreamed up, but the rules that are common to all human beings, crossing every border reaching every culture, every generation, rules that determine the winners and the losers, timeless rules deeply baked in to human nature, powerful rules that will still be active 500 years from now.
The first one they learn is unexpected. It’s foundational.
As I was teaching the concept of affinity, Bridget very bluntly told me she doesn’t have time for it. I told her that I understood, and with her busy schedule she certainly doesn’t have time to do anything additional that would add time. But I explained to her that affinity is not something you do in addition, it’s HOW you do what you’re ALREADY doing. It doesn’t take any time.
Liza: “I’m leaving you.”
Matt: In shock. “Oh no you’re not.”
He was at home in Silicon Valley. Liza was calling from Boston. She was in a hotel room with the man she was leaving Matt for. She was on a business trip, but now she was telling Matt she wasn’t coming home. Matt just found out that their affair had been going on for months.
He knew things had gotten distant between them, and he felt responsible because he had been working too hard and had stopped really being present in their marriage. “I wasn’t there for her.” He suddenly realized what a mistake that was. But he loved Liza and he didn’t want her to go.
Matt was on the phone and thinking fast. He felt he was losing everything, his mind was a blank. He had just done Causative Communication and the only thing he could remember was intention.
Many people don’t know what to do when they run into push-back, hostility, opposition, or resistance. Especially when it comes from groups. There are so many wrong ways, but there are also many right ways to transform it. They all rely on outrageously great communication.
This isn’t something you can do “half-way” and expect to generate extraordinary outcomes. This type of result requires an ability most anyone COULD achieve but one that few ever will.
Terror, fear, even a little anxiety, makes people talk too fast. When you talk too fast, your words lose their meaning. Correct pacing is the hallmark of a professional speaker. There was one thing that Mariela was doing that was causing ALL the problems I just mentioned. She was talking to EVERYONE.
It seems logical. You have 300 people in your audience - you should talk to 300. Right?
This is the worst thing you can do.
I take many candid screenshots during the virtual training, and a number of videos with small enough groups when the workshops are in person. A candid photo is a photo where the person is not posing, they don’t even know a photo of them is being taken.
As people go through the workshops, and they see their faces change in their screen shots, especially when they see the anxiety replaced with affinity, they almost can’t believe how good they look.
Your face alone has 42 muscles. Some sources say it has up to 60. Every single one of them reflects your attention and your affinity.
How do you teach the principle of dignity? Most people wouldn’t know where to start.
I start with the word. People don’t know what it means. And if you can’t define it, you can’t do it.
Think to yourself, do you have crystal clarity on dignity?
I use a revolutionary new process called Word Clearing to teach extremely powerful concepts, including executive presence.
People make a huge mistake thinking that just because they said something, that the other person “got it”. That it registered.
When the person you’re talking to is solidly stuck in a particular viewpoint, when they have an obstinately fixed idea, there can be a time lapse between the time you say something and the time it registers. Why?
Your communication hasn’t ARRIVED.
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