Say What They Can't Unhear

Thank you so much for joining me. I'm Nola Simon. I'm the host of the Hybrid Remote Center of Excellence and joining me today is Tamsen Webster. She is a prime example of somebody that I've built a relationship with over time. I've actually followed Tamsen probably for years. When did the red thread come out? That came out in

2021,

but I've been

talking about the red thread for eight years now.

So my role was actually my corporate role was actually restructured in 2020. So I started paying attention to LinkedIn. I wasn't writing, but I was consuming a lot. And so I think I started noticing you around there. So I've honestly been following you probably since then, but I just connected this year. And I had attended one of your workshops that one of my other podcast guests Marty Constant had made available. And then I connected after that. So I always tell people I, I don't accept pitches from my podcast. I like to invite people that I've got to know online. So I know your work, and Tansyn's work has been instrumental to helping me develop the messaging for my business. And I'm really excited that she's come out now with a new book, another new book, which is called Say What They Can't Unhear. And I gotta tell you, the ding is something that we really have to talk about because I know that although it manifests differently for me as well. Tamsen, how do you describe your profession? Obviously you're an author, you're a keynote speaker you're deeply involved with TED Talks How do you describe yourself? Like what's your perfect message to deliver who you are?

So I, for folks that would understand at least somewhat intuitively I say that I'm message designer, so I have, after a lot of trial and error, that seems to be something where most people generally. Yes, correctly what that probably means. So meaning you've got something you want to say and you're trying to figure out how to say it. I help you do that. My more my like sassier answer, my cheekier answer, which is also correct is that I'm an English to English translator. Because I think that's what I'm I help people do. But fundamentally, I feel like that my I don't even feel, I know that my deep passion is helping people help other people create change. And so whatever I can put together, learn, process, size, tams and eyes, whatever, to help people really get what their, their difference of perspective, their approaches, their offerings, their ideas, their initiatives, all of these things that they're, investing time and money in to make a change for themselves, for the world, for clients, customers, whatever it might be. I want to make sure that they have as much opportunity for success as possible. And so that's where I come in because I've somehow cobbled together this deep and long interest, both in transformational change and in communications. And so I've put those together. To create message design. Awesome.

Perfect. Yeah. I was always fascinated that part of your origin story really is Weight Watchers. And a lot of that, when you're trying to lose weight is cause I remember my mom did this probably in the eighties. A lot of it is, She did manage to lose a lot of weight. She came back, but that, that was always something that caught my attention because I remember her experience with that, but a lot of times it's the stories that you tell yourself, right?

Yes, absolutely. And yes, it is a hundred percent. I think it's to quote one of my members she always said that it's 99 percent mental and the rest is just food. And that's, that is, we know now that's, it's not quite as pure as that. I think that's one of the things I'm delighted that science has caught up with what was observable in the 13 years that I was a Weight Watchers leader. And that is, is that. There are fundamental physiological differences between people that no amount of retraining your thoughts or positive self talk or willpower will, will overcome. And so it's not that it's not possible. It's just that it was one of the of so many lessons I learned in the years that I moonlighted as a Weight Watchers leader. One of them is that to be very wary of one size fits all. Anything, right? One size fits all approach. One size fits all message. Because. That is bearing it, that bears with it a lot of assumptions about what you're offering and who you're talking to. And those can get you in trouble on both sides. I don't like getting in trouble that way, which is probably why I've spent so much time You know, because I've had some horror stories of just whoop, that was not the right way to say that. And so that's, that's part of where all this has come from. And now that I've gotten to a certain point in my life, in my career, where I feel like it's mathematically impossible for me to be the age that I am, but there are some objective truths, that I really have gotten to a point where it's. Where I feel like, I have something to say on this like I, I, I have put all this together. I've seen this work. I've done the work. I have done the research. I have done the testing just to see what it is that works and doesn't work so that within a world that is constantly changing and with people who are you know, I feel I have something to say on this like I, I Just absolutely different. Person to person in so many different ways. What are some of the things that are reliably true, no matter what, no matter who you're talking to, no matter what the situation is, because that I think gives you at least a place to start and gives you a place to start where you're starting with the strength of what is Thanks. Known, right? This is how people think about things, this is how people make sense of information, this is how people react when they're treated a certain way. If those are some of the things that either will move a change forward or back or get in the way of the message or accelerate it, , it, solvable problems. Unsolved solvable problems drive me nuts. And this is one of those where I, when I come to looking at messaging and change messaging, I'm like these, most of the things, most of the places where we go wrong are completely solvable and I just really wanted to help people solve that.

Yeah, no, it makes sense. So in Tamsyn's book, she has these nine principles that are they're so logical, they're so straightforward, but they're brilliant, right? Thank you. And one of them that really caught my attention, I think that's really where you're talking about this too, is the deepest beliefs are the hardest to shift. And I always found that because I always lived north of the north of Toronto and worked in the city. And so they would the company would often come out with like messages that were designed to be for the majority of employees. I wasn't the majority of employees because I didn't live in the city. I, A lot of and a lot of times I didn't fit so they would come out my favorite was always the, let's save the planet. Let's bike to work. I don't know. I live 60 kilometers north of the city like that's not going

to

happen. You can't bike on the freeway for one. It's illegal to I'm probably going to be. I'm still biking six hours later and then I have to turn around and go home, right? So fundamentally, like my belief was, this is not a message that's designed for me because you have no clue how I even get to work. You don't even know who I am.

Or that's, oh, or that's all you're left to think, absent the information, any other information being put out there. So Again, it's such a solvable problem, right? All that take, took, all that would take is a, I'm no grammarian a dependent clause that says, for those of you who live in the city. But, right? Yeah. Because at least what that does is say, this is for you. And when it comes to those deep beliefs, so the way that I, as you probably figured out by reading these things they're all like nine different perspectives on what kind of sits in the center is. The same thing. It's not all the same thing, but it's different avenues into this kind of nut of what is it that people have to hear in order to understand and adapt a new idea. And. The deepest beliefs are the hardest to shift. That one is in the trio, like that one sits at the heart of the book. It's number five. So it's like literally in the middle of all the pieces, because I think, for me, it is one of the most counterintuitive principles of inspiring long term change or creating the conditions that are more likely for it. And there's good reasons for that. The good reason for it is that it's counterintuitive is that when we think about deep beliefs and, we'll acknowledge that they're hard to shift, and the reason why I chose that phrasing was because most people, A, would agree with it, but B, they see that as a problem. They see that it's a problem that deep beliefs are hard to shift. And my perspective is that. No belief. Very few beliefs. Let me be careful. One always has to be careful with absolutes. Very few beliefs that anybody holds are equally true for them in every context, right? And what I mean by that is so all that has to happen when you combine that principle with let's say every decision has a story, which is the second one, which is All someone has to hear is something else they believe to be true or recognize as true that is just as strong or stronger and that they can notch into the story they're telling themselves, but in a different way. And though I didn't have the language for it back when I was a weight watchers leader it's again, one of the ones that, that truly had its birth there because so often, your experience with weight loss was my experience with weight loss, which is that I had tried and failed any number of times before I finally found and created this kind of combination of factors that, that worked for me. And certainly one of the things that I observed over 13 years was that one of the biggest and most dangerous things that could happen was someone faulting themselves for failure and adding that to the mental tally of this belief that I can't do this thing. And so often when that's the operating deep belief, I just can't, it's my genes. Like I'm just destined to be this way. And I felt that way about myself, which is just like I come from a family of overweight women. And so maybe this is just who I'm supposed to be. And what I found that was the antidote to that kind of, setting where people set themselves up for failure was instead of saying, put okay. Instead of putting all your eggs in a belief that you haven't tested this is possible for me, or in a new behavior of let me stop eating some food that I love. What would happen if, it really started with a question, what would happen if we could map over something that they are already good at someplace else? And for me personally, just as an example, I am. almost pathologically a rule follower and a systems follower, which is one of the reasons why for me Weight watchers was a really good match. It is not a good match for people who See it as a constricting framework. And or and aren't able or don't have a leader who could show them or present them with a different way to conceive of those same guidelines. But for me, it was like, once I found a system, I was like, yes, this is awesome. I am great at following rules. Just give me rules as long as the rules aren't too hard to follow. And for me, it was like mapping that over and saying, oh, it's just a budget. And instead of thinking of myself like, oh, I'm a bad person, food is good or bad, it for me, that system neutralized the emotional attachment to it all to, to me, to, to the food. And so again, for me, once it, once, it was, this is just about, solving a puzzle. Another thing I love, like how do I get the food I want? into this framework that's being presented to me, then it became actually like a game. Not one that I chose to gamify, because, again, a thing I learned over time, was that, like, when you're trying to play that game you win, you lose, and if you lose, you win, right? It's just you're, it's all you. Who are you trying to win against? Who are you playing against? Exactly. And, but I would, so once I was like that, again, it wasn't the program that worked for me so much as there was this aspect of the program that I could link to something that I was already confident that I did well. And so that was a

stacking. Before habit stacking was a thing, really.

Yeah, because it was just like this idea of again I'm, I love puzzles. Let me figure this out. Let me let me figure out how to do this. And I'm also a little ornery. I'm contrarian. So if you're like, It's not possible to keep doing X, Y, or Z. Then I'm like I'm going to see if it's possible if I can still have dark chocolate every day, and I can still have my ice cream, and I can still have these things. The whole reason why I joined walked into Weight Watchers for the first day is because I saw this hilarious episode of the Oprah Winfrey show. When Sarah, the Duchess of Ferguson was on here, this is dating me rather significantly. That's okay. We're the same age. Yeah. And they were, they like a got themselves pretty much drunk on television and then attempted these two women who really don't cook for themselves to make chocolate chip cookies. And I just, Hey, it was such like a joyful thing, but also this whole idea of Oh, it linked into to bring it back to some of the things that I talk about in the book, something that I recognized is true, which is that if I couldn't lose weight doing the things that I love, how could I possibly keep it off? So it just again from a thing that You know, from assessing for myself. What hadn't worked in the past was like, okay, if it's too restrictive, I'm not going to stay on it. If I telling me if I don't, if I feel embarrassed about telling somebody else what I'm doing to lose weight or to get healthy I'm not going to do it. If it's too extreme, I'm not going to do it. And so it was really getting to a point of saying, okay, I know what I need from something in order to make it work. And then it was just about finding that intersection. And that was the role that I saw myself as a way watchers leader with my members was, one thing that they said that the company said to me once upon a time, which I couldn't unhear. And I still use this in any number of ways was, they said to us at one point during ongoing training that we would have that, our job was to be the expert. In the program and to recognize that our members were the expert in themselves and that our job was to figure out how to blend the expertise, not to presume that we knew what the right way to do. The program was for them, but to get as much information and the Understand the program so thoroughly that we could really adapt it to wherever somebody was. So an example, I find a window

or a door,

right? Exactly. And one of those windows of the doors was I grew up in the point system of Weight Watchers, which is basically like a budget, right? You get a certain number of Points to eat in a day and food has points and your job, like a budget, is don't go over budget and one of the things that was very difficult for people was when they deeply believed that they were a night eater, like a label that they would assign to themselves saying that they're a night eater and what that means for folks that may not be familiar with that term is that it. They were they were great fleeing things that you were they were, they felt like they really had great and strong control through most of the day and through dinner. And then somewhere between dinner and bedtime, the wheels would just come off. And some of that. As I observed over time again, 13 years and, with a number of meetings that I led in, around my day job, I did the math one time. It was 3000 meetings. You pick up some data from doing that. And one of the things that I did. Picked up was that people that would get so desperate because they would run out of points because the, the points have worked for 24 hours. Most people started them in the morning. And so again, if you get to the end of the day and at the time they wanted to or needed to eat or, do whatever food was doing for them was the time when they had the fewest points. And they had got a lot of them again. We get to that point where they were just like, then I can't do this because the program doesn't work with who I am. And I spent some time trying to figure this one out for people because there really are a lot of people for whom this is a challenge. And then I was like but there's nowhere in this literature that says the points start in the morning. The points are just 24 hours. What I ended up doing was saying to them, hey, guess what? There's no, nothing says that you have to start the points in the morning. It's just 24 hours of points. And yeah, it's going to mean you're going to need to play with the journaling things that we've got and where you write things down a little bit. But as long as you can feel like you can keep track, then start your points at dinner because deeper belief that I anchored it to. That there's 24 hours in a day. Yeah. And that 24 hours can start at any time. And so for many people, I'm not saying all, but for many people, just that simple shift. Again, I didn't have to tell them they weren't night eaters. I didn't have to change who they were. All I was doing was saying, there is something else that is actually, in this case, outside of you, that's even more reliable. That it that when it comes together with you actually gives you a path forward here. And

that works too for, cause like people who work night shifts, it's a way to be more flexible with the reality of who they're like, who they are in their life.

Yeah. And. There's always something like that. I I should say I always start with the assumption or the belief that there's something like that because it allows me to start looking for it. Then, if I come into any situation where I'm trying to help someone change or help someone help other people or their organization change. If I come in saying, how do we get them to say yes to this? Then I've created a really binary situation where it's just Yes, not yes to this change, not how can I open up and say, All right, we are trying to achieve this larger thing. Are we all in agreement about that? Are we trying, in Weight Watchers, are we trying to achieve health goals? Yeah. Okay, great. Then as long as we're in agreement about that, we're going to start there. Now let's take point by point and say, what, where else are we where are the points of conflict? Where aren't they? But by avoiding looking and trying to challenge those deep beliefs and really just coming at it from whatever the situation is from a different direction and finding something that is strong as strong or a stronger than what's standing in the way, then we allow people to tell themselves a different story. In their head or one that now has a possibility of success, whereas the current one doesn't. And when somebody wants the outcome enough, they will, at least at that point, be willing to try because they'll agree in principle now that it's possible. And. For a lot of us and with a lot of change that we're trying to do in organizations, like that's the first barrier that we run up against, which is people reject it at a hand before even because there's just dismissed. It is not possible. And this is where I, I, one of the many things I hope that people pull from the book is just this idea of that little tiny yes, that comes saying, is it possible? Do you agree in principle that this would work, that this is, that this makes sense? Again, not based on data and evidence. Those are important. They come later. But intuitively, based on what you recognize as true become something that will shift what you how you think about the world or how you think about the situation or how you think about this change. And I think that's really where the key is so that it comes it flips from the deepest beliefs are the hardest to shift as being a problem to the deepest beliefs are the hardest to shift actually tell you where to start to solve the problem. Start with by building on those deep beliefs rather than trying to challenge them.

Yeah, no, I the question comes up with my work is the whole return to office debate and everybody, like all these CEOs trying to bring people back in because of collaboration and innovation. And, that the work is just better in the office and people fundamentally don't believe them. Because for one, they've been able to work well at home. Two, their role doesn't really involve innovation or collaboration. And as we've tried in the past, they haven't succeeded to actually influence that innovation and collaboration. And so fundamentally there's that disagreement about those beliefs.

Yes. And I would venture to say. That in some of those cases where the leadership is bringing people back, they don't actually believe that it they don't believe it either. And that actually isn't the reason. Bringing them back. And so the thing is that, particularly, I think people's intuitive BS meter has always been very good. But employees to their employers is super good because they have a lot of history with the behavior of the organization. And and guess what? We are, as humans, we are actually Nonverbal first, right? Like that and we will trust what we experience with all of ourselves far more than any words we ever attach to it. And this is where, again, as part of the motivation of this book, which is just saying, listen, if you can't actually make a, I know this is going to sound super direct. rational. I don't get to the reason why it's not. But if you can't make both a valid and sound argument that your audience agrees is valid and sound, and what I mean by valid and sound is it is a logical argument. Like it's complete, meaning this plus this equals this and they agree with you. And sound, meaning the premises upon which you are, like, the thing where you're saying, this is true, and this is true, therefore, if they don't agree with one of those two things, then the argument is dead in the water. And I know you're right. Because I've seen and I know you're right because I've seen it as well that people don't believe that they're more creative or innovative when they're all together. I also know that the studies say that. They are wrong that when people are together, they actually are. And then you're going to say yes. And some of those studies came from places like Microsoft. Of course, it's self serving again. Everybody's we can get the numbers to say whatever we want. But here's what I would say that even people who are reluctant to come back to the office. All the time, regardless. You know what I see, and you probably see it, too, because I go into organizations to speak often at these occasions when they have brought everyone together when they've been remote is that magic happens, particularly in the non formal situations when you bring people together when there's lunches together when they all go out to karaoke together and those kinds of things and What I, where I think these back to work and I get not an expert in all of this like you are, but where I suspect a lot of this breaks down is that if the leadership actually articulated their own case to themselves, they actually wouldn't be able to make an argument that actually because if they took off, one of the things I talk about in the introduction to the book is what I call the persuaders paradox, meaning we get so convinced of our own idea Or so charged with. We have to make this thing happen that I have to convince people that we often will engage in a persuasion techniques and attempts that if we were to take that hat off for a moment, we would never tolerate for ourselves. Yeah, and. It's one of those things where, you know, cause I see it a lot. It's the role I often play in organizations. So thank you, brave clients where, they'll say we believe that it's, it's going to be better for collaboration. Innovation. I'm like, and I would say, do you believe you are more collaborative and innovative are equally collaborative, innovative working remote. And I think a fair portion of those people would be like yeah, I am, but. They aren't. Right? And it's this kind of perspective. So anyway, I think a lot of it comes down to really thinking about what would be an argument that The employees would agree is true. What would be the premises that the employees would agree would make sense. And I think one of the one of the avenues for that is recalling a recalling those experiences where there has been something magical about getting people physically together and then be making sure that your policies procedures that are in fact what's happening. The way that I've come to define something that someone can't unhear is that it is a recognizable truth that creates, crystallizes, or corrupts how they see the world. And the issue is when you're trying to get someone to change, And they and the whatever you're presenting to them does not do one of those four things, right? It's not a recognizable truth. They don't see it in play or it doesn't do one of those and then it's not going to work. So when it comes to back to office again, it's like, where do people agree? Can we start there? And. Again, I think the path is like there. There are these magical moments where when people are physically together, other stuff happens. It may not be collaboration and innovation. It may be something else that enables more of that to happen later. But then the second step is critical on the part of the organization, which is to set up the situations where those things are actually going to happen. Because the vast majority of people I talk to who have been at. In their terms, forced back to work part of the reason why they're so frustrated by it is because they're sitting physically at work in online meetings. Yes, I survived a return to office mandate in 2013. So long before, online meetings were really regular, I think. And part of it was we were brought back because the infrastructure didn't necessarily support everything that we were trying to do at that particular time. And I had driven a lot of it and I knew it was completely possible to do it. They just needed to work together and they needed to get their act together. So I had made specific recommendations, but the way that I coped with that was actually flipping it and basically saying that I can make this work for me because this is what I need to do so that when we bring it back, it'll work well. So I flipped it to be like I could totally work from home. I could make this work. But what do I have to do? How can I help so that everybody else can get to where I am. So I went in and I started training people how to use webinar software. I built out operating protocols and I, I worked with like the tech team and I did all of that work. Like I never really stopped working on it, even though it was never my job. And so assuming that identity and flipping that helped me deal with the emotional impacts of it, even though, it was still aggravating, but it's at least I could flip my perspective. And I became the person who is going to make it work. He was invested and committed for the longterm. Yeah, that, that's the, the risk in this approach is that you discover that As most marketers know about marketing messaging, and this is where a lot of this started for me, cause that's where my career started. Marketers know that no amount of great marketing will fix a product problem. It's another version of, nothing killed a bad product, like good advertising. There is no amount of messaging. that will make a change that is not fundamentally in someone's favor, in their favor. And I would argue that anything where you're trying to get them to believe that it's in their favor is Out of line with my own personal ethics. People's own mileage may vary, but the thing is that eventually they'll figure it out. Let's we can get all Shakespearean on it. Like the truth will out again, over time, people will see whether there's a gap between what they were told and what they experience. And they are always going to trust their own experience more. And so when You know, in those situations where it really isn't going to work out for some people on the team, that's where, this underneath a lot of, there's a, there is a realization that may come to some readers of this book, which is that what this is. And what that shift in approach does is that it shifts the risk of the change onto the person asking for it or onto the people asking for it. And that's again my bias. I've got a lot of reasons for why I think that's appropriate, but it like get intuitively. This is definitely for a book for people who would agree that is true, that if I am asking you to change. The. If it's a worthwhile change, I should believe enough in that change to assume the risks of giving you my honest, fully transparent reasoning for it and acknowledge and take the risk that you may not agree. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we had that once with a software program. They were trying to bring in. They did spend 2 million dollars on like a. Basically, like a custom CRM before Salesforce was a thing. And then they're like we spent 2, 000, 2 million on this. We need you to use it. And I'm like, okay, but you're making my life. More difficult. Why would I use it? Because it doesn't solve any problem that I have. You're just adding to my day. And then eventually they started adding in things that were useful. So then it's okay I can see the use case for that. That's making my day easier. I'll use it. I don't really care about your 2 million that you spent on it. That's poor planning on your part. Yes. If you make my day easier. Okay. I'll support you. And that is where, and that's, for me, that's always the place to start a message of change is what, in what direction are the people you're talking to already traveling, right? And one thing that you can rely on is that your team always wants their day to be easier. They always want there to be less annoyances. They always want to be, they always want more time to do the things that they love. Right now in some companies that culture is do more of the work and other for other people and maybe even within that company that for other people that's spending more time with friends, family, loved ones, crossword puzzles, dogs. I don't know what that is. This comes back to that fifth principle of the deepest beliefs are the hardest to shift because part of the belief is that I want the thing right? And if I'm already organized and wired in the direction of, I'm going to pursue and be open to anything that legitimately will make my life easier, then start the message of change there. Pretty much one thing that's usually not going to fly is that it's for the good of the company, that may fly with your C suite, but it's still conditional on as long as it doesn't make my job harder. And so starting from there is the first thing. And then again, so often what we do when we, All forms of messaging, but particularly around messaging that's meant to drive a shift in thinking or behavior or just create an action is that we think that, at least we've learned that just telling people what to do doesn't work or doesn't work long term or doesn't work and build the kind of relationships and culture that you want. So we've we've, Thanks in no small part to Simon Sinek. We've got, we've got this. We've understood now that we, yeah, exactly. We have to at least explain why are we doing this thing? We're doing this thing because now I would say that when you're trying to drive action. That we use the why that doesn't resonate for people a lot of times, or it does, but it's a distant, it's seven rooms over, right? Whereas if there was something closer, like for you to say that to, for them to say we invested a lot of money. You're like, that doesn't ring my bell at all. But if it were legitimately, even if it were initially positioned as this is going to make your life easier, what we miss. And what that means is that is starting with not just the why behind what the change is, but the why, but behind what, how the change works. In other words, why will this change actually accomplish this thing? And that's the one we skip, and that's the one where we, More often than not end up with things that we trying to argue based on things we wish were true, like the collaboration and innovation, but not things again, something that someone can't unhear is a recognizable truth doesn't mean it actually is, but they have to recognize it as truth. And this is where we resolve this tension between someone going, this is a very logical approach. It's logic that uses beliefs in its input. That's not rational, totally not. So this is where we find that middle ground. But it starts with saying, if you want people to go along, it's not their job to move in a new direction. It's your job to show how the thing that you're asking them to do doesn't take them off the path that they're on. And in fact, may actually accelerate them towards whatever it is that they're pursuing. But it's your job. It's your team's job as a leader, as a colleague to, to If you don't know specifically what those things are to just to do the little bit of human work that would say what would a smart, capable, good person, which all of your team is, by the way, what would they most likely care about the most, what would be the most, what would be the thing that they're most, caring about again, not, and it isn't by the way, long term avoiding pain. It's. Yes, they want to avoid pain in the short term, but they also want, there's something else that they're looking for. So there's a lot to it, but ultimately it is, does come down to very simple principles, which is why I wrote the book. I like to the smart, capable, good approach because it helps people approach it with empathy. Right, and put themselves in somebody else's shoes, I find. So if you assume that everybody is smart, capable and good, which the majority of people want to be, I maybe Elon Musk claims to be an evil genius. I'm not sure, but if everybody wants. Yeah, from that perspective, then you have to consider that, there's a reason that's driving them that it makes you start that curiosity thread, which I think is. It's helpful. That's right. So yeah, I love this topic. It's a couple things. One is, again, most of the things that I've put in here come from trial and error experience of what business leaders and humans do and don't talk, right? And. And one of those, particularly in business, it can be for not for all people in business and not for all leaders. But the empathy is can for certain people feel quite squishy on. And that's because oftentimes that we've conflated that there's only one kind of empathy when, in fact, there's actually multiple kinds of empathy and Most of the time what we're, what we think we mean with empathy is emotional empathy, which is understanding what somebody else is feeling. And that feels very touchy feely to particularly, task oriented leaders and things like that. Not everybody's wired towards relationships and that's okay by the way. But one thing that can help to understand is Hey you don't. Control how somebody feels about something. You do not. And they do. And that's On that. And so not only does it feel uncomfortable for certain people because of how they're wired. I don't feel comfortable on this feeling thing on another level. Other people may resist it because they're like, I don't feel comfortable. I don't directly control how they feel anyway. So again, what's for some folks that maybe they're efficiency oriented. Like I don't, even if I wanted to know or could know, I can't, there's, it's not a thing I can directly affect. And there's lots of people who actually don't really understand what they're feeling either. Like admitting their own emotions to themselves. So it's complex. And this is where understanding that there's another avenue towards empathy that can be really important and that's cognitive empathy, which is understanding what somebody else is thinking. And there's a huge amount of support for the fact that many of our feelings are directly tied to our thoughts. And so if we can back up and go, whoo, this person is super passionate about this, or, ooh, this person's really angry about this. And instead of going. I don't understand the feeling, which you may not, you're probably not going to understand it unless you start to say what must they be thinking? Or what could they be thinking that would produce that anger would produce that doubt that would produce that resistance? And. You're right. The smart, capable, good thing is that most people want to be it. And I chose the phrasing in the book quite consciously that most people want to be seen that way. Because I've spent enough years in therapy to know that not everybody's convinced all the time that they are smart, capable, or good. Most of us. The majority of us, I would say even the Elon Musks of the world want to be seen as smart, capable and good to their in group, right? Or to other people. And so they're very happy to be seen as not good by a huge group of other people as long as they feel validated by the people whose opinion they want or need. And so this is where. Again, putting that lens on just saying again, you don't even have to believe I suggest that you do, though, because still going to leak out. If you don't have to, though, but at least take that step of saying, okay, let's just thought exercise. If this person. We're actually currently smart, capable and good. Why would this make sense? Because people do follow their own internal logic. It may not be logical to you, but it is to them. We do not, as humans, operate outside of internal logic for very long. We don't. We are very internally consistent people. Even if we're consistently inconsistent, right? It's like Dan Ariely's like predictably irrational. We in fact are predictably irrational, but we're irrational in very predictable ways. We are logical and very illogical ways. And that's what we can count on. So if you can marry those two things together, that people will operate. Long term on their own internal logic. So there is one there's some kind of mental model or collection of models and beliefs and frameworks and worldview. Absolutely, which I love, by the way, favorite topic and that people want to be seen as smart, capable and good. Then you can start to solve for the worldview. You can say, I can see this reaction, if I assume they're smart, capable, and good, given what I know of the world, and of people, and even this person. What would have produced that? And if you can't figure it out guess what? It is a beautiful point, to your point, Nola, of becoming curious, and asking them. What makes you say that? What is, what is it that you are? That are, what is it that you are angry about? Again, not why that can be a very triggering question. Like, why are you so angry? It's just what is it? Because that can start to really focus the question on, you could, if someone said that to you with your resistance to coming back to work or that to that implementation of that software system what is it about this? That is, is so frustrating to you. You're like, it makes my job harder. It does again, like we operate. From these worldviews with the assumption that people see the world the same way we do. And if we stop and for just even a split second and go of course, not everybody does or can, but our brain saves brain cells by assuming that everybody does. And so sometimes we have to create those moments either in conversation or by presenting this case for change that again, people can recognize. In that moment, because it doesn't take long to really say because I believe this is true, and this is true. That's why I believe this is the approach that's going to produce this outcome that doesn't take much to help people identify where the friction is, where the alignment is, where there's opportunity and where there is. And where there isn't and regardless, what I have seen is that being able to do that and have that discussion allows people to civilly agree to disagree and say, oh, I understand. I just don't agree and then it's up to the leadership. It's up to you as an individual working with that leadership to decide what that actually. Means for you. And like you did, you said how can I reframe it so that I can do something with this and be helpful towards it? But that's how that response is always gonna be personal to Yeah, and fundamentally, I think that's really where the whole return to office thing breaks down is it's related to identity. So these leaders who want to bring people back, that's how they've always been successful. If they tell the story of their careers, it's told in person because that was their reality. You would think that they want to mentor people, they want to train people, they, and to do that in the frame of referenced in to their history, they can't do that if the people are at home. Like their reason for being successful is fundamentally related to the fact that they were in person seeing people in different contexts. And so they have to reframe their whole entire understanding of their career success in a way that's really uncomfortable for a lot of people. Yes, and that also means that in many cases, it reveals to them in a way they may not want to face quickly or ever how they were viewing the people who work with them, right? Meaning they were looking them as workers. Not as people because again, as a person to put the persuaders paradox back in play as a person, they wouldn't want to be seen as just a worker either. They would resist it. And so sometimes it's having that perspective of just it's where that classic 90s 80s and 90s. It started in Toyota. The five wise. comes into play of just keep, it isn't always five. Sometimes it's three, sometimes it's seven, but keep going down until you, it's a, or even share Lockian. The only thing that's left is what must be true. And sometimes that's uncomfortable and but if you're really trying to get a change to be successful, that's the work, right? And sometimes the work is going to be This realization that you are putting the needs of the company ahead of the needs of your employees and that may go against what you have said Your values are right. And so that's where the trust breaks down, right? Because it's the story doesn't hang together, right? Exactly. It doesn't it. It doesn't. It is not recognizably true. So that's what you know, for me this idea of these recognizable truths apply both to individual pieces and parts of this story, but also to the story as a whole, because sometimes, we can hear something that just completely, Like just shifts everything, and it just rewires the rest of a story that's already in play. I would say we've seen that this week in Kamala Harris's response on Call Her Daddy when she said there are many women who do not aspire to be humble. And for many women, I'm not saying all, for many women, that was one of those recognizable truths. All of a sudden they heard the words and they're like. I recognize that as true and I recognize that as true about me. And so what it did was it crystallized for a group of people. This is why this something didn't work. This is why, some like something about the story I'm being told about my role as a woman doesn't work because I've just heard a recognizable truth. And then to your point, Nola, sometimes it's the whole story, right? It's just it's, these things don't track together. And that's, I, sorry to get all Aristotelian on it, but it's it's not a, it's not a valid argument, meaning A plus B does not equal C in this case. And And if that's verifiably true, based on your audience's experience, if your audience cannot validate it based on their own experience, first test. Test. Dead in the water. And so this is why so much of the approach that I'm talking about in this book really relies on those underlying, sometimes implicit, unspoken, in practice principles that are guiding what the leaders do and team members do every day, because that is what we do. That is the first validation of the change. The first yes, that always has to pass is does it check? Does it check with my head? Does it make sense? And does it make sense? Does it feel right? And the ding, it has to be, I don't hear an audible ding. When I hear a truth, I feel it like in, in my chest, it's not audible. It's a feeling right. And that actually happened once where it was something that somebody was dealing with an insurance claim and somebody told me something that they shouldn't have told me and I'm like, Oh, this is the truth. This is what you're trying to do. And I got a 34, 000 settlement out of them because I recognized their truth. Yes, we there's a lot as I'm, as I am learning right now, cause I, I started amidst all of this. I started a doctorate program this summer. We have. I think overlooked in particularly Western and Western culture and in business, the other forms of. Knowledge, wisdom and learning that we have. And, it what is intriguing to me in this environment of incredible complexity and incredible change is how important it is. To be able to not just articulate quickly why something what something is, why is it important and what and be able to give people that information that allows them to do that to do a very quick check, but to be able to recognize. That actually nothing that happens up here happens without the gut check happening first, and I don't care how B2B or how engineering or tech or science focused, an organization is it's, it's proposal review committee is or whatever that data, we're going to trust the data. That either aligns with what we've seen and experienced ourselves, or in rare cases, we will trust it because it either comes from a source that we really trust, or again, that it finally unlocks, even in a way that we weren't expecting, something else. One of my best examples of that, and I know we're running out of time, but one of my favorite examples of that was with with Jay Baer. So Jay Baer is a customer service and customer experience expert. And two books ago, three books ago, he wrote a book called Hug Your Haters. And it started with, he started with, by, he started it by doing research. So he started it by doing, by gathering information on. Like, how often you need to respond to the haters online and what the expectations were and all of that. And to Jay's eternal credit, his original hypothesis about it, I don't even remember what it was disproved. And what he discovered in the data was not that was that the haters were actually deeply passionate about the brand. And when they got angry, it's because they cared so much. And so this is one of those places where, when it suddenly, for him, what that created was, and I remember we worked on the messaging around this, which was, That it wasn't that the haters weren't the problem, ignoring them was the problem, because they were so passionate about the brand, the company, etc. That hearing that disconfirming data is what unlocked for him why haters could have, like, why they carried such power. It's because the people who I would submit, it's because that passion. For the brand or for the way things should be was so intense that people felt it even through, the austere online world. Yeah, I actually built my customer service career around difficult callers and dealing with people that other people couldn't deal with. And. That was how I was successful because I listened to them, because honestly, the majority of the time is they had a vision of what could be, and they were actually trying to help you get there, if only you would pay attention. Yes. Yes. And that actually is what's happening with the whole return to office thing is, it's not that people object to. It's not that they don't want to work. It's not that they refuse to go into the office. It's because they don't feel heard. That's the really big thing that's happened. That's right. And they are, and it's and when the leadership says we don't feel heard either. This is where I would urge people to say, because are you asking people to hear something that you haven't actually said, right? And that is how could they hear that? And so this is why so often it really is so important to it's, to say what they can't unhear, you have to say what they can't hear first, right? In order for that to be the case. And that sometimes means digging deep into really understanding what is driving why you believe a particular change is actually the right thing to do. And then discovering what in that. And then deciding what does that mean for either how you change the message or how you're going about making the change in the first place. All right, we should wrap it up because we are over time at this point, but thank you so much. It's always lovely to chat with you. I did find the book immensely helpful. I think in my review, I actually wrote immediately useful because. I was actually applying it. If I, if you go back through my social, you'll actually see I was weaving, smart, capable, and good. And I was actually weaving it into things I was already writing. Oh, I love that. Yeah, it was, is really cool. And so definitely the book is out today. I checked my mailbox to see if it had arrived. It hadn't arrived yet. But it's already hitting the charts. So if you get the book, Say what they can on here by Tamsyn Webster, write a review for her on Amazon. And we want the next book in the series because it's helped me to this point. Share your time with me. And I'm just very grateful to be able to have such an engaging conversation with you. Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate it.