0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to Experience-Focused Leaders! I am delighted to introduce you to Jay Johnson, the CEO of Coeus Creative Group which is a professional training, coaching and management consulting firm. Jay spent 15 years guiding leaders in organizational culture, working with amazing companies and organizations like NASA and General Dynamics and in institutions like Johns Hopkins University. He's an active keynote speaker, author and has many millions of views on his TED talk on how to deal with difficult people such as myself.
Welcome to the pod, Jay!
0:00:38 - Jay Johnson
Thanks, Alex, glad to be here with you!
0:00:39 - Alex Shevelenko
Almost everybody who is in game-changing businesses, at some point, runs into dealing with people who are challenging them in good ways or bad. Let's dive a little bit into that topic just for the human interest. So everybody gets a nugget that they could take away into their work life or family lives. What is the secret to dealing with a “difficult person”?
0:01:11 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, I'll lean into the key statement here, “It's your heart attack and you should not be having a heart attack because of somebody else's behavior.” If we recognize that we can only control ourselves, then we need to look at tactics to be able to give ourselves the best opportunity to navigate some of those situations.
0:01:36 - Alex Shevelenko
So when you say “heart attack”, you would say that there's a gap between the stimulus that I'm getting from this “difficult person” and how I respond to it. If I am trained in the ways of the Stoics, I have self-awareness and create a gap. Their reaction does not require an immediate response like a hijacking happening at my end. I can actually take that response and create a gap, and not be caught in a difficult, non-productive discussion. Is that a fair interpretation?
0:02:30 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, absolutely! It's a fair interpretation. Have you ever experienced these situations where you were dreading going to work or dreading dealing with a client? These experiences actually produce a lot of anxiety, cortisol, adrenaline or epinephrine in your system. That has a huge impact on your central nervous system, your cognitive capacity and a number of other things.
I love stoicism and a lot of people say, “Great, how am I supposed to do that? Because I'm dealing with these people and they frustrate me.” So I like to use our Predictive Behavioral Intelligence Model, and what that looks like is: I want you to imagine you were sitting on the couch watching a horror movie with your partner or one of your friends. The movie builds up and then halfway through the movie, right as you hit the crescendo, boom! The ghost goes by, everybody jumps and is scared. Well, then your friend takes the remote and, if it's Netflix, goes back like 10 seconds so the ghost goes across again, and then does it again, and then again. So you seem to go now five or six times. How many times before that ghost would come across the screen and you would stop having a natural reaction to it? You'd essentially know that it's coming. You'd be able to predict it.
Well, if you think about difficult people, their behaviors are patternistic. So even though we see the same behavior over and over again, we get frustrated or angry with it every single time. That is a choice.
What we do is teach tactics to help people choose a better-regulated response. So it's not about not being upset by it because they're still going to make me angry and frustrated, but it's really about being able to predict that. Which then allows me to put in an influence measure or a control measure to make sure that I have control over my own behavior.
0:04:29 - Alex Shevelenko
Interesting, so what if that difficult person is ourselves?
0:04:34 - Jay Johnson
Well, that's why I started teaching about difficult people. That was a journey of self-discovery, and a big part of that is actually where our drives come from. So we tend to perceive people as difficult who, maybe, don't have the same type of core underlying biological drives that we have. That is one kind of primary area that I study with the Behavioral Elements program.
So, for example, I'm really strong in the drive to acquire and the drive to learn. Meaning that I'm highly competitive, I want to create new things and I want to get them to market really, really fast. And if your drives were to buy.
If your strongest drives were the drive to bond and the drive to defend, that's much more systematic, processed, focused and people-oriented thinking. We end up finding a lot of clashes between those different drives. So when we're experiencing that as part of our everyday work styles or our everyday interactions, it can have a huge impact on how we perceive somebody else to be difficult or whether they're very well aligned with us in our work approach.
0:05:45 - Alex Shevelenko
So there is a motivational or value set and if those are aligned, it's a little bit easier. There's another one that I think is related. It is that our people operate with the same set of data about how the world works. It may be almost separate from their predisposition. It's like having a set of facts about the world. But if you have a very different set of facts, there may be something else that needs to be unpacked in order for us to find a common language. It is a filter through which we interpret everything. How do you know, how do you dig into that and how do you help establish a filter?
And I think I bring that up because sometimes that's something that you could bring up in written communications as well. For example, some people I've noticed using RELAYTO. We had a customer who said, “Here's a manual on how to work with me.” It's a pretty sophisticated way of sharing this with vendors, colleagues or it could even be with family members. This is a great collection of what I know about myself at least and I'm willing to share it with other organized people. Then all of a sudden you say, “Well, that's really interesting. I would have never assumed that's a way to deal with that person. Because my values are slightly different in some areas. Even the idea of sharing something like that is foreign to me. So my data set is different.”
Guide us a little bit on how people are making it easy to communicate with them. For people that are maybe in different time zones, different cultures, have a different data set of experiences, and yet they need to find a way to work together in our crazy, remote and very diverse world.
0:08:01 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, and that's a really astute point, Alex. When we think about how people show up, we all are limited by our own experiences, our own knowledge base, the way in which we interpret the world and the way that we've been influenced by external factors such as culture, socioeconomics, etc. One of my big pieces is to always be curious. I'll even relate this to the digital space and remote work. What I mean by staying curious, and you know we've heard people say, “Okay, give grace and do this”, but I like to always start questioning. Especially if I hear something from a difficult person or I see something in an email that maybe triggers some response or reaction from me, I immediately go into my behavioral science background and start going, “Why?”
What was the stimulus that created this? What experience were they having right now? What experience have they had this week? What experience have they had this month? This is one of the things that we actually train customer service representatives on. It is being able to understand that sometimes when you're getting yelled at at the moment, it's really not about that moment. It is about the week, the month or even the life that that person may have.
0:09:17 - Alex Shevelenko
So it's not only about you, because that's the first assumption. It's like, “Oh, they're yelling, they must be really unhappy with me.” We go back to our 7 or 11-year-old self when everything was about us. Then you're saying, “This could be in their context, in the context of their week, of their life and their childhood.” And then you are much more able to accept that person. It's almost like one of those TV series where there's a deeply flawed character that you somehow still like because you understand that their flaw is not necessarily their fault.
It's just the way life turned out for them.
0:10:12 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, yeah, you know. And being able to re-contact that through curiosity or trying to learn about, like what, what? Let's be honest, I mean most people don't actively go. What is the dumbest response that I can have right now, in this very moment, most people think that whatever their behavior is is their best behavioral choice or their best behavioral action. In that moment. Now we come to regret many of our behaviors or we come to regret I wish I would have handled that differently. But if we, as the person on the receiving end of that, actually take a curiosity framework and say why, where did that come from? What were the conditions? You know? So say I get, you know, say I get an email that has what I would read as a really harsh tone to it.
0:10:58 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah.
0:10:59 - Jay Johnson
And I immediately react like gosh, why are they being so direct or why are they being so aggressive? And then I pause and I take a step back and I go. Well, what would be conditions that would create the directness of this email? Maybe they were busy, maybe they just needed this problem solved and off their plate. Maybe they had a really rough morning with their team or with their family, or maybe there's something going on. There's a number of stories that we end up telling ourselves. So, if I come at it from a point of curiosity, I can create multiple stories about what the behavior is, and they might help explain some of those behaviors in a more functional and productive way, and it gives me the opportunity to ask questions and seek clarifications.
0:11:43 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I would throw in a challenge into that, where you're putting the onus on the recipient of the communication. And we see that the best communicators that are senders of the communication, also engage in curiosity, right, and their curiosity is about how would their message be received, especially if you're doing important one to many or even the really important one to few, one to one message that you can't deliver in full fidelity right in a conversation that we're having. How do you do that in a synchronous way? And email to your point it's like it's a look, like it doesn't express you know that you're smiling when you're writing this or that you know you have your cheeky sense of humor doesn't come across Like you need to be very, very explicit to get the email right, and oftentimes you can't, but then you know, same same sometimes applies to presentations. But if you have your presentation and then you add a little video introduction on top of that just to kind of humanize it, so that they there's you know that there's a person behind these ideas and you kind of explain the complex points that you're worried about, that are just not enough to they could, they fall flat on the slide, but if you could walk through them, share the passion you know, for those that are interested may want to drill in.
Just like in a conversation, do you provide, you know, 30 30-minute response to a topic, or you you provide an option to hear the 30-minute response to a particular area of that's an area of real interest, right?
Like you don't want to hear 30, 30 minutes on this page, 30 minutes on that, 30 minutes on that, right, but that becomes an enormous monologue. So you create an interactive layer. So I wonder what you're seeing happens with the best communicators that facilitate this real human exchange in in the, in the context, where you know, maybe presentation that you present but, like the information is a little bit like harmonic that expands depending on areas of interest and makes some beautiful sounds or if itself serve that it feels conversational and it naturally taps the curiosity that you're bringing in, but it sort of unlocks the curiosity versus data dumps. You know, like I have to say it, I have to communicate, it doesn't matter how you receive it, it doesn't matter what you do is that I need to express myself, boom, boom, right, that that sort of feels like a. You know we got caught into that trap of the need to express ourselves without the curiosity about the recipient.
0:14:33 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, you know, any good communication is going to account for the fact that there are two people that are minimally two people that are part of what you're talking to the wall, right? So a couple of different things that we train our managers, our teams and, you know, the people that we work with. We teach them identify your tone. Now, some people don't feel comfortable sending out emojis, and that's perfectly okay. You know, in an email I don't want to necessarily look super unprofessional with, like you know, smiley face, laughing face, etc. But in my emails, yeah right, big old hearts, in my emails, you know I will put hey, team, this is a sensitive conversation. I want to find out what had occurred. But I want you to understand my tone is of curiosity, not of punishment or not of anger. We really just need to better understand what this situation is so we can move forward. Here are my questions. Now, if I just started with here are my questions, they're going to be on that defensive right out of the gate because they're going to go oh my gosh, we're trying to uncover what this issue is or challenges. I don't want to get blamed, that's natural. That's natural human behavior. So, being able to clearly identify your tone. Another really cool way to do this and that we've been really promoting amongst some of the managers that we've been training If you're sending an email that has questionable tone, send a very short voice note with it alongside of it.
You could do that on WhatsApp, you could do that on, you know, any of the social media. Hey, Alex, I hope you got my email. Just want to let you know, really appreciate all the things that you're doing. If you get a second and you can send something back to me today, that would be wonderful. Now they've heard your tone. They didn't just see your message, but they've also heard your tone. There's a follow up humanistic piece to it and the video idea which you do very well, by the way is absolutely fantastic to go along with that.
0:16:26 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I think that we focus a lot on maybe one to many or sales and marketing situations where there's more time to prepare for the quality of content, engagement, and I think that's you don't need to apply that bar to everything, right, like? I think you, what you're bringing up is like even in formal situation, I would raise my hand. I could do better with my team. Sometimes, you know, in the while I may be curious about the answer. I'm not sure the the questions was out.
That context will will people kind of their heart will start bumping up a little bit. It's like Alex is demanding excellence that I probably messed up and etc. So, you know, there's only a persistent effort I think that we need to do as leaders to be aware that what seems small to us could be much wider spectrum to the audience that maybe doesn't have regular contact with us, right, doesn't have that, you know, doesn't have the ability to interpret that in a long like, a lot of along the lot of dots of relationship form factor, right, like so that it's, you know, first time I contact my boss and he doesn't love my work, oh, my God, I'm like this. This must be very stressful moment for people. Is that kind of the implication of not getting it right that that you're bringing up?
0:17:54 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, I think one of the things that I would say is a good communicator is going to be somebody who can handle their own communication failures or communication issues. Take ownership of them. Sometimes we have to apologize.
Sometimes it's simply sometimes the simple act of hey, my intention wasn't to create these conditions. I understand that I did that. How might I be able to do that better for you the next time that we have a conversation? And literally digging in again back into that curiosity, but being able to identify hey, I messed up, that's okay. We are all human. We all make communication gaps and errors. A little bit of humility in that space can really go a long way to furthering trust and building that relationship in a way that is mutual and that the next time that we communicate it's more effective than the last.
0:18:51 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. Well, this actually is a really great lead-in to one of the data points that you've shared about what constitutes a communication, so I'm going to quote you and let's interpret that as particularly what it means in the digital context. So you say communications can really be broken down into three different things body language, tone and inflection, and the third one is the spoken word 55% is coming from body language, 38% from tone and inflection, 7% from the actual message that comes in the language that we choose. And so the question becomes what if we take that and move it out of just video alone and think of, broadly speaking, a digital context, right? And so we have a lot of people that are doing this, which everybody is doing on Slack or email, and it could be again sales oriented, so it could be with people that are external to us, don't have the bandwidths to do it. How do they understand the real person behind this right? How do we make sure that our body language is congruent was our tone and inflection, and congruent was the message, and they'll let you react.
So people put together a proposal and there would be something like here's 80 page proposal that I put together for you, very excited to share it with you. It's 80 pages of content about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and it's going to help your digital transformation inside this PDF, right, and so I think there's a total incongruence here. Tone is not exciting 80 pages of something that sounds very boring, but you say that you're excited. Digital transformation being presented in a piece of paper is not credible. So there's sort of the sort of incongruences that you could throw out there that doesn't feel right. Right, if the proposal itself is not exciting visually, then you saying that it's exciting and that you're motivated and that you'll be easy to work with doesn't align somehow. So these are some of the common missteps that we see people are doing in their written visual communications. What do you see and how do you apply the principles in these types of interactions that you share emails into that kind of more written visual communication focus?
0:21:37 - Jay Johnson
It's a great question, Alex, and those breakdowns of body language, tone, inflection and the spoken word were actually researched, done by Albert Moravian, and there's some other research that says, ah, that's maybe not perfect, but for the purposes of using it here, let's imagine that you're preparing for a speech. More than likely you sat down and you wrote out all the words and most people I personally don't, but most people are writing out words or they write out their thoughts and they're tweaking this word and they're changing this word and they spend a lot of their energy and effort on the actual text. And if we do look at any of the body language literature or anything else like that, we realize that we're spending a majority of our time on the part that has the least amount of impact. And when we think about that 7% or whatever percentage the spoken word accounts for in our communication, that leaves a lot of space to be lost.
Here's a couple of rules that I like to follow when I'm putting together my 80 page proposal. One if I find myself skimming my own proposal, it's probably a good sign that it's not matching what I want to accomplish. Number two if I get bored while I'm reading my prone proposal, I can assure you that your audience is going to get bored too. So how do I determine some of these things?
0:22:57 - Alex Shevelenko
In some cases and bored means you're not proud about it. You're like there's all sorts of you're not excited. It's not putting your best foot forward, right? Is that kind of like? Broadly speaking, what does bored mean?
0:23:09 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, if I'm not enjoying reading my own text, no one else is going to, so that means that there's probably lacking enthusiasm, lacking energy.
If I were to take my text or my proposal and read it out loud and record myself reading it, how would it sound? Could I give that same reading in a different way and think about it like I can read it with a lot of excitement? Could I also read it with a lot of just mundane-ness and see what that sounds like? Because we're going to have a variant, a very wide range, of how people are going to experience that document, having other people take a look at it and say hey, if you were to give me three words, three emotions that come out as you read this first page, what emotions would those be? Getting somebody else to give you that feedback helps us get out of our own head and be able to predict what potentially a reader or somebody is going to do. But yes, that congruence is so important when we feel dissonance in communication or dissonance in behaviors. It's an immediate turnoff and it's something that, even subconsciously, can have a huge impact on reducing trust.
0:24:21 - Alex Shevelenko
So I think the keyword is what you're bringing up. It's trust, right, like why are you doing this proposal? You want to establish a trusted relationship, and you, ideally. We're living in a complex world where nobody wants to be hating what they're doing, whether you're delivering your service, right, or somebody's receiving your service, and so there's a part of it that I would put enjoying the act of expressing yourself and connecting with this other individual right, like doing the best communication of your life, right, and so you feel like that is just sort of you're jumping out of a page or video, whatever is the medium that you deliver.
That's sort of one idea, but the other one that I really love and I'd love to get your experience like a take on it is this notion of autonomy. So if you're in a monologue, right, and you just get a lecture and everybody gets the identical lecture, everybody's in the audience listening to the same identical lecture, which is the traditional way to deliver amazing keynotes and you know how to do that, that has actually works. Maybe when the expectation is right and you have the sort of 15 minutes masterpiece, a TED, that's relevant for everybody, but it's not the reality of a proposal. It's not because there's different people that are gonna be interested in different bits of the proposal and they may be even the same person on a different time zone of their engagement with your content, maybe interested in different bits, and depending on where they're consuming it is it in bed in their iPad, or is it in front of a large screen, or is it on their phone on the move they may want to even get very different nuggets, and so I worry that when we apply our traditional one to many communications mode, we're forgetting that that world is gone.
That world was great for Steve Jobs doing his delivery to gazillions of people and he was a master orator and that like master presenter. But we live in the sort of interactive I pick my own adventure, I skip to the areas that I care about. But when you present a long form content, that's one like just basically monolithic, you know non-interactive, not letting you jump to the things that you want or consume the mediums that you prefer, because you have. Everybody has their own preferred styles of how they want to consume content. We miss this huge opportunity to upgrade our communication stack. What's your take on that personalization layer and how do we accomplish it in our current digital landscape?
0:27:17 - Jay Johnson
You know, I think we lean into and it's a good question, Alex, I think we lean into what has worked throughout human history and that's really the power of storytelling. As you navigate, whether it's a written document, speech, training or anything else, humans understand the world around them based on stories. Now, if I just tell you my story and what my story is, that's one level of storytelling, but the reality is I need to be telling stories in which the person that I'm communicating to can see themselves in that story. Now, once they've been in that experience, right like even even at the beginning of this. I give an example of Netflix and sitting on a couch and watching, you know, a movie, a scary movie with a partner or whomever Most people could at least identify.
Okay, I've sat on a couch before I've done this. I can imagine myself sitting in that position. So, as I'm telling stories or I'm utilizing a story framework, what I'm really trying to do is help the audience member find themselves as the hero of that story, whatever that is. Maybe they're going to overcome their big challenge or their big difficult person. Maybe they're the person that's going to sell that next huge proposal, because that's what they're looking for, or solving their cultural challenges. When we can create stories in which our communication partner finds themselves in identifies with relates to that's. Number one going to build trust. Number two memory recalls six times faster and more prevalent. It's actually going to have more meaning within the context of that communication.
0:28:55 - Alex Shevelenko
I love it. I think this is a great place to wrap up was one edition, so I would say there was a story. So you pick the story, like we believe. We agree that storytelling is important, but in today's day to age, you have the choice of which stories resonate with you right Inside that proposal. Which case study do you care about? Right, you don't need to go through them linearly. You know that I want to hear. What you've done was Ford word, because I am, you know, another automotive manufacturer and that's the story I want to go on first, not the one that was laid out in the linear structure by a monologue thing. So I'm picking the story, I'm connecting to the story, I think something else happens, and that's what I would call.
We have a need for autonomy and I think that is becoming a more and more important need. So we in a communication do not want to be stuck in a like one way type of monologue engagement. Right, we want to pick and control and know where we are and know when. Can we wrap up this, this, this content, right, I want to know that it's. I'm going to drill in, but it's a two minute drill in. I don't need to watch your two hour webinar. I want to get to the, to the two minute segment that really resonates, and if I love that, then I could choose to expand right. So it's sort of these quick trust building steps that keep me in control.
Know what's my investment? And I think that's lost somewhere because the model that we learn from is not like that it's. It is much more still. One to many performance, and then you just try, and that one to many performance meet everybody's needs somehow. If you're a master, you can do it, but we no longer need to do that right, we don't need to be doing the world's best monologue that meets everybody's needs, right, like that's citizen Kane, which you know.
You're like, who can do citizen Kane? Who can do Hemingway? Right, like not as your average B2B creator, unfortunately. And so we could, but we could give them a sense of creating an exciting journey for their audience. And that's sort of back to trust and a relationship that sort of hey, we are co-creating something because you give me a set of options and out of that I create my own story. And that story is special because we're it's like we're watching that TV on Netflix and we're discussing it together and we're interpreting it together, and I'm taking your points and you're taking my points, so we're making some of the one plus one equals three. Does this, does this feel right? The sort of autonomy plus co-creating a story versus consuming a story?
0:31:45 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, I don't think in the history of ever has somebody wanted to be talked at. You know, they want to be talked with and they want to contribute to the conversation, and reciprocity as a psychological principle is something that's there. You know, even Ernest Hemingway did say that any good story should be able to be told in six words or less. Now I don't know if he actually did that, but when we think about it, what you're talking about is people with a proposal or with a communication or long form content. They're coming in and saying marry me. And in dating, no one ever just says yes right, what's your name.
0:32:21 - Alex Shevelenko
What's your name, you know?
0:32:22 - Jay Johnson
instead of what's your name, you're like marry me, let's get maybe, maybe we start by having a drink or dinner, or something you know so think about that too is, as you're developing content or as you're developing anything out, are you really getting somebody to marry you, or are you asking them out on the first date and maybe they've taken that first date. Now it's time for the second date, which could be a little bit longer, and the third date, which maybe has an extended you know, an extended outdoor activity that goes with it, and so on and so forth, and you build up. But yeah, to your point, that is human nature. We know that in other contexts. However, in business, in many cases we forget and we try to, you know, we try to have such an expansive approach that we end up, you know, basically just boring the hell out of people.
0:33:09 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I think this is this is fantastic summary that you know you need to apply humanity with behavioral and neuroscience principles to have this empathy, and you know creativity.
But also there are some fundamental principles that you're sharing through your work that are just universal evidence driven ways in which people can succeed in these high stakes Communications, because I think the ultimate tragedy when we say, well, we messed this up in business, but we do this well on Netflix or somewhere else, is that we live and then in a society where we suck at communicating the important ideas and because there are savvy people in the entertainment industry or or some sort of adrenaline generating spam industry and the email, we get really good at Communicating shallow ideas that don't do anything good for us, don't move the world full for don't help us.
Wrestle was complex, important ideas, and so this is a dichotomy where there's part of us that's Consumerized, so we don't have to think, and then there's another part that's getting shy from engaging and wrestling Was the important issues of the day, and we want those people that are wrestling was important ideas have an Advantage in how they communicate. So, jay, how can people find that advantage through your work? Where can they find you and connect? Was was your thought leadership on this topic?
0:34:39 - Jay Johnson
Yeah, I would encourage people to go to www.behavioralelements.com. There's an assessment there and taking that assessment is a 10-minute assessment and it's gonna help people to understand what their primary drives are. So those four drives the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to defend and the drive to learn what is that primary drive that you have? That is actually going to give you some real strong awareness and insights To what type of a communicator you are, how you make your decisions, how you like to be communicated, to how your body language may show up. It's all in the report from that behavioral assessment. I think that's a great place to start and then connect with me on LinkedIn, so I'll be sharing content constantly about behavioral balance and how do we create the conditions for Effective relationship building and trust building amongst the people that we interact with every single day. So thank you, Alex, I really appreciate that awesome jade.
0:35:36 - Alex Shevelenko
This has been a lot of fun and incredibly useful.