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Digital People Skills

(applause) We are almost there, guys. We're at day 28, digital people skills. So everything we've learned so far helps us online and offline, with phone, in person, social media, but today I want to give you specific tips, tricks, and rules to help you be a social media powerhouse. I'm also going to go through some specific science that relates to online communication skills and phone communication skills. As always, I like to start us off with a warmup to get our juices flowing. And our warmup today is I want to know what are your biggest pet peeves about digital communication? What drives you crazy? Van, yeah, your hand went up. I feel like some people just only want to have a textual relationship with you. Yes, a textual relationship, they're afraid to pick up the phone, they don't want to see you in person. At home I hope you're writing down all your pet peeves, brain dump on those. Yeah, tell me. They expect you to respond within like two seconds. Instant response. And by the wa...

y, people get angry at me if I don't respond within hours. It's amazing the expectation there. I know, I totally agree. Yes? Unscheduled phone calls feels like I'm being ambushed. I feel the same way. I'm not a phone person. I think that I put phone in my neutral category. I really have to be mentally prepped for my phone calls, so I get you. Yes? There's so much noise you have to get through with social media to find the gems. There's information overload is what I call it. Too much information, yeah. It's relentless to have a presence in social media or blog or wherever, you have to put in so much work, that's what it feels like. It is, absolutely. If you do it right, it takes a lot of work. Any other pet peeves? Yeah. I don't like how people don't get humor. I don't get theirs, they don't get mine sometimes, and it creates a lot of problems. No tones. So here we ask people this problem and we got tons. It must have gone to spam. You never know if that's true or not. Text wars, spelling errors, impatience, fake pictures, informality, lack of privacy, awkward pauses, I don't know why I did a dance while I read those, but it makes it sound more fun. All of these, solving our digital people skill problems. Your high people skills can be used both online and offline, and here is how. I'm going to start with online communication skills first. First, we talked about confidence a lot. Contagious confidence for our people skills. But how does that look online? One study found, they wanted to know, could you rate someone's attractiveness based on a written profile? A profile without a picture. Could you detect someone's confidence? And here's what they found. Yes, participants could accurately rate attractiveness from words alone. What? This is crazy. The reason is because confidence is contagious. And by the way, it was higher for women rating men. Women were very accurate at knowing which men were the most attractive just by their written profiles. The follow up to this is does feeling confidant change your attractiveness? So that study happened and they repeated it and repeated it and they were like, how does this work? How does it change your written words? And they found that feeling confidant changes your attractiveness. Here's what they did. They sprayed, oh yes they did, they sprayed a group of men with Axe Body Spray. This is not a promo for Axe Body Spray, by the way. They sprayed a group of men with Axe Body Spray. The took their picture and they had women rate the pictures. In group two, they just had them take the picture without any Axe Body Spray. Without a doubt, women rated the Axe blasted men as more attractive. These were not scratch and sniff pictures, guys. These are just random pictures of guys, and women were like, oh yeah, that guy's attractive. That guy's attractive. Those were always the ones who had the Axe blasted spray. Now obviously their appearance didn't change from Axe Body Spray or not. Something about them feeling sexy, feeling confident, made them more attractive. And that came out in their pictures. It comes out in our written words. Most people never think about this when they're writing their profiles or taking pictures online. So what I want you to do is first, do your success routine. Your success routine or your superhero activity list. And I want you to go rewrite your profiles, your about page, and your marketing materials. Because we're usually writing those, we're super nervous, especially dating profiles. We're sitting down to write our dating profile and we're like, what do they want to hear? I'm so nervous, are they going to like me? I hate this, I hate doing this, I don't like writing this profile. And what happens? Those micro-inequities come out in our pictures, and in our words as well. So I want you to do your success routine, pump yourself up, before you write any of these things. And I want you to rewrite them and see the difference. See if there's difference in the kind of words you use when you already have your confidence pumping. I also want you to retake your photos. Look at your photos you use all the time. Your head shots, the one on your website, the ones on your dating profile, your social media pictures, your LinkedIn profile picture, especially if it's a corporate one where you know that you were in blinding white light and you had a full day at work before that picture, and there you were smiling for that picture. I want you to retake those photos and do your superhero routine or your success routine beforehand. I also have a photo shot list for you, if you want, and scienceofpeople.com/pq. So if you're like, I don't even know what photos to take, I have a whole list of ideas for you that you can use. I talked about that a lot in my body language course and I have that list up for you if you want to use it. Number two, the personality matrix. Can you use the personality matrix in digital people skills? Absolutely. One study wanted to know, can we speed read someone's personality from their profile picture? I've taught us how to speed read people when we first meet them, but can we accurately speed read someone just from their picture? The answer is yes. We are best at extroversion and agreeableness. After looking at someone's picture for just seven seconds, we can get pretty accurately how extroverted or agreeable they are. The cool part about this study, it's done by Samin Vazeer, and she repeated this in many ways. And what she did was she had people take the personality test that I had you guys take that everyone at home took. Then she had their spouses take it for them and their friends take it for them. And then she took their picture. And then she asked strangers to rate that picture on their Big Five personality traits. People were able to get it right. They were the most accurate in extroversion and agreeableness. Next we can do conscientiousness and openness. We're pretty good at it. We're not so great at neuroticism. So we're really good at these top two, and we can tell that just by looking at a picture for seven seconds. The next study was, could we speed read someone's personality from their profile? So take out the picture, just read their words. The answer, of course, is yes. When desired, our profiles are highly accurate. People can read our personality from our profiles. The problem is, our words are much easier to manipulate than our pictures. So it's hard to take a picture and hide your true personality trait. You can do it, but it's harder. It's much easier to manipulate your profile, the words used in your profile. But I think this gives us information. Don't we want to know how someone wants you to think of them? That might be just as interesting as their actual personality. In fact, I learn a lot about someone by meeting them in person briefly and then looking at their profile and seeing, does it sync up? Is this their ideal self? Most likely it is. People will write their profiles to be their ideal self and their real self might come off as different. Better or worse, I don't know. But that does give us interesting information. The question is, what does your profile say about you? Are you all wondering right now what your Facebook profile and picture says about you? The good news is there's a way to tell. There is a tool that you can use that will speed read your Facebook profile and analyze you on the Big Five personality traits. So this is mine. It did it based on 1,289 words from my Facebook posts as well as my pictures. And it got me pretty right. It said I was 64% extroverted, 87% open, 76% neurotic, 64% conscientious, and 55% agreeableness. That's actually very close to my real test answers. It also picks five words for you based on your profile. For me it was inventive, restless, efficient, outgoing, and friendly, which I don't know, you can tell me, I think it's pretty accurate. But the cool thing about this is it also compares you to your friends. So you can speed read your friends' profiles and it will compare you to them. Here for example is me compared to my husband. So we're pretty opposite. Mine are the green, his are the white. And it compared it, overlapped our graphs so I could see how he related to me. It will also tell you of all your Facebook friends who's the most similar to you personality trait wise. It's a very cool tool. It's a really big, big time waster. Everyone's like, what's the tool, what's the tool? (laughter) I have a link to the tool at my website, scienceofpeople.com/pq. It's also in the workbook for you. It wastes a lot of time though, so reserve an hour or two to go through your profile and all your friends' profiles. It's pretty great. So here are your action steps. I want you to run your algorithm. I want you to see how you rank up. I want to see how can you make your profile more authentic? Was it correct, did it get you right? What could you do to make it more the real you? To see if it really matches up with your real results. And then who are you similar to or dissimilar to and why? It will you which friends you're most closest with. And I want you to go and see their personalities, see their profiles, and see why. What about their personality is similar to you? This is a great way to start a new conversation and practice out some low pressure practice. Some of the conversation starters we learned. Number three, the power of faces. One study found that when you randomly select 1.1 million posts, social media posts, those with faces were 38% more likely to get likes, and 32% more likely to get comments. Faces, the power of faces. Our brain is like telling a story. We love to see faces. The more the better, by the way. These numbers kept creeping up the more pictures they had in posts and articles. And by the way, gender was irrelevant. The picture could be of a man or a woman. Most people think, oh, well everyone wants to see a pretty girl, no, gender was absolutely irrelevant. It didn't matter what was in the picture as long as there was a face. And that was different for landscape pictures versus pictures that included someone in it. So here's our action steps. Number one, always have a profile picture. It is a huge trigger if you do not have a profile picture, people, they want to see you. Google Plus, email avatar, and chat or office programs are often the places we forget to put pictures. So we might have one on our Facebook or on our Twitter. Maybe even on Twitter. I see a lot of eggs on Twitter. Lot of people forget to do that or they use pictures of their dog or pictures of their home. Unless you really have a privacy issue, which is totally fine and I respect that, if you feel comfortable, I highly encourage always using a profile with your face. Google Plus, adding your picture to Google Plus helps if you're writing a lot of articles online. It makes your face come up in the Google search results. SERPs are Search Engine Result Pages, and you climb up higher in the search engine result pages if you have a picture on the side of your post. Yeah? Just so many questions. This is front shot of the face, no side or head? Actually it's any face. I have self portraits. Do you know anything about that? Is that less effective? No, perfectly fine. Selfies and self portraits, as long as it has a face. It doesn't matter the gender, doesn't matter the position or the lighting. Now we do talk about micro expressions a little bit in the power of body language course. I think it's really important to show true happiness. And in that article on the shot list, I have a little bit on there about showing true happiness versus low confidence poses. In that shot list article I have some information on that. Good question. Next, post with pictures of faces. So if you are doing articles, if you're trying to build your brand and you're looking for pictures for your posts, first of all, they're incredibly important, the more you can do with people and with faces, the better. I have an article and a video, it's a 30 minute video on digital body language, if you'd like for free. You're welcome to go watch it. Scienceofpeople.com/pq on how we show our body language online. Number four, the power of words. So this is one of my favorite things to teach, so I'm going to try to do it justice. The power of words comes down to something called priming. Priming is when we use words or images to shape experiences and actions. Let me explain this. In one study in 1996, John Bargh had three different conditions that he did. So what he did was he brought people into the lab. And in the rude condition, that's what he called it, he had people unscramble words. And they were mostly rude words like impolite, rushed, fast, interrupt. He had them unscramble words like that. In the second condition, he had the polite condition where he had them unscramble polite words. Patience, time, kindness, empathy, agreeableness. He had them unscramble them in little puzzles. And then the neutral condition he had them unscramble completely neutral words. Trees, cherries, tables. Then he had them leave the room after they unscrambled those words, and he said to them, when you're finished with the unscrambling test, I want you to walk down the hallway and hand me the answers. I want to give you a couple of instructions afterwards. But what was happening was as soon as the person got up from the table and walked down the hallway, John was in an intense conversation with a colleague. And that was just fake, that was an act. And they would talk and talk and talk and wait to see how long it took the person to interrupt them. They wanted to know if the unscrambling activity primed them to either wait a short amount of time or wait a long amount of time. And so here's what happened. After 10 minutes, in the rude condition, 60% of the people who had unscrambled rude words interrupted his conversation with a colleague to say, here's my answer key, what were the directions you needed from me? After 10 minutes, 40% of the neutral condition interrupted. After 10 minutes, only 20% of the polite condition interrupted. Just envision this for a second, okay? You're taking an experiment. You're unscrambling words and you go to give your answer key and you're waiting and you're waiting. 10 minutes is a really, really long time to wait and stand while they're talking to someone to give your answer key back. Only 20% of people who had unscrambled polite words waited because they had been primed to be patient and kind and agreeable and polite. So I want to talk about how we can use priming in our interactions, in our digital interactions. I want you to think about, before you write anything online, an email, a text, a chat, marketing materials, an article, what is the emotion that you want to elicit? And I want you to use words to produce that emotion. Here's an example. Negative priming. I can't get you that product until next month. It is back ordered and unavailable at this time. A lot of negative words. Here's an example of positive priming for customer service. That product will be available next month. I can place that order for you right now and make sure that it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse. Quick example of negative positive. Let me show you how I caught myself in negative priming. So I sent out an email to my weekly team where I have them prep for a call. And I was going back through my emails to see if I use negative priming to elicit the wrong emotions after I read this study. And here was one of my emails. Bad priming. I highlighted in red the words that are bad, negative priming. Hi all, as usually we have the weekly call tomorrow. We are a little stressed for time and might have some trouble getting through the tasks on the agenda. I need everyone to please tighten up their points and avoid asking lengthy questions on the call. You can send the difficult ones out in an email later if you need, I attached the agenda. So what was I actually priming people for? Stress, tighten, avoid, lengthy, difficult. Those were the words that I was priming them for before they even got on the call. And our calls, by the way, were lengthy and difficult and people avoided bringing up topics and they were awful. So I decided to switch up. And so not only did I send this email, but I actually did this all throughout my agenda. So I switched it. The response was crazy. First of all, someone who said they weren't coming to the meeting said all of a sudden they did have time for the meeting. People actually showed up for the meeting. And second all, we got so much done that we ended it 15 minutes early, and people sent an email to me afterwards, one person sent an email to me afterwards, saying I really liked that call. It was super helpful today. Now, I didn't really change anything about the call, but we were all primed differently. Here was the email that I sent out and here's now the kind of email I send out. Hi team. Tomorrow is our weekly goals call. I'm hoping we can be really efficient, because we have a lot to discuss. If everyone can take a look at their points and prepare a well organized overview, that would be great, because then we will have plenty of time for succinct questions, if people have them. Remember, you can easily send them in an email after the call, I attached our agenda. Same content. But my god, doesn't that feel different? How many of you think that you use negative priming on accident in your emails or texts? The people who didn't raise their hands, why didn't you raise your hand? Are you unsure, do you try to use positive words? I don't know what this was. I just remember spending a lot of time writing composing writing emails that people would actually respond to. And I found that you get more responses if you focus on the things that they can do rather than what they can't do. So you intuitively hit on priming. Somehow negative responses showed you, negative priming with negative responses, showed you that doesn't work, and you know to tweak your emails to get that better response and the can do attitude. For me this was a revelation. As a high neurotic, when I'm thinking about the weekly goals email to come, I'm nervous, I'm worried, I'm stressed, and I'm anxious. So that comes out in my emails and micro-inequities. But actually my worries bleed out onto the page. When I went and looked at all my emails that I was sending about events that I was planning and with clients, even with friends, I realized that my anxieties were being poured out into the email and that was actually priming them to respond that way. So this was a huge aha moment for me, and I hope this is an empowering tool for you. Here are your action steps. I want you to go back to your profiles, to your website, and if you feel brave enough, emails, especially if you have canned responses or emails that you send out quite a lot to either prospective clients or colleagues. And I want you to highlight every negative word that's in there, and I want you to circle every positive word that's in there. If you can, swap out the negative to the positive and increase the amount of positive words in your emails. That emails, profiles, and websites, that's going to help people when they're reading you to get that positive feeling. So you're priming for the goals and the emotions that you want them to have. I also want you to practice positive priming in your phone calls and your text messages. That's actually a really easy way to practice when you're texting. This works in words as well. If you're speaking and you speak with mostly negative words or avoidance words. So don't be stressed. What do we hear? Stressed, we don't hear the don't. So using it in texts on the phone was a way that I was slowly able to use positive priming in both my written word and my verbal word, my spoken word. Number five, emotions are contagious. We've learned that confidence is contagious. But there's an extra layer of this on social media. I don't know if anyone saw, but Facebook had a big leak that came out recently. And this was that status update feelings are contagious. Facebook removed, as an internal experiment, but this was leaked recently, they removed positive posts from the news feeds of 680,000 users. They wanted to know if they removed positive posts from people's feeds if that would make them more negative. They wanted to know if emotions on Facebook are contagious. Those users made fewer positive posts and more negative ones. Clear correlation, as soon as they weren't seeing the positive posts, they became more negative. When negative posts were removed, the opposite happened. So when negative posts were removed, it was all positive, people were like, yeah, it's a good day, it's so positive, they were primed. They were being primed by their feed on how they should feel and they should write their status update, which is crazy. Our emotions are contagious everywhere. So what this means is that Facebook is a tool for self verification. They found that when people go on Facebook or Twitter, what they're doing is they're like, how do I feel? They're in a mood, but they don't quite know what it is, and when they go on Facebook, they're trying to self assess, am I in a good mood or a bad mood? We actually use it as a tool for self modification. And this makes sense, because we use relationships in general as a way to self verify so that Facebook would do that, it's a poor substitute for face to face interactions. Joseph Walther found that our self esteem boosts when we look at our own page. When we look at our own Facebook page, our self esteem, we feel really good about ourself. But it decreases when we compare it to others. The second we start to click on other people's profiles, our self esteem drops. So it's a very interesting tool for self verification. This is called the hyper personal model, which is that people on Facebook, they select what we want people to see about us. We go on Facebook, we can put up our ideal self. On Twitter, we only post the good things. And so Facebook is really a life highlight reel. People go on Instagram and they just post all the best things, and so you have to feel like you're missing out because everyone's posting their highlights. It's not their average, you're just seeing their highlights, and that's why our self esteem tends to drop when we look at other people's pages. Here are my action steps for this. I just want you to be purposeful when you check social media. I'm not saying you shouldn't check your news feed. I just don't want to do it as a default, because I want you to realize how powerful that news feed is on your own emotions. Is it nourishing or toxic for you? So a few months ago I decided I was going to stop checking my Facebook feed. Not only was it a time suck for me, but I also realized it really did change my emotions. I would instantly feel the emotions that were being posted, and I didn't want Facebook to dictate my own internal state. So I do not read my news feed anymore. That was a toxic activity for me. That is a survive event. I post on Facebook, but I do not read on Facebook. What I do is I ask people to catch me up. My closest friends know that I don't check my Facebook feed, and so I'll say, gosh, I've been so busy, I haven't checked Facebook recently. What have I missed? My closest friends know I don't check it at all. I tell them, I'm very transparent that I don't use that as a self verification tool. You can also ask people to summarize their profiles. So when I meet people, occasionally, I don't do this always, but you can if you want to, is I will actually ask them, hey, I've only been able to stalk you a little bit online, I would love to hear about it from you. Especially if you've been introduced to someone online, this can be an interesting conversation starter. People usually will laugh when I say, I've only been able to stalk you a little bit. I looked at your LinkedIn profile. What did I miss, tell me about you. It's a much better way to say, what do you do? Because when I go to meetings a lot of the time, I can't ask some of my normal killer conversations starters, because we already kind of know each other. I can't say, so what's your personal passion project? Because they've been intro ed to me by someone else with a little bio. So it feels sometimes a little bit weird. So I will say, I got a little intro from John and I was able to stalk you a little bit, so tell me what I missed. Tell me what isn't online. So that's a killer conversation starter you can use if you have had a digital introduction. I thought this study was interesting. Researchers at Arizona State University, they did focus groups and student surveys, and they asked people to come up with their number one rule for digital life. So in the online world, what rules dictate their behavior? And after all these surveys and focus groups, they had a top 10 set of rules that most people agreed on. I thought it would be interesting to talk about the top three. I have all 10 in your workbook for you, but I thought we could talk about the top three. Before I do that, I want to hear what yours are. If you had to pick one rule for digital life, what would you pick that you can make everyone do? Be respectful to everyone. Treat people the way that you would in person. Absolutely, what else? You could pick one rule, yeah. No vaguebooking. What's vaguebooking? I don't put anything that people can't understand the context of what I'm saying. So I'm like, I feel sad today. Nobody really understands why. I like that term. Did you coin that term? That's cool. No vaguebooking. Any other ideas before I give you the actual top three that happened? Always keep it positive. Keep it positive. If you know your emotions are contagious, giving that as a gift to the people around you. So here were the top three that came out in the focus groups. First, reciprocity matters. Users most strongly agreed that if friends or friends of friends reach out to you, you're expected to respond. I was pretty shocked that this was actually number one, that reciprocity was number one. This is the reciprocity norm in action. If a friend of a friend reaches out to you or asks for a favor, you have to reply. If someone pokes you, you're supposed to poke them back if they're a friend or a friend of friend. I was shocked that was number one. But that is the reciprocity norm in action. And it really happens in the digital life, because it's black and white. You can track who poked who and who sent messages to who and who added who to friends. Second, respect. A disrespectful comment online is the same as a disrespectful comment in person. Exactly what Lee said. And the third one is, don't repost. I thought this one was important. If a friend deletes a post or tag that you made, it's considered impolite to repost that content. Amen. I was like, yes, this is so true. We don't think about this necessarily in real life, but in online life this is a specific rule for digital life, this only ever happens in digital life. But we're slowly creating the digital etiquette that we need to survive in the online world. I wanted to share number 10 with you. Number 10, the last rule of digital life, was called the boss sniff test, which was, consider how a post would look to a friend's employer or potential employer before posting. I love that rule, that you respect your friends enough to know, would their boss or potential boss be okay if they saw it? Quick quiz for you, for those of you watched my power of body language course, you will know the answer. Which mode of communication has the highest amount of lies? Is it A, face to face, B, email, C, phone, or D, IM. How many think A? B, C, D? The answer is C, phone. Now, when I first saw this study, I was surprised. Because I had guessed it was going to be email. But actually what happens is first, when there's email or IM, there's a paper trail. We do not like to lie when there's a paper trail. So that actually has the least amount of lying. Face to face, it's very difficult to lie right out to someone's face. Our brains are firing on multiple cylinders. They're like, oh no, this is going to get me in so much trouble to look someone right in the eye and lie to them. Phone, however, you don't need to put it in writing, and you don't have to look at someone in the face when you're lying. So that's where by far the most lies happen. This takes us right into phone communication skills and into action steps for how to prevent lying on phone calls. The way that you take down the amount of lies in phone calls and get it to be the lowest is you use the paper trail method. So one, you always try to do person to person if possible. But if that's not possible, state at the beginning of your call that you're taking notes. In their mind, this tells them, ah, I'm going to be called on what I'm saying. In a way, it's taking the effect of the paper trail and putting it to phone. That also could be a gift for them. Speaking their love language, taking notes for them. So saying, don't worry about taking notes on this call. I'm taking notes and I'm going to follow up with an email afterward. You can confirm everything's right, see if I miss anything. So not only is that a gift, but it also is confirming that you didn't miss anything, that what was said was actually what was said. And you're both on the same page. And lastly is confirming responses or changes. I have had so many aha moments after a phone call I've taken notes, then sent them the notes, and they've written back and they've been either, wow, there was a miscommunication here, I don't think this is what I said, or I forgot to tell you something important, it is blank. That follow up can really strengthen and deepen especially business relationships, adding more to that phone conversation. In your workbook, I have a chart for you. This is a self evaluation chart. So it is the way you say it. Becoming articulate, well spoken, and clear. In this chart, I've put down the top things that are the problem in phone communication. And what I want you to do is give a self rating and then I want you to give an action step. If you're having trouble with your self rating, I want you to ask a trusted friend to rate you for you. Usually we know what our issues are. We know if we speak too fast or too slow. We typically know if we are not using the appropriate speaking volume. But if you don't know, you can ask a comfortable friend hey, how could I be a better phone talker? For that segment that we talked about, how could I be better at blank, that's a great way to use the Franklin Effect to get feedback on any phone or communication skills. Here are the top common phone problems I wanted to pull out of that chart just to highlight. Warmth. I think that you talked about warmth, wanting to be seen as warm. A compassionate tone is the biggest component of warmth. And remember how we learned that positive reviews, when delivered with a cold tone of voice, end up feeling bad. But negative reviews with a warm tone of voice still feel good. So if you deliver bad news, even if it's with a warm, compassionate, empathetic tone of voice, people are okay. They know that even though it was bad news, they still feel heard. So the warm compassionate tone is hugely important on the phone. The other aspect of phone problems, we're talking about phone charisma. Phone charisma, we talked about, is warmth and competence combined. That is all about having a low tone. So competence is using the lowest end of your natural voice tone. Doctors with low voice tones are sued less often. They did a study where they took recordings of doctors speaking and they warbled the words so you couldn't actually understand the words that were being said, but you could hear the tone of voice. When people rated those clips for competence, they found that the clips that got low competence ratings, those were the same doctors that were sued the most. And the only pattern was that those doctors did not have a low tone of voice. Now, what I mean by low tone of voice, I don't want you to actually go down and talk in a fake low voice tone. What I'm talking about is not using the question inflection. So the question inflection is when we go up at the end of our sentence. Someone earlier when we were talking about the question inflection, yes, tell me. Oh someone earlier, you used the question inflection by accident, who was that who was up with me? That was me. Oh, tell me about it. I was trying to remember what we were doing. But I think it was when we were doing the pitch. I was pitching my why and how and I went up at the end. The question inflection is when you say a statement but you end it as if it's a question. So you say, my name is Vanessa? So it sounds like it's a question, but it's actually a statement. So the way that you keep a low voice tone is by first with breath. (breathes out) We go high in our voice tone when our vocal chords are really tense. So staying in the lowest end of our voice tone is about using our breath well. Kim, I'm sure you know about using breath for mindfulness. Would you mind sharing? Do you have any tips on keeping low voice tone? All I do when I hear my voice getting high, I take a deep breath and I speak on the out breath. Do you have any other little tips for us by chance? Yeah, just to pair well with that is to soften your belly, because when we get tense in our body, we tend to hold a lot of tension in our belly. And by relaxing the belly, that naturally brings in a more relaxed breath and it just relaxes everything up the chain. So let's try it, let's all stand up. At home I want you to stand up. Let's, first of all, shake it out. We've been sitting. So I want you to take a deep breath. Relax your vocal chords. Release your stomach muscles. And on the out breath, I want you to say, hello my name is, fill in your name. Okay, ready? Hello my name is Vanessa. Oh that was so relaxing. It sounded like a song. Okay, let's try it one more time. Ready? Hello, my name is Vanessa. Love it, thank you, sit down. I want you to bring that into the top of your head when you first pick up the phone to cold pitch someone. Cold pitching is when we get the most nervous and our vocal chords get really tense. If you have to stand up and power pose a little bit. Thank you for that belly tip. I didn't not know it, release your belly. And on the out breath. That is how you bring competence into your calls. Lastly is speaking speed. And I highlight this in your workbook for you. But not too fast, not too slow. This is a very hard rule. How do you know if you speak too fast or too slow? What I try to do is I try to mirror the energy of the person I'm speaking with. Up to a certain extend. But I can go real fast when I'm talking to a chatterbox. But I also have learned to slow down my speech if I'm talking to someone who's a little bit more of a slow talker. I think this is a way of showing respect. Saying to someone, oh, you want to speed up the conversation, you're maybe high conscientious, you want to get it done? I get you, I'm with you, let's get it done. But if you have someone who wants to take it easy, relax a little bit, slowing down your pace is a way of saying, I want to communicate on your level. That's okay, I'm happy to talk on that pace. I used to go to school in the South. I went to Emory in Atlanta, Georgia. And a lot of my professors had a nice, southern drawl. I pitch a lot of people in Atlanta as well. And so I learned in college to slow down my speaking pace as a sign of respect for my professors. Because that was me communicating on their level. Does anyone feel like they have a problem with speaking speed or compassion or low tone? Does anyone feel like they're going to address that? Yeah, tell me. I definitely think I have, well, on camera I'm not going to say I have a problem with it, but most definitely I do not use the compassionate tone most of the time. Okay, so what are you going to do? What's your action step in this chart to work on that? What's your action step? And if you don't know, we're going to help you figure that out. What is it? I don't know. I really don't know. Because I do understand about being compassionate in terms of choice of words and the body language of it. If you're standing and talking to somebody sitting on the floor, obviously it's going to look extremely authoritative. I get that. But then I don't really understand how it pertains to the actual tone of voice. Sure, so compassionate tone comes when we feel true emotion. What kills compassionate tone is anxiety. So if you're anxious, it's very hard to harness empathy in your tone of voice. So one way that I try to add compassion to my tone of voice is to one, tap into my mission statement before the calls. So daily legs really helps with that. If you're on a call with someone and yeah, you have to get it done, but you're thinking about, okay, I really want to help this person, or I really want to do the best possible job we can on this project. That can help bring that emotion back into your call. I think you're a very warm and compassionate person. When you say you have a problem with warmth, it doesn't feel like that to me at all. So I would love it if you would reach out to some people in your life who you trust and ask them if they feel that from you, because I think you might be a little hard on yourself. I feel like you have the most warm and compassionate tone ever. Who could you ask, who do you trust enough to ask that question? Probably a partner, a spouse. It might be easier. I would definitely start with them and practice them and say, I would like to be a better listener, I would like to be a better talker. Do I use a warm or compassionate tone enough for you? Because I think you're very warm and compassionate. Thank you. Yes, you are welcome. So we are getting close. We are getting so close, guys. We are entering the goals phase. Day 29 is awesome club. I'm going to show you how to up your personal power, build a support team, and achieve your goals. And that's going to perfectly set us up for day 30, which is your people plan. That is the next 30 days, the next three months, the next three years, the next 30 years. And smart people planning, logistics of people planning, and how to harness our empathy. It took us 30 days to get to empathy, which I think is one of the hardest and one of the most important people skills. Here's your challenge for today. I want you to do your phone self evaluation. See how you do, see how you rank. I also want you to complete three action steps for online communication skills. So all those action steps I gave, which ones resonated with you? Do you want to go rewrite your profile? Do you need to go look at your profile pictures? Do you want to see if your news feed is toxic or nourishing? I want you to try three different things on your digital action steps. And lastly, we're launching this course in October. You could be watching at any time. This is a little reminder that every year on October 1, make October your digital people skills month. Every October from now on, I will be talking about digital people skills on my blog. Updating the science, looking at the phone communication skills, so come back to re watch this on October to see what new things have happened and how can you recheck some of your profiles and your pictures. It's that time. What's the most important thing we learned today? What's our aha moment? I want to hear about your aha moment at home as well. #peopleskills @vvanedwards. And the best responses who've done this all 30 days win my dating and entrepreneur course. But first I want to hear from you guys. What was your aha moment today? It was about the power of words and just driving home the point that I feel when I write an email that comes from some sort of anger or whatever, it comes across and I know I always get the response. But when I write something that's a lot more positive, I always get the same response. But that's kind of putting it into practice. That was a huge aha moment for me when I saw that study. And going back to emails and looking to see what maybe has worked and not worked. Other aha moments? I'm completely blown away by the science for the online communication stuff. Yeah, I'm blown away. And also the power of words. Just how I'm really going to keep in top of mind as I write emails. And then also with the voice, because as I start coaching people, I know I'm going to be nervous and I know that's going to give me anxiety and I'm not going to have a warm or competent tone. So being able to breathe into that will be really helpful. Breathe into it and harness our inner confidence. Power pose launch stance, superhero activities. One more, yeah Lacey. I've trained customer service teams in the past and it's easy when you get used to shooting emails back and forth, you get annoyed by questions. You have your own stuff going on in life. So I train other people to do it, but then I also do it myself, I just remember that they have a story. They have stuff going on in their lives. And I try to key into, based on what they're saying, what are their hopes and dreams? This might be annoying to me. But it's because they're really concerned with whatever it is that they're actually experiencing. How can I be loving and kind in reply? Fabulous, tying this into customer service. What a gift to your customers. Absolutely, I want to hear yours too. Tell me your aha moment on Twitter. Definitely looking forward to reading these. Now Vanessa, the workbook for this particular day has actually got some exercises that are not covered today. Yes, so the 10 rules of digital life, I covered the first three and the 10th. But I have all of them in there for you. They're all in here, and of course this is available as a bonus when you purchase the course. And make sure you have that to hand and you can follow us through the exercises at your own speed. But for now, thank you so much for being with us for this segment. We're looking forward to seeing you back with us very, very soon. (applause)