The Perils Of Virtual Communication And The Future Of The Speaking Business With Dr. Nick Morgan

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell, and I am sitting in my podcast seat today. This is the seat for a lot of things these days, but this particular task in the day is actually something I really look forward to. Deriving so much pleasure out of the conversations that I'm having with people that I've known for years or followed for years, friends and colleagues and even some people that I've never met before. Especially those conversations have been really just breathtaking. And I feel like I'm on my growth edge when I'm speaking to somebody new. And there's so much that I want to learn, questions that I have. Hopefully you guys are getting tremendous value out of these conversations for yourself. I'm trying to sort of intuit what it is that I want to know and assume that if you're following this, if you're subscribed to the show, that these are things you want to know as well. Today's guest is no exception to the what I just said out there. He is somebody that has been doing some pretty amazing things in the world and helping people for a number of years. I've been following him and sort of over the last year or so and reached out to see if you have an interest in engaging in a conversation about what's going on in the world right now. And I think he's sort of uniquely situated to provide some perspective there and, and I'm just in great anticipation and feeling quite grateful that I'm going to have Dr. Nick Morgan with us. He is one of America's top communication speakers, theorists and coaches. A passionate teacher. He is committed to helping people find clarity in their thinking and ideas and then delivering them with panache. I've interviewed a lot of people. I have not until this moment had anybody that had as part of their introduction the use of that word panache. I'm already very, very happy about that great word. He has been commissioned by Fortune 50 companies to write for many CEOs and presidents. He's coached people to give congressional Testimony to appear in the media and to deliver unforgettable TED Talks, something that is really near and dear to my own heart. And he himself has spoken, led conferences, moderated panels at venues around the world during the last election cycle. In fact, he provided expert commentary on the presidential debates for cnn. His latest book, can youn Hear Me? On the Perils of Virtual Communication, published by Harvard in 2018, is definitely a topic that we've. We've gonna have on the agenda today, given what's going on in the world. Welcome to the show, Nick. It's a pleasure to have you with us, Adam.

It's a great pleasure to be with you. This is, this is a cool connection and not just because of where we are, both Massachusetts area.

You know, you and I just chatting before we hit the play button on this thing. I didn't realize. Are you in Massachusetts at this moment?

Yeah, I'm in. Just outside of Boston. So I'm very envious of you and your vacation aisle.

Oh, no, I found out, right?

I won't specify the place because I don't want you to.

No, no, it's cool. Martha's Vineyard. Good luck finding me. We're in the woods, but tucked away nicely, quietly.

How's that witness protection program working out? Is that going well?

The jig is up for me now. I mean, seriously, go look for a bald guy with a beard on this island. You know, you got a few, you got a few to choose from. I'll just put it that way. So it's really ironic this will have nothing to do with our conversation, except it has everything to do with everything. Only 20 minutes ago, I was on a zoom call with an old college buddy. So my wife Randy and I, we met at UMass Amherst back in, I don't want to say the year. I'll just say we're going to be married next week. 31 years, so it's longer than that ago.

Congratulations.

And this, this guy, Joe, we were. We were housemates. We were all, you know, so tight back in the day. He was at our wedding. We haven't seen him, haven't spoken to him. Probably 30 years or something like this. A long, long time. And he's going through a pivot of his own right now. And what he had reached out because through his. Just stuff that's happening in his career life, found the book pivot and then went and did some more looking and found TED Talk and some other things. And he goes, I know that guy. He had a lot more hair back then, but I know that guy. So just, you know, only moments ago, just reconnecting with an old Massachusetts buddy who still lives in this great state. So no, no accidents. Nick, I'd love for folks to know a little bit more about you. And I read this very cool bio. I mean this is greatly, just wonderfully written bio. I'm normally scribbling things out on people's bios.

They're awful.

But this is great. And what I'd love is for you to share one thing that's not a part of that bio that you'd like for people to, to know about you at the outset.

Sure. So it all started with a phone call. I was at the University of Virginia. I was teaching the literature of death and Victorian lit. And it's a toss up as to which it was harder to get the students excited about. And I got this phone call from a friend of mine who had become the state Secretary of Education in Virginia. And he said, nick, the previous speechwriter has just had a nervous breakdown and had to quit. How would you like to replace him on short notice? The governor needs a speechwriter. And I said yes, just because I had a PhD in rhetoric and I was fascinated with public speaking and I had taught it occasionally, but I hadn't had any practical in the trenches experience like that. What I should have asked was, why did the previous speechwriter have a nervous breakdown? That was kind of the obvious question that I failed to ask until later. It turned out it was from overwork. I wrote five speeches a day for the remaining two years of the governor's term, seven days a week. And I only had one day off and that was Christmas Day, which happens to be my birthday. And I'd announced to everybody in advance that I was taking the day off whether they liked it or not. Don't call me on Christmas, I said, I'm going to be in the bosom of my family having homemade wine that my father in law prepares. It's not that great, but it's wine. And it was Christmas. So naturally the phone rings 1:00 clock on Christmas day. It's the chief of staff and he says, nick, get your butt down here. We decided to work on the speech. After all, the government governor was bored on Christmas. Too much food and, and so he wants to get to work. I said, I can't. This is my day off. He said, no, it's not. This is a work day now. And I played my trump card. I said, I've had two glasses of homemade wine. Who knows what the alcohol content is? I Can't be driving out there. It'll cause an incident. The local paper will pick it up. A DIY from. I mean, a DUI from the. From a governor's aide, that would be disastrous. He says, don't worry, I'll send the state police to up.

Pick.

Pick you up. So 20 minutes later, two state police cars with the lights flashing show up at my door. To this day, my dear friends down in Richmond are convinced I was arrested on Christmas Day. And there's nothing I can say that will. I think they just like the story. They don't want to hear any. Any explanation. So that's how it started. That's how I got into the speech writing and coaching business. And I worked for a couple of big consulting firms in the 90s and then started my own company, Public Words, in 97. So that's a. That's a long.

It all began by getting arrested on your birthday.

Exactly. Now, who can. Who can claim that?

I think we validated that whole story at this point. Yeah, you know, it's. It's funny I said in the sort of intro that I came to know of you by reading your blog and on public words, publicwords.com and there'll be in the show notes more information about that, but I was just really impressed with the approach that you were taking to the business. What was it that inspired you to start? You said 1997 is when that began for you.

Yeah.

Blogging was a pretty new thing at that time, I would say.

I didn't start the blog until 2006, but that was still early days for the blog. I've been blogging essentially forever. Yeah. And don't ever try to move. We switch from one provider to another at one point. Don't ever try to move. We had over 1500 blog posts, and what a nightmare that was. But all the broken links, you name it. But yeah, in. In 97, the Internet was just starting to take off, and I'd been doing some work coaching a. An IT company of researchers, and they were speaking and they were rock stars who knew that IT people would be rock stars. And they're not necessarily the world's greatest speakers. They're really smart, they're engineers, but it's not their normal thing to do. So they needed a coach. And that's how I got started and created enough of a network that I could do my own. Do my own thing, start my own business and never look back. Yeah.

This is a pretty interesting time for the book that you last wrote, I think, to be out there. So let's talk about what the perils of virtual communication are, because right now that's pretty much the main form of communication. Obviously if you investor in Zoom stock, you would have been doing pretty well at this point. We were using Zoom about seven years ago, I think six, seven years ago with our company, and then started to tell people about it, how much just easier it was than some of the other platforms. But. But what are some of the big perils right now of virtual communication as you see it?

Well, the biggest thing, the first thing that everybody has to understand is that what we humans care about way more than we care about specific words when we're communicating is we care about each other's intent. So I want to know, are you a trustworthy guy? What do you mean? What are you meaning to me? Are you going to, you're going to be good to me or bad to me? And if I work with you, then I want to know, can I trust you? Are you going to be on my side when I propose something? Are you going to work against me? These are kind of essential, fundamental questions about intent. That's what we care about. Face to face, you can easily and quickly and unconsciously get a read on the other person's intent. You can tell whether you think this person's a straight up person or not, and whether they're, they mean you well or not. In the virtual world, that's incredibly hard to get. So all that information, all that feedback that you normally get about the other person's intent is just instantly cut out. Now you get a little bit of it and we can talk about the ways in which you get both good and deceptive information on video conferencing and certainly on audio conferences. Text based communications, of course, are the worst. But all three of those virtual means of communication are fraught with danger for reading of intent. We think we're getting the intent 90% of the time. That's what the research shows. We're actually only correct about 50% of the time. So there's this big gap in intent and accurate understanding of intent. And how do we fill that gap? We fill it with negativity. Now that sounds like we're bad people. We're not. There's a good reason for that. There's a good reason to fill that gap with negativity, and that's survival. If I assume the worst, then I'm not going to be caught out, I'm not going to be caught by surprise. Imagine early hominid ancestor walking through the jungle if you assume that every shadow is a tiger, you're going to be the one who survives. So, so you may be a little anxious, but we humans therefore have evolved to be an anxious species. So when you don't give us information, when I don't know what your intent is, I'm going to fill it with negative assumptions. And it's the, so it's understanding how difficult it is to get intent across in the virtual world and then understanding the negativity of bias toward that intent. And you've got the virtual world communicating the virtual world summed up very, very precisely.

Yeah, Nick, that is fascinating to me. I've just turned off my camera just to preserve some bandwidth at the moment, but I can see you fine. And it seems as though what I'm hearing you say is that when we can't determine someone's intent, there's this uncertainty. And we know as so human creatures, we don't like uncertainty very much. We don't, we don't like the unknown. And when the unknown, we sort of make up stories. And a lot of those stories are fear, kind of fear based stories or. And it's interesting too, because let's, let's say we're in a typical zoom meeting, which is something that people are just so familiar with now, or maybe it's, you know, using, using a different platform. But in any event that you're at, in this virtual training space and you're wanting to be able to be effective in your communication, are you saying that what's happening there is that the communication itself is less effective because you can't see a person's body language, you can't get sort of the cues that would otherwise clue you in to the person's true intent. Is that something that's happening?

Yeah, that's absolutely part of what's going on. On a video conferencing like system, like zoom, the person is visible but small. So it's just a little harder to read that body language in the same intuitive, easy way that our unconscious minds read each other, read each other's body language when we're together, when we're face to face. But there are a couple of other subtleties that go on in the zoom and video conferencing in general world that add to the difficulty, and those are less obvious. So the first one is there is, despite the best efforts of the engineers who created video conferencing, there's a slight lag between the image and the sound. And they've got it down to the place thanks to bandwidth and thanks to clever engineering to where you're not consciously aware of it, but unconsciously you pick it up as a slight lag. So it looks like the other person you're talking to is having a constant series of little strokes and can't talk back. And so you assume that the other person is less competent than they are. I was going to say something ruder, but.

I love that kind of dirty talk.

So the other person assumes you're an idiot most of the time. And that kind of dumbing down response is one of the things that makes it difficult. Another one, and this one gets a little geeky. But it's important for your listeners and viewers to understand. And that is we have this sixth sense called proprioception. And they don't teach it in school. They should, they don't. Beyond the five senses, the sixth sense is how we keep track of where we are in space. So this is the sense that allows you not to bump into things even when your vision is not 100%. And by the way, it goes 24 7. So when you're asleep, if you sleep with a partner, you don't roll over and whack your partner in the face. If you ever wondered why that was the case, it's not because you're a genius. It's because you've got this sixth sense called proprioception. It keeps track of where you are in space and where the people around you are in space. Now, why is that important in the virtual world? Because when you see an image that's about an arm's length away on a computer screen, your proprioception sense says, whoa, that person's close. I should take action. I should. I should prepare for somebody coming into my intimate space. And the question is immediately asked by your unconscious mind, friend or foe? All right. But what happens is, because the picture is too small for somebody who's theoretically two or a half, three feet away, your proprioception sense can't figure that out. And so it gets confused. And what it does is it responds with stress, fight, flight, or freeze, as we call it, the adrenaline response. And so you get this low level adrenaline response, this low level adrenaline enhancement while you're on video conferencing that makes it harder for you to evaluate the other person, to read their body language, even to participate intelligently in the, in the conversation. And that's, by the way, why we get what everybody calls zoom fatigue these days. Because by the end of several of these sessions, with your slightly elevated heart rate, slightly elevated stress Response adrenaline going through your system, low levels, you're wiped out.

You know, it's a really, I think it's a very simple explanation for, for something that, that I think many people are kind of confused about. Why, why is it that they're so fatigued from, from Zoom? And it's that cortisol or that adrenaline that's sort of coursing this low level anxiety that we're kind of living with. And it's interesting too. I've just found this out. You've explained it to me now, so I understand why it is. But we were playing music. We're trying to get together with a group of people and just like play guitar and sing together, but it was always just a little off. And we're like, you know, why can't you keep up? We thought somebody else is lagging behind, you know, like, I know I'm playing in time, but what are you doing, you know? Now, now it explains that. So, so this is, what we're, what we're dealing with now is, is the forced. This, this forced. And I'm not judging it. I think it's actually brilliant that we have the technology to be able to connect the way we can as imperfectly, I guess, as we can. But is there something that we can do, let's say, like you're, you're gonna put on a, an event or a workshop for, for your, your, you know, for some part of your, your, your office, let's say, and you're aware that, that these things are issues. What, what can you do? Is there anything that can be done about this other than just to, to make people aware of it? And is making people aware of it at the start when you're setting a context, let's say, does that in fact alleviate some of the fight and flight response and some of the, hey, you're, look at this idiot. You know, he can't even, you know, those judgments.

So unfortunately, the telling people about the intellectually about the emotional difficulties that we have with Zoom doesn't help much. And the reason for that is your unconscious mind responds before the conscious mind does. It's a couple of milliseconds ahead of it. And so before you can stop yourself and go, really? That other person I know is very competent and very nice. Your unconscious mind has already thought idiot, and it's too late. And I would just remind viewers who have ever gotten the email from a boss or from, from a colleague, we've got to talk. I'll just ask you, did you ever assume that the other person wanted to talk about something good. No, never. And that's that unconscious response kicking in. It's the uncertainty and the negative. Negative bias. So that's. That's the reason why that doesn't help much. There are things you can do, and you'd asked about those. I can jump into those if you want. But unfortunately, just explaining why it's hard doesn't help much.

Well, let me ask it a little differently. And then we can jump into some other things too. Do you think it does any harm in sort of setting out at the beginning as a part of how you create a context that, hey, just. Just to let you know, this is what's actually happening sort of on an unconscious or, you know, on a subconscious level. Does it help or. You said it may not help it. Will it hurt? Because I'm actually thinking this is a good thing to do.

No, I think it is a good thing to do. I'm just saying it doesn't help stop that instant response. But I think it's very helpful for people to understand the context. It's reassuring as you reacted. It's good to know, oh, that's why I feel tired. It's not because there's something wrong with me. It's because that's the way I'm hardwired, and we're all hardwired. So I think it is helpful. It's reassuring. And just having a rational explanation for why these strange things are going on during this stressful time, I think is helpful.

And it's good to know, for me personally, that. That I can't sort of get ahead of people judging me as an idiot. It would been so great if that was the case, but obviously it's so quick. It's so instantaneous. That's. That's happened many times in my life.

So, yeah, I think. I think what you need to do, Adam, is just immediately the first thing out of your mouth should be, I'm a genius. I'm a genius. Just remember that. See how that works out.

I'm gonna try it. So other things tactically that can be done. I mean, again, so many people are delivering these kind of trainings or participating in them.

Yeah, I think the first thing to keep in mind is that the power dynamic, and I don't mean that in a sort of controlling, evil way, but just the. The relationship between speaker, let's say, and audience or instructor and trainees. People in the room changes online. And think about a traditional keynote speaker. He or she comes out on a stage. That's elevated above the audience. The audience is in the dark, the speaker is lit up. There's applause and there's a great introduction and there may even be music and there's. The stage is decorated. There's a lot of implicit signals that this person is important. And there's an inequality that the speaker learns to use to his or her advantage to help the audience focus. And it's all good to help the audience focus, to help the audience pay attention and get a good experience out of it. That's why we do those things, because we say, this hour is special. This person has something interesting to say to us. That's sort of the built in presumption in the online world. We're all on the same computer network. We're just all nodes. And so on a network it's all equalized. So you have to start from the assumption that this is one big democracy and everybody's input therefore feels as important as everybody else's. And so that means a couple of things. First of all, you simply got to make everybody include themselves. You've got to get, put everybody to work. Everybody has to be in on it. And then second, you've got to understand that if you're not allowing other people to have their voice and to express their opinion, they're just going to tune out. They're going to, they're going to cut the link. It's so easy to leave these settings. You don't those of us who remember going to conferences, I hope that's everybody. You remember what it was like to sit in the audience.

It's a mythical time.

Yeah, it was a beautiful golden era that we can hardly remember now. But remember that sitting in the audience and maybe you had to leave for one reason or another, a call of nature or you got an emergency phone call or something, a text saying there was some reason why you had a meeting and another meeting to go to. And it was awkward to get up in the middle of this thing and walk out. It was funny. And people, you watch the body language of people leaving early and they've got their heads down. They're trying to minimize themselves, to be invisible as they go out. Right. None of that happens online. Online. You just click, you just go. And so if you don't give people a reason both to participate and then to feel like their voices are being heard, they are. They're part of this new network that you created, then, then the feeling is not going to be good. They're not going to be enthusiastic. They just leave.

They'll Just check out whether they physically, as you say, sort of turn their camera off and then go to the loo or whatever. They, you know, pick up the paper. They just mentally check out. So I think those. For those folks that are out there thinking, you know, that they, well, either are already leading groups online or they're wanting to step up and do that kind of thing. I think my part of my takeaway here is that you've got to have a lot of interactivity. It's different. I was just on with Eileen McDarg. She's an experienced public speaker many, many years. And we both speak about resilience. And so we had a conversation earlier today, and that's one of the things that when typically you're on a stage, it's less conversational. I always want. Wanted a lot of engagements kind of how I was trained. So there was quite a bit. But even still, that's a different dynamic, less conversational. Whereas right now, in this arena, as you said, more eloquently than I'm about to say, that interaction, that interactivity is really how you not only keep people sort of there and present, but there's something more going on that you just sort of unearthed for us, which is that there isn't this sort of important ness to the person who say leading that, you know, they're all eyes should be on them, the lights are on them. You're. You're sort of being rude. If you're not paying attention, you're not staying. At least staying in the room in body. Very, very different situation now. So if you're leading a group or you're, you know, facilitating for some. For someone else for hire, let's say. I think it's really good practice in that period of time, whether it's 30 minutes or 45 or an hour or something, that there's just a lot more conversation and interaction going on than the classic. Here, let me just show you my slide deck. Let me hit you with all my great stories and, you know, I'll take my check and, you know, head to the airport kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, we like interactive speeches. Audiences do, and they consistently rate them higher. So I'm glad to hear you were. When it was face to face, you were keen on interactivity. They consistently rate interactive speakers higher than ones who just preach more. But it's still the case with a keynote speech. If you're a good, charismatic kind of speaker, you could talk for 45 and then do your 15 Q&A and out you go. There's the hour. You can't do that online. You simply cannot deliver that standard speech online and expect people to get the same thing out of it. They won't. And so I was arguing with an old friend of mine the other day. Can you go five minutes or ten minutes without interactivity?

Yes.

And we had a vicious argument about that. And I would say the jury's out. You know, if you're good and you have something really interested to say and you've got the audience involved, then probably you can go as much as 10. But I would use that as a good rule of thumb and think, err, toward five minutes every five minutes. Look for some way to bring the people in, whether it's an online chat comment or a vote or a poll or those sort of things. That's the good news that about video conferencing and these platforms, they give us the opportunity to have these kind of virtual interactions. So use them.

Yes, yes. Are you currently working with TED speakers as well? Is that still part of your daily, your daily work?

Oh, absolutely. Well, I mean, at the moment we're not doing prepping a lot of TED talks, but just because like everything else, it slowed down. But I'm still involved in the, in the TED world and I've done a number of them over the years. I love ted. I love the format. I think it did huge. I did a huge. It did a huge amount to sort of elevate public speaking in general. And that's all to the good. I think the only thing you could critique it for is it made all public speakers think they could be. Be rock stars. And, you know, that's.

Aren't. Aren't all public speakers rock stars?

Yeah.

Tear every vestige of what I consider truth out from under me today, Nick.

Absolutely not. Oh, my gosh, you're a rock star.

Oh, thank God you said that. I want to ask you about your own personal definition of resilience. I've got a couple of questions that are really important to this community, and so I'll cover those. Now, how would you define resilience?

I'm with the Chinese on this one. The Chinese have a saying, and I can never remember whether it's fall down eight times, get up nine or fall down nine times, get up 10. It's one of those two. I think resilience is about putting yourself back together after you've been punched in the gut or something tough has been dealt to you. I had a personal pivot a couple of years ago. My spouse left me and I was devastated. And putting myself back together was the hardest thing I ever did. And it also, in retrospect, was one of the better learning experiences for me. I meditated long and hard about why the marriage had failed and spent a lot of time thinking about how I needed to be a different person to make it better. And so, you know, at this point, this remove, I can say I'm grateful for that. Not easy to say. Yeah, at this point I am now grateful, but at the time it was devastating. So I would say resilience for me is getting back up and then owning the. Owning the experience, understanding what your role was in it, what was your fault, what wasn't your fault, or what happened because of you. Let's take the word fault out of it. And what was external to you. Understanding those things. And any experience can be this huge learning opportunity. Learning is not always fun, can be painful, but once you're through it, it's amazing. And you never want to go back. You never want to say, yeah, put me back in that pre time before I knew what I knew, because that's.