Understanding Writing: What The Written Word Really Means Now In The New Digital Age With Rob Ashton

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day, we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Barkel and his inspiring guest explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change.

Proof. Well, once again, you are in store for a treat. Today I have Rob Ashton. He's a writer, a former scientist who works at the intersection of words and the mind. He's also the founder of a global writing skills consultancy, Emphasis, through which he has transformed the writing of more than 80,000 people worldwide, working with everyone from Google to the Royal household at Buckingham Palace. He argues that in the digital age, the ability to convey thoughts in text is probably the most undervalued of all skills, and that understanding how words we read affect our minds is one of the keys to resilience. You're going to love this episode, so stay tuned. Okay, Rob, so I'm going to just dive in with a question based on your bio, your introduction. What is one thing that is, that is not in that, in that bio that you would love for people to know about you? Something that's not written in the bio that you love people to know?

I guess that writing or the, the misunderstanding of the writing and reading process is something that I've become obsessed with. You know, I think that. I think that bio doesn't really capture that in the sense that, yes, I've, I've spent a long time doing it, but this is. But the longer I've done it, the more this has become an obsession. You know, it's big. It's. It's one of those things where I just see this problem everywhere now, and it's quite hard to let it go because once you see that, you can't unsee it. So, yeah, I would say that.

Terrific. Use the word problem. So I'd love to just dive right into that spot. Let's define what the problem that you're referring to is.

Okay, so writing is one of those things that. Or reading is one of those processes that is just invisible. You know, we don't realize we're doing it.

We.

The. The whole world seems to run on written communication now. And it's. In fact, I was in a discussion with Adam Grant last week about this, and because he, he'd said that is the, the most undervalued skill of our time, he said the most undervalued skill of our time is the ability to write. And, you know, I was asking him, well, what do you, you know, why do you say that? And he said, well, it's, we're doing it all the time that, you know, it used to be that the spoken word was paramount and now it's all about text based communication. And he's absolutely right. This is something I've been saying for a while now that we communicate with text and you know, that could be email, that could be messaging apps like Slack or Teams Chat. We do that all the time, you know, from when we wake up in the morning to when we go to bed at night. And it's so, it's ever present. In fact, if my phone rings, I assume something's wrong. And, and there's something about writing that's, or reading that's seductive. It draws us in and we just stay there. So, you know, we might have a, you know, be there for half an hour trying to resolve a difficult issue or even an argument by text message. When if we took that, that thing that we're using to text the phone and we just kind of took it from there to moved it up to our ears, our ear, then the problem would probably be solved in a couple of minutes if we used our voices. But we don't see it that way. We don't think of it as writing. If I say I'm a specialist, I research writing and its impact on our lives, people kind of look at me in a puzzled way and think, what do you mean writing? Do you mean creative writing? Do you mean, you know, do you mean how to write a novel? Do you mean handwriting? I say, no, I mean that thing we're doing all day. And so it's just, it's just invisible. The reason it becomes a problem is it's not something that we evolved to do. So we did not evolve to read and write. We evolved to, to speak and listen. The earliest examples of writing are about, as far as we know, are from about 5,000 years ago in what is now modern day Iraq. But for most of the time, even since then, it's only a couple of hundred years ago that most people had access to the written word. Even 5,000 years might sound like a very long time, but in evolutionary terms, it's just a heartbeat. It takes much longer than that for the, for the brain to evolve. Major change. And so what happens when we learn to read is we have to wire together parts of the brain that we evolved for other things. You know, and this is, this is actually what happens. You know, we grow a network in the brain and that takes a Long time. And it takes, in fact, it takes to learn to read. It takes really around 10 years to learn to read properly. Whereas we can communicate with our voices out of the womb. You know, you can't ignore a baby's cry. And we will learn to speak and, and to. And to, you know, we will learn spoken language and, you know, to understand it. We'll learn that passively with no tuition, just by being. Just by people talking to us. But it always. Writing always remains suboptimal. It's always something that can go wrong very, very easily, partly because we didn't evolve to do it and partly because we expect it to do way too much heavy lifting.

That's fascinating and not even playing the angel's advocate here, but just curious that the movement toward text communication, and I see this in my own, you know, very close to me, in my own work and in my. Just with our families, you and I, right before we hit record, we were talking about our kids and UF2, and we have four, and our youngest is 22. And. And our oldest is 30. And the, the 22 and the 30 were in a conversation the other day. We happened to be away. We were in. In Hawaii and. And our 22 was in. In California. And they were having a fight, all right, And. And I didn't. I only knew they were having an argument, let's say, because they were having a text argument. And my. I. We happened to be with our oldest daughter and her husband and their newborn baby and all that. Our grandbaby, and she says, I'm, you know, I'm in a fight with, With. With a little girl by text. And it's just what you say, Rob. I was like, you know, you could just pick up the phone and resolve it or I guess escalate it. I mean, there's a chance that it could also just go the other direction. But. So I saw what you just said live and in person. I'm just curious if our, if, if we're not. If we weren't evolved or, or the writing aspect of our communication certainly would be secondary to our verbal communication is the shortening of it, meaning to go from longhand. And the writing of letters, you know, that was commonplace in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. You know, people wrote each other letters that they wrote postcards, and now they're. Now it's gotten shortened to the point. And then they wrote emails, and now they're just communicating in shorter text form. Is that a movement somehow back to what is primal to us that we don't use writing as our main form of communication. I'm just curious. You're the researcher, but I think it's.

I think it's part of the problem. You know, I think getting shorter and shorter is part of the problem because we're getting faster and faster at this writing. You know, it's those examples you gave. We didn't do very, very, very much of that. You know, it's kind of. If you got a letter, it was a big thing. Yeah. And, you know, it took, you know, you might wait days for someone to write to you and, and.

And you loved it. There was so much. Right.

Absolute. It was amazing. Yeah. And you'd read it and you'd read it again. You know, it's kind of. But it's uneven memos. You know, the email evolved from memos. But, you know, we send. Last year, we sent and received around 319 billion emails every day. Every day. And that daily figure each year is going up by another 15 to 20 billion emails every day. You know, so we're becoming more reliant on this, but it is. We do it quickly. So, you know, when you're writing, if you're writing by hand, if you are writing one of those letters, it'll be a slow, deliberate process. You would think about what you were writing.

It was agonizing at times.

It wasn't, but. But it's. It still can be agonizing, of course.

You know, I mean, in a great way when you were done, because you. It was like you gave birth to something at the moment, your emotional state, what was in your brain, you know, just what it is that you needed to communicate, wanted to communicate. And when it was done, it was like, wow, I can fold it and put it in an envelope and stick a stamp, lick a stamp, stick it in the mailbox. This is a very different. I mean, and there was so much patience that was involved. Right on. All. On all sides to that.

Yeah. And it's like writing is cheap now. Writing is.

Writing has gotten something cheapened.

Yeah. And it's something we do without thinking. And I think this is. This is part of the problem because, you know, if we're writing, whether we're tapping on the keyboard on our phone or whether we're writing on our laptop or a desktop, you know, we're using a tool that's become an extension of our brains. You know, we do develop networks when we use tools repeatedly. And so what happens is, you know, your think of the laptop, you know, that's become an extension of your, of your brain and you're, and you're looking at a screen and you're seeing this reflection of your thoughts on that screen. And incidentally, in that situation you are solitary. It's just you. The trouble is you are also in a social situation in the sense that you are communicating with another person, except it's just you, you know, you are on your own communicating with another person. It's a complete paradox. And so you're using the thought processes that you would use on your own. You know, you're thinking to yourself. You're also using the kind of backing track if you like. You know, you've got, you know, all the thinking that goes behind what you're writing. Not just tone, that's very important, you know, or humor. You might be being humorous and so you can hear that, but the other person, they are also on their own. This thing lands in their in tray and they open it and in isolation they see this quite kind of bold, unadorned message with. Doesn't have the backing track, doesn't have the context it's writing, which is what psychologists call a low capacity channel. There's not much information you can get across or at least far, far less than you can with your voice. And not only do they not, can they not hear your backing track, they're listening to their backing track and they've got their thought process. And, and of course now they could be receiving that message anywhere. They could be upset about something. They could be, you know, they, they could be late dropping the kids off to school, they could be stuck in a traffic jam and, and open their e email in a misguided attempt to get some relief from that. And they could be, they could be angry, wound up and they see your message and that's the context it lands in. So it's, there's, there's so much going on that we take for granted and it's really, it's not so much a surprise that it goes wrong. So so often this, it's a miracle that it ever goes right really.

In, in your work you are known for a number of things, but this intersection of words in the mind, I'm really curious the, the say a little bit more if you could about that.

Sure, sure. Well, I set up this training consultancy back in 1998 and back then most people didn't even have websites, you know, so I've really seen this. The, in fact, back then people were saying, why are you setting up a, a training consultancy focusing on writing? Because no one's Writing anymore. Yeah, well, that didn't quite work, did it? And I've seen writing become just dominant, you know, in the, in the working world, but also, also at home as you described that, that situation. And about six years ago, because I've got a science background, you know, going way back, I was, I used to work as a molecular biologist and, and so that's, that curiosity of the science has never really gone away. And I was in the fortunate position in that I could take a step back from the business and focus on looking into this and thinking, okay, let's see if there's any research on this. And I gave myself six months. I thought, okay, I'll look into it, you know, I'll read up on the science, I'll write a book. And you know, and it was a classic case of the Dunning Kruger effect. I did not know what I didn't know. And here I am six years later really only getting to grips with it, you know, because there is lots of research out there, but it's, it's across disciplines. You know, it's in neuroscience and the various branches of that, it's in the various branches of psychology and you know, you have to, even in developmental neuroscience and developmental psychology, you know, how we learn to read. And so it's taken a long time, but I guess that the privileged position, I mean is that I've got, I've spent all this time in the world of work, you know, outside work, beyond academia and I, and I see organizations getting this wrong again and again. And so what I'm trying to do is link the two together and the intersection of the word, of words in the mind. I mean that's really the key to it because it's all about how the written word, text based communication affects us for better or worse, you know, how we misunderstand it, how we process it normally, you know, in as far as we know because this is still very much a developing field and you know, if anybody tells you they know all the neuroscience behind this, you know they're lying. It's, it's so complex but some of.

It really, I don't know if it's even possible but to hit, to hit the nail on the head, I mean again with what feels like a very complex set of, of, of things that interplay and I would imagine visually a diagram of Venn diagram with a lot of overlap between disciplines. As you said. Is text a good thing or not such a good thing? What is it? Can we even like what, what does the research tell us Today about whether we're the text and our, our use of it currently and the way we're using it. Is it, is it heading us in a, in the right direction? Evolutionary, we know, or evolutionarily? It's all right. It's always all right. I think that's my belief system anyway. But does it feel like we're, we're going in the right direction now or going backwards in some way?

It's, you know, not to, not to cop out, you know, but this is so difficult to answer that because I kind of think of the science as neutral. It's like you can apply it in a bad way or a good way. You know, like, like most science, I, I certainly, you know, we can't go back, you know, we can't put the, the genie back in the bottle. You know, it's in fact, nor should we want to because we have grown so much because of this, because of this amazing ability to communicate at speed with anyone in the world using our keyboards, you know, and, and organizations are able to grow at warp speed because of that. You know, the. Go back to 2020, when suddenly we were all working from home, or most of us, a lot of us were working from home. Zoom grabbed the headlines, but really it was, it was things like Slack and email and teams chat, that, that, that's where most of the communication was. We spent less time overall in meetings than when we were working in offices, even though we had more meetings. But what were we doing in between? We were, we were writing to each other. And that kind of, kind of dramatic kind of digital transformation would not have been possible without communicating through the written word. And then, you know, look at how much literature has enriched our lives and, you know, the advancement of science, it's done through publication. You know, this is all written communication. And I don't think it is a bad thing. I think it's a fantastic opportunity. Where it does go wrong is when we underestimate, or rather overestimate how much communication or how easy it is to communicate in writing. Well, and, and I think probably the biggest mistake we make is to think of it as just a case of data transfer from one brain to another. You know, and if you just give someone the data, you just give them the information, then everything will be fine. You know, it's a more complex process than that. So you can't just simply give someone the information. You know, you can't just, for instance, give them a series of bullets, which was a, you know, that was a, was a piece went viral, a Few years ago, which recommended. Exactly. That was about writing like the military was the title, because it was talking about bottom line up front, which. Or bluff, which is very popular in the military in the US and here in the uk. And it was saying use bullets, keep it brief. And the trouble is, although brevity can be a really good thing, it's very, very easy to miscommunicate when you do that. But again, because of this lack of context, it becomes a little bit like trying to study for an exam using somebody else's study notes, you know, somebody else's lecture notes. They've got all the context. It triggers things in their brain and doesn't in yours. And so it's. Yeah, it's. That's a. I guess, I guess really.

What I'm, I'm wanting to get at. I mean, I was being a little cheeky, I suppose, with the good bad thing, but I'm a trend follower. We do quite a bit of resilience research in the world and. Right, right on that topic. And I'm a resilience keynote speaker on that and lead workshops and work, same as you with organizations on how to develop things internally that produce longevity, produce productivity in the long run. So we're following trends, we're looking at trajectories. I mean, when kids are in the house and they're texting each other from room to room, I mean, in our house, we'd scream. That was the mode of communication. And I'm not saying kids are not screaming at each other, you know, siblings and parents, etc. But, but at the extreme level, people texting one another at the dinner table, I mean, there's just a lot of, you know, sort of hyperbole around that, but we see it, we see people out there. I mean, how many times have you been in a restaurant where two people sitting at the table have their phones out at the dinner table in a restaurant? Oh, it's so now common now let's say it's a high end restaurant. And now we're not talking about millennials because they're always getting the short end of the stick for, for a lot of these things. No, I'm talking about, you know, baby boomer age people that are at the table with their phones out. So I mean, I, that's why I'm just saying from a trend standpoint, a trajectory standpoint, that, that we're reducing our communications to these pithy little LOLs and other, you know, other acronyms, which they're too many to keep up with. You Know. Lmao. It's like, well, what, what from a research standpoint is can we say anything about what that trajectory looks like? Or is it too. It's just too impossible to sort of predict those kind of things?

Yeah, I think it's. We can. We can. We can say what the effects of doing this has on the individual. We can. You know, we've got some stuff on that. We. But it's. In terms of where it's going, then really, that's just conjecture. You know, it's kind of. Personally, I don't think it's a good thing, you know, those, those situations you describe. I think, you know, unequivocally not a great thing, you know, not taking us in the right direction, that we, we, you know, it's. We need to speak, to start speaking to each other more definitely. And, you know, I've seen this. I've seen this in my own. In my own life where, you know, because we are all. None of us is immune to this. You know, it's. I am as prone to getting irritated and inappropriately by. By written messages as anybody else. You know, and getting triggered by. By, you know, tweets or whatever. It's. We. When we are writing, we're. As I said, it's a, you know, it's a limit to how much you can get across true. Through doing that. But there's some research that shows that the same. So when you're speaking, there's some research that shows that oxytocin release is triggered. Okay. So you hear a human voice, know you're speaking to somebody, and you get this oxytocin release. And this is this, this thing that's been called the, you know, the love hormone, but is, you know, but it's. It's more complicated than that. But it's something that's. That's central to human interaction.

How we're wired, like our physiology wired.

And it's. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's. So it's. When we're speaking, you kind of. You've got this. You've got all sorts of things on your side because we've got millions of years of evolution, you know, behind us on that. But. But there's evidence that when we're reading something from the same person, okay, so the same person has written something and we're reading it, that, that the oxytocin release isn't generated, isn't triggered. And so we don't get that. And I've seen this in my own. In my own Life where I was in a slack conversation with. With member of my team a few years ago, and, you know, I asked him for an update on a project, and, you know, I said, how's it. How. How is it going? And he just replied with one word. He said, why? You know, it's kind of, you know, that's not, you know, that's such a loaded thing. And. And so I kind of started, you know, and he was. He's a bright guy. But I knew that, you know, sometimes conversations could, you know, these. These discussions could come.

Oh, come on, Rob. You can say it. You lost it.

No, I didn.

You didn't?

No, no, because what I did is I kind of. I. I started treading on eggshells. Yeah. Because. And in fact, I think even my first question to him was. Was so caveated and nuanced that, you know, I was on the back foot already. Anyway, this long story short, he, you know, I. I replied. He replied, and then to his enormous credit, should we have a chat about this?

Yeah.

And I said, yeah, sure. And it was just like calling time out, you know, and he came into. Into my office and we started speaking. And as soon as we started speaking, you know, my shoulders dropped. His shoulders dropped. I could feel this. This kind of feeling wash over me. Probably fanciful to say that was oxytocin, but it was definitely this kind of feeling of, oh, well, that's. That's so much better, you know, and I'm not kidding. Within. I mean, immediately we were starting to, you know, the whole tension had gone, and we were starting to sort it out. And I think part of it is, it's not just oxytocin, is that you can react in real time. You know, you can see that person's reaction. You can see if they. If they don't. If they don't get it, or, you know, you can see their hesitation. You know, even, you know, with the human voice, even just a pause of. Of a few seconds is. That's a very, very long pause.

It is.

You know, it is.

You're told, especially if you're a.

Especially if it's, you know, the response to a question like, you know, why I love you? I love you, or, you know, or. Or why do you love me? You know, it's kind of like, you know, kind of like just a few seconds hesitation there is kind of. We're gonna know. All right.

Right.

Do you.

Do you love me? And then the pause. And the pause. The pause is. What does that mean?

Yeah, just my behind, like, digging this, you know, it's kind of like, you.

Know, just, it's like, did you get my text? I was in a bad, I wasn't going through the, I was going through the tube, you know, and there was no service for a few minutes. But.

Yeah, but, you know, but with. So it is, we've got, you know, it's, it's. We make a big mistake when we just, we rely on that too much and we don't try and, you know, sort things out using our voices and we just stay stuck in it. But I think there is really something unique about writing that draws us in. You can't not read something, you know, even though reading is a, is a complex process. You see a word, you'll read it. And that's why, you know, it's a big mistake, for instance, to have lots of text on a screen on a PowerPoint deck if you're making a presentation.

Oh, no kidding, right?

You know, someone's going to read that. And I'm not even talking about, you know, filling the slide with text, which a lot of people do, but you know, even just having a few bullet points if you're speaking well, they're not listening to you. They're reading because it takes, you know, it's an involved process. They have to focus on that. Yeah, you can't even, you know, it's very difficult to walk and read. I don't know if you've ever done this, Adam, where you're kind of, you're reading a text and you're walking along and then you find yourself stopping reading it. You know, so it's even walking and reading is.

Yeah. Usually when you're about to run into, walk into some other person. Yeah, yeah.

Probably doing the same thing.

Doing the same. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, and it's, it's so fascinating too because the we, we can see the value, we all can see the value in being able to be more efficient now. I mean, business and personal wise, there's a lot going on. There's a lot in our lives. The universe is constantly expanding. So that's normal. That just makes sense that lives, people's lives were simpler, maybe more boring, whatever you want to say 50 years ago. So it's exciting. There's a lot going on. We've got to be able to, to walk as you walk and chew gum now, walk and read, walk in, you know, multitask, etc, on some level. And yet I think the problems are also showing, you know, what's evident is that there's just Heightened anxiety. And obviously it's been attributed to the pandemic. It's been attributed to exhaustion in the workplace, which is something that we study in the context of resilience. But the anxiety levels across the globe are, are so high, almost sort of they're off charts that they have to create new charts to measure how, how people are doing in that area. And, and it would seem to me that, that our, when our communication is so is. Is abbreviated in, in the way that it is that like you said, we're not, we're not getting filled up filled sort of Our, our, our energetic tanks are constantly in a state of depletion. And, and normally when we're in a conversation, as you say, if we're, if oxytocin is being produced or something else has the equivalent of sort of filling us back up, we're being re. Energized by that interaction, well then, you know, we're, we're always have a little gas in the tank. But, but when it's just, you know, you're not getting something back through a text message or through. Or through technology, then that depletion just becomes more. I would say it compounds anxiety levels. We cannot ignore the fact that so many people are, are showing, you know, signs of, of, of breakdown of burnout. You must see it in your work all the time.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think it's difficult to overstate the importance of that. You know, we're relying on the written word now. We're reading from when we wake up in the morning to when we go to bed at night. Whether it's the news or whether it's text or social media or our email, you know, we're just reading a lot. If you're talking about building resilience, then, you know, look no further as, as a, you know, as a, as a place to start because the effect on that is of, on. On the human psyche is enormous. You know, it's. For a start, you've got, you've got the news media who depend on, on concentrating bad news for their. If that's their business model, always has been. And so whereas, but you know, but at the beginning when early newspapers, you know, you'd get a newspaper and you would read, you know, maybe just a sheet, you know, and, but now this is, you know, we've got this, this constitutive flow of, of news 24, seven, seven days a week. Wherever you happen to be, you can look at the news and you know, it's, it's not just texting that People do in restaurants, you know, they're, they're looking at the news and they're looking for something, you know, a little bit more interesting. And let's sort of think about that. You know, you are. You've got one person in front of you and you could have a conversation with them, or you've got access to all the world's information, which is going to be more interesting. You know, that's not much of a fair. It's not really a fair contest, is it? You know, and so we end up devaluing the human relationships that we have. But it also has a, you know, other negative effects. So that you're going to get a dopamine hit from, from, you know, checking your email, checking. You know, dopamine is all about motivating activation. It's the molecule of more. Okay, so it's, it's the thing that makes you. It's central to drug addiction, for instance, the dopamine response. Dopamine also, by the way, kind of mediates attention. You know, people with ADHD have a problem with the dopamine system and, and being able, you know, and it's that, that's, that's, that's thought to affect concentration and focus on things and switching between mind wandering and focusing on one thing because so, so they end up doing it, the two things together. So you're going to get this dopamine hit from this, whatever it is, and so you're going to keep doing it. But when you do that, you are, as you say, you're emptying the tank. You're not filling yourself up. You know, it feels like you are because you're filling yourself up with information, but you're fragmenting your attention because you've got all these quick hits of information. So you, you reduce your, your ability to think clearly. You lose perspective, you lose your ability to solve problems. And then you can get depressed, stressed from things that actually immediately are going to have no effect on you. But we're very difficult, very bad at differentiating world events that aren't going to affect us right now from things that we need to do now. And you end up worrying about these things. So it's.

And that wouldn't have depressed us years ago because again, I think before we even hit the record, you and I were talking a little bit about the fact that chaos is really the norm. If you look at history, pick a time when there wasn't some form of chaos happening in the world. You know, I was a child of the 60s, not I wasn't an adult then. I was born in the 60s. So, you know, the, the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere in the world was, Was blowing up when I was just a baby, when I was just a kid, you know. But the 70s were, were a time of, of great inflation and tumult in the United States. You know, Watergate and Nixon resigns and, you know, this and the 80s, AIDS is on the scene, and people don't know what the heck is going on with that. And people are scared to, you know, like. And the wall comes down. I mean, every decade. Pick a decade, pick a time. It's just as chaotic as it is today. And yet, and yet we're seeing that we are fragmented. I love. You know, thank you for using that word that. The fragmentation that, the, the fraying. I would use that word too, that people are more afraid. And it's not because we're less resilient. We're more resilient, I think, than we were then. But there's something that's also. That's pulling at us that, That I think has to be defined. I love, that's why I love the work that you do. And with such an. A pleasure to, you know, be able to set this, this conversation up, really, because I think people, it's. It's important that we understand what our experiences. And it's tough to understand our experience. Very difficult while you're in it. Like the goldfish in the bowl can't know that you don't know you're in the bowl, you know, so it's, it's helpful. It's very helpful. I don't know that we, that we, that we can do more than point to certain things. We were just the way I mentioned earlier, we were on vacation for, for eight days. I made the decision when I landed in Kauai that my phone was getting turned off. It went dark. I did not pick up the phone for eight when. Until we landed back in San Diego. Now, in all honesty, I checked email once or twice on my computer, but I didn't have this constant thing that is literally an appendage to my body, this cell phone that at all hours of the morning, noon or night, no matter what context, I could be at dinner, I could be, you know, in the most intimate setting. We could have my grandson right next to me. I could pick this thing up and like you say, be drawn into the, the, the thought stream of other people and their agendas because the world is interesting, politics are interesting, things are happening that I'm curious about. And this thing is constantly draw that if I allow it, the eight days without it, I didn't die, I can tell you that much.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I, you know, even day to day now I find I have to do something like that. I use an app called Freedom and I block news, social media, you know, anything that I'm, that I know I'm going to look at when I should be working, when I should be doing, you know, deep work. So, so I block that until 1pm I find I have to do that, you know, if I do it for a few days. And I think, oh yeah, I've got it now, I won't look tomorrow. I don't need to set that, you know. Well, I might not, but the next day I will. And then I'll just, you know, a week later I'll be thinking everything's fragmented, I'm not getting anything done. And then you get really stressed because you're not able to focus. There is something though, I mean, I should should say, I mean I did some research on this back in 2020 when, when we were in the four throes of the pandemic and I was looking, I did, did a lot of research on, on worldwide, on, on use of trigger words in, in media headlines. And yeah, there were, you know, words like infection, for instance, you know, or bug or whatever you would expect those to go up. But there were also words like panic. Panic saw a five fold increase in, in usage during, in the first, I think it was the first quarter of 2020 and it was, and some in cases it was deliberate. You know, some, some of those headlines were a master class in how to bring maximum anxiety out of a few words. So, so, so here in the UK there's, there's a news newspaper and news site called the Mirror. And, and the, the headline was tragic. Now that's a trigger word. Okay, so tragic coronavirus, death toll. So you've got lots, lots of, lots of very emotive words there. Okay. Tragic coronavirus death toll rises by. Whoa, this isn't good. Rises by lowest level or lowest amount in seven weeks or something. So, you know, they were just positive news. It's a positive thing. It was an improvement. But you know, the way we process, we process sentences by prediction. And this is, this is key, it's absolutely central to understanding how we read. You know, we, we predict what's coming up. Our eyes are not, they're not sophisticated enough, believe it or not, to, to take in all the information, most of the information when we're reading is coming from our brain, and then our eyes are checking to see if we're right. That's why we miss huge typos in, you know, in PowerPoint presentations that we only spot when we're in an auditorium of 300 people. You know, it's kind of that. That's why. Because we're predicting, and it's true with email. It's one of the reasons we lose it when we're reading email, because we're not reading it. We are just predicting what's coming up.

Sort of sight wording.

Yeah, but that prediction is, is. It's a bit like predictive texting, you know, that predictive texting works on what's the statistical likelihood that the next word, you know, most likely to come up after those two words or those three words. Our brains work like that, too. And so, you know, it would take. We have to take these shortcuts. And it means that, you know, that's why, you know, if someone's ever sent you instructions and they, you know, they say, I wrote you the instructions. You didn't. You follow them, you know, and because they knew what the instructions said. This, this happened to me recently, you know, somebody said, oh, yeah, it's very simple. And he gave me these instructions which were anything but simple. But to him, they seem to be, because he knew it already. So prediction is so, so important. But it also means that, you know, with those news headlines, you know, the media can. Can play on this, and it's their job. It's their job to get eyeballs on the pages. You know, it's kind of not. It's not necessarily a criticism. It's, you know, it's just, it's. They're doing their job, but it's being aware of it when you're reading it and being aware of, of. Of the limits of reading and the effect that that stuff has on you. And, you know, that, as I say, is central to building resilience, that being aware of that, of how limited reading and writing are and the effect it can have on you because it's there, you know, it's in your. It's in your brain straight away. You know, it's. It's part of your world. And, and you're isolated. You have no context. You're not actually speaking to anybody about it. So it's, it's going straight in, straight to your amygdala. And, you know, it's just. It can be combined. It can be really bad news. But the good news is that if you look at that, then that's a, that's a good place to start if you want to build resilience.

You said something earlier about the, that organizations are getting it wrong. Would you say a little bit more about what you meant by that, what you mean by that?

Yeah. So the thing is, even if you look at leadership, okay, so communication, one of the pillars of leadership. But most of the time when people talk about communication, they're really talking about the spoken word, not the written word. And when they talk about the written word, they're generally talking about remedial stuff. You know, getting the grammar and punctuation right, getting the spelling right. So it's seen as this kind of low level remedial thing. And what I've noticed is that organizations will tend to spend around 10 times as much on presentation skills training as they were on helping their people to communicate through their writing. Even though those people who get that training, get the presentation skills training probably go nowhere near a lectern, most of them, and, and yet they spend all day communicating through the written word. So it's like we've got it back to front, and I think it comes back to this invisibility. And, you know, you talk about the goldfish, you know, we're so steeped, you know, we're so surrounded by writing. It's so much a part of our world that we don't even see it, it's just there. And so I think that, you know, the good news is that it is an opportunity because if you improve that, and this is, particularly with things like organizational change, you know, it's kind of the opportunity to make the workplace so much better is there, you know, by optimizing how people are communicating with each other through their keyboards. But also, you know, if you look at achieving strategic goals, you know, you've got strategy, you've got, you know, execution, you've got, you've got feedback, you've got, you know, refine the strategy. It's, you know, what's connecting those things. Usually it's the written word. Yes. People will speak to each other, they'll have meetings, but in between, you know, everything else is, is writing. And so it's like the, it's like the thread that runs through, through everything or, or, you know, you know, it's like the rising tide that lifts all boats. You know, if you, if you improve the writing, you improve everything else. And yet it's not something that people tend to do and it's not something that they, they even look at because they're not aware of it. And also partly because people do what other people do. You know, if they don't see other people doing it, then yeah, you know, it's like, oh, well, it's, yeah, it's, it's. We're far less logical than we think we are. You know, we're social, social beings at work. As, as, as much as anywhere else.

In, in your work with organizations, are you ever actually tasked with or, or hired to teach writing?

Yeah, so, so that, so the company I founded in 1998, Emphasis, has worked with 80, 000 people since then doing exactly that. So, so it's, I mean, that, and that's all pretty much been in small groups of eight to 10. So, you know, it's a lot, so it happens a lot. And you know, it was, it was my privilege to work with so many people, you know, through that and to get, to get, to examine that issue and tackle it. But what I will say is that those organizations and you know, we're talking, you know, the tech giants of Silicon Valley right through to even the royal household here in the uk you know, for, for it remains, with the possible exception of that last, of that second example, that last example, it remains a minority interest. You know, it's something that only a few people work on.

That's what I was thinking is that just in my work as a lawyer and as a writer myself, I know how excruciating writing is. Not just the longhand letters that we don't do anymore, but that I have, you know, many memories of now to, you know, just writing, writing a card. I don't know how many people still actually write cards to other people. Some I think probably still do for birthdays and things, you know, but the, the art, and it really is quite a, an art and a science, I suppose the, the, the written word and being able to communicate effectively through that is something that, you know, I went to law school. They didn't teach writing in law school. I was in taking business courses. I was an undergrad. There was writing. There was certainly writing taught in, in a little bit in high school and a little bit in, you know, I was an English major in college. It taught some writing. But once I got out into the business world, I've yet to really see any focus, as you said, on this very vital and important school. And I'm just thinking as we're having this conversation, what an important thing it would be if you. Again, if part of resilience is, is what you said earlier, that it's about awareness that, that the concept of just understanding, being aware of that these things are at play. And that if we, we've taken, you know, in our conversation attack where we can see that potentially it's led to fragmentation, it's led to more anxiety, there are other, many other effects of, of, of the way the speed of communication has led to shortcutting. That, that this shortcutting has a, there's a serious cost to it. That one of the things. And I want to use our last couple of minutes here to talk about the solution side because I, I don't personally love it when all I ever hear, you know, in a, in a discussion of something is the problem of it. Like, so what the hell do we do about it?

Terrible.

Thank you guys. I appreciate it. I feel a little worse now than I did, you know, an hour ago. Whatever. But like, no, what's. What solutions I see is one of the possible things that the organizations and individuals can focus on. We can do this at all levels is really the work on our ability to communicate more effectively in writing than we currently have been trained to do. You know, some people have a facility. They're just good writers, you know, whatever it is, they have a skill at it, they're creative, et cetera, you know, and others, not so much. I think, you know, mostly I see bad writing. I've seen bad writing in emails and, and in, you know, any number of other things for, for eons. But we can for sure improve our writing skills, you know, and you help people to do that. Your organization in the past has done that with more than 80,000 people, which is remarkable. Is there something that you now share with organizations as to the process for that that we could, we can introduce? I've got one other thing I want to bring to the table too, but. So how do we improve our writing? Do you have any suggestions for that? For leaders?

There are lots of things people can do, you know, around the language you use. For instance, simplifying it, which doesn't mean dumbing down. It's usually the words in between the jargon that cause the problem. As long as everybody understands the jargon. So. And I've got an example here, actually, which is, you know, you might say, for instance, could you give me some assistance in making a decision? Okay, now that's, that's 10 words. It's 15 syllables. And. But, you know, if you've got words in there like decision, anything that ends in sion or tion, it's usually a bit of a. It should it should be sound an alarm bell indicates you've probably got too many words in there because you have to use other words to make that word work. Okay? So you don't make a decision. You can't say, you know, can you. Decision. You have to say, can you make a decision? You know, so. But you could say decide, and then if you're saying assistance, you could change that to help. And, you know, if you kind of work with that, you could say, please help me decide, okay? Which is. Which is four words and. And five syllables, you know, so if you imagine the effect of that all the way through, you know, an organization or through every document, you're massively going to reduce the brain power required to process all of that. And you're gonna. What's gonna happen is the. The message will come through and the ideas will come through, and then you kind of have this, almost like this release of the. The knowledge capital in an organization where suddenly the ideas can start to flow a lot more. So I would say that. I would say talk more. You know, expect. Don't try to use writing for something that it's not very good at. So, you know, don't use it for emotive issues. If, if you, if you can't avoid that. If you need to communicate with a lot of people about something quite emotive, then don't start with the emotive thing. So, you know, this bottom line up front doesn't work in a lot of instances, you know. You know, if you start with all leave is canceled next week, okay, that's the bottom line up front. But that's like a punch in the face. And because of the way our brains work, that psychology, that affect heuristic, if you're. You'll be angry, and that's where the prediction comes in. And you will misinterpret everything else. In fact, you won't even be reading it properly. So be very mindful of that. And what I say to people is, there's even a mnemonic you can remember which is scrap, which is situation, complication, resolution, action, and politeness. And situation is things that get people nodding, things everyone can agree with, okay? And then complication is. So if you think a situation is where we are now, complication is why we can't stay there or why there's an issue with that. Resolution is what we can do about that. Action is what we need to do next. And politeness is just rounding off on a positive. So situation, complication, resolution, action, politeness, scrap. It's a Very good way of introducing what I call human centered communication into your emails. And then the, the final thing is, I would say, and really it's central to all of it is put the reader first and do everything you can to put yourself in the reader's shoes. Now it's not easy, but you know, it could mean just taking a notepad and just writing down, you know, what are they interested in? What, what are they likely to be? What, what are their likely thoughts on this topic? You know, what are their priorities? How much do they know? Because we vastly overestimate what people know. And in doing that you kind of force yourself to get into their shoes and step out of yours if you like. And that can really help with written communication. So there is a lot you can do and that that organization emphasis is still very much alive and kicking and doing great work. But there is on the, on their website, which is@writing skills.com There's a ton of stuff there. If you go to the blog, if you want to go direct to it, just go slash blog. There is probably the biggest repository, you know, library of information on how to communicate effectively in writing probably in the world. You know, it's been going since 2008. There's so much stuff on there and so there's a lot you can do to help yourself. You know, it's not all doom and.

Gloom and often it is that we in our, in our communications take an assumptive position. That is we assume other people know what we mean, they know why, they know the context. And, and we expect people often unconsciously, I think more, more often than not, we expect others to just know what we're thinking. So they're expecting others to be mind readers. And how often we do that in our intimate relationships with people that know us as well as in, in other areas which again when, when we assume we know the old, the old mnemonic about that. So my one suggestion, so I so appreciate the solutions and multiple solutions that you just offered. I'm going to just share something that's worked for me over the last couple of years when it comes to the text thing, because we're not going to get rid of text. The communication is sped up. As you said, the genie's left the bottle. I don't even think there's any, there's any reason to try to put the genie back in the bottle. But we do have to be more aware to be resilient. We have to be more aware. And so for example, when I'm sending a text Message these days, I would say 50% of the time, I will send a text memo instead. Now, of course, this has to do with whether you're on an iPhone or you're on an Android. And so there's a bit of a challenge there, because if you're communicating from an iPhone to an Android, you cannot leave a voice text because those platforms are not compatible in that way. And here's a call to action to the, to the tech folks to make to get rid of that barrier, because that's ridiculous. But if you are platform to platform, to send a voice memo is so much different. And it takes, I think it takes me less time to, to, to leave a voice memo for someone, as opposed to the text message that my thumbs are constantly revising. And you know what, I'm shortening it to the point of, like, I'm not going to give somebody, you know, three paragraphs to read, but by shortening it in the process, I'm not really simplifying. I'm. I'm actually making the communication less effective, I think, and, and losing the nuance that. And maybe, as you said earlier, so important. I never heard this before, losing the opportunity to create that oxytocin for my, for my, for the person I'm sending this message to. So not hearing the love in my voice, they're not hearing the, the tone that I want them to receive, the feedback, if it's feedback, for example, they just see the feedback in writing. It's like, well, this person is, you know, Adam's pissed at me or he's disappointed, or, you know, he's asking me to do yet another thing which doesn't come across when I leave that voice text. So I just think there's a lot of ways that we can work with this, because the genie is not gonna. We're not gonna get it back, so. Nor do we want it to, but what do we do to just lift our, our resilience, be. Be more able to. To leverage these technological advances to our benefit and not just see it depleting us, which I think we are. We are seeing signs of that.

So I think that's such a good idea. Somebody did that. If you use WhatsApp, for instance, you know, and I, I'm not a great user of WhatsApp just because of habit, but somebody left me. You can do that. And that is platform independent. But somebody did that the other day with me. They left me a voice memo. And it's not like a voicemail for some reason. You know, I never check you know, I don't even bother leaving voicemails now, you know, but it wasn't like that. I could see it there. It was visual because you just got a little player in the message and then it's like, oh, what's he, what's he said? And I played it and it, and it was a message that was about 20 seconds long. So it would have taken him presumably not much more than 20 seconds to record and yet said so much more because it was, he was actually communicating bad news. But it was okay, you know, that's. It worked. I think that's, I think it's genius. I think it's a really, really good idea.

Yeah, Rob, I, we're going to end here, but I could literally talk to you for days. I think people are listening to this now, watching this now are, are feeling the same way. We will have full show notes. So this is a message to our audience. Full show notes. Rob has a, a wonderful website. There's a lot that you can find about his work in the world and everything that you might want to know and, and how to engage him is all going to be in those show notes as well. And Rob, I just thank you for your time today. Thank you for the quality of the conversation. I've just loved it and look forward to us being able to chat again soon.

Absolutely. My pleasure, Adam, it's been a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure all mine, folks. If you would be kind enough to leave a comment or a review, AdamMarkel.com forward/podcast, you can leave a comment there. The reviews are fantastic. They really help us out. So on whatever platform you might be listening to this, you can, you can leave us a 5 star review, that'd be terrific. But again, we, we thrive on the feedback. So the comments and, and your thoughts are, are ever so important and I'm personally the one to respond to those things. So don't think it's some bot or somebody else. It's me. And again, if there's, if this is an episode that you've gotten value from and I gotta assume you have, please share it with a friend. Find somebody that might, maybe they're, they're, you know, could use some help with their communication skills or they're struggling with the communication of members of their team. And this is so prevalen days or even people that are just feeling that anxiety and don't maybe exactly know what it's from. I think there's some great insight in what Rob shared with us today about where, where we Might look for answers there. And again, just wishing everybody a wonderful rest of your day, your evening, or wherever you might be in the moment. Thank you so much for your time. We'll see you soon. Ciao for now, everybody. Man, I just loved my conversation today with Rob. I mean, honestly, we spoke about some of the most important things that I think we're all struggling with these days. How it is that we are experiencing fragmentation, what it looks like to develop a better relationship with our text messaging. I know it sounds funny, but. But we're so attached to these cell phones and we're using that texting mechanism all the time. It's. It's a part of what's happened in, in the, in the information age and in the technology age that we're living in right now. Communications are so fast, and many of us would like to slow them down, but as Rob said, there's no, there's no getting that genie back in the bottle. So we have to learn how to use those things more effectively. I think we really covered quite a bit of what is challenging in the space. We think about how frayed we are because of the speed, the frequency of the communications that we're all involved in, and the content that we're reading and consuming each and every day. You know, we. We are in many ways frayed. We're exhausted. We're seeing the heightened level of anxiety across industries, across geographies, across the globe. Really. It's affecting all of us. And, and at the same time that we have this awareness and this, I'd say, heightened awareness based on some of the insights that this amazing expert shared with us today, we were also able to not just put a bow around the problems and talk about them. Even if some of the problems that we talked about are things that maybe you've never heard of before, you never, never spoke about before, never heard people speaking about before. I know some of these things were brand new for me in the course of my interview of Rob. So it was, it was, to me, so valuable in that area. And yet, like so many things, we can't dwell in the, in the, in the, in the lowlands. We can't dwell on the plane. We have to get to the top of the mountain. And the top of the mountain is always, what do we do about things? How do we, how do we use our heightened awareness? How do we use our understanding to be able to make change or plan for change, or dare I say it, create solutions? You know, sometimes we can't move into solution too quickly. We have to Sit with things, we have to be willing to marinate in them, as my daughter would say. But in this instance, I think we all get, we get this, we've been living with this. We've all had the experience of sitting in a restaurant, a beautiful restaurant and watching people at this beautiful restaurant on their cell phones, sometimes communicating with each other, I suppose in that regard, I mean, you know, people texting one another from, from different, different areas of the same house. We've all seen these things, we've all experienced it, we've all probably judged it and we've all probably been, been guilty of doing those things ourselves from time to time. So it's, it's important that we, we have conversation about that and, and yet be able to know what are the small things we can change. How do we take that awareness and actually turn it into some action that not only makes our resilience tank, our resilience score higher, but helps to give permission other people to do the same. That has a ripple effect, if you will, that only increases the resilience all around us in our teams, within the organizations that we're a part of, within the organizations that, that are our communities, our families. Some of the tools, some of the tips, some of the hacks, I would say even that Rob shared with us are just first rate. They simply are. I did my best to keep up with him, contribute some things and I felt decent about that. But he's the expert. That's why we have him on this is something he's been doing, studying, researching for a very, very long time. So how to think about the digital age in regard to the context of what, what Rob spoke about, I think for me was, was elevated. I see the digital world a little differently today because of this conversation. I think you will as well and I think there'll be people in your world that you'll want to share this episode with. I know I'm going to do that. Even though, even though we share this with our community as, as you would imagine, there's some very specific people that I think really would benefit from listening to this and I, I hope that you've enjoyed it. Please Leave a comment. Adammarkel.com forward/podcast Leave a review we love those five star reviews. If you'd be kind enough to, to, to do that, that's also super helpful and, and most importantly put these things to action. There's some very actionable techniques, suggestions that, that come after we fully explored the problem. I think we did cover it quite well. So you be the judge of that, of course. But let's. Let's all work on this. I think this is something that we're gonna. We're gonna see collective benefit, worldwide benefit, even if. If we're all a little bit more aware and we can take these very simple steps that Rob and I spoke about today. If you're curious about how resilient you are these days, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, feel free to do something that. That 5, 000 plus leaders have done already, and that is to get your resilient leader assessment in just three minutes by going to rankmyresilience.com rankmyresilience. Job done for you, and it won't cost you a thing. And most importantly, it'll give you that heightened level of awareness, a baseline from which to build from and build forward, which is what we're all busy doing right now. So without saying any more than that, I'll just say, I bid you a beautiful day, rest of your day, and ciao for now.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@admarkel.com podcasts. For more Resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com BecomeChangeproof.