92: Write to Influence | Carla D. Bass

Grab a cup of tea or listen as you go, ladies. This is your hour with Dr. Zoe, your life and relationship coach. With encouragement, on-point insight, inspiring guests, health tips, and advice, Dr. Zoe helps busy women keep their mind in the game by redefining your superwoman. You're listening to the Dr. Zoe Show.

Welcome to the Dr. Zoe Show. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe. I'm a licensed psychotherapist, a life and relationship coach, and a motivational speaker. And I can work with you virtually to help you get unstuck. Connect with me by texting the word join to 38470 or go to my website at drzoeshaw.com. Today's topic is right to influence. Now some of you might be thinking, writing? What does writing have to do with being a strong woman? Well, let me tell you, but first up, my Superwoman win and my Superwoman fail. Let's start with the fail first. It was a work fail this time. As some of you may know, I have an Ask Dr. Zoe column at the Grit and Grace Project, an online women's magazine. And I've also been a guest on their podcast a number of times. And they recently asked me to do a video as a promo for one of the podcasts. Of course I agreed. And so I had set some time apart to do it on Wednesday before I had sessions. And I recorded the whole video, felt great about it, starting to do some editing and realized it was the wrong topic, wrong episode, wrong. I was so frustrated with myself. So there's my fail. I recorded the wrong darn video and I was out of time because I had to see a client. And so I wasn't able to get to it again until later that evening. And I recorded the correct one that time, but lesson learned. I was working so fast, I was not paying attention. So there's my fail. My win is kind of a global win. It's not really specific, but in the past few weeks, I have had the toughest cases I have ever had. And in the midst of this, I've had moments where I've been hit with an overwhelming feeling that I, right here, right now, am doing exactly what I was put here on the earth to do. And that's the best feeling in the world. Of course, the next minute I waste my time filming the wrong video, but that's okay. And even that wasn't a complete fail because they were able to use the video. But having fleeting moments of walking directly in the middle of your purpose is an awesome, awesome win. And I just encourage you to continue to do what you know you were put here on this earth to do, to pursue it, to learn more about it, to go deeper into it, because I've been doing this therapy thing for— 20 years. Goodness, close to 20 years. And I learn more and more every day. You guys, my clients, you guys teach me more and more every day. And the deeper I get into it, the more convinced I am that I am doing exactly what I'm supposed to do. Next up, Write to Influence. So this is a little different. I've been doing a lot of solo episodes and I've been bringing in a couple of guests here and there. And I really wanted to bring in this guest, Karla Bass. She's the author of Write to Influence, and she is a retired Air Force colonel. For 30 years, she's been writing in various ways, and she's going to talk about that. But the reason why I wanted to bring her is because you guys know I'm all about helping to support you in being a woman of strength. And I know that a woman of strength knows how to communicate well. And the written word is a vast majority of our communication in this day and age. Text, email, you know, of course, all the traditional ways as well, social media, so much written word. And so Carla has some great tips and insight and a little bit of a different mind shift when it comes to writing and putting an emphasis on your writing. And it's funny because I felt kind of self-conscious about not having the right answers. You'll see as we get to the interview and she's quizzing me about just some techniques and a little bit of— English, I guess. I felt like I was back in school, but it was great, and I, I learned some things, and I hope you will as well. So listen up. Welcome, Karla, to the podcast. I'm so glad to have you here today, and my interest was piqued when I saw your book. And we write every single day, so I'm excited to talk about how increasing our writing skills can help us as busy women.

Yes. I, I, for me, when I realized the simple truth that powerful writing changes lives, when I recognized that it was trying to help an Air Force unit, there's a whole story there about how this journey began, but that turned out to be a turning point in my own life as well. Completely unexpected.

Yeah. We gotta talk about that because I haven't mentioned yet, or maybe I did in the intro, that you are a retired Air Force colonel, which is so very impressive. 30 years. I told you my dad was in the Air Force as well, so,

and I I followed my father's footsteps. So when I was in 7th grade is when I decided not only Air Force but Air Force Intelligence, and I stuck with it. And 30 years went by like 30 days. It was amazing.

That is incredible. What an inspiration. So we'll talk about that in a minute. But before we get started, can you please share your Superwoman win and your Superwoman fail in whatever order you'd like?

I'm going to start with a Superwoman fail because the moral here is We're never too old to learn, and my fail only occurred 2 days ago. So this is fresh.

Awesome. We like recent ones.

Oh my golly. You know, I did the best I could, but when there's nothing left to draw on, that's all you can do is do your best. So here's the deal. I'd gone up to New York City to give an interview on a major radio station, and immediately following that was a live interview— not live, a recorded interview, but with Fox News. Big, big opportunity, huge opportunity. The problem was, by the time I made that phone call, I was absolutely physically and mentally exhausted. There was nothing left in the well. And so I really had to struggle to figure out what to say and pretty much ask my own questions and then answer them in this 10 or 15-minute telephone conversation as I'm stumbling along because I was so tired. Wow. The other thing I didn't do, which I generally am very conscious about doing, is I'll have notes by my side here, which I do now as a matter of fact, so that if you ask examples of fat writing or how do you go from fat to skinny or how do you write with really powerful verbs, I have those at the tip of my fingerprints and I don't have to struggle to drag it out of the very tired databases. And so all of those things went wrong. I hope they can work some cut and paste magic, but those were my lessons learned. That was my, my bad news. The good news is the fact that I have in me this ability to write powerfully, and more importantly, I've been able to share it with other people. And so I still get all sorts of emails and social media contacts that say, Colonel Bass, if it weren't for, I wouldn't have been able to.

Wow.

That's what keeps me going.

That is awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. And yeah, I'm sure they'll probably be able to figure out what to do with that interview. I'm sure it felt worse for you than it really was.

Oh, it did. I even called them back and said, listen, I'm really sorry to call you again, but, you know, I just didn't feel— were you happy? And they said, yes, it was great. So we're always more critical of ourselves perhaps than we should be. But I was so grateful for that opportunity and it didn't feel like a home run. I'm not used to that.

Yeah, but what a wonderful opportunity. Your book is really doing so well and it's getting so much national attention and I mean, you must be very happy with that.

Oh, I'm delighted. The whole thing here is not to sell books. It's to share my writing techniques and methodologies because it really does change lives. So I'm ecstatic at being able to do this.

So can you tell us a little bit about your story? So I mentioned, of course, you were an Air Force colonel for 30 years as a woman, which is just phenomenal. Can you tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to the place where now you are writing?

Sure. I'm of the generation that there were not very many women in the Air Force at my point. So I was breaking glass ceilings all over the place. But what I loved about the Air Force is that you were judged not on who you were or what sex you were. In my experience, it was how good are you. So the challenges and the promotions came based solely on your aptitude. And that for me was a level playing field. But as far as writing, as a 2nd lieutenant, which is, you know, 1st lieutenant, which is almost right out of college, I was writing the daily intelligence briefing for the director of the National Security Agency, which was just nosebleed-level responsibility. And so for basically the 30 years of the Air Force career, and then I still work full-time for the government writing documents to go to the White House and Congress for 40 years, I've been writing various products where every single word has to count and every second of the reader's time is precious.

Mm-hmm.

So that's just part of who I am. How I began this particular journey, when I was a Lieutenant Colonel, I became Squadron Commander of a unit in Hawaii, 480 really talented young kids. When I took command, it was the most losing unit in the entire state for these professional quarterly and annual awards, which means they weren't getting the accolades. It hurt their promotions, it hurt their pay raises, it hurt their ability to send kids to college. And the reason why was not because they didn't deserve it, but their bosses couldn't write.

Oh.

So you could be the best staff sergeant that God ever invented, but because your boss, the tech sergeant, can't tell your story, what you did, you don't win.

My goodness.

Yep. So I took 3 days personal vacation. I sequestered myself in a beach cabin and I analyzed my writing because I knew that I could do this. So the question was, okay, Carla, What do you do? How do you do it? And how can you teach others? And out of that 3-day session, I developed a little tiny handbook, like 20 pages, and taught my people how to write. I turned it into a 1-hour class and we started sweeping the awards. Oh my God, was that fabulous. Then the other units came and said, can you teach us too? And I did. But what astonished me was that little handbook and my writing techniques, which constitute the second part of the new edition, that followed me. So, I ended up teaching for the next 15 years to thousands of people wherever I went. This word sculpting thing followed me, and that's where I learned that powerful writing changes lives. You could be so good, but if you can't tell your story or someone else can't tell the story for you, it's game over.

Absolutely. And I've definitely seen that so many ways in my professional life, you know, working with other therapists, with other writers, how important your ability to be able to get your words across on screen or paper, you know, how much that matters. So a lot of busy women might be thinking, okay, well, you know, you know, I don't really do that much writing in my life. How important is it for me to hone my writing skills now? I'm not in school. I'm working, maybe, maybe a stay-at-home mom. Maybe I run a business, but how important is writing for me now?

Well, it's critical. So, let's take it one by one. If you are employed someplace, generally, most businesses have performance appraisals. So, the boss very often comes up and says, okay, Jane, it's time. And they usually do this with a sigh. It's time. I have to write your performance review. Can you give me some bullets about what you've done? Right. Well, the boss doesn't like writing it and you certainly don't like providing the input. Nobody does. So, learning how to write powerfully takes the sting out of that. How you get around the awkwardness so you don't sound like you're bragging about yourself, which you really should be doing—

Right. If

you pretend that you're writing about a deserving subordinate or a deserving colleague or someone who you think really deserves to get promoted, pretend you're not writing about you, and then just lay out the facts and figures of What did you do? Quantify it, put it in details so the impact comes through, and kind of depersonalize it. Pretend you're writing about somebody else. So for people who are employed, that's what you need to do. For folks who are looking to find a different job, this is where the resume comes in. I've got a whole chapter in here on how to write powerful resumes. If you happen to be a mother and you've got kids either in high school or college or just entering the workforce, especially for kids who are still students because the school systems don't teach this stuff any longer.

No, they don't. I've experienced that with my son. He just graduated from high school and, you know, writing the resume, trying to get summer jobs before he goes to college. Yeah.

They come out writing fat, not skinny.

Hmm. What does that mean? What's fat, not skinny?

So, for example, I can take a poorly written paragraph of 150 words and turn it down to 20.

Ah, okay.

By applying the writing strategies and the word sculpting techniques. And the whole point to this is that everybody is busy. Every time that you knock on a door, whether it's a telephone call or an email or a letter, you're interrupting somebody. So, the question is, knock, knock. The answer is not, who's there? The answer is, What do you want? I'm busy. What do you want? So, the goal of anybody here is to make your point, make it quickly, and get off the stage. The audience, the reader, the person to whom you're communicating would really appreciate that.

Right. So, it's about being more concise. And I've learned that in my article writing too. I often, when I go back and edit, I look at, okay, how can I say that in a more straightforward way? And it's more impactful. It always is when you lessen it, right? When you make it Skinny— I like that word— you're making it more impactful for the reader.

One of my word sculpting techniques I call don't hog space. So you up for a quick challenge here?

Sure.

Okay, so what's a faster way to say on a weekly basis?

What's a faster way to say on a weekly basis? Just say weekly.

There you go. Okay, a multitude of—

Many.

Yep. In the near future—

Soon.

Uh-huh. Okay. All right. Day to day—

Oh, occasionally or—

Daily.

Daily. Okay.

How about one more here? On at least one occasion. At least—

Once.

All right. So, that's an example of don't hog space, go from fat to skinny. And where this is so critical is sometimes when you're writing, you're like on a webpage or on a form where the space is physically demarcated, where you have X number of spaces and that's all you're allowed. So you can't afford to waste those precious spaces on sloppy writing.

I guess Twitter helped us with that a little bit, right?

It did. It did.

Yeah. Okay, great. That makes a lot of sense. And so tell me, what would you say are the biggest mistakes that busy people tend to make with their writing other than making it too fat?

The first is failure to proofread. You could have the most powerful message, the best resume, the most word-sculpted, whatever it is, but if you haven't proofread it, then your credibility is shot and nobody is going to read the substance. They're completely blinded by the errors, and so it's game over.

What do you think about those apps like Grammarly and other apps that you can install?

They help, but the mistake is people rely on them 100%, and that's not going

to get it. Yeah.

So I personally don't rely on them. Anything that I proof, I will proof it myself, and I will go from, from beginning to end, and then I'll proofread it backwards.

Hmm.

And that makes perfect sense because if you proof it from beginning to end, you can very easily get caught up in the story that you're telling. You're reading it from a substantive perspective and you overlook the mistakes.

Mm-hmm.

Read it backwards, you can't get caught up in the storyline, and so it's easier to identify the mistakes.

When you say backwards, you mean actually starting from the end of the sentence and reading backwards?

Yes, exactly.

Wow. Interesting. I've never thought about that. I know for me, what helps a lot when I write is that I have to write something and I have to put it down and I need to look at it a couple days later and then I can proofread it because if I read it right away, like you said, you're caught up in the story, you're caught up in whatever it is you're writing and you're not going to notice it. But if I put it down, And then pick it up a couple days later. Of course, then you have to plan when you're writing things.

That's my second— I have in the second edition here, I've got something called the Dirty Dozen, the most common errors in professional writing, actually in writing, period. Number 2 is failure to plan ahead, failure to outline. So, you have X number of minutes. I have X number of minutes with you. You have maybe 1 page that you're allowed for whatever the communication is. So you need to outline what your story is and then space it accordingly in the allocated space. Very often people will just start writing and the thoughts meander. They miss the key points. They put information that's tangential to what they're trying to do and therefore dilutes and misdirects the reader. So like a roadmap, you wouldn't take a very complicated family trip without a roadmap. Mm-hmm. You wouldn't build a skyscraper without an architectural drawing. So you shouldn't go into

That makes sense. But what about smaller things like writing an email or things like that? You don't really need an outline for that, right?

No, but what you do and what happens a lot is people in the journalism world, it's called bury the lead. In my world, I call it don't bury the golden nugget. But typical for emails, because people are generally kind, they'll open up with an email saying, Dear so-and-so, thank you for blah blah blah blah, and then the email just goes on and on and on, and then the critical point, the whole reason for them writing, is at the tail end of the email. Well, if you remember knock knock, who's there? I'm busy, what do you want? Then that was completely written backwards. You should open with, hey listen, here's a major point, and oh by the way, thank you very much and great time and blah blah blah. So you got to put the important thing first. First in an email.

Excellent.

Yep. Another thing on email is we all get so frustrated because you could ask maybe 2 or 3 questions that you're asking of the recipient, but the recipient only responds to one of

the

points. We all know that. One of the hints that I recommend is to help the reader, to help you help them help you, is, Dear Jane, I have 3 points, and then actually number them.

Number them. Excellent idea.

3. And then thinking in terms of the golden rule, for those of us who are now reading the emails, think about the golden rules and slow down and read the emails. If there's 3 points, answer all 3. You would like the other guy to do that for you, so stop the world and do it for the other guy.

That's an excellent point. I love that, and I've done that myself as well. So can you tell us what are the 5 principles of Right to Influence?

Sure. The first one, and I've alluded to it just a little bit, is that every writer, every writer, fact, fiction, whatever you're doing, is constrained by 2 things. You're constrained by time. Knock, knock, I'm busy. And you're constrained by space. And if you add those 2 things together like an equation, time plus space equals opportunity. So I have only X number of minutes with you. I value every single one of them. The person that leverages time and space The best wins.

Okay, so that's for the making it concise and skinny. Got it. Uh-huh.

And making sure that you've got your story strategically placed, important stuff first, ancillary things later, that you add the appropriate amount of details to convey with impact what you're trying to describe. Okay, so that's all part of leveraging time and space. It's not just concise. There's strategy in there too.

Right. So, if you're writing your kid's principal an email, you definitely want to make sure you're making it concise. Yeah.

Yes, and get to the main point first and do it politely. The second principle in writing is empathize with the audience. You have to know to whom or with whom you're communicating so that you, you don't speak over their heads or you don't speak under them. You don't communicate in jargon that they don't understand. You must know what's their level of familiarity with your topic. What is it that they need out of the communication? So if I were marketing a product, I wouldn't necessarily just talk about how great the product is. You have to put that in the context of what are the needs it's trying to solve.

Right.

So empathize with the audience. The third one I've spoken to already, it's include detail to make sure that your points convey. Detail provides the reader or the listener a mental yardstick. So for example, if my statement is, I led a team On a study, we made several recommendations to the CEO, period. That was basically a bullet from a resume. It says nothing. I led a 6-person team on a 5-week study. We made 6 recommendations to the CEO. He accepted all 6, and we saved the company $800,000. You see the difference there?

Oh yeah, I'm hiring that person. Yeah, for sure.

Jargon. Don't speak jargon, meaning job-related stuff that not everybody understands.

Oh,

are you with me on that one?

Yeah. So, well, I mean, to specific people you would, but make sure that you know your audience and you only speak jargon to the people who are going to get the jargon.

Yep, exactly. Now, sometimes jargon's appropriate because if everybody is in that same grouping, they understand it. There's no need to explain further. That's talking down to the audience. Just make sure you speak appropriate language to the appropriate audience. And the other one is revise, edit, and proofread. Quite often people don't recognize that that's a 3-step process. Revise means, okay, you've got your draft down. Now you compare it to your outline and make sure you've got all the points, that the paragraphs make sense, the sentences flow. Edit is kind of a grammatical, making sure the syntax is there and so forth. And then you get down to the proofreading. But very often people don't think about moving paragraphs or moving sentences. Does it flow? Read it out loud. Reading it out loud, sometimes you can hear where you've got duplicate words or sentences just don't work. We can hear things that you're not going to pick up by reading.

Yes, that's excellent advice I got early on when I started writing articles is to read them out loud. And it's so funny, I'm so glad you talked about revising because I talked to my son about this all the time. He had a habit of writing his, you know, his first draft was his last draft. And this is in, you know, English class. And I would always talk to him about it, but it's funny because when I write a text, I always go back and read it. And he would say, Mom, why are you like revising your text? It's just a text, send it. And I'd tell him, because I want to make sure I'm getting my point across. It's not that, you know, I'm trying to write a novel, but I want to make sure I'm getting my point across.

That's something that I really emphasize to the high school students when I'm teaching. I've got a workshop. On writing the essay for college applications.

Hmm.

So, 2 points there. The first step I tell them is go find a quiet corner all by yourself and do an inventory. What you need to do is you have this empty bushel basket, if they know what bushel baskets are, and identify detail— your likes, your dislikes, your hopes, your fears, your dreams, movies or songs that move you. An unusual family circumstance, a tremendous vacation, and what did you learn from it? Figure out who are you and come up with specific examples, vignettes, because that's what you draw from when you sit down and you write the college essay, because the, the reviewers want to know who you are. So something that's very personal to you. And then I tell them that this is probably your first foray into the world of adult writing. And what I mean by that is this little essay is going to have a huge impact on your next step. So this is not something that you write one draft and you're done. You write it and you put it down like you said, and you come back time and time again. Give it a day or two, which means plan ahead.

Right.

The more things you can add, you can take out, but it's like a vegetable soup. It needs to simmer, and the older it gets, the better it gets, and then you've got yourself a winning essay.

I love that. I never regret waiting a day or two and revising it because when I wait a day or two, I always find something that I want to change. So, excellent, excellent advice. So, this book, Writing to Influence, can be utilized by basically everybody, right? Everybody who knows how to read, And write needs this book?

Yep. The lowest grade is probably high school. It's a little too advanced for junior high school. The word sculpting tools are good, but the overall book— so it's high school all the way to people in the workplace. Now, what kills me in the workplace is I call it bureaucratic blather. It's so pronounced now, it's ubiquitous. So that's where you've got the one paragraph, you read it 4 times, but because it's written in such atrocious language, you have no idea what they're trying to say.

Right.

Here's— you want to play ping pong again for a second?

Sure.

Okay. So I think it's my 5th word sculpting technique. It's called verbs are your friends. Now, if you can imagine a hard-boiled egg, got it? Hard-boiled egg?

Yes.

Now make it 6-foot tall, huge hard-boiled egg.

Scary.

The verb that you're looking for is the yolk. And what people do in sloppy business writing is they smother that yolk with the egg white. So, here we go. Again, this is going from fat to skinny, but focusing on where's the real verb. Okay. Stop from happening.

So, what am I identifying? Where the verb is?

One verb that is the same thing as stop from happening.

Just stop.

Or preclude.

Oh, preclude. Okay.

Okay. Here's another one. I take you up on the offer. I—

Accept.

Uh-huh. Let's talk about this.

Chat.

Or discuss.

Uh-huh.

I would much rather go. I—

Prefer.

Yep. Conduct a compilation of.

Examine?

Compile. Compile.

Compile. Okay.

Conduct a compilation of. Compile. Be in attendance.

Attend.

Attend. For the purpose of gaining.

For the purpose of gaining.

Easy to gain.

To gain. Okay.

I'll give one more. Provides updates.

Updates.

There you go.

Okay. I feel like I'm in school.

No, it's kind of like some pretty, but yeah, no, it's

great.

If you find the real verb and you skinny it down, that's what makes the writing so much crisper.

That makes sense.

So banish bureaucratic blather.

I got it. Thank you so much. Well, I hope that my listeners will check out your book, Writing to Influence, and. See how they can—

Right to Influence.

Right to Influence, sorry.

With an exclamation point.

Right to Influence. And the link to that will be in the show notes as well.

So it's Amazon, Barnes& Noble, online, everywhere, paperback and ebook. And my website is righttoinfluence.net.

Beautiful.

And I travel, I give workshops to high schools, to government agencies, to NGOs. This is appropriate for them too.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Karla. I appreciate you coming on the show.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

And best of luck with your book.

Thank you so much, Zoe.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation and I hope it inspires you to polish up your writing a bit. So thank you for listening in to the Dr. Zoe Show. New shows go up every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss a show and you can connect with me by texting the word join to 38470 or just hang out on my website at drzoeshaw.com. I have some articles and you can look at past episodes of the show. I look forward to connecting with you ladies on social media throughout the week. Have a super week.

You've been listening to the Dr. Zoe Show, Redefining Your Superwoman, with your host, Dr. Zoe Shaw. Don't forget to sign up for her monthly newsletters to get encouragement, tips, and And skills for keeping your mind in the Superwoman game. Connect with her now at www.drzoeshaw.com. Tell your friends and subscribe to her podcast on iTunes. Join us next time for another edition of The Dr. Zoe Show.