Authentic Communication - Highlight reel

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I think today, although I am optimistic for the future, I think that we have gone backwards in many ways with the advent of COVID just rocking our system and the use of electronics to communicate primarily and less face to face interaction. We see people doing things that they wouldn't ordinarily do. That you see a lot of what I like to call keyboard courage. It's what people are not fearful to type, but would never say in face to face conversation.

Yes, no, I see that a lot. Especially if you make the mistake of frequenting comment sections online.

Absolutely.

But the problem is we're Starting to see that same level of vitriol in actual professional interactions. So let's go a little bit deeper. So when you talk about keyboard courage, can you give us a couple of specific examples of what that would look like in the legal setting when they're talking to people in colleagues or clients or judges even?

Well, for example, remember resolving a discovery dispute among two lawyers where they had been trading some pretty aggressive jabs on email, and one of them was sending their emails in all capital letters in yellow font, which is just unkind to the eye. And so I would bet that if those lawyers thought that they were going to see each other sometime soon or even regularly, that may not have been the case. As to the yellow font, as to the capital letters, and as to the substance of the email, because in our polarized society, in communicating this way, we have all forgotten sometimes how to persuade. And all we are doing is just arguing and trying to batter home our point, which isn't going to convince a judge, it's not going to convince another lawyer, it's not going to convince another citizen many, many times. Because bullying is one of the least effective ways to communicate and to persuade.

Absolutely. And when you think about the distinction between persuasion and argumentation, can you tease that out a little bit more for the audience?

I would say the difference, at least from a judge's standpoint, persuasion is much more intellectual versus emotional, and particularly in the law, it tends not to have a lot of emotion in it. But that also brings into focus, Kwame, that we also have to know who we're talking to. Because when you're talking to a judge, when you're talking to a client, you might want to use more intellect than emotion. Whereas if you're talking to a jury, you don't want to hang your hat on emotion, but you may use your tone of voice, certain words, to convey and rouse up some emotion in order to persuade.

Absolutely. Yeah. And that reminds me of the old school Greek rhetorician. Right. You have the. We have ethos, logos and pathos talking about how to create a persuasive argument. So we have ethics, we have logic, we have passion. And you need a little bit of all to be really persuasive. And that's especially true with the jury and the judge. Sorry? With the jury. Right. But then when you're talking to a judge in, for example, a bench trial, trying to stir up emotions in the judge probably isn't as effective, I would assume.

No, no, we really don't appreciate it because, you know, we're like stick to the law. You know, this, that's our job. That's what we do all day, every day. So, you know, you trying to rouse up my emotions, you know, isn't really going to do anything.

Yeah, and I think that's a really important point for us to recognize here, is that there's no one size fits all approach to persuasion. And so the way that you persuade a judge is going to be different from the way that you persuade a jury. But then even within the judge, the bench, it's not a monolith. Right?

Right.

The way you persuade this judge might be different from the way that you persuade that judge. Right to that point. Even though the judges are going to be focused on the law. What different nuances have you seen people use when it comes to persuading one judge versus another based on what they know of the judge's background?

One thing I've seen several times is the use of technology. We have a shift going on in all areas in every profession in that the baby Boomers are leaving and Gen Xers and Millennials are coming in. I don't think that baby boomers don't like technology, but I do think that Gen Xers, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Y expect technology. And so it becomes a tool to persuade us.

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First off, you're too kind. Thank you. And the main reason why storytelling is valuable is that it covers everything you're looking for. So everybody speaks the same way for the most part when they're reaching out to customers, it sounds the same. Everyone is very homogenized, I should say. So if you're going out there with storytelling, you're definitely going to stand out from the crown. You're going to look different and the people who are reading are going to pay attention to you. And what storytelling is just basically taking the bullet format and spreading it out. So you're not going to make it look like a thick essay. We're not writing Tolstoy here. It's still bullet point, but a little bit different. You give it some color, you give it some flavor, some Zhuzhou, if you will.

This makes so much sense, John, because again, there are a lot of people who comment on my posts. And your comments always stand out because they are so well written and they're captivating. And now it makes sense because it sounds like you have a replicable model for the way that you go into storytelling. Am I getting that right?

A hundred percent. The way I, and I learned this in the little bit of time I tried selling life insurance is you got to come up with a system that's repeatable and scalable, something that you can do over and over and over again. And that's what I do on LinkedIn. I spend about 30 minutes ahead of time commenting on my normal people. I have my core. And then I'll write my post and then I'll spend another hour reaching out to new people, commenting on their things, adding value on their posts. And that's the trick too with storytelling, is doing the value add. It's not enough to just say, hey, great post. Well, that's fine, but there's no context behind it. What's the context behind Great post? What made it a great post to you? The writer. So I tell you what makes it a great post. And then this is the trick that I always do. I don't know if it's a trick, but it's what I always do is I always try to add even more Value to the original post. So you'll get the original post and then I'll look at what you wrote. I say, okay, this is all excellent. This is very great. Here's some things that you might have missed. I don't word it that way, but I'll do it as a value add so that people who are reading the comment section comes across what I've written, they see the value add, now they want to come to my page. Does he add value on other things? They'll look at my post. Does he add value on other posts? What kind of value am I adding into who?

This is so good. I'm sitting here taking all these notes, and as you're saying it, I'm saying to myself, man, that's true. That's exactly what I did. It is great. And I love the fact that there is this replicable model. Because when you think about writing in general, writing is tough. If you want to write well, it takes a lot of intentionality. It takes a lot of time and a lot of thought. And if you tell people, all right, tell incredible stories, that is hard to do. And when you. It's almost like if you take all of the guardrails off of creativity, it becomes so overwhelming that you can't produce anything. And so I really think that the listeners should focus on this part of the process where, hey, this is a process, it is replicable because you're going to have different conversations in different contexts. And if you can have this framework that you can keep going back to, then it's going to be much easier for you to communicate in this way using stories.

Absolutely. And the way the framework works, it starts off with the hook, and in the hook, what I always tell people. And if you pay attention to my writing, it is always addressing the problem and telling people that I'm going to give them a solution right off the bat. So like today I wrote about how to find an ideal customer. So I say, okay, are you a detective looking for your ideal customer? Well, I'm about to tell you how to find the ideal customer. That's the intro, basically. And then I go into five things I do to find those customers. And then I follow that up as once I find them, here are three things I do to address them. So that's kind of how almost all of my storytelling goes. It's solution, problem, the step by step guide on how to do it, followed by final resolution and a call to action. And that's every single post. But I don't do it in the way that you would think that most people on LinkedIn do. Because on LinkedIn is. You just said it was write incredible stories. Now, I could do an entire. I could do it right now and tell you an entire post on how to do that, right? How to write an incredible story. And the thing is, do you absolutely have to have a passion about writing about. No, absolutely not. It helps. It really helps because people will feel it, but it's not absolutely necessary. Think about when someone has writer's block, right? Okay, I have a passion for something, but I can't think about what to write. Well, now I have to do something to get myself out of that block. So I'll take, like, this pin, and I will write an entire story about this pin, about its journey of how it got to me, the step by step from creation to getting to me, and what it must have gone through to get here, and then what it's like living with me and the things that I put it through, queuing on it, writing with it, the stories it sees and all that stuff. So that's how I do it. And another thing to make your stories absolutely engaging is fill those suckers up with analogies. Because people need to see what you're writing. It's not enough to say, all right, insert this here, do that there. You got to give people something that they can attach to an emotion, to it, so they can see it, feel it, and understand it.

This is powerful. And for me, as a writer, I think one of the most powerful things you talked about was getting through writer's block. Because writer's block is a such a frustrating thing. You allocate the time to write, and then you're just. Your brain isn't braining, and it feels really disempowering. It's like I'm trying to eat on a very full stomach. It just doesn't work. I love that example of getting. Taking your mind completely off of it, being playful, and then that creativity comes back. And I love the hook to solution problem and then giving people bullet points. It makes it really easy to understand. And I think that hook element is something that people often miss. I want to drill in on this hook, because, sure, if you don't get the hook, people don't even tune into the story. They might be there, but they're tuned into a different channel in their brain.

Well, the hook is when people tell you talk to your audience, what they're saying is the hook. Right? Everything else, if you get them with the hook, as long as everything else actually addresses their Problems, you got them already, you got to pull them in. So what it is, you address that problem right off the bat. What is the pain point? What are they feeling? What do they want to be solved? Whether they truly know what it is or not. Address it right up front. They go, oh yeah. So they're scrolling through out. Yeah, that makes sense. But I also try to create eye popping images for my post. Don't just write a post, right? Because people just see a bunch of words, they're going to tune right out. You got to give them something to see. So bright colors, contrasting colors, especially on words. So if you, if you post something, make sure, like important words, the verbs especially are a different color than the nouns and all the other the words in there. So the verb almost always has to be a different color. Now people will tell you the adjective, but I always go verb. So if you try to be like this, like get exploding, growth, right? Don't ever write anything like that. So people's eyes are on the verbs and then they'll go, okay, get using what? So everybody's writing the same short, quick, able, consume, move on, right? It's doom scrolling to the max of what they created. What I want you to do is sit and stay. I don't want you to scroll, I want you captivated. You, you're my audience. I'm selling, I got me to sell to you my words. I want you to be able to come to me saying, I want to talk to him now. I don't want you to go talk to all the people. The other bullet points, there's tons of those, They're a dime a dozen. Talk to me. Because I'm different. So I do pacing and spacing. I try to keep it quick. And I also try to keep my sentences to different lengths. So three words, five words, seven words. So the. And then I'll also do it where. This is another thing. If you ever pay attention to my writing, the hook is usually one, maybe two sentences. The next line will be about two to three sentences, the next one a single sentence. And then we're leading into the bullet points and then we're leading into a sentence followed by one or two, followed by whatever, but is to keep. And then I'll use certain emojis, sometimes at the beginning of the sentence, sometimes I'll put them at the end of the sentence. The whole concept is to keep your eye interested. Because if you look standard PDF of a like let's say contract, you look at the contract, you know you're going to Sleep. It's not interesting. No one cares. It's a legal document. Same thing with LinkedIn. The consumable stuff worked at first because it was just easy to get through. I don't have to dig into anything. Just tell me what I want to know so I can move on. But the problem is everyone's doing that now. So for me, it's not that I. I want to go now. I'm stuck here. I want you to get there, and then I want you to be engaged once you're there. So the pacing, the spacing, the analogies, the keeping your eye moving at all times is never just going to be like, okay, here's a paragraph, paragraph, paragraph. It's always moving and always guessing. So you're always going to be interested by what you're seeing in addition to what you're reading.

Hey, listeners. As a lawyer, CEO, entrepreneur, husband and father, I know the pressures of trying to fit everything into a limited amount of time. And over the years, I've come up with a variety of hacks for continuing my personal and professional development journey while still handling business at work and at home. And now I'm ready to share some of those with you if you're looking to do the same. Join Negotiate Anything Premium today. It's designed for busy listeners just like yourself. It's everything that you love about our traditional feed just packaged to save you time and make it easier for you to apply these expert insights in your difficult conversations. Not only will this save you time, but it will also make preparing for your difficult conversations that much easier. Just download a quick mini episode or takeaway guide and you're on your way to negotiating more of the best things in life. So what are you waiting for? Get started with your free trial today. I gave you the option whether we could go with a typical preparation that we did before, or we could go with wherever your energy is driving you. So can you tell the listeners how you answered this question? What is it that's giving you the most energy right now related to communication?

I would love to answer this question, Kwame, and honestly, what gives me the most energy right now is communicating with people who are genuine, who are authentic, who know who they are, who confident enough to be themselves, and who are direct in their communication. And I think that takes a lot of maturity to arrive at that point in time for somebody to be that way.

Absolutely. And it's funny because as you started to describe the type of people that you like to communicate with, it made me realize how rare that is in today's society, the authenticity being genuine and then being confident in who you are as a person. It's rare. We're really drawn to people when we see it, which helps us to recognize just how rare it is when it comes to communicating in this way. What do you think are the things that hold people back the most when.

People are starting out? For example, in the legal profession, I think it's really easy to be intimidated by stereotypes, by what you believe a real lawyer should look like. So I think we all imagine Harvey Specter, somebody in a suit, somebody really smooth, sleek, who somehow manages to know all of the rules of evidence and have the best thoughts just on the fly. And we want to be like that. We want to be that person. And I can tell for myself, I can speak for myself. That's who I wanted to be when I was in law school, when I started practicing law. And I tried to be that person. I really did. But I soon realized it wasn't me. I'm Elena Cohen. I'm not Harvest Spector. I will never be Harvey Specter. I have an accent. It's just. It's not happening for me. I have a little bit of a sense of humor, and so I like my jokes here and there. I don't take myself seriously. So I was faced with a dilemma whether to try and change myself completely. And in that, I could lose my personality and I could lose my identity or to just embrace who I am and with whatever it comes with, right? Pros and cons. And I chose to just go ahead and be me.

I love this story, because you're absolutely right. Your life is a perfect case study for this, because you're successful now. You've come to the country, furthered your education. You've got the degree, passed the bar. We always have to talk about that as a lawyer, because that test is a nightmare. I still get nightmares about that test. And now you're in house, which is where most people, at least coming out of law school, want to end up being. This is really great and it's inspirational because you're demonstrating that you can be successful by being yourself. And I love the fact that you started off with intimidation, because even if we don't identify what we're feeling as intimidation, it is intimidation because we get intimidated by this avatar of what a successful leader, a negotiator, communicator, might be within a specific industry. Because for us, we have an idea of what that is. As a lawyer, other people might have what it is, that perspective as an architect or A doctor or whatever it happens to be. But what ends up happening is we have this polished perspective on what we should be as a professional, and then we get up every morning and we see our own flaws, and we just are confronted with the reality that who we are is so different from who we think we need to be, and that can really beat us down. So what allowed you to have the confidence in yourself to make that transition?

That's such a good question. And I thought about it as you were asking me that question. I actually remember a moment in time, which is I called my physician to make an appointment, and the front desk person who answered the phone call, she heard me. And she said immediately, without me even telling her who I was, she said, oh, Elena, how are you? How's your day going? I felt like a celebrity. I paused for a second, thinking, how did she know it was me calling? It was my accent. It was the unique way that I speak that it made her put two and two together and immediately recognize it was me calling. It was a moment in time that made me pause, like, oh, it was a positive interaction, and she wanted to talk to me, not to anybody else. She recognized it was me. So maybe there is something about my accent, about the way that I am, that I could embrace moving forward. That was a while back now, but that's the moment in time that I wanted to share with you.

I appreciate that. Because probably in that moment, that day, you might not have appreciated what that would mean to you, but now we can look back and we can see that from the outside looking in, it might have seemed like a really trivial interaction, but it was really formative for you.

That's true. It really was.

That's incredible. And it's almost like it gave you permission to be you.

That's right. That's exactly true.

That's so cool. I think that's one of the most empowering things that I've come across in my career, too, because you will find this very interesting. When it came to the podcast, when it came to the posts that I would make on LinkedIn and the presentations that I did, I got some feedback from my friends. They said the content is good, but it's not you on stage. It's not you. Your presentations and your posts and the podcast. It sounds boring, and you're not a boring person. I realized I was trying to act like a lawyer. It wasn't enough for me to be a lawyer. I was trying to act like a lawyer, sound like a lawyer, and look like a lawyer. And I wasn't being me. So I had to come to this point where I said, all right, I want to be so authentic with who I am professionally and personally, that it will naturally attract people who like me and repel people who don't. And I'm completely okay with that. And that's what was really the turning point for me in my career.

That's such a good point. And it's perfect because you're super genuine, super authentic. I feel like I've known you for ages, even though I haven't. Right. So I think it's definitely working for you. And it's a huge realization on your part as well that some people are not attracted to who you are as a person. That's okay. It's fine. You don't want to be liked by everybody. That was one of the lessons my mom imparted upon me, I think when I was 6 or 7. She told me, you know, the dollar bill to be loved by everybody. I was like, oh, well.

That'S so good. Oh, my goodness.

Some of my mom's wisdom in this podcast as well.

Listeners, that is great. And this is a great segue to one of the key tenets to your approach, which is not sweating the small stuff, because like you said, not everybody's going to like you, and that's okay. It's literally impossible for everybody to like you all the time. And for us to be effective in negotiations and difficult conversations, we have to be able to keep our cool. And if we're constantly taking things personally, then even if we have the right strategies or skills, we're not going to be able to put it into practice because we're so emotional, because we're taking things personally. So for you and your experience, when it comes to not sweating the small stuff, what is it that you. To a point where you were able to actually put that into practice?

Law is serious. The issues that we negotiate are serious issues. And sometimes people on the other side of the negotiations could take it personally and it could lead to negative outcomes. And I think if in my case, I sometimes act a little bit self deprecating, I have a bit of a sense of humor sprinkled all over the substance. And I think that really shows people my true side, my kind of human side, and they stop perceiving me as this attorney on the other side of the negotiations, this Harvest Specter type person. But instead, this is Elena, right? Just another human on the other side of the transaction trying to make this deal happen. It really helps, I feel like. And then the other person shows their human side too. And it's us. Two humans, stalking, trying to make the deal happen. The best deal for both of our clients.

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