How To Have Difficult Conversations About Coming Out To Your Family With Jessi Hempel

Hey, everyone. You are in for a treat. So with this episode, it's with my buddy Jesse Hempel, and we were chatting, and the conversation was getting so good that I said, you know what? Let's just flow into the interview just like this. So the introduction is going to be a little bit different because we're going to drop you right in the middle of our conversation. But I think that'll be a cool change of pace. So you could see, because Jesse's a really great friend, we have great conversations, so it's awesome to have her on the podcast. And this conversation went in a direction that I. I did not think it was going to go. So without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

Really thrilled to be here with you.

Good. I'm glad that I. I'm good. I'm. I'm good. Now that the. The book launch is, like, done, I'm excited to post about things other than that, you know, and so it's. It's cool. I. It went really well. We'll see what. What the big lists look like. But we hit number one on Amazon, which is a good sign, I'd say.

It's incredible. I read on your LinkedIn actually just didn't have enough copies to fulfill demand. Which way to go?

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's great. Now that the dust is settled, I have an opportunity to kind of sit back and appreciate it. And it's really exciting because when you're in the heat of the moment and everything like that, it's just like you're just reacting, just constantly reacting. So it's super exciting. And then next week's my birthday, so we have most of the week cleared. I should say. Still have a presentation on Friday, but it'll be nice to. I don't. I don't. I actually, you know what's funny? As I said that, like, the week cleared, I felt anxiety, like, in my stomach. I felt a pit in my stomach that tells me that I. My brain has been warped over the last year of just, like, constant. Just work and struggle. So I think this is the reset I need.

Good on you for clearing the week. I bet it's massively uncomfortable, at least at first.

Definitely is. I actually gave my team the ability to bench me when they think I need to be benched because I'll never do it myself. I'll just keep on going. And I. So I told them, I was like, never tell me when you're going to do it. Just pick it down my calendar. You just clear it out because I just live my day, my days, like, day to day. I wake up, I look at my calendar, I say, oh, this is what I'm doing today, so I'll never know. Just don't tell me. And so I'm excited to see those days pop up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So cool. I'm pumped to focus on you and this book. How's. How are things been going with it?

I have no. So the truth is, I have no idea. And I think with books, as I think you have some experience, it's kind of hard to tell beforehand. Like, you can do all of the right things, and then you let it go to the universe and you wait to see what happens. And people either step up and buy it or they step back and are less interested. And I'm at a good moment where it seems like there's just a ton of enthusiasm for it, which is, you know, call me. I think it's because the topic and the idea speaks broadly to people in a way that I didn't expect. So, you know, the book is called the Family Outing, and it is a memoir. A memoir about. About really my entire family having the hardest conversations with each other you could possibly imagine having coming out. But not everybody comes out as lgbtqia. Plus, I think I got all the acronyms in there. I come out as gay. I like to. I like to like to always note that I was the first one out of the closet in my family. My father comes out as gay, and the next person to come out is my mom. And she comes out as a survivor of a series of violent acts from her childhood that she had never dealt with, never addressed, never looked at, and suddenly did. And so she found the courage to do that. And then my sister was next. She came out as bisexual. And then my brother, who began his life assigned female, called us up and said, hey, y', all, by the way, from now on, I'm using the pronoun he. We're all like, what? And it's sort of. At that point, we were sort of five years into the process of coming out, and I think we all thought, oh, like, nothing will surprise us. We all have these, like, shifting natures and identities. And then along came my brother and totally surprised us. So this is the story of that. But it's so much more because that happened 20 years ago. And what I was curious about all of these years later is what. What did the process of coming out of having those diff. Difficult internal conversations with ourselves? What did that allow us to become afterward? And my hypothesis, Kwame, is that when you do the difficult work of self reflection, when you get real with yourself, and when you decide to live most authentically on your own, you also become stronger at having difficult conversations with other people. And as a result, your relationships with them grow stronger. So that was my hypothesis, and it played out in interesting ways. There was no happily ever after to the book, but it played out in interesting ways.

Yeah, let's just roll from here. So tell the listeners about yourself and what you do.

Okay, so I'm Jesse Hempel. I am a senior editor at large at LinkedIn. That's my title, but it hardly tells you anything about my work. I'm a writer. I've known that about myself since I was about 7 years old. And I am a podcast host. I host a podcast called hello Monday and broadly at LinkedIn. I also, I am the editorial director of our podcast network. So I'm in. In the flow of thinking about media and what media is becoming.

This is great. And listen, listeners, one of the things you'll realize about a lot of my friends is that they're humble, so I have to hype them up a little bit. Jesse, you said you're a podcaster. Almost as an aside, but can you tell the listeners about hello Monday? Because it is a big deal.

Well, thank you for saying that. Hello Monday is a show about the nature of work and specifically how work is changing. But I have this, this thought, Kwame, which is that it would be very straightforward to make a career show that has, like, helpful advice and tips. And we do a lot of that. Right? Like, if you want to think about how to get that next job or how to move ahead or what new skills to learn, it'd be good to listen to us. But where I think people need most support and where I think people find most community is in the conversation around how we as humans evolve. And work, of course, is a part of that, because we spend probably two thirds of our time on Earth engaged in work. Now, that's not true for everybody, right, Kwame? There are, there are people who, who don't need to work for financial reasons. There are people who can't work for other reasons. But if you're a person who needs to pay your bills and you live in North America, where most, not all, of our listeners are, it's likely you're going to spend two thirds of your life, including half of your waking hours, engaged in your work. And so it's my belief that your work has to matter at least to you. That you have to understand its purpose and that you have the opportunity to evolve as a human through working with other people and on your own.

That's great. That is great. I am a fan of the show. You do a great job with it. And for. For LinkedIn's first foray into the podcasting, I think that's a pretty solid way to start for the platform for everybody. So it's really exciting. So, listeners, we'll put links in the description of the episode to hello Monday.

And, of course, I mean, we have famous guests. We really do. Like, we had Seth Meyers on the show, we had the actress Laura Linney on the show, we had the CEO Satya Nadella on the show, we had the famous negotiator Kwame Christian on the show. And weirdly, that episode way overperformed. It continues to be one that people just keep coming back for. So, you know, we get big names.

I appreciate it. That's funny. That is funny. Whenever somebody says things like this, I send it to Whitney. I'm like, see, Whitney? Somebody care. So, yes, this is great. So, yeah, let's talk. Let's talk about the book. So this is. It's really fascinating. And as soon as I saw the book coming out, the. I said, this is. I need to have you on the show to talk about this. You know, and, you know, it's funny, as I'm hearing myself speak, I said, the book coming out, you know, that's. It's so funny. That takes on so many connotations here in this conversation. But what was interesting to me was your response to the original invitation, because there was a little bit of hesitation there. And to me, it seemed super obvious how this is so vitally important and relevant to negotiation, conflict resolution. But can you talk to the audience a little bit about that hesitation? At first.

My first response was, you do such rigorous work around negotiating, which even though I've talked to you about it twice on the show, I still think of as too narrow, and this is a mushy book about coming out. Whereupon you said, actually, I'm pretty sure that this is a book about having some of the hardest conversations we'll have in our life. And your compassionate curiosity framework is an ideal way to think about that. You didn't say that. I then reflected on that, and I was like, actually, yeah, that framework was actually the way that I reported out this book. Right. And, you know, so we all have our relationships with our families. I don't know what yours are like. Mine, before the book, they were pretty Good, Right. But if I were talking about, let's say we're talking about growing up in my family with my brother, he might say, oh, well, this is how it was for me. And I would say, oh, no, no, no, you're totally wrong. I, I remember it this way. And he might be like, oh, no, but I remember that. And, and that would be a good natured conversation. It wouldn't even be a conflict or a problem. It would just be that, like, when I'm talking with my siblings, I have one way of talking. But.

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When I stepped back and I said, you know what I'm going to do for this book that is this memoir about my family's journey, I'm going to interview all these people like I would as a journalist interview a source. And what that means is that when I ask them a question, I'm not going to assume I know the answer first. So simple, Kwame, but actually really big for me when it comes to my family, because I personally think I know all the answers about my family. And so before I ever picked up a pen to write anything, or as it were typed on the computer, I spent hours and hours on the phone with my mother, my father, my sister, and my brother, each separately, just saying, hey, tell me about what you remember, and you pick what matters most to you. You start where you want to start, and you tell me everything that you can remember about something. And when I was not ready to jump in, but instead was willing to allow the entire answer to unfold, I heard it totally differently. And it really shifted the way that I understood their histories. But way more important, it shifted the nature of our relationships with each other now so that we can be closer. And by closer, I don't actually mean we can have easier relationships with each other, but we can have conflict with trust and Compassion and an understanding that the conflict will lead us to a place where we're closer because of it.

Absolutely. This is great because I find it really interesting that you said you interviewed them as a journalist. And what this tells me, and I've seen this in other people as well, is that when we're having a difficult conversation, if we step in as ourselves, there are going to be different reasons why we struggle. One of the things is it's very close to us. It's intimate. And when we care, that is what brings in the emotionality, too. When you think about Buddhism, they talk about desire being the root of all suffering. Right. And so when you want something, you want an outcome, you want change, you want something like that, and you're not getting it, and you're reaching, getting some resistance, then it causes emotional angst, which makes it more difficult for you to perform. And so you didn't interview them as Jesse, member of the family, you interviewed them as Jesse the journalist. A different aspect of your personality, which is still authentic, but when you brought that element of yourself to the conversation and approached the conversation through that lens, you were much more effective. So can you tell us a little bit about that identity shift and how it impacted the way that you navigated the conversation?

I love that you asked about that. And I. I believe we all can have a journalist that we bring to the table when we need an inner journalist to step up to the table. You know, I trained to be a journalist. I practiced journalism for 20 years at time magazine and then Business Week and then Fortune and then Wired. And when you train to be a journalist, when I did, and still today, one of the most central things you learn is the importance of going into an interaction with somebody without assuming that you know the story. Right. The. The mistake that novice journalists will make is they'll go in and they'll say, oh, the house is on fire. This is a story about the house on fire. I can see the house on fire. They run in and they talk to a lot of people about the house that's burning down in front of them, and then they leave and they write the story. But it could be that the house on fire is simply a symptom of a larger issue. Let's say maybe the story is reaching for this one. I don't want to make you have to, like, edit the tape here. But, like, you know, maybe the story is about a family that had way too many people living in it because housing code was really off, and that family lost several members of their family. And the fire actually was started because the structure was unsafe. If you, as a journalist, you run into that situation and you ask almost only the obvious question with the assumption underneath what you're doing, you walk away without the more important story. All that is to say that when you train, you learn to go in and assume you know nothing, nothing at all. And the better you are at this, the richer your story will get over time. It requires a level of patience that is hard. It also requires you to check the ego, which is really hard. And this becomes harder with people that you know better. So in my case, with my family, I'll give you an example. There's a chapter in the book in which my sister and I go on a road trip. I'm 24 at the time. She's 21. I remember this road trip. It was a ton of fun. We drive across the country. And I know that my sister was really angry at me during that time. I don't exactly know why, but I figure she really didn't deserve to be angry at me. That is my assumption going into this story. So I interview her about this road trip. And I also know that at the beginning of the road trip, we were having this huge fight. I don't even remember what the fight is about. Don't even remember at all. And the fight is so bad that we are stomping around in the driveway, refusing to get in the car, telling both of our parents we're not even going on this road trip. And our parents kind of have to push us in the car and wave at the top of the driveway and just be like, be gone already. So my sister and I talk through this road trip, which is mostly her telling me everything she remembers about it. She remembers lots of fun points. But one thing I keep hearing her say is, I remember, Jesse, that you planned xyz. I remember that you planned that we would visit our cousins. And then, I remember, Jesse, you planned we would go to Montana and go to Glacier National Park. And then, Jesse, you planned this boat ride that we did. And then, Jesse, you planned to visit your friend in Oregon. And as she said it, I thought, oh, wow, I. I did do a lot of the planning. Wow. I. I did a lot of the planning. Oh, yeah, that's because I'm good at planning. And she keeps talking. And I was like, you know, sis, is there anything else you want to tell me about this? I think I've got it all. I think I know everything you said, but is there anything else you want to tell me? And she Said, yeah, I remember that road trip was hard because you did all of the planning in our life. And I said, oh, yeah, I guess I did. And I said, and you remember that fight we had at the beginning? I don't even remember what that fight was about. And she said, oh, I remember what that fight was about. That was a fight in which I was telling you, hey, you're controlling. And you couldn't hear me. And after listening to my sister tell the story for two hours, I heard her for the first time in the 40 plus years we've been alive, tell me, hey, you're being controlling. And I was able to hear and see, oh, yeah, I am being controlling. And it led to this huge, profound shift. It's a good chapter in the book. It's worth reading. It's like a fun chapter to read, but way more important than that. It led to this profound shift in our personal relationship where I could let go of the reins a little bit and give her a lot more space to bring her fuller self to our relationship.

Oh, there is so much in here. So much in here. Because at the beginning, you said, in order to do this effectively, in order to essentially interview like a journalist, you have to have patience and you need to check the ego. And then you told this incredible story about you and your sister. And what's interesting, too, is because I think when people listen to the podcast, they think about negotiation, conflict resolution. They think it's something that they do to other people. So I am persuading you, you are the only person in this interaction that needs to change. But in order to have a truly transformative interaction, you need to be open to transforming as well. And in order to do that, we have to check the ego. And this was one of those times where you were able to do that, and you were able to do it in a way that you weren't able to do before. Right. So we've talked about the benefit of shifting your identity going into this conversation to think as a journalist. And part of that is checking the ego. And we know it's tough. And I know people have talked about, hey, you have to check your ego. That's something we have. We say a lot, but it's very difficult to do. So how were you able to do it?

That time distance helped a lot. But also, I never thought, oh, I need to check my ego. I thought, oh, I need to just remove myself. I need to park like Jesse Hempel over here and be the journalist. That's actually a tool that I can bring into Any personal relationship. I mean, Kwame, if you and I had a disagreement, I think it would actually help me a good deal to say, okay, I'm going to bring Jesse the journalist in here for a few minutes. Let Jesse the journalist drive and listen. Because really, untangling that knot is just listening long enough, like, making enough space for somebody to find all of the words they have to say. And. And you can't. You can't, out of a desire for efficiency, shortchange that part of the process. But then the other thing that I think, and this comes back, I think, to your framework as well. You get to the joint problem solving piece of the work that you have to do together finally. And what I think I have learned is that much of the problem solving actually happens in the listening aspect, in a conflict that my sister wanted to be heard. And once I had heard her out, it was like the nut of that anger dissolved. Now, it didn't mean that the work was all done. It didn't mean that I didn't need to now do the work to figure out and ask myself, like, when else have I been controlling and how can I shift that? But we were much closer for it. And I think that often that is the sort of the secret to good listening. The secret to good listening is that it does much of the work of dissolving the angst and the discomfort of conflict. Because I think, and this is my gut speaking, no research whatsoever. And this is more your specialty than mine. I think what most of us as humans want in the world is to have our experience in our humanity recognized and realized. And if another person in any way makes the space for us to put it all out there, whatever it is, we feel better and closer to them and more compassionate toward them and willing to work with them.

Oh, that's powerful. That's powerful. And it makes so much sense. And I think one of the things that people struggle with is the fact that they think that listening is doing nothing when it is doing a lot of the work. And if you're willing to let go, then the conversation becomes easier in the sense that you accept that this tool of listening can do some of the work that you would want to do with your words. And a lot of times the words take us in the wrong direction. Sometimes the right thing to say, the best thing to say is nothing. And then just give them the space. But again, that's very challenging to do because there's that inner voice in your head that says, say this, say that. No, they're wrong. Here Counter this point now, those type of things. But again, it goes back to what you said about patience, just giving them the space to sit back and listen and be heard.

And, you know, also for this project, I taped all of our conversations, and so I'd have the conversation, and then later on, I would listen to. I'd take a walk and I'd listen to it again. And there is an art in a craft to deep listening. I learned how much I missed the first time around, even when I was focused on it. I'd listen to a conversation again, and I would hear not the words this time, but maybe the particularly long pause my sister made between one thing she said and the next point. And in that pause, I'd hear the emotional truth of it, the resonance of it. Oh, this is hard for her to talk about. I hadn't realized that. And so I'm a huge fan when it's. When it's possible, not just of listening once, but listening again. Like, come back for more. If it makes sense to tape a conversation, tape a conversation. Of course, in most of our human interactions, it makes no sense to do tape of conversation, but what a gift it was for me.

Yeah. Oh, this is good. This is good. And I think this is. It's so interesting. And I know you've probably experienced this, too, as a podcaster. Now, conversations go in directions that are different than you anticipate, and I'm sure you experienced that in the interviews with your family. I'm experiencing right now with the interview with you right now, because this is really fascinating, and I think this is a masterclass in deep listening.

And.

And you've operationalized checking the ego in a way that nobody else has on the show. Because really, in order to do that, you're not saying to yourself, hey, ego, get in check. That's just not how egos work. Doesn't usually work that way. But what you're able to do is you're able to start from the right mindset, and the right behaviors flow naturally from the right mindset. So, yes, we've covered some really important skills, but really, it all flowed from the mindset. And I'd like to go deeper into these conversations, too, if you don't mind. What were some of the biggest surprises that you had when you were having these conversations with your family?

Well, here's a big one. You know, my. My family coming out for my family involved letting go of things they were ashamed of. When my father came out as a gay man, he was a very Christian man who felt like God would condemn him for his, his sexuality. And it kept him for many years from confronting this aspect of himself. And during the period when his life kind of fell apart and he came out, he didn't even choose it. He was sort of kicked out of the closet. I like to say, when my sister discovered some things on his computer that led us to understand that he wasn't being faithful to my mom. And like, how awful for your teenage kid to find out you're having an affair with, you know, a man. This is terrible. I, you know, even thinking about it, it's just like, oh, gosh, horrible. And as a result, he made some really bad decisions. He was, he'll tell you, he was a pretty crappy parent for a while. He had an extended period of time when he was just really not present, really not a great parent. So now fast forward to all these years later and I say to him, hey, dad, you know, I really like writing. I'd like to write a book. In the book, I'd like to tell all of your secrets and I'd like to describe what kind of parent you were. How do you feel about that? Are you game? And my dad didn't even think about it. He said, sure. And this comes back to the surprise that I take away from this book, which is, you know, I didn't say, let me just tell my story and you're going to be a character in it. I said, hey, I want to co create this. I want to do this with you. I'm going to interview you, I want you to tell me everything you remember about that time. And then I'm going to try to honor the narrative, going to be honest about it. And if you read this book, you will think at different parts of this book, wow, this is not a great person. This person is really letting his family down. And the surprise to me is that when you tell the truth about people, they often aren't angry with you. My father, upon reading the book, called me up and he said, you know, I don't come off very well at the start of this book, Jesse, and I love my father so much. And I said, oh, gosh, dad, I'm sorry, maybe we could make it better. And he said, no, no, no, you don't have to make it better. He said, I did a lot of work in my life. I love who I have become and you are honest in this book and so I really respect it. And that is true about my family in this book, pretty much across the board. It's also true about people I write about, in journalism, when you hold powerful people to account for things they have done that were inappropriate and you get it right, and it is true, they can usually live with it and have a conversation with you about it. And I think when it comes to conflict, we like to avoid saying the bad things. Even we both know the bad things, because we're like, well, I don't want to. Ooh, they know. I know. I don't want to talk about it. It's uncomfortable. But I have learned in my. The earlier part of my adulthood that it's okay to just drive straight into it as long as you. As long as you listen well enough to get it right.

Oh, that's really good. And tell me what you think about this, because the term you used was. The phrases you used was drive straight into it. And to me, I wanted to think about the opposite, too, because most people drive the opposite direction, avoid it completely. And then if they are saying, okay, I have this direct, this. This destination, they take very circuitous route in the conversation, and that might lead to a meandering conversation where the other person ends up saying, I don't even know what we were just talking about was that code. Was I supposed to understand something? But you found value in going straight to it with pinpoint accuracy. And so I'd be interested to see what led you to have the confidence in that approach versus using a more circuitous route to trying to get the information.

Well, I think I would go back 15 years in my journalism career to when I was at Fortune and just starting to write about powerful people who occasionally made very bad choices. I discovered during that period, I remember interviewing a particular CEO who had had an affair with someone and as a result, had lost his job. And now he was at his next job, and I was interviewing him about his next job. But I also had to deal with this other thing that was very public that everybody knew. And the first conversation I had with him, I tiptoed around it, and I was with an older mentor, colleague, who said, now you got to go back in that room, and you got to say the equivalent of, let's call him Bill, because that's not his name. Bill. The New York Times reported that this happened. I know it. My readers all know it. What do you have to say about it? And how did it impact you? And I was like, oh, I can't say that to him. I can't look him in the eye and tell him this, like, really, like this thing that I know about him that he's got to be so ashamed and embarrassed of. But that was the exercise, and I sucked it up and I did it. And, you know, he looked down at the table, and I looked down. I did that thing where I was, like, really trying, but I was still like, well, so, Bill, I'm sitting here in New York Times. I was reported, but I got it out. He looked down at the table and he looked out at me, and he said, you know, thank you for mentioning it, because I know you have to write about it. Here's my side of the story. And when I wrote the story, I wrote, this is what this guy says happened. And then I wrote the other side of the story as well. I did it, in my view, extremely fairly, but still I was aware, like, this guy's kids would read this. This guy's community would read this. And he called me up afterwards and he said, hey, that was a good story. And I just remember that because I expected him to be so angry at me. And that that fear that he would be angry at me stopped me from almost having the conversation in the first place. But it comes back to what I think is true, which is when you speak honestly and fairly about people, they respect you.

This is great because there's a difference between being liked and being respected. And at the end of the day, in our lives and in the business world, we want to be respected. It's nice. If we can be liked, that's a bonus. But sometimes when we have a job to do, we have a mission that we're set to do, it requires us to have difficult conversations. And you articulated it really well because you said, I was afraid he was going to be angry. And a lot of times we have these conversations with people, and. Or we know we have to have the conversations with people, and we either avoid the conversation completely, or we tiptoe around issues during the conversation because we're afraid of the other person's emotional response, which is problematic for a number of reasons because it prevents us from accomplishing the missing. The mission that we were set there to accomplish. That's the first one. And then the other thing is, we can only control the controllables. We have to focus on the things that are within our control and being respectful, telling the truth very clearly. Those are things that you're in control of. You are not in control, nor are you responsible for their emotional state. And then if you have better conflict resolution skills, then you can manage those emotions, but again, it's ultimately outside of your control. But the only way to accomplish the mission is by having the conversation, you.

Know, I also learned that you can do a lot before a conversation to set someone else up for success in having the conversation. So let's take that conversation I just talked about with Bill. I knew I was going to have to talk to him about this thing that had happened, this affair that he had had. I was going to have an in person conversation with him. Three days before the in person conversation with him, I sent him an email saying, here is a thing that I'm going to talk to you about. Here's my sourcing. Here's, here's why I feel like I need to talk about it with you. And we can't be resolved in our story until I've talked about it with you. I'd like to talk about it on Wednesday at 2. Just want to make sure that you have a heads up in advance. And so it gave him a couple of days to just to sit with it and figure out where he felt on it. It gave him an out if he needed to cancel and come back to it. And I think that when you do that, you also give people the flexibility to feel more prepared coming to the table for the conversation with you. I did that with my family too. I mean, you know, the conversation about my dad's affair, I set time on his calendar. I said, dad, next Tuesday, I want to talk about this. FYI, I'm a little nervous about this particular conversation. I'm going to tell you how I feel beforehand. I know it's necessary for the book. You and I have not talked about it since 1999 when it happened. I'm a little nervous about it. We have, you know, 45 minutes next Tuesday. I'm really looking forward to just gave my father the time to sit with the conversation and come to it on his terms.

This is great. And I really think that's a pro tip too, because when it comes to these tough conversations, again, sometimes we're so focused on ourselves that we don't take the time to set the other person up for success as well. And the sooner you can begin the process of negotiation, conflict resolution, difficult conversations in general, the, the more successful you will be. Right? And so if you start planning about planning the, the conversation, thinking through it beforehand for yourself, you're going to be in a better place. And then if you also give the, the other person the information that they need in order to prepare effectively, they're going to be in a better place too. And I love the fact that you disclaimed your, how you're feeling about that. And tell. Tell me a bit about the thought process of explaining the fact that you felt nervous in that prior message you sent to your dad.

Well, I kind of think that we always have our feelings, and our feelings are very readable, even if we don't share them. If I'm really nervous in my conversation with Kwame, with you, and I haven't told you that before we begin, I might talk really fast. I might talk around things for the first few minutes. I might look at my hands a lot. I might look down a lot. You're going to know that I'm nervous even if I haven't told you. But if I start by level setting and saying, hey, I'm coming to this conversation this way. Here's how I'm feeling, it's going to erase those physical tics, and it's going to allow us to find common ground quicker. It's also like a mark of your own vulnerability. And if you're asking somebody to be vulnerable, and you always are, when you're asking them to tell you the truth about any single thing, they are going to have a better time doing it if they see it modeled, if they see that you're doing it, too.

Yeah, I agree completely. And it's essentially conversational leadership. Because we're saying, hey, in this conversation, it would be valuable to be vulnerable. Let me show you what vulnerability looks like. This is how we do it. And it also makes it more likely for you to be understood, because people can. Can read emotions, but they might not always understand where the emotion is coming from and what the particular emotion might be. And so the. The body language and mannerisms that you described, it could be read as nervousness, but then somebody else could read it as shifty. Is Jesse hiding something from me? I don't know. And now they're off. They're not in the moment. They're feeling a little bit less safe because they're. They see something is happening with you, but they don't understand what it is. And so I think about it almost of, like, marketing, too. You're letting the person know, hey, this is how I'm feeling. So if you see something, this is what it is. I don't want your mind to race to, like, darker places. This is what I'm feeling and why.

You know, there are two things that I think of as techniques in conversation that serve me well. One is when I am feeling a little bit nervous, my tendency is to want to fill the space. But I know that the most effective thing to do is to shut up. People are very discomfort, People are very uncomfortable with silence. And if you let silence hang, and it's a great test, you should try it, you should try it with anybody that you're speaking to. If you let the silence hang, the other person will speak up to fill the silence because the silence is that uncomfortable. And you will learn something. And I also think that we can take sort of a subtle, energetic control of a conversation simply by slowing down by how we sit, how we breathe, breathe a little bit slower. What will happen? Without even realizing it, your conversational partner will also start breathing a little slower. There are subtle ways to bring you back to a point of togetherness. And that's the point. Right? Like we actually are always mirroring each other's energy. And so if I start, if I start talking really fast, you're going, you're going to meet me there or else you're going to slow me down by taking your conversation to a slower cadence.

This is great. Yeah, that definitely is a pro tip because again, I think pace is something that is really important. It's critical in these conversations, but it's something that people don't pay attention to enough and don't recognize that they can have an impact on the pace of the conversation. You know, I, I know that. I remember when my dad was teaching me how to drive. I learned something really important as I tried to do something dangerous. You're, you're going to make more mistakes by going too fast than by going too slow. And so slowing down is usually not going to be the wrong answer. It's the, is the safest move to make. And I love the fact that you said you understand your tells. So if you are nervous, you're going to speak faster. And so when you have that, you feel that pressure to speak in the moment, you know, you know what? That is not, that's not. Jesse the journalist. That is not my, my higher level thinking telling me to speak because it serves a strategic purpose at this point. This is my amygdala telling me this is the release that you need. Right. And I think it's really important to be able to recognize that essentially the, your emotions offer suggestions. They're not mandates. And so your nervousness will suggest, hey, talk a lot really fast right now. And he's like, okay, hey, I felt that before. Those are nerves. The best thing for me to do is sit down, listen, and let the silence ride. And I think the more self aware we become not only of how we're feeling, but what our emotions will push us to do in the moment, the better we're going to be when it comes to actually steering the conversation, because we're going to make the right reads at the right times for the right reasons.

Yeah, that. Exactly.

Kwame, this is great, Jesse. This is really cool. And I think a lot of people are saying, man, I wish this episode wouldn't end. I wish Jesse had a podcast or, like, a book or something where I could continue learning from her. Do you have any suggestions?

Well, I would hope that they would consider following me on LinkedIn, the place where I met you. I mean, I really. I do think that it's. Kwame, I consider you a friend. And there are several people in my life, like so many, that I need both hands that I have met and connected with around important ideas on a social network, which I just think is really profound. So, anyways, if you were following me on LinkedIn, you would see hello Monday, the podcast, and I think it's worth a listen. You should start with the episode on Kwame and his new book. Having difficult conversations about race is something we go deep into. And also, I hope you'll check out my book. It's out on October 4th from HarperCollins, and it's called the Family Outing.

Yes. Everybody, I highly recommend it. I already bought my copy, so I'm part of the tribe. Jesse, really appreciate you. Thanks for coming on.

All right, thank you so much.

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