01: Your Guide to Communication "Tells"

Would you believe that I can usually tell how old a person is just by the way they write and speak, But I bet you can too. Without even realizing it. You're listening to the Communicate with Confidence podcast. Episode number one. Hey there. Welcome to the Communicate with Confidence podcast. I'm your host, Molly McPherson. Today we are talking about communication styles and how they are formed and what they say about you in person and online, both professionally and personally. But I'm going to take that one level deeper to discuss the tells in your communication style. These are the reveals that people will give away when they're either speaking or writing or communicating in some form. Now, there are three types of communication skills when we think about communication. There's verbal communication, that's the most obvious. There's nonverbal and nonverbal. Communication can provide a lot of insight into a speaker's word choice. You can see what they're doing with their hands, their eyes and their mouths when they are trying to communicate something without saying it. And then there's the visual communication and these are the optics that are involved. I'm going to start the podcast at the origin point of me. I created this podcast to supplement my business training. I work with a lot of clients who are in the C suite or at a director level, a lot of employees at organizations, and I talk to them about just communication in general. It could be about crisis communication, it could be about social media, it could be about issues management. But my job is to help people communicate effectively and safely in the 21st century. There's a lot of risk now in how we communicate and so I have formed my business around offering instruction and solutions on how you can effectively do that. Now, who am I? As you know, my name is Molly McPherson. It's wonderful to meet you. My background is within the communication field, but I've touched on a lot of different areas and I've worked in newsrooms, in television stations, radio stations, and also for a newspaper. I also have time working in public affairs for the federal government and I also worked as a director of communications for an association. I spent a lot of time in the Washington D.C. area. I was a director of communication for the cruise line industry, which was a way fun job to have because who doesn't love a cruise, right? But my job focused a lot on the issues that impacted the cruise ships, the things that people don't think about when they're booking a cruise, the safety issues, the flagging issues, personal safety, fire safety. And I worked there around the time of 9 11. So port safety became a big part of my job. And so emergency management was an area that I moved into. When I started working for female. I worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency right about the time that the brand of FEMA was in crisis, and that was around the time of Hurricane Katrina. And working at FEMA was an amazing job because I could be a part of an organization and federal agency that was there to help people who were in distress, who needed help. So I could see on the ground level the work that FEMA was doing helping people get back on their feet after a disaster. However, after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA was a brand in crisis. And part of the reason why they were in crisis was due to how people were acting within management at FEMA and also in response to bad management outside of fema, at the state level, in New Orleans, also at the federal level in the US There was just a lot of things happening at a lot of agencies weren't prepared to handle this crisis. In this case, it was Hurricane Katrina. But FEMA got the brunt of it. Working at FEMA in those years was very difficult because we didn't have the reputation we once had. To put it bluntly, FEMA was a joke. And my job was to try and get press for an agency in Washington D.C. that was constantly being disparaged in the press. When a reporter would call to talk to me and ask a question about something, I would try and get a positive spin on it, or I would try to call reporter to get a story in the paper or on the newscast and they would laugh. I mean, literally someone laughed in my face. It was very, very difficult to do this job. But I was still passionate about getting the story of FEMA out there. And what I wanted to do was show people what FEMA did on the ground. How could we do this? When I was at fema, it was right around the time that social media was just starting to take a toll hold in major metropolitan areas. It was at the colleges. Facebook, as you know, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, started at Harvard. He moved Facebook throughout all the different campuses and now it was hitting the mainstream. So at that time I wanted to grab hold of that technology and find out how we could reshape the brand new FEMA. And the suggestion that I had in 2007 was to go out on the road and to bring a camera with me and to film what we were doing. I waited for the first disaster to happen. It turned out to be tornadoes and straight line winds in Tennessee. Once I was in Tennessee, I found some People, some victims of the storms that lost their homes. And I followed them with my camera as they went through the process to try and get back on their feet. I brought all of my footage and my interviews back to headquarters in Washington D.C. worked with the audio visual team there, and we created a package of videos to show that firsthand authentic experience of how FEMA can help. I presented the footage to everyone at fema, the higher ups, everyone at the regions, the public affairs staff, and said, this is what I think is going to be the next way that we can reach out to people in the public. We don't want to just speak directly to the press. We're going to go around the press and we're going to speak to the public directly online and through social media. That was the launch of the social media program. Since then, a move to New England sent me on a course to create my own business, which I love. Now I've taken a lot of those tactics that I learned from my career in the private sector and also working within the federal government to use for clients directly. A lot of my clients are from associations. I work at a national level, a statewide level. I work directly with clients. I do training, face to face training where I'll stand up in front of a room. It might be media training or it might be just communication training. I also do training online and I also give a lot of talks and keynote addresses about what's happening now in terms of communicating and how to be a risk free, confident communicator in the 21st century. I would get a lot of questions from people asking how can I become a confident communicator? And that's the reason why I developed this program, specifically this podcast, because I want to help people everywhere and make it as simple as downloading a podcast and listening. Now that's my bio. But now let me go a little bit deeper in terms of how I communicate. Just going to tell you a little bit about myself. Starting when I was around six years old, I loved to read the newspaper while I ate my cereal, which was usually Quisp King Vitamin, Raisin Bran or any of the three General Mills monster cereals, Count Chocula, Frankenberry and Booberry. When I finished the newspaper, I would read the cereal box. And to this day I can tell you all of the vitamins and minerals inside of any box of cereal. True story. I love to read, I love Nancy Drew. My favorite was the Secret of the Old Clock. I liked Wrinkle in Time, VC Andrews Dolls in the Attic, or was it Flowers in the attic. It was flowers in the attic. I loved Schoolhouse Rock. Not School of Rock, but Schoolhouse Rock. I like Sid and Marty Croft, television shows like Sigmund the Sea Monster, Electro Woman and Dinah Girl. Before I went off to school, which was a Catholic school. And on Friday nights when my parents went out, I would stay home with the babysitter and watch Donnie and Marie on abc. And then I would switch to the local CBS station and watch Dukes of Hazzard. I loved John Schneider, and I had very eclectic music taste. I liked the Monkeys and the Beatles when I was younger. I also liked show tunes. I liked Neil Diamond. I liked whatever my parents were listening to at the time. But when I went to high school, I started to normalize my musical habits and I started to listen to music of a certain time period. I loved playing sports. I loved being with my friends. The first dance I danced in high school was To Safety Dance, which was sung by Men Without Hats, I Believe. And the first classmate I danced with was Mike Jones. It's funny what we remember. I listened to U2. I loved the album War in 1983. And then I also loved the album Joshua Tree. I was not a huge fan of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. I mean, they were great, but. And they were certainly of my time, but I didn't love them. I loved Murmur by REM But I also love Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen. I took English, science, religion. I took home ecstasy. Typing with computers, and we use floppy disks. In college, I still loved alternative music. R.E.M was still a favorite. The Violent Femmes played at my college dance. And I remember losing my favorite earring, dancing to the song Blister in the Sun. I remember working in the computer lab late one night on my final paper. It was an Apple Macintosh, and I lost the entire document because I forgot to save it along the way. Back then, it was the user's job to save the document, not the computer. In graduate school, I went to Boston University, the School of Comm there. And I was the first class at BU to get an email. And my email was Mollybake. Edu. I did not know email etiquette and how to create a name. At that time, my work study job was in the Mac lab. So I sent people in to work on the Mac, and then I would tell them when their time was over. And I think I learned to tell them to save their documents. I loved Boston University. And this is where my love of the Red Sox started, because I lived behind Fenway park, and now the Red Sox are The World Series champions. Go Red Sox. Now here I am with my own business. So I have an interest of news mixed with the Internet that has kind of traveled with me my entire career. The question I have for you, can you tell how old I am? Many of you may have figured out that I am Generation X, Capital G. Capital X. X marks the spot. Some of you might be tracking the exact same age as me. You like the same songs, the same television shows at the same time that I did. But what do my likes and my age tell you about me and communicator? Well, this subject is a subject I researched as a professor. I'm also an adjunct professor at a college in New England. I started as an on the ground teacher and then I switched to online teaching where I teach social media and multimedia journalism. And one of the theories that I brought into the classroom was by Mark Prensky, and he's an American writer and speaker on education. He coined the terms and digital native and digital immigrant, and he described this in a 2001 article called on the Horizon. I only use the term digital native now. I no longer speak up on digital immigrants because, I don't know, it just doesn't seem as PC. Now, you're either a digital native or you're a non digital native. But the idea is this. If you were a student who grew up with technology, you had an iPad or a computer or an iPhone or any type of technology that was given to you at a young age to learn, you are a digital native, how I say it is. Your brain is now wired to understand how to use technology to learn. In contrast, are you someone that went to school and learned from paper with a pencil, maybe a chalkboard? You had a teacher in front of you in the classroom speaking to you directly, walking around the classroom and writing things on a blackboard. Not a smart board, but a blackboard. Those people are non digital natives. Now, why does this matter? When Prensky was discussing it, he talked about how people learn. I tried to take that one step further and think about how people take in technology and how they use it. What is their comfort factor with technology? What is the level of fear that they have with technology? It's clear, I'm sure you know this. If you give a younger person an iPhone, they're going to know exactly how to use it. They're going to know exactly what app they need and what they need to open. Compare that to a baby boomer who is given an iPhone for the first time or an Android phone. Do they know what they're doing, they have to stop and think about it or they may need to ask for help. Because my trainings are filled with a lot of C suite types, executive types, I get a lot of baby boomers. So I approach this theory of a digital native or a non digital native from a fear base or from a base of discomfort. And how can I make people feel more comfortable in the space of using technology? One of the openers I use in my talks, I ask what is that flashpoint moment in your life? What is that first memory that you have of a major news event has to be a public event. Not something private, but something that everyone would know about. But it's the first one that you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard about it. And I'll go around the room and I make them introduce themselves and then tell me what that flashpoint moment was. It's typically when President Kennedy was assassinated. It was the start of World War II. It could be the attempted assassination on President Reagan. Most of the responses are along those lines. Lately I've been getting more on the O.J. simpson verdict or a number of people will say the Challenger exploded. I remember when that happened. And they all say the same thing. It happened during school. The television was rolled into the room and we watched it happen live. Why do I do this? Well, one, I do it as a cheat to find out their ages. So some I can guess to the year. Like the Challenger, for example. I know that that happened in 1986 and most students that saw that happen live typically were older. It wasn't really an elementary age thing. I'm noticing it was mostly for kids in high school. So when someone tells me that was their flashpoint moment, I know that they're likely going to be a Gen Xer. So this tells me where everyone falls on that digital native spectrum. Now when I go into these classes, since most of them are not digital natives, sometimes all of them make up non digital natives. This is a tell for me as the trainer in the room or the coach. And that is not to assume anything when it comes to technology. I explain everything and I don't talk down to anyone because I don't want to patronize anyone. I want it to be a safe space. I tell people no question is a stupid question when it comes to technology. We are all in this together. Now if I have a digital native in the room, I may ask them a question. They know immediately they can nail it right on the spot. And it usually has to do with social Media or technology or what do you think about Snapchat? The non digital natives, they start to get nervous, they start to fidget a little. Then I'll pivot to a non digital native and ask them a question about strategy. Tapping into their industrial knowledge or their interpersonal skills that they learned in school on how to think a certain way. Works every time. Now, moving on to social media, are you sitting or running or walking and listening to this podcast on your phone? Chances are, yes. Many of you are listening in your car. But that means that you know how to hook up your phone to your car. So that's using technology. Good on you. Now another assumption I can make is that most of you are on Facebook. Facebook now has a billion users, and it now seems like over a billion users say, I hate Facebook, I can't stand Facebook. And I'll hear people tell me, oh, the young people aren't on Facebook anymore, you know, they're on Instagram and Snapchat, you know, which is true. But there's a lot of young people on Facebook. The difference is they just don't post a lot on Facebook because they know their parents are on Facebook. But in today's online world, everyone is struggling to be relevant. The older generations want to be relevant through technology. The younger generation wants to be relevant when it comes to, like, big ideas and how to run things like organizations and companies. The baby boomers are now starting to phase out of the workforce. But there are a lot of baby boomers who are still out there. They are working, they're at the top of their game. They don't even want to think, think about retirement. But I know there's this little voice in the back of their head saying, am I good enough to understand this technology? The baby boomer generation, they're seen as very goal oriented, but they may not come across as tech savvy. Now, Generation X, that's me, that's the last generation to grow up with technology, you know, at fingertips constantly. The Gen Xers, those are the people that grew up in a time when computers were introduced. At some point in their schooling, I remember clearly sitting down and having to write code for DOS and backslash with this big, huge computer in the floppy disk. It was not natural to me at all. But I knew at that age that technology was going to be the wave of the future. And I knew I needed to figure it out. And that says something about most Gen Xers. They feel the same way. But Gen Xers are the ones that kind of straddle both worlds they started working in a time where there was still fax machines, where people were still pushing physical paper. So I always say, a Gen Xer. Right now, they rock because they can handle both sides of that digital spectrum. They're pretty savvy on their phones, but they understand traditional communication as well. Now, millennials have a bad reputation for being lazy and selfish, but they're the fastest growing segment in the workforce today. And many aren't loyal to one specific organization. And that's not a bad thing necessarily. They like to jump ship for a better offer, but they also like to work at places they love and mean something to them. And that's a little different than a baby boomer who's always worked at the same place, because that's where my pension is. Now. How do we all work together? The way to do it is to figure out what makes each generation comfortable in where they are. That's part of the tell. Each generation grew up in a different environment. They each have different communication styles. So if you're a baby boomer or Gen Xer, you're trying to stay relevant. And if you're a millennial, you're trying to get noticed. Online writing for websites, emails and social media is much less formal than the five paragraph essay that other generations were taught in school. Baby boomers grew up with typewriters, Gen Xers had typewriters, and then we moved to word processors. Now with the typewriter and the word processor, we are taught to use two spaces after a period. If you're still using the antiquated second space, you're automatically dating yourself to anyone. Folks, that's another tell. Now, I give a talk on communicating with confidence. I have one for women, and I have one for men and women, but I talk about this point in both of them. And that is this idea of the double space after the period. Now, that relates to everything that I'd mentioned generationally, because that's how we learned when we were brought up. If you have kids at home or kids that are in school, they wouldn't even know what double space meant after a period. But if you ask someone over the age of 50, chances are they wrote like that for half of their life. When I give my talks, I tell people to try and move away from the double space. And the reason why I do that is because of the tell. You're telling people that you are older than, let's say, 45. Now, when I say that, I look around the room and there's going to be one or two people. I spot them before they even walk in that are going to be upset by what I said or take a little offense to it. And I know this because after the talk, they're usually the first ones to come up to me and say, hey, I took issue with that double space thing. I use double spaces. That's the way I was taught and I'm not going to change. I hear that every single time someone of a certain age comes up and tells me that. And I've also heard it online when I had a talk, I had tweeted information about the double space. People in the room were also tweeting about it, how we're not going to be double spacers anymore. And a well respected former colleague of mine had Tweeted, Aha, Molly McPherson, take this. We double spacers have science on our side. And she included a link to a study that was in the article, I believe it was in the Washington Post about the rules of the space bar. And researchers at Skidmore College rounded up 60 students and they used eye tracking equipment to set out to heal the divide between the double spacers and the one spacers. And the verdict was two spaces after the period is better because it makes reading slightly easier. Now, there is that, of course, but the people who are hardwired to use the double space are not using it because it's easier to read. They're using it because that's what they're wired to do. Now, if you're a double spacer, you're an ardent double spacer and you're never going to change it because that's how you were taught, that's fine. That is okay. And I tell everyone that own it, love it, do whatever you want with it. I just want people to be mindful if they do use it, you are giving that tell that you are of a different generation than millennials. And if you're okay with that, that's fine. But if you are someone that's worried about millennials clipping at your heels at work, or if you're someone that wants to be known as still very relevant, still very tech savvy, I'm the person that should be manning this social media program that we're doing. Keep in mind that people are likely judging you if you're writing straight out of 1969. Just something to think about. It's not a right or wrong, it's what is the right way for people to think about you that is accurate. So something to think about. Similarly, millennials and younger people, now they have their quirks as well. They love emojis and they love what we call newsies call bangers. Those are explanation points. It's the punctuation of the millennials. Now, as an aside, there is a question. Is it an explanation point or an exclamation mark? I tend to call it a point. Many of you may call it a mark. While everyone seems to be emoting more these days and they're emoting in their writing, especially online, there was research that showed that women use the explanation point more than men. The reason why women tend to use explanation points more is because it conveys friendliness. And women like to use emojis more as well. These emoticons I just read are the fastest growing language. Think about it. It is a language. It's a way to communicate, but with a picture. Now, what do we think about using explanation points or emojis when we speak? Now, the younger you are, chances are you're going to use explanation points more. When I work with my clients, my companies, sometimes I'll give them a social media audit. I'll look at what they have on their social media pages and what I'm really looking for. It's like a risk assessment. I'm looking for things that are said online or something that they might be communicating or an intention that they're trying to put out there, but they might be getting it wrong. Or they may be a little bit off because they're not quite sure how to socially communicate adequately. And that may be because they have a communication staff that's filled with people over the age of 45 or over the age of 50. And there isn't like a very deep comfort level in communicating socially. Now, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just a matter of learning how to appropriately do that. And now, conversely, I notice when companies and organizations just have younger people manning the social media, it seems that there are a lot of emojis and a lot more explanation points. And they tend to use explanation points in almost every single post. It's diluting the message in many cases, because an explanation point to many people is, means an interjection, means that you're trying to place an emphasis on something. But for some millennials, it's just going about their day, writing about anything. And it just means positivity. There's nothing sharp or emotive in there. It's just as plain as a comma or a period. But what does that do to a message? It gets a little misconstrued. So I do tell a lot of the Organizations that I work with, there is a magic number for social and communications in general. And that magic number, if I'm going back to my Schoolhouse Rock days, is three. Three is the magic number for social media at your organization. And here's the reason why. Getting three people means you're getting three points of view. You're getting three communication styles, you're getting three different generations all using the same form of communication. They're using the channel of social media at the same time. It's easier to read, it's more enjoyable to read because it's more of a conversation about the business. Multiple people, not just one 24 year old that was given social media because they're the youngest person and they're the newest person on staff. And so we just gave it to them because they're on their phone all day anyway. Whenever I hear that, I tell organizations, put a stop to it immediately. Because one, you don't want to have just one person representing your entire organization. You're making this new employee, in many cases your primary spokesperson for your organization. And there's going to be a lot of explanation points when they're discussing things about your business. But you're also losing value in getting a point of view and from employees that have been working longer or working at that organization longer. So splitting the work between three people is valuable. You're going to get a great mix of ideas and writing styles and people are really going to like reading the social media post. When I speak about these tells, are you starting to understand where they come from? The answer is in the generation. No generation has to worry about how they appear online or in person. Everyone's a great communicator. We're all just bringing in different points of view. Even though I'm partial to Gen Xers, I tend to like how they communicate the best. But we all have our strengths and we all have our weaknesses. The bottom line is this. You are who you are. And it's not easy to change behaviors that are hardwired into your brain, whether it's from time or habit or how you learned in school. But most people are afraid of how they are perceived. This fear factor is big in communication. So this is the final word. Embrace where you are and who you are, but be mindful of the message you are sending. If you are a millennial wondering why you're not getting more respect from your colleagues or why you're not getting that promotion, take a look at your writing, take a look at your social media posts. How are you communicating with people who are in charge of promoting you or might be responsible for your next big gig. Is there a disconnect there? Conversely, are you a baby boomer who gets frustrated because people assume you don't know how to use technology or you shouldn't be a point person on a specific project that involves social media? Perhaps there are some inadvertent tells out there that are unfairly labeling you. Be mindful of how you appear and how you react and how you speak about technology, specifically social media. How do you write? How do you communicate? Take the time to learn. It's okay if social media doesn't come naturally to you. It doesn't come naturally to probably half of the population. But that doesn't mean you can't learn it. Just like you learned anything in school, you learned about history. You learned about cursive writing. You can do this too. And there it is. Your guide to the communication tells. The tells in your communication style and your habits that may reveal a little bit more about you than you realized. Remember this. The tells aren't positive or negative. It's just how you are using those tells. How you are communicating. Remember, everyone is a great communicator, no matter the generation, and we all do it in our special way. But it is important to understand how you communicate. Can send signals or tells that could be accurate or wildly inaccurate. It's just important that you take the time to understand how people perceive you. If you want to stick to how you're doing it, that's great. Own it. But just be mindful that some of these things could lead people to perceive you to be a certain way. Before I let you go, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on itunes or wherever you listen to your podcast. If you learned a lot today, and I hope you did, I hope you come back and set yourself up to continue to learn. You will learn even more if you subscribe. Thanks for tuning in. I cannot wait to continue the conversation next time.