Looking For High Performers? Pay Attention To This...

Can you tell if somebody is going to be a high performer or going to be successful based on the way that they communicate?

1,000%. And I'll tell you, the biggest key is their pace, how fast or slow they respond. If you ask me a question, or let's say I'm interviewing and you ask me an important interview question, and I immediately respond, yeah, that's probably true. I'm thinking— and again, this is in my experience, and I'm just— What it's indicating is I didn't really listen all the way because it's possible I missed the low-hanging fruit. I missed the whole point of this because it's not just the experience and the words, it's how you handle the present. Versus if you ask me a question and all of a sudden I went, in my experience, and then I went on. And I slowed down my words, all it says is I am controlled. I'm not emotionally reactive. It's the same people that— and this is not to step on anybody's toes— if you cuss in every other sentence, what you really indicate is I am emotionally sensitive. It's I'm over-seasoning my food. I don't have any other words to explain how I'm feeling or what I'm doing. So I just expect that throwing a curse word right in front of it is going to make it more impactful in some way. But it also dilutes the message because that's not what anybody hears. So it's kind of that same exact concept, the pace of your conversation. The difference between if I was going to say, I already told you I'm not going to do that, Cody. I already told you I'm not going to do that. Versus I already told you I'm not going to do that. Like, that right there is who sounds more in control, who sounds like they can be relied upon, who sounds like this is a person who knows what's happening, who sounds like the person who cannot be moved. It's always the slower.

How do you work on your inflection in order for people to take you seriously? Because you have incredible pacing, inflection, presence, eye contact. That is hard, I think, for a lot of people to do. What advice would you give somebody who doesn't think too much about the way they say things, but only thinks about what they say?

Oh, that's a good question. Number one is you want to use a tone that goes down. So if you pictured it, for anybody listening, if you pictured it on a graph, You want to start at like a 5, and then you kind of go down to a 2. So you use it in a tone of, let's say, like at the table, and I asked you, I was going to ask you to pass me the salt. I wouldn't say, can you pass me the salt? As if like you don't know what it is. I'm going to say, can you pass me the salt? So you're going down with it. Every time person who goes up on the inflection, it sounds a lot more uncertain, unsure. So you want to kind of end downward and slow your words down. Two, for eye contact. And I know we have a mutual friend, Vanessa. I know she also talks about this. People are much more forgiving if you don't keep eye contact, eye contact the whole time. You can look around, but as long as you end the last bit of your sentence with eye contact, nobody will know the difference.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. So if you— I have people when I trained, teach every one of my clients for deposition I'll say, look, this video, it's going to be recorded. So I want you to try and end all of your sentences looking forward so it doesn't look like you're looking all over the place. Because when you do, then it looks like you're trying to hide. Or worse, don't look at me. Anytime you get a question, don't go, uh, and look at me. Don't do that. So I need you to keep looking. And it's— I can look all around this room, but it's not to the very end of my contact, the end of that sentence, that I make that eye contact. You'll never feel like anything else is is different. But 3 would be the slower your words come out, the more intentional they sound. And you don't want to use the filler words, the ums, the ahs. It's fine for everyday communication. If you and I want to um and ah it up, we can knock ourselves out. Nobody cares. But when you need that high-performance communication, you need to get rid of all the filler words that water down your sentences and just serve them neat.

Yeah, it's interesting because like I'm doing it right now. When I'm thinking about something, I don't typically have eye contact because I'm usually listening. Right. When I have eye contact, it's something I have to work on quite a bit actually. And when I'm really pondering something, I look up or I look down in order to get my words correctly. But it's interesting, I wouldn't ever end that way. I would always start that way. So maybe naturally I got lucky with that one. But the ability to, Speak quickly without filler words, I think is super important. You talk smoothly. I wouldn't say you talk slow, though. I guess I suppose as opposed to a lot of people, including me, you talk slower, right? But there is also a real fine line between somebody who doesn't communicate concisely and somebody who communicates concisely but slowly. So if somebody is listening to this, how do they determine Hey, I'm just talking smooth but slow versus I'm just talking too slow and not getting to the point.

Oh, I usually can tell that by the frustration of the other person.

Yeah, yeah, the feedback.

Yeah, the other person will start doing what we talked about and start popping your knuckles and breathing out your nose and getting frustrated because it's creating that anxiety in the, in the conversation whenever you're, you're doing that. I think that everybody right now at this, this point of our life, we really are searching for calm energy. You, you want a leader to lead, they have calm energy. The, the high performers, the people who are relied upon, they say, you know what, I know that Cody is— she knows what she's doing. Oh, I don't know what's going on, thank goodness Cody does. It's because of the calm energy. You think of Any movie you've seen, or you think of anybody in combat, it's the leaders have the calm energy. They do not respond emotionally to the chaos. And those are the people that people look to, and they look for that in everyday conversation. There's a reason why when you go into your grandmother's house, all of a sudden you feel at ease. It's that calm energy that says, "Don't worry, honey, you're good. Tell me all about it." When you have this sense of, you go into one of my favorite restaurants, it's this mom and pop, She calls everybody honey, calls everybody darling, sweetie. It's like, yes, I just love— we need that. We really do more than you think. We need that calm energy. When you're around these people that are always anxious, always go, go, go, always want to just— you got to 10x everything about your life. That's a quick way to being really unsatisfied with a lot of things. There's nothing wrong with talking slow. I would say People say I talk slower in person than I do in my videos because I'm not having to cram everything in the 47 seconds. Um, but it's, it's this calm energy that, that people are drawn to like a moth to a flame because it's this vibe that you— when you can come into the room and they go, oh, thank goodness they're here, like all of a sudden that's this— everybody at the room feels different by your presence. And it's not because you're hyping everybody up. That's great. There's a place for that. That is not sustainable. It's the calm energy that leaders show that means they always know that they're captain of the ship.

Fascinating. So I'm sure there are many times where you feel super anxious and you feel elevated and you do not feel like the grounding energy. In fact, you'd love somebody else to be that, right? What do you do to prepare yourself to be that calm in the storm? Is there something that you do to reground yourself so when you walk in the door to your family, you're different?

Right. Well, biggest key is I really do try to be exactly who I am at home, same at work. But you have to wear a different hat. Like, I get it. It's this, and it's rule number 1 in the book of Sate with Control. Let your breath be the first word that you say. And I teach it to every one of my clients before they answer a question. And when somebody's asking them a question they don't like, and I take my own medicine, I do the very same thing. And when an opposing attorney is saying something I don't like, you better believe I'm using my breath to make sure I'm continually regulating my system when that's all happening. Otherwise, you— I'm bad at holding my breath. That's what happens, Cody, is I'll hold my breath in moments of tension. And then all of a sudden I realize, why does my body feel like I'm drowning? Well, it's because you are. I mean, you're preventing oxygen from flowing. That's why everything is tight. And that's why you yell, because your body goes, I don't know what to do with all this trapped air we got. So we better just shoot it out. That's because you just put it like a in a bottle and shook it up, just waiting for it to pop. But when you breathe the entire time, it's like breathing underwater. You can put me as deep as I need to go. I'm still all right. No matter what the pressure is. So it's a lot of the letting your breath be the first word that you say. So wherever your first word would be before you say the, I don't agree with that, or the, that's not true, you put a breath. And what it does is it allows your, logical and logical side to stay at the forefront where you don't get emotionally swept. And the benefit is, so does that other person. That's what happens when we talk about the how do you handle insults. When you allow that 5 to 7 seconds, what often happens is that other person will all of a sudden, their logical side will come up and go, no, no, no, that's not what I want to say. And they will apologize as soon as they said it. That's not what I meant to say. I shouldn't have said that. What I meant to say was— and they'll adjust it because they realize they can hear it now. It's not what they want to put off. Yeah.

You know, what's interesting is this is so good for negotiation too. You talk a lot about just communication and conversations in general, but so much of this, it just reminds me of a mixture of like Robert Greene and also Chris Voss. And yeah, have you talked to Chris yet?

Yeah.

Oh yeah. He's got— you guys have that same voice too. Like, has he done his radio operator voice for you yet?

Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like step one.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. And this stuff is mine. I guess we came at it totally different ways. Mine's more of this, like, good old country, you know, whatever. And his is this more northern vibe, mob boss type of like— he could convince me to give you— me to, like, give him my couch while I sit on it. Like, that's just what his voice can do. So I'm very curious what the actual statistics would be about the importance of voice.

Oh, it's got to be high.

It has to be so high of what it does because he would be like, I agree, that's a— it is a great couch. I agree. I just— I need your couch. Dang. All right.

He seems like he needs it.

Yeah.

Well, you know what's funny is him in particular, I think I've learned a ton from watching his stuff and people are going to learn so much from reading your book because one of my favorite mentors of all time said, if you're not capable of having difficult conversations to the point where you start to enjoy them because you learn from them, you'll probably never be very successful.

Oh yeah, that's good. That's very true. I love that.

I think it is true. It's the more that you can learn. You say it somewhere, you say something along the lines of, um, it's an opportunity to uncover.

Yeah, yeah. It's this idea that if you want to have a deeper relationship, then you have to have a deeper tolerance for difficult conversations. Like, if you only want to have surface-level conversations, well, I'll show you a surface-level relationship. You're not gonna be able to go deep. Like, you and your husband have had some probably the toughest conversations. Out of that, you have the closest bond. People that have gone through the hardest moments together and come out of it will always be stronger. So it's this idea that if you shun difficult conversations, life is not gonna be any easier. It's not the way it works. It's almost the opposite. If you enjoyed that clip and wanna see the rest of the conversation, you can click right here. Or if you wanna see the latest episode of the Jefferson Fisher Podcast, Click right here and I'll meet you there.