Common Mistakes in PowerPoint Presentations

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And so with anything that I teach, I teach the theory and then I have some kind of exercise, many of them pulling from the improv world And then we debrief how it tailors to the topic at hand And That is the voice of Heather Barnes. and Heather Barnes is a professor at Northwestern, where she teaches classes on leadership development and communication And as part of all the things she teaches, she shows people who are going to business school to management school at this very nice university how to give presentations, how to in front of people how to capture an audience's attention and keep it and not waste their time How to make PowerPoint slides that aren't awful and ugly and how to present those PowerPoint slides in ways that makes it so your lecture is not tedious so that If you're in the audience You forget you have a phone, you forget that it has apps that would be more interesting than what you're going through at the moment. I met Heather at Northwestern, when they invited me and her at about a dozen other people who are fascinated with disagreement argumentation to helpel them create a center for enlightened disagreement. That's what they've named this wonderful place that has brought us all together. the Literitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. It's a lot of st We're just calling it the CED now And you can go back through the catalog of this podcast for many of the recent episodes and find all sorts of shows that are devoted to the CED and to the people. there. to help them create their program I encourage you to do so. There's one episode that just sort of covers the whole thing. And I wanted to invite Heather on this show for an episode just about what she does because She did a thing that the students who attended the big pilot program They just couldn't stop talking about it. And couldn't stop talking about it because it was the first thing that they put together as a module Heather and I were both recently invited back to Northwestern to lead modules with students. There were like workshops, in person activities All of it part of the pilot program. they did earlier this year so that students could get a certificate in enlightened disagreement. And her module involved taking everything she has learned about communication wororking in museums and aquariums, working as a professor who teaches people how to engage with an audience and what she has learned as a skilled improv performer so skilled Heather Barnes spent years at Second City in Chicago as a faculty member Second City is a legendary comedy institution with Alumni like Tina Feay, Amy Poolar, Chris Farley and Bill Murray Heather taught improvisation at Second City. auditioned and selected cast members and She did a lot of improv. So Heather took all of that And she kicked off the program at the center with something she does specifically in her workshops And we'll talk about what she did in a second. In particular, we'll discuss something called positive rants, which I think everyone should add to their conversational and rhetorical toolkits. That's going to be the title of this episode, Positive rants But first, I wanted to ask Heather, how did she find herself in this world I was an information technology consultant and I started taking improv classes for fun because I was dying a thousand deaths in the IT world. I didn't feel creative or fun it was hard. We worked long, long, long hours. It was intense. There was a lot of pressure. It was classic corporate America. and I had gone straight from Undergrad, that was my first job. and I just felt after three years I was losing touch with myself, the the creative part of me. so I went to a second city show My mom knew the cast member. I asked if there were classes. They said yes and take them. and I did and I was immediately bitten by what we call the improv bug I had a blast In my second or third class, a director said you really had audition for some shows. You're great. You get it. You're supportive, you're a good scene partner, you listen And I had no formal acting training. Growing up, my sister was always the star of the family. I can't sing. Although at Second City, when you get in shows, they write songs, they test your range and they write songs based on your range, so they make you sound like you can sing is super fun. So I guess in some cases I can. But I was doing the secondecond City for fun while working in information teechnology consulting. they didn't want anybody to know I did improv because my world was so professional. It was like two separate heathers. And I won't forget the day A deputy director from the state of Illinois, because I was working on a state of Illinois project, consulting project came up to me and said, I saw your show And I thought, o my Godd, now I'm gonna get fired. This is the day It all goes out the window And she said, I thought you were brilliant and I'd like you to make fun of me at the Christmas party coming up next month. And I said, No now I'm really gonna get fired. This is notot a good situation at all. And I did it in a safe way. I said yes and and I did it in a safe way, which is what Second City teaches you and it was really fun And a few other people had seen those shows. Now why do I say all this? Because the The Vice president of the Museum of Science and Industry saw one of those shows while I was at the state of Illinois. She also was working at the state of Illinois And she recruited me. She said, we would like to integrate more theater at the Museum of Science and Industry. We need to change the way we approach engaging people in science content And would you be interested in applying for this job? And I said, yes, and and I didn't have a museum background and I had imposter syndrome. So I went to the museum three Saturdays in a row. And I took notes of what I saw And I wrote sketches and I pitched ideas about how I would transform some of the experiences And it took six or seven months to get hired. It was a rigorous interview process. I had an interview with the actual CEO at the time And then I was hired and I worked there twelve years And I just loved it. I was creative. I was able to apply my business skills and background launched sixty seven new programs, we transformed our teams. U the improv approach where you start with a topic and get get your audience' input as to what they already know about the topic and then build on that. You're constantly integrating the audience' voice It was a lot of fun. And we did open a science theater, we just we really shifted the way we did programming. and I truly thrived and I loved it This is great. I love all this. I met you at the this Northwestern thing and you brought something there and I mentioned this before we hit record When I was talking to students doing my module stuff and I would ask them to tell me about your experience Every one of them brought up What You did firstirst That was the first thing they talked about. It was the only thing they wanted to talk about and they They loved what you did, right? And they knew they remembered your name and they w they all talked about how they had one expectation of what this was going to be like and then you destroyed all those expectations And then theyt they couldn't wait to see what was going to happen next after that module. So And I know that you, as you said, you brought impprov into this fun thing that you do with institutions, organizations and such. and then you did a modified version of it for The express purposes and sort of mission statement of the centerm What did you bring to those people? And after you tell me about it, we can give it a go for the show would be so fun. I would love it. ught a little bit of background information and some data and statistics on people and disagreement in our world today And then I shared a different approach. about how you can listen for core values through people ranting. throughrough an exercise called posositive Rants that I learned at the Alamal D Center for Communicating Science And then we experienced it together. People paired off. they actually got to Do ice in real time, that theory and see what it feels like. I think you can talk all day at people But unless they Experience it fully get it or understand it or know how to implement it or know how to use it. It's just theory. And it' and that's an important step, but I like to take it to the next level And so then we experience it and then we debrief it together and I led three different exercises in that hour and a half or hour and fifteen minutes And the comments of what the students were taking away were so different than any other times or places in which I've led these exercises at other law firms organizations museums or aquariums. So it was really enlightening for me too. to hear how the students could apply these skills. It's great to hear that that truly resonated with them. I think part of it, feel I feel almost like I don't w to say a gimmick, for lack of a better word, because I'm having them do it in real time. And I'm immediately creating a safe space and I set that up in the introduction say Hey we're gonna practice this stuff. We're going to work together. We're going to be supportive. We're not going to judge each other. And those are the foundations of Second City And when you say those things and lead by example and Say there's no mistakes Obviously be respectful and mindful People are willing to try these skills and they need a safe space to practice these skills. And I think that's it's not necessarily me. it's the format that I use that I think resonates with people. All right, Le at Omi, let's give it a quick run through so people can can understand what we're talking about So I did three exercises at the Center for Elightened disagreement. The first is called Three Things, where you have to find a highly obscure thing you have in common with someone. We won't do that one, but what that teaches is The main takeaways there that our brains are taught to go to the differences we have with one another How do we try and find some kind of common ground? How do we As good open ended questions, have fifty, fifty airte Listen and also be vulnerable and share specific information about oursel And that's hard for people to do. Everybody likes to play it safe. I'll ask you right now, what's more interesting if I say hi, I'm howather I like to travel Or hi, I'm Heather I just turned fifty. I hiked fifty miles in Bamp Canada and saw three grizzly bears Who can you relate more to or who are you more inclined to want to have a follow up conversation with I'm a little torn because travel's great, but I want to talk about those grizzly bears very bly Yes. and so Being working with people to be specific, and vulnerable within certain settings is one of the things that we W work on that people often don't do. Then the second exercise I led was what I'm hearing is and that's about listening to understand, not listening to respond. As a society today While people are talking, we are preparing our response. We're solving our problems. We're saying what we're going to say. If there's a disagreement, we're sharing We're composing in our head while we're listening the opposition statement, the way that we can or refute what they're saying and Boy, I was guilty of this all of the time. would solve people's problems left and right when I started at the Museum of Science Ministry. I had twelve direct reports, one hundred and sixty staff and six hundred volunteers, and I would tell people exactly what to do and when to do it by. how to solve their problems and I thought I was killing it and some people felt that I was micromanaging and didn't listen to their ideas and that was horrifying for me. so Anyway, I learned this exercise, I learned how to lead with empathy and that One way that you can do that is to paraphrase people and what they're saying to show that you understand them And that was a powerful lesson. So I teach that exercise, we go through that, and then we debrief And then the last one I teach the one I think we should do now. which is super fun. It is called positive Rants. It is one of my favorites And you let someone rant for one full minute about a pet peeve that they're having, like a genuine pet peeve. And then I have to accurately represent without using any negative language. So I'd love to do that one with you now. So So all I'm going to ask you, I'll set it up right now David, think of a genuine pet peeve that you have. like people talking with their mouthful or kids at restaurants on their iPads. whatever is a genuine pet peeve that you have Think of it, and I'm going to time you for one full minute and I want you to rant T me. about that pet peeve And then I'll pause those. Cool you have a good you have a good rant? I think I I think I do. yes Okay, I've got my phone. I'm going to time you. I want to keep you going, even if you think you're finished I'm gonna to keep you going for that full minute. Okay. Soill I call scene and give you a round applause Cool on your mark, getet set and action Okay, cool. I Have this pet peeve, I think it may be a kind of a common pet peeve and it may be something that illustrates or it may be something that communicates your age range, the era in which you grew up People Oftentimes in grocery stores in movie theaters in airports and pretty much every other general public space commonly will'll have conversations, casual conversations, not emergency conversations. with their phone on stereo on speaker with their phone on speaker mode. and they're just openly speaking and it's loud and I. that The phone is magnifying the voice of the other party and oftentimes they're letting that person rant because they're just shopping for shampoo or something or they're trying to get through a line. So I'm just hearing another person discuss life. And I'm not even really here of applause. give David a huge round of applause. That was perfect. You went and I could tell you were just getting warmed up So my job is to introduce my friend David accurately representing this rant using only only positive messaging. So this is my friend David He likes it when people out in public places are aware of their surroundings and choose to hold private conversations people on the phone in more secluded spaces and in spaces where Both sides of the conversation cannot be heard. He likes to be mindful himself and really appreciates it when people are respectful of other people's space and sound. appreciates it when when they use their cell phones in secluded spaces, secluded public spaces. This is my friend David. How did I do? That's great. That's fantastic. And I love that. It makes me immediately want to have a conversation with you about that. so I can like shave off the edges of it until to say like it's not quite that broad, but it's close to it. it is but it's in the domain of it. and I most importantly I was heard, I was seen. and You didn't even say how you felt about it, even though that made me feel validated Yes. don't you might love that. You might be one of those people. You might Actually this was all rants. so positive framing is a really important skill in life. It builds resiliency. And with the center for enlightened disagreement, what I focus on in this exercise is how can you listen from what people value? What is it they do appreciate? What is almost the opposite of the rant? What is it that they value? and you value mindful people? That particular rant actually drives me crazy too. I don't want someone on your cell phone. I don't want to hear both conversations loudly when I'm on the L comm commuting for work And it is in grocery stores, and I think it's It's over the top. It's rude, and it's invasive of other people's spaces. But So that was a good ran. I could definitely relate. and I wanted to jump in and say, oh my God, me too, me too. But that's the other part of this exercise. instead of just agreeing with you and going down this negative path together I'm able to truly listen and reframe who you are as a person based on your values and understand you. So even if it was something that I disagreed with you on, betteret identifying what your core belief system is allows me, the listener to connect with you and it allows had a negative space to become a more positive space without misrepresenting. And then I go on to say This is for the listeners. This is a challenge Early in my information technology consulting career, corporate America, I stormed in my boss's office. It was late one night ten PM. And I said, we are not going to finish the state of Ohio project on time. We are all burned out We are working eighty hour work weeks. This is too much. We're not going to meet the deadline. This is horrible. We're all miserable And I need we're just this is awful And she shut the door and said, howather make that positive. And I said, there's nothing positive about the situation. How are you not listening to me She had me in there forty five minutes And it was awful. And she and I did not get along to begin with and I was really tough. and she looked at me and she said, Heather, I'm going to teach you two things. One, you don't speak for the entire team And two, you need to positively reframe without misrepresenting. So she had me in there forty five minutes And if I we had a whiteboard, I would say this, we are not going to meet the state of Ohio deadline. We are all wororking ninety hour work weeks I wrote that on the board And then before I left, what I ended up saying was, in order for us to meet the state of Ohio deadline, we either need an extension or more resources so we can work forty hour work weeks. And she said, Y problem, Heather is you're going to rant and run around and you're going to disengage people. You're going to be perceived as this negative complainer that no one wants to work with. You you need and then they send you to Washington, DC at the time. this was twenty, thirty years ago And you had a textbook of rants that you had to rephrase positively problems that you had to phrase in solutions. And she said You need to be able to speak in solutions so more people listen And I took that lesson through life, even with my team when I was leading large scale teams at MSI and Sed If people came with problems, I'd ask them to come up with some solutions too that we could talk through. So it wasn't just a a rant session barns right after the Hey, this is David Mcrany. This show has a Patreon page and if you go there and contribute to the Patreon for this show, it will the show and keep the show going and giveive you stuff you can't get otherwhere. O we elsewhere Other whereere iss a cool word Search for my name, David McRraney, or click the link in the show notes which is otherwar I like it The schoolool of thoughtought. I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of thoughtought for years It's a nonprofit organization They provide free, creative commons, critical thinking resources to more than thirty million people worldwide. And their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of thoughtought have just launched something new called Kitted. Thinking tools K I T T ED Thinking tools And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want There's tons of them. and School Vot will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality, each one about double the size of a playing card Matte cello four hundred GSM stock prompt cards nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops. Level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and Much, much more. And each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more You even get PowerPoint and keynote templates There's so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. 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On top. of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box Check all of this out Kided D. shop or just click the link. in the show up. And now we return to our program I'm David McCraney. This is the Your notot So Smart podcast. and this is the rest of our interview with Heather Barnes Yes. And my name is Heather Barnes. I am the founder and CEO of Improvate Work And I help organizations like museums, zoos and aquariums Either evolve their guest experiences or employee experiences. I help with culture transformations I also work quite a bit with U. S based corporations, law firms, universities companies on a number of things related to strategic communication, people leadership skills, leading with empathy And I am a professor at Northwestern University, which I am excited about. I teach MBA students executive presentations, and I dabble in teaching executive presence, navigating difficult conversations And I love it. Before I met you, I did not know that you could this is something you would takeake a class then in U giving presentations is a thing because I didn't go to business school or even ever thought about what business school does You can take a class and how to give a good presentation. That's How did you become a professor who does that sort of thing Okay, well, I was recruited, so I didn't set out to become a professor that does this sort of thing. In fact, I too, did not. Go to MBA school. I did get a master's from the University of Chicago, more grounded in social work and public policy And I have translated some of those skills, but Bye. learned a lot of executive presence through being at Second City. So I was also a faculty member at the Second City training center which is an improv bass comedy club here in Chicago, Illinois and One time, I was cast in a show purely because I had strong executive presence and commanded the space And I could project and I could engulf the space with my full physicality. And so many other people auditioning were theyre like, Hi, my name is Heather. Hi, my name is David Mcranny. Nice to meet you. And I come on with confidence and with stage presence and I didn't I wasn't aware that that was a skill at the time and I now teach that And I was recruited, like I mentioned becausecause I was in charge of the aquatic presentation at Shed Aquarium. and I also was doing faculty training at Northwestern University And one of the faculty at Kellogg attended one of my workshops and said, we have an open position for teaching executive presentations. wouldould you be interested? A actually at the time it was called presentation fundamentals my dad and I said, wow, I just you know, we went through then in a traditional interview process and I had to submit quite a bit in a formal application and be reviewed by others, but I said to my dad, I got hired as a faculty at Northwestern and he paused for beat and said Are you even qualified for that? They called me. Like I'm not sneaking around trying to budge my resume to make sure that I'm Applying for jobs I'm not qualified for, dad. So dad. you right?' That For me, the Christmas vacation moment where he's like, one of your lights isn't blinking and then Park Griswald is like, Thanks for nosing Dad. That's that's bad. His second question is does it come with health benefits? Yeah, of course. ye. You should f for that Right If Well, if you trick them into giving that job, does it have health that? Right R. Well, quite truthfully, I was nervous. I didn't know if I would like working with that population. Most of my work was in nonprofit. I worked at the Museum of Science and Industry for twelve years. I did lead large scale teams and then Sut Aquarium. And prior to that, I was an IT consultant information technology consultant leading large scale teams. But I wasn't sure it would be a good fit. I thought they would be asking me questions about value proposition or I just didn't know that I would be able to hold my own and having not been to business and being school myself and I absolutely love it. loveove the diversity of the student body at Northwestern. I love the global perspective the students bring I love how eager students are from around the world to learn communication skills and strategies to best position them to succeed in conducting business globally and I I am I really thrive. I also learn so much. They have to do a final presentation on anything going on in the world. things that these students are talking about today I learn a ton. It keeps me relevant I'm talking everything from fast fashion sustainability to putting regulations of social media and iPad use and kids under eighteen. I mean, it's just fascinating the topics that they are so passionate about I had a great experience hanging out with the students too. They really are up to something there. It's not the business school I thought it would be or the management school either it was really cool Yeah And they're intentional to drive many social functions. It's funny. I also work quite a bit with Feinberg School Medine And they they have even highlighted and working with me how much Kellog does to drive social interaction and to build a community and to build relationship. evid. The evid. Yeah And that's what we have to do more of in this world today. And I mean, they've got it. They're nailing it and it doesn't have to take A lot of time or money, it's just a strategy in relationship building. and I think they've got that They do that better than anyone I've seen. Yeah, I loved that that was true But it's also Drew. It's like The journalism school felt like a journalism school. I visited there. The psychology school felt So much like a psycholog. You go in there and you're like, there's a brain in here exposed. Like I can feel that. and in the journalism school, I can feel like Everyone here has seen some things and and so their posters are Chase for I have one quick question from what you just said that as it occurs to me, I could ask you. what seems to be the thing that you most often correct people on when it comes to PowerPoint presentations? What's like the thing most people get wrong before they're told that you're doing that incorrectly Often with an actual PowerPoint presentation, people pack too much data on one slide or it's busy or the graphs aren't clear from an audience perspective. And I love sharing the quote H. Boy, David gave a great presentation. I just wish she had more slides, more content on those slides. Sid no one. No one says that. People leave presentations and go that was information overload Too much data I got lost in the detail And so People have what the Elm Olde Center for Communicating Science refers to as the curse of knowowledge, which is People think that their frame of knowledge is the same as everyone else is. So when they talk in these details and when they take dives into the content Without talking about the application of the context or the why it matters to the audience, They lose their audience. I think those are some of the most common mistakes. Today. I saw a presentation. I was part of a conference this week And one of the partarticipants stood up and told a personal story Then he used Minti, which is an interactive tool to get the audience's input He had personal photos, or photos of humans lawyers engaging in some of the activities he was talking about. He nailed the presentation because it integrated so many elements of what audiences look for today interaction, storytelling, personal connection, relevancy, including the audience voice. I did I used to do that when I was just getting going lecturing. I do a lot of lecturing now, so it's like a third of my life. I've gotten to the point where I will Most of my slides are just a picture And I and I just talk And I don't ask you to read this I don't read it off the slide to you, which is one of the worst experiences you can have Exactly And I love the Allen Alla Center too. I adhere to many of their principles in both lecturing and writing. But like you do. I've seen your lecture and you have incredible slides with images and you ask the audience to interact with the slides. You ask us to think and make O aim. decisions based on what we're seeing. I mean, it's exactly what we need to be doing more of. How do we engage and include the audience and the content and the subject matter in which we're talking about, not just talk at people. Oh yeah. like I'm going to tell you a story at least. and since I'm a on the ground journalist for a lot of my life, it's going to be something I did You basically just have to pretend we're all sitting around with a cocktail. I'm going to tell you about this crazy thing that happened to me There's going to be some science, but I'm going to do it as an as picture form as possible so that we can get through this together. Oh I'm very aware of cognitive load, which is something that I since I write about science topics, I'm doing this right now because I'm finishing up my new book The number of things you need to understand before I can get to my main point There's so much stuff that I can't even tell you what I'm about to tell you fully. What I' need to do is slowly build up the foundations and then when we get there, it's going to feel like This is the right part of the book for you to start talking about this thing. And that' that's alsos very theoretical. I'm very interested in learning more about your new book. This book started out, I'll may break this brief, but this book started out as what does the word genius mean? pereriod. Not that it's I wanted to know Is there a scientific definition for this word becausecause we use it a lot And then very quickly, I learned no science doesn't believe in that and like it used to, but now it doesn't. I'm like, well, that's neat and then I got more fascinated with the idea that Is there a definition at all? and there And I eventually met this cognitive linguist who was like, Ohh, you found you've stumbled into the territory. You stumbled into madness. And I was like, what do you mean? becausecause you're at the prepise of madness. And I was I don't understand, but she was totally right because if you go down the path of trying to completely define any word you'll get into the madness places and I found that and it was beautiful. was like I went back to Pengwood at a meeting we had in New York and I was like, I think I want the book to be about this instead. And they were like, go for it. So now the book is actually about somethingomething that I' never really talked about even though this is in my wheelhouse, called the It's called the fallacy of Reification and that's when you take an abstract like awe or joy You For whatever reason that it happens for many different reasons, it'll become a concrete. And at the moment when it becomes a concrete, it's always false. and that causes bad things to happen. And I using genius as my example because genius became a thing that is real, It exists, and we have a test for it. We had to abandon that and that's something that's always dangerous in any field, right? fascinating. So that's what the book's about. And it's like, oh, that's weird. There's no why would you read that book? And I have to convince you in reading the book, Oh we're going to get there. You'll see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's really interesting. and I love your approach to looking at the current world around us and how we live today and integrating history and moments and lenses to take I think it's really innovative. You mentioned that there was crossover here. there's overlap. There's like a Venn diagram thing with with some of the stuff you learned in the Alan Alda stuff. I want to know more about this. What is this Alan Alda science communication thing? I'm a huge fan of all that, but I've never gotten an opportunity to actually get you know inside there and do the stuff. What's going on with that I was fortunate to attend when I was doing my work at the Museum of Science and Industry They were coming to the University of Chicago and I wrote them a letter talking about how I too am using improv to change the way we communicate science at the Museum of Science Industry. I meaning our teams in the Center for advancement of science education And they wrrought me back and they said, we'd love to come visit you and see the work that you're doing And they did, they showed up and they saw the work that we were doing and they said, wow, this is So in alignment with what we do and who we are, would you like to attend? And so they invited me out and I spent the week And I learned all new exercises and the way they were working with the medical professional field, medical professionals on removing jargon distilling your message. chehecking with your audience to make sure they're with you And then we were trained to lead these activities. The positive rants is also so similar to my experience in the room with my boss when she had me write Yeah thingsings without misrepresenting So I think positive Brands is a quick exercise that hits at those same points. There's so much in there. You get so much out of it. So much. Yeah ye And it's about listening and it feels good to rant. Andm not it's not saying, please don't rant or your life is roses or I have rose colored glasses on and I'm no, the negative things happen all of the time in my life But it is how I refrain them that builds resiliency, that helps me consider solutions that I maybe haven't thought of before. And I find it a really powerful tool and I'm stuck in a rut. It's like, how can I what might I need to get out of this. How can I positively reframe this without misrepresenting it? Notice, I didn't say, we're all happy at the state of Ohio We love it here And this is great. And it's funny when I ask rooms of professionals from C Site to Students sit Northwestern peoplee try to reframe it and they're like We are committed to this project And they it's a hard skill and people miss the mark each time they misrepresent. It's like, no, no, no, you gott to still stay accurate. In order for us to meet the state of Ohio deadline, we either need an extension or more resources So I think I think it's a valuable skill that not many people have and I'm really impressed with All the research on resiliency the today and positive reframing is one way to become a more resilient leader, a more resilient person. And so I just I embrace it I love this there's a connecting point here too this positive so much is You get so much out of this. you learn how to be a better active listener. the other person gets to rant and get something off their chest. They also can feel like they're not insane and they haven't been judg judged that they are legitimate in their complaint. and then right they get to feel seen and heard and They also get that revelation that epiphany that oh, this could have been I could have put it that way and and and then All of that is all wrapped up in all of this exercise and you're doing it with another person. so you're not just reading this off the internet or watching a YouTube video.. You're experiencing it. There's so much in that You're trying it. And it's so funny when people this one takes a bit to master because even participants will say like David is concerned when people talk on their phone with speaker in public places. Well, that's negative. Concerned, doesn't like. David appreciates it when people are mindful to hold personal calls on their cellular phone in secluded areas So You also don't want to just reiterate your point negatively. You have to reframe It is. And it helped me hearing you say it back I was like, You know, the thing that's really got me going is just just being mindful. L you I feel like you aren't you're actively not caring about the people around you and I didn't necessarily that way, but now I have a better understanding of my of my rant. Yes. Oh I love that. That's awesome. and that is that is something that I've heard in our debriefs from leading this, but I'm so glad we got to play it too. That was That's the best. Yeah, there's nothing. And in there also are two positively reframe it You have to identify the deeper values that are driving this frustration Uh, it can't just be the surface level like you can't just say David doesn't like cell phones. L that's not right like what is driving you to be upset about that would be would be true in another domain that has nothing to do with talking on speaker phone, it would be something else where people aren't being mindful, right? Ex This is like standing up when you land on the airple, even though you've got at least twenty minutes before we get on this. Like Another pet peeve of mine. nailed it. But see how categorically they're coming from the same emotional space. They are It's like yeah, exactly. David likes people that are mindful that follow the rules and FA regulations and are aware of others. I don I don't even need you to follow the rules. I just want you to note that we are all in this together and it will get worse if we don't remember that I love it. U These are actually practical applications of things from the world of science, communication and communication in general. that leave people they won't just talk about it. They'll do it with their friends and family. They'll do it in their personal lives. And I think that's Stellar and fantastic and cool and I like it and I don't really have anything else to say there except that's a positive rant about the things you do Awesome, and I do use it in my personal life. I have a few fun personal examples too that I share in workshops. Really, really relevant. What wisdom from your former employer What a what wisdom? like to I hear what you're saying, but here's how you're going have to say it if you want to get anywhere with this. Right? I wish I could thank her. I left that meeting. Puffing and puffing and furious and angry. That just goes to show what twenty three year old Heather and how I rolled in the face of adversity I was mad at her and I wish I could I should find I could find her and say, thank you. That was a valuable lesson I want to challenge you to send that email. Okay, But I'm afraid of her still. She and I did not get along. Iven' even know her name. All right, all right, I challenge accepted. your chang in the world. That is it for this episode of the You're notot so smmart podcast for links to everything we talked about. Head to you arenaotsomart. com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McRriny. I have been your host You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks details DavidmcRraaney. com And I'll have all of that in the show notes On my homepage, davidmcrany. com you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book, talking all about it You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter. read reviews All sorts of things for all the past episodes of this podcast You are not so smart You can Follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Blue skky and everything else that's like that at David McCrany, at Symbol, David McCrany the show at not smmart Blog We're also on the Facebook slash you arere not so smart If you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me Go to Patreon. com Sash you are not so smart pitching in it Any amount gets you the show ad free, but the higher amounts that it gets you posters and t shirts and signbooks and other stuff. 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