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Excellent Executive Coaching: Growing Your Business and Enhancing Your Craft.
EEC 364: The Power of Connection: Unlocking Emotional Intelligence with Donald Weber
00:23:16
Donald Weber is a dynamic communication coach and speaker with a passion for transforming how leaders connect with their teams, clients, and audiences. Drawing from an extensive background in human behavior, psychology, and emotional intelligence,...
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- [00:05]
A
Good communication can help us create better connections and succeed as a better leader. But how to improve our communication? Let's ask Dr. Donald Weber. Welcome to the excellent executive coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katrina Barus and today we have Donald Weber. Donald, welcome.
- [00:32]
B
Thank you. Thank you, Katrina.
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A
So tell us, you say you were a struggling communicator and now you're a consultant of high level clients. So explain the shift.
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B
Well, more as a teenager, as a child, I grew up in the states, primarily in the Midwest, and I was bullied a lot. Initially I went to a private school in Chicago and we moved down to Kansas City and I went through pretty, quite an adjustment during that period. So I had some, maybe some confidence issues and I'd say more confidence issues. So through that period of my life, from I'm going to say age about 8 until I got into the end actually until I got to university, really I struggled a lot because I went to be, you know, I went to be liked, I want to be popular and all these things. A lot of people, well, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't really fantastic at athletics. I was actually a pretty good student, so that was a good thing. But yeah, I didn't really excel any other. I wasn't accepted, you know, and how important that is sometimes for adolescents. So when I went into university, I decided I was going to make some changes. And my dad was one person who recommended me reading some books like Dale Carnegie's, you know, how to Win Friends and Influence People, Stephen Covey and some of these older, very quality writers. And I started studying this sort of material, learning, you know, to listen to people when they're speaking, remember people's names, the importance of a smile, all that kind of thing. And by bit I was able to kind of start developing these skills.
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A
So tell us, what are the key body skills insights you've learned from working with executives?
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B
Well, there's different kinds of executives. It depends what, you know, what type of executives we're talking about most, if they're very senior and big companies and things like that, usually their demeanor is what we call executive presence. Right. So they, they sort of ooze like confidence there, can be inspiring, they can be highly motivational. Generally they're very good communicators with their teams and with their people to motivate them. Because the idea is not just to inspire and motivate your direct the people that report to you directly. Let's say as a CEO or CEO, right. I'm talking big organization, but for those Directors to transmit your message down the ranks. And that energy and that inspiration and that motivation to filter down through the ranks, that's a sign of a really top leader. How many leaders do really have that ability? I don't know what percentages, but you normally notice that they're well trained. They invest in themselves in developing their own skills and their own abilities to communicate with other people. And as a result, I think that also helps them develop their confidence and so forth. It's not always the case. Huh? But I'm speaking in a. Generally speaking.
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A
I see. Okay, but give us concrete examples how to develop that executive presence.
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B
Well, there's some things you can learn, but I mean it's. I tell people they come to me sometimes for body language and say, well, you can fake it for a little while, but by learning, let's say I do certain hands gestures or sitting in a certain way or moving my hands in a certain way, it might give the impression that I'm very confident. But it's really what's inside the person, what's going on inside. Let's just step back for a second. If you think about like what they. You always hear people talk about emotional intelligence, right?
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A
Yes.
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B
Well, emotional intelligence is one thing, but in order to be really emotionally intelligent when we're speaking with people, we need to have a high level of self awareness. Now, not self consciousness and insecurity, I'm not talking about that. But self awareness, being aware of your own emotions, realizing maybe this is not the best time for me to communicate this message to this person. Understanding and observing people and how that message is coming across or how making the other person feel and the critical world there is feel. Agloo once said, you know, people will never remember what you said, but they always will remember how you made them feel. And that is a really critical component.
- [04:29]
A
So being a self aware, from what you said, it's being aware of the other person, how the message will land, how to communicate to them. But how does self awareness impact your communication with others? Being aware of your own emotions.
- [04:45]
B
That's a great question. Think about like this. If I came out of a meeting and I'm a little stressed out or frazzled or whatever, and then I take that sort of toxic energy, I'm going to say, or stressed up energy into the next meeting, what's going to happen? So if I'm self aware, I might realize, you know what, I'm not in the best emotional state right now. I need to like relax, chill out, take it easy, and maybe just take five minutes and go to your office, close the door and do some breathing exercises or I know a lot of top executives of major corporations who practice meditation, for example. Most people would be very surprised, but doing something just to calm yourself down so when you go into the next meeting, you don't bring that either toxic energy or stressed out energy into the environment. And thereby because what it does, it just kind of like dominoes or chain effect with the other people.
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A
Right.
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B
It's really critical be self aware of your feelings inside.
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A
So how do you develop that self awareness and executives, let's say that are not self aware?
- [05:46]
B
Well, one way that you can develop your self awareness is getting feedback from people that you trust. People very close to you can help you develop your self awareness. Obviously meditation type practices, mindfulness practices definitely will help. It takes time. It's not something maybe you develop overnight. And there are a lot of executives, I've met quite a few who lack actually in that area being able to manage their stress properly or their self awareness or they get too tied up in, in the title of the job and they forget that they are not, they're not the title, they're just filling that position that they're filling that office that they're responsible for doing. So it's a process exercise obviously will help taking us, you know, time out, realizing this is not the right moment for me to deliver this message. And therefore I'm going to take two or three minutes or five minutes and go relax for a moment and then I'll go into this next meeting and do the best I can. I mean some people are very good, they have great poker faces. So they can kind of fake it to a degree. But keep in mind they say there's about 237 non verbal gestures when we communicate. And it's impossible to fake all 237. Why do professional poker players where oftentimes we're sunglasses when they're playing poker because they don't want people to see their eyes because there's certain things about the body that you can't actually fake.
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A
So you develop that awareness, self awareness and also awareness of others people, nonverbal expression. Is that what you do?
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B
Yeah. Let me tie it together for you. Okay. So if I'm aware of body language just by observing or being aware of my own body language, it'll help me identify how am I feeling in the moment, in that meeting or in that interaction. And that's really powerful. More than most people realize in fact your body language to a degree. I mean it's not like, the solution for everything. Okay? So I'm not saying like. But yeah, yeah, if your body language will change your life, but it'll have a big impact, that I can assure you. If you're aware of your own body language and you realize, you know, I'm doing things, it's more than what I'm showing at this point. It's if I'm doing certain things with my hands, for example, this gesture I'm showing you now with my fingers crossed like this, this is a sign of confidence. And actually I learned this from an FBI agent because I worked u. S. Government for a number of years. Okay. But I was just with the minister of finance in Germany in berlin last Thursday, and he was giving a presentation and he was being interviewed, and I took a bunch of pictures, in fact, of him. I think I was making him nervous. I took so many pictures, but I kept noticing he was doing the same gesture when he was speaking. I mean, you have the steeple and you have these different things, but this is a sign, someone being confident. What studies have shown is if you use, let me say, positive body language or confident body language, it will make you feel more confident. There were studies done by amy cumming at harvard university on this saying that it raises testosterone levels. There's been some debate about how much and so forth, but the research doesn't indicate at least that people feel better when they're using positive body language is what I'm going to say. Tony Robbins as well. When I was with tony robbins, I met him back in the late 80s, and at that point, he wasn't very famous. You know, his groups were like 200 people, that kind of thing. In fact, I had people at university were promoting his events at that time.
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A
Oh, really?
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B
Amazing, isn't it? Yeah, how time flies. So, I mean, if you're giving a presentation, that's one kind of body language you would want to use. If we're doing like TV interview or something like that, that might be another one. If we're having a meeting with a group of people, board of directors, or maybe with a client, and I'm trying to sell something, you know, if my body language is contradictory to my message, so my body language is not congruent to what I'm saying. We've got a problem.
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Right.
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B
Because people will pick up on it subconsciously that there's something here that's not right. If we go back to Albert Meberin's study in 1974, I believe, or 73 at UCLA, he's the one that came up with the idea of the pyramid. He said our words are only 7% of our communication. Our non verbal communication, our like vocal tone and things like that is 38% and 55% is our body language. I hope I got those numbers Right. At 7, 38 and 55. There we go.
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A
That's right. That's right.
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B
Is non verbal. But where people misquote this all the time on YouTube, on the Internet, because they don't actually get it. It was the congruency of it, which means is I can't just say any words, blah, blah, blah, and have this great body language. No, it doesn't work that way. The body language, the voice tone need to match the words I'm communicating to the other party.
- [10:29]
A
Right. I want to also ask you, okay, you mentioned earlier there's different body language for people on tv, people that are giving a presentation or people that I don't know in a different situation. So tell us, what are the different body languages that you recommend for a TV interview versus a presentation versus being in front of a team.
- [10:51]
B
Okay, let's say if you're doing a presentation in front of an audience, a big audience, thousands, 6,000 people, let's say yes.
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A
Okay.
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B
Your gestures need to be much bigger, much more exaggerated. It's kind of like theater. A person I know that works at the Royal Academy of Arts in the uk, most prestigious art school that there is in the uk, they teach us hail Caesar. For I have come doing really big gestures, practicing the part because they know when they get in front of the audience, actually those massive gestures that they practice, they'll bring them down because obviously people tend to feel. Most people tend to feel a little bit inhibited when you're in front of a large audience. It's natural. Okay, that's a big audience. Now we're with a smaller audience. Let's say we're talking 100 people, couple hundred people. The gestures don't need to be so exaggerated. We're talking in a boardroom or a group of five or 10 people sitting at a table and I'm presenting. It would be a little bit weird. Let's be right. If I was doing these exaggerated, you know, gestures like, I mean, something mentally wrong with this guy. Right. And it's not congruent to the environment. So we need to adapt. And obviously if you're doing a TV interview or something like that, you definitely wouldn't be using like massive gestures and things like that. Okay, you're talking with your hands a little bit to animate the conversation. We can use our hands to impact certain ideas or concepts that I'm sharing because those concepts I feel are important and I want you to grasp those concepts. We know from studies from Stanford University that if you have an audience of people and you ask everybody with the palms up like this, and you raise your hands with your palms up and say everybody please stand. Compliance is somewhere around 60%. Between 50 and 60%. Then they did the study, repeated the study and they did the same thing, but now with the palms down and raising the hands, but the palms are down, asking the audience to stand up. And compliance was I think around 30 something. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was in the 30s, 30% and then they did it with fingers pointing. So pointing the fingers at the audience and bringing the fingers up and asking everybody to rise had the lowest compliance rate of I believe 21%. If my memory doesn't. Okay, what it means is that there's different gestures that people prefer. Pointing your finger is not probably one of those things you want to do too much. It's much more useful. Bill Clinton love to point the finger. So they used to try to get him to wrap his finger back and point like this, but he had a hard time like even adapting to that. So it's not good to point. The best way if you want to direct something to people is to use your palm. You know, think about it. If you come into a nice restaurant, five second and they ask you, please sit down. How would the major d. You know, how would they.
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A
They would just.
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B
They wouldn't point at the chair. So here, sit down. They might do that at Denny's but I don't think they would do it.
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A
At, you know, a nice restaurant. Tell us a little bit more about the non verbals of Tony Robinson. Deepak Chopra.
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B
Deepak Chopra. I know him, met him personally and I know his family as well, but I haven't been with him in years. His earlier interviews, earlier I'm talking 20 years ago, were quite, quite good, quite good. Recently I haven't really seen anything of him. Tony Robbins, master, master of body language. But then again he, you know, he studied hypnosis. Actually we share a common teacher by the name of Richard Bandler that lives now in the uk. He's originally, I think from the Bay Area. He's one that developed him with John Grinder the idea of NLP noted language, but it's called neuro linguistic programming. It's has thinking and so forth. We're talking about here that has a lot of different elements to it but one is calibrating. If you're like practicing hypnosis or something like that and you're the hypnotist, it's important that you can calibrate the other person meaning that you can read their non verbal communication. Skin color changes and they can be very slight but they can tell you a lot about what's going on with the person. Pupil size, changing link rates, the throat, all these things are indicators of confidence. Lack of confidence, stress. Non verbal communication won't tell you necessarily for most people anyway if somebody's lying or not. That's a really dangerous territory to go on to. And there's not that many people who are, I'm going to say that good at non verbal communication that could detect that. But what most people can learn, the majority of without a lot of trouble is learning to detect comfort and discomfort. And basically in non verbal communication that's what we teach people. I'll give you an example, a voice tone. Remember I said it was like 38 of our communication example somebody, I go to someone and I said so what is the price for your services? Bloody, bloody, bloody blah. And they're talking at a certain frequency, right. And then all of a sudden when they get to the price point, voice drops really really soft and then it goes back up to me. That indicates not just a lack of confidence but they probably normally don't charge that much and they generally don't get paid that much. Almost certainly almost. I'd say with 90 accuracy pray higher than that. Yeah, offering. I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do this. Where their voice drop dipped alert because something's up emotionally that they are not confident what they've said. And even though somebody might know this you say well they can manipulate it. Yeah but in a long enough interaction most people can't manipulate their non verbals for an extended period of time. It does not.
- [16:21]
A
And especially if one is very attentive to the nonverbal, sooner or later you'll pick it up because it's the voice, it's the body language that shifts, it's the where they look as you mentioned, you know so yeah, good, very interesting. So Tony Robbins you said is a master art because he also does nlp, he studied it and he can read people very well. Okay, so what would you say are the most effective strategies for Leaders looking to master public speaking.
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B
Different people have different challenges with public speaking. I'll give you extremes, Right. Sometimes I have the opportunity to work with very senior executive CEOs of huge companies, and they're very good at presenting. They have a lot of experience. Why would they come to somebody like myself for presentation? For two reasons, primarily. One is because it's a very important presentation and they know well from experience they need to practice and they need the feedback. And not just anyone can give you feedback on a key presentation. I'm not talking like a presentation that's every day. I'm talking like maybe you have to deliver a very important presentation and the president or prime minister of a country is going to be there at the embassy, for example. That's a true story just a few months ago. The other extreme would be. This is very common too. Younger people, I'm going to say late 20s, early 30s. They're a little bit. They're ambitious, which is a good thing. They want to get ahead in their company, but their communication skills are maybe lacking. So they want to learn the basics of good communication. Right. Or even more challenging, maybe they have grossophobia, which is the fear of public speaking. That's the fancy word for globia.
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A
Right.
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B
I'm not sure the audience that we're addressing, it should use the right language for the audience.
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A
That's right. We have diverse audience. So you're hitting on both levels.
- [18:19]
B
Thank you. Perfect. So if you're dealing with somebody who has a high level of fear of public speaking, well, obviously it's because they don't have perhaps that much experience with it, so. Or they've had one or two bad experiences when they were in school or something. So one of the key things I'm going to share with you, that I share this often, is if you're afraid of standing front of an audience, in front of a group of people, and your main concern is fear, ask yourself why and I'll give you the response or the reason why. I was doing a coaching session. I wouldn't give them the answer. It's because you're focused on the wrong thing. You know what you're focused on when you're afraid of speaking in public? You're focusing on yourself. You're not focusing on helping other people. If you focus on helping other people, why in the world would I be afraid? Why? I'm here to help you. I'm not here to take something. If I'm here to take something, ah, it doesn't land right or doesn't go well. I'm worried about what people think about me and all this sort of thing. That's not to say you shouldn't practice, know what you're going to say. And it takes work to give good presentation over and over people to give good, great presentations. People like remember Wayne Dyer, Tony Robbins. Right now I'm going like blank on names, but a lot of well known speakers, Les Brown, Brian Tracy, I'm going back in years.
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A
But what they have in common, I've been on the board of the National Speakers association of Las Vegas, so I know quite a few good speakers. But what would you say they all have in common?
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B
They practice a lot. True, that's it. And now maybe they have a lot of experience and that helps, obviously. But how did they get a lot of experience? Because before they did their work, they put in the hours and they practice and they practice and they practice and practice. But you notice you really top speakers, they usually when they come in, they do a keynote. They have two or three keynotes that they're really good at giving.
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A
Right, because they practice.
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B
Exactly. And they'll make variations for the audience. Because that's key too. If I'm talking to an academic audience, then I probably would use different kinds of words and vocabulary. And if I'm talking to an audience that has less expertise or less experience or less knowledge about the topic, then I need to sort of simplify my vocabulary, my language, as they say, dumb it down so that it resonates with the audience. That's very.
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A
So what about when you do a negotiation? Any key insights you can give to the listeners?
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B
Sure. This is the best negotiations. And body language is fundamental. It's key. If you're negotiating with somebody, you want to know what the red lines are. Right. By observing very closely when you're talking about different topics, in seeing how they're reacting to those topics. And this is the non verbals will give you a clue into how far you can push certain topics or certain demands and so forth. Now, before you even get into that though, before you even start the negotiation, it's really, really important to what we call the technical terms called baselining. What is baselining? Baselining is simply asking Katrina a series of mundane questions and seeing how you respond. The more time I have to baseline, the better I get to know you and the better I get to know how you normally are, how you normally react. So the moment I hit a button or you get a little bit stressed, ah, I don't need to say, hey Katrina, you're really stressed, you know, on Article 3 of the contract. That's not necessary, obviously. But put a flag up, say, okay, there's something there, there's something there. And it just gives you leverage when negotiating with people or might even you might say, you know what, in that area, it's not that important to me. I'll just back off on that because I want the deal or I want a win win situation. Or I went in this case, I'm saying I want Katrina to be happy because I want to have a great result at the end of the project because there's no point in getting a great deal. But then the other person's not happy and the quality of work might suffer, possibly.
- [22:13]
A
Right. Very good point. Unfortunately, we're coming to the end of our podcast, but where can people get a hold of you?
- [22:20]
B
Dr. Webercoaching.com or if you just type in Don Weber Communications. I should pop up. I write a column for Entrepreneur magazine or you find me on LinkedIn or website or YouTube.
- [22:34]
A
Okay, good. Thank you so much. It's very interesting and a lot of fun to hear the different examples. So thank you.
- [22:42]
B
You're very welcome. You're very welcome. Thank you, Katherine. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for listening to the Excellent Executive Coaching Podcast. You can subscribe to all Future podcasts@excellent executive coaching.com. join us each Wednesday to learn more about the latest trends in leadership techniques and bring your coaching to the next level. To learn more about Dr. Burris CEO mastermind, use the contact form@excellentexecutivecoaching.com.